Bennett Eckert-Kuang

Philosophical orthodoxy has it that forgiveness is always discretionary—a gift we are free to extend to those who wrong us, but one that we are never morally required to offer. I dispute this orthodoxy, arguing that forgiveness is sometimes obligatory, even though wrongdoers can never demand or otherwise extract it from us. In particular, I argue that having accepted forgiveness in the past sometimes makes it obligatory to forgive one’s future wrongdoers. The obligation to forgive because one was forgiven is grounded, not in a correlative right to forgiveness held by one’s wrongdoer, but in a moral norm of consistency that applies to how we accept and extend forgiveness. The resulting account sheds new light on the nature and scope of our discretion to forgive and on the possibility of obligations to others without correlative rights.

This article is about how best to understand the Murdochian idea that love is the direct apprehension of another person as a source of value outside oneself. Taking expressions of care as a case study, the article argues that the unilateral conception of loving attention that Iris Murdoch and some of her influential defenders employ cannot make sense of phenomena central to interpersonal love. According to the intersubjective alternative defended, loving attention is based in second-personal thought: thought about another subject that stands to their self-conscious thought as uses of ‘you’ stand to uses of ‘I’. Such a conception better explains why one fully counts as seeing another person, in the sense that constitutes loving attention, only if one thereby puts the beloved in a position to feel seen.