Sam Ridge

An almost universally held view in the literature on forgiveness is that wrongdoers cannot have a right to be forgiven. I argue this claim is false. Sometimes wrongdoers have a right to be forgiven. In Section 2, I show how widespread the view is that wrongdoers never have a right to be forgiven. In Section 3, I present a counterexample to this widely held view, arguing that promises can ground rights to be forgiven. In Section 4, I show how the case of promised forgiveness is instructive, as it points to other possible grounds for a right to forgiveness. In Section 5, I consider three objections to my view. Section 6 concludes by considering how the existence of a right to forgiveness informs debates about what forgiveness is, arguing that it gives us reason to prefer certain kinds of views of forgiveness over others.

There is a debate about whether hypocritical blame is wrong per se. Extant views of hypocritical blame are insufficient, I argue, because they fail to appreciate the significance of the fact that hypocrisy comes in degrees. I argue that the more hypocritical an instance of blame is, the stronger the pro tanto reason there is against blaming. My view allows us to capture the intuition that there is something problematic about hypocritical blame while avoiding the pitfall of regarding all instances of hypocritical blame as equally inappropriate. I argue for a commitment-based view of hypocrisy according to which one’s blame is more hypocritical the less one is committed to the norm one blames another for transgressing. I argue that hypocrisy makes one’s blame an inaccurate signal of one’s commitments, and that the more hypocritical one’s blame is, the more inaccurate the signal. The more inaccurate the signal, the stronger the pro tanto reason against blaming.