Ying Liu

Moral redemption in secular contexts is often analyzed in terms of nearby concepts like apology, reparation, reformation, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This paper argues that redemption is nonetheless distinct from them, and that grasping its uniqueness requires shifting from an other-directed approach, which centers on the relation between the offender and the victim (or the moral community), to a self-directed approach, which concerns the offender’s quest for reconstituting their life after wrongdoing. Three observations motivate this shift: (1) redemption is unfitting for one-off, small wrongdoings, giving it a narrower scope than nearby concepts; (2) other-directed accounts cannot adequately explain private redemption, where amends are made anonymously; and (3) these accounts struggle to make sense of perpetual redemption, where redemptive activities continue even after forgiveness and reconciliation have been achieved. I defend a self-directed account on which redemption consists in the offender settling on a new way of living that manifests their recognition of the past wrongdoing. This account can explain all three observations, preserve the intuition behind associating nearby concepts with redemption, and open up the possibility of redeeming moral misfortune.

The Shape-of-a-Life phenomenon is widely recognized by philosophers of well-being: an upward life trajectory seems better than its downward equivalent if the sum of momentary well-being is held fixed. But what if we hold fixed the sum of momentary well-being in an upward trajectory, are certain ways to improve from the bad times better than the others? Velleman suggests that a redemptive trajectory is better than a bare upward trajectory. In this paper, I elaborate this proposal by developing a mediating factor account of prudential redemption. I argue that, in redemptive trajectories, there is a mediating factor that bears certain relations with the negative and the positive events respectively, one that does not necessarily appear in bare upward trajectories. Prudential redemption, compared to mere improvement, can enhance a person’s lifetime well-being because a redeemed event is made less bad by virtue of the mediating factor. This result has implications for making decisions in the face of equally good options and for evaluating the rationality of honoring sunk costs.