The Impossible Demand of Forgiveness

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work, I argue that neither of the two standard accounts of forgiveness offer an adequate understanding of forgiveness. Conditional accounts insist on specifying the conditions an offender needs to satisfy in order to count as deserving of forgiveness. I argue that such accounts not only render forgiveness unintelligible (since forgiveness is intelligibly offered only to the offender qua offender), but also dissolve the ethical decision forgiveness demands of us. Unconditional accounts promise to do justice to both by insisting that forgiveness is a freely granted gift offered to the guilty as guilty. But I argue that when pressed to justify why one should forgive unconditionally and how one avoids the threat of condoning, they typically fall back onto the conditionalist’s ground and lose the electivity of forgiving. I conclude by arguing that genuine forgiveness would have to be purely unconditional but could never appear as such.