The question of forgiveness in politics has attained a certain cachet. Indeed, in the fifty years since Arendt commented on the notable absence of forgiveness in the political tradition, a vast and multidisciplinary literature on the politics of apology, reparation, and reconciliation has emerged. To a novice scouring the relevant literatures, it might appear that the only discordant note in this new veritable symphony of writings on political forgiveness has been sounded by philosophers. There is a more-than-healthy cynicism directed at (...) what many philosophers see as an uncritical promotion of forgiveness, which – they fear – risks distorting and cheapening forgiveness as a moral ideal, on the one hand, and ignoring the moral and political values of justice, accountability and the cessation of harmful relationships, on the other. Are philosophical fears about the dangers of thinking about forgiveness in political terms warranted – or do they perhaps depend in part on conceptual conservatism regarding what exactly political forgiveness might be? I argue that most, if not all, standard objections to political forgiveness emerge from theoretical reliance on a picture of forgiveness I will call the Emotional Model. Once we make conceptual space for descriptions of forgiveness in performative and social terms, the concept is more easily adapted to a political account without at least some of the risks feared by philosophers. (shrink)

When it comes to how to hold people responsible for wrongdoing, much of the African philosophical tradition focuses on reconciliation as a final aim. This essay expounds an interpretation of reconciliation meant to have broad appeal, and then draws out its implications for responsibility in respect to three matters. First, when it comes to criminal justice, prizing reconciliation entails that offenders should be held responsible to “clean up their own mess,” i.e., to reform their characters and compensate victims in ways (...) they find burdensome, an approach to punishment that differs from deterrence and desert theories. Second, regarding civil justice, reconciliation means that holding responsible to compensate wrongful harm means improving victims’ quality of life in ways they accept, which contrasts with a common prescription to put victims in the condition they would have been in had the wrong not occurred. Third, reconciliation can involve putting on trial more than just the direct offender, for instance family members who had been able to influence his behavior and were allied with him. The chapter provides reason to take the reconciliatory approaches seriously that will be found prima facie attractive by those from a variety of backgrounds. (shrink)

How can we account for trials in which the judgment speaks not only to and about the defendants and their deeds, but also about injustices from a more distant past? Building on approaches to ghosts and haunting by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, I propose to examine a set of the German post-1990 trials for human rights violations committed in the former East Germany as instances of haunted justice. Here, the courts not only adjudicated the present cases, but also tried (...) to ‘go back and make whole what has been smashed’ by their own lack of judgment in the failed trials of the Nazi perpetrators. In this instance, the ‘time is out of joint’, and we see the ghosts of the failed trials of Nazi perpetrators standing next to the inheritance of impunity fostered in West German courts, and next to the now present East German perpetrators. What can justice mean in such a complex constellation of injustices? I argue that the ghostly dimension of these cases point to a need for a kind of justice and engagement that can ultimately not be found in courts—yet the courts’ engagement with this ghostly matter is nevertheless important. (shrink)