Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

To be compassionate is to care about others specifically in opposition to their suffering or deficiency. While the distress of compassion is paradigmatic of the virtue, a wide range of emotion types – gratitude, anger, fear, joy, and so forth – can express it. Aristotle offers an analysis of the emotion of compassion as entailing propositions (1) that the other is suffering, (2) that the other doesn’t deserve the suffering, and (3) that oneself is vulnerable to the kind of suffering one sees in the other. In dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s exposition and adaptation of Aristotle’s analysis of the emotion of compassion, this chapter compares Aristotelian compassion with the compassion that is commended in the New Testament. Differences between the two turn on differences in the concept of suffering, in the presence of a concept of forgiveness, and in the locus of commonality.

Chapter 5 discusses the various timelines involved in the question of the imprescriptibility of atrocity crimes. I distinguish between four timelines involved in imprescriptibility and assess these from the viewpoint of legal values and philosophical debates on forgiveness. Taking the perspective of the judge, the chapter ends by spelling out what is at stake in the judgement on an imprescriptible international crime.

The chapter’s first section develops the book’s underlying argument that the moral psychology of violation involves synthesising metaphysical expression and its metapsychological grounds. Its second section engages with Martha Nussbaum’s argument in Anger and Forgiveness (2016) that we should understand guilt and forgiveness without reference to metapsychology, and only in terms of unconditional love leading to eudaimonic social ‘Transition’. Against this, I argue that guilt and forgiveness remain morally important and we see this in the parable of the prodigal son. Where Nussbaum argues that the father’s unconditional love sets aside questions of forgiveness, I suggest that such moral questions between a father and son remain at stake. A third section offers a ‘case study’ of guilt and forgiveness in the dialogue between Jo Berry, whose father died in the IRA Brighton bombing of 1984, and Patrick Magee, one of the bombers. This shows how difficult moral dialogues around blame, guilt and forgiveness are central to reconciliation, though this may be blocked by surrounding unresolved social and political questions. Overall, connecting metaphysics and metapsychology enables us to see why moral transactions (distinguished from legal ones) and social transitions are both necessary for reconciliation.

If Chapter 4 develops the ontology of guilt and forgiveness, this chapter explores its moral phenomenology as a practical engagement of love after violation. I argue first for an account of love based on Roy Bhaskar’s conception of its five circles: in terms of its relation to self, to the other, to the relation of self and other, to self, other and the wider community, and self and other in their ontological depth as unique individuals. These five forms of love are then explored in relation to the experiences of victims and perpetrators in The Forgiveness Project (Cantacuzino 2015). Forgiveness involves both a ‘giving to’ and a ‘giving up’, and this can lead to a profound sense of identification between a victim and a perpetrator. It is different for each person and how it develops also depends on the broader social setting in which it occurs. Forgiveness can be understood either as an ethical and metaphysical phenomenon (dispositive humility) or as a law-related institutional practice (an exchange relation). The latter recasts forgiveness in ways compatible with the criminal justice system and links it to the tendency to punish rather than reconcile those caught up in violation.

The Joseph story has money the brothers paid for grain surreptitiously returned to their sacks, in some sense a loan only but, as it turned out, an act concealing a gift, which led to reconciliation. Topics in the Two Debtors parable covering debt, sin, and forgiveness rework these features of the Joseph story.

This chapter considers five practices, or constellations of practices, that emerge from imitating Jesus: (1) care for the poor and needy, including the contested practice of seeing Christ in the poor; (2) sacramental practices of the Lord’s Supper and baptism; (3) prayer, including lament; (4) forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking; and (5) self-giving or kenōsis. Each practice flows in its own way from the twin imperatives to love God and the neighbor.

This chapter analyzes devotional experience, especially as it is displayed in contemporary evangelical approaches. Devotion is examined not as a singular practice but as a way of living out religion in daily life, within regular social, economic, and political structures without radical withdrawal from them. Devotional experience is marked by a deeply personal affective experience of a loving God who is seen to accept even the most evil and wretched person. This serves as a horizon of friendship that enables the devotional self to confront its faults and shortcomings. Devotional experience is marked by its intensely emotional and individual forms of expression. It accompanies people in their concrete daily lives and is experienced as suffusing and transforming daily and ordinary experiences without separating oneself from the society or the world. Devotional experience thus capitalizes on the human need for loving relationship and personal guidance in daily life.

Some neo-Aristotelians see a strong link between virtues and eudaimonia or flourishing, but others do not. After acknowledging this difference, the chapter explores some of the possible implications of this link. The view explored in this chapter is that virtues contribute to success in goal and good pursuit, which, in turn, contributes to a flourishing life. The neo-Aristotelian view examined holds that there are things that are good for humans qua humans (e.g., close personal relationships, group belonging). Success in pursuing these goods is hypothesized to be correlated with eudaimonia. It explores several challenges in studying eudaimonia, but concludes that eudaimonia research should continue and be updated as conceptualization and measurement improves. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three well-documented human goods (close personal relationships, group belonging, and meaning) and their hypothesized relationships with specific virtues (e.g., loyalty, forgiveness, honesty).

The purpose of this chapter is to outline in a more systematic way Augustine’s understanding of the nature of sin. This involves exploring a number of issues which have not been discussed in the previous chapters, namely, Augustine’s insistence that even when we were virtuous, we might also be sinful; his understanding of original sin; and his idea of sin as consent to carnal concupiscence.

This chapter describes how romantic partners navigate the disagreements that necessarily result from their interdependence and how partners recover when they intentionally or unintentionally hurt each other. Specifically, it reviews the ways in which goals and desires conflict to produce disagreements and how disagreements provide a diagnostic situation in which people make inferences about their partner’s thoughts, feelings, and commitment. Next, it describes typical conflict topics, how conflicts tend to be experienced, and typical conflict prevalence over the course of a romantic relationship. Next, the chapter covers how people manage interpersonal conflicts and highlights specific conflict behaviors that are typically destructive (e.g., hostility, withdrawal) and specific conflict behaviors that are typically constructive (e.g., intimacy, problem solving), as well as how the adaptiveness of conflict behaviors can change depending on the situation. Finally, this chapter reviews how partners can recover from destructive conflicts and other relationship transgressions by accommodating rather than retaliating, sacrificing, and forgiving.

This chapter argues that Ishiguro’s novels frame ethical issues through questions of agency. Hannah Arendt’s ideas about agency and action provide a way to understand this in detail: for Arendt, speech and action reveal ‘who’ the speaker is, and shows their involvement with the ‘web of human relationships’ and the ramifications of their actions; the representation of action is inextricable from style and form. Using these ideas, the chapter demonstrates that there are significant changes over Ishiguro’s work: the first three novels concern reflections on past actions; the second three explore different conditions of agency in both content and in style; the two most recent novels deal with the impact and risks of actions and reactions. This also illuminates two recognizable literary devices used by Ishiguro: the way his characters ‘project’ themselves onto others, and what he calls the ‘dream grammar’ in relation to some aspects of his prose and plotting.

There is a tension in military culture between the growing acceptance of moral injury and an idealized view of Stoicism that leaves little room for the guilt and shame, mercy and forgiveness characteristic of moral injury and repair. Does that emotion-lean view do justice to ancient Stoic doctrine? I argue that it does not. The emotions of the Stoic moral aspirant, such as shame and moral distress, bear striking similarities to the negative self-reactive attitudes that P.F. Strawson famously discusses. Notions of mercy and forgiveness speak to the positive reactive attitudes. I develop my argument by turning to Seneca’s essay, On Mercy and his play, the Trojan Woman. Mercy, Seneca insists, makes good on the gentler side of Stoicism. Learning from the mercy others show us, and that we would show them, is one way that soldiers can begin to show mercy towards themselves.

This chapter presents the resolution to Hegel’s account of the problem of recognition by considering the “moral” self, that of “conscience” (Gewissen). It begins by showing that “morality” is the stance that adequately countenances the self-productive character of self-conscious beings, so that the self is understood to be constituted through activity. Only conscience, however, acknowledges the social character of this constitution of the self, the fact that, to count as a self, I must realize my moral knowledge both through my actions, and through participation in moral discourse along with others. For Hegel, successful recognition as a moral self requires the development of particular social practices, confession and forgiveness, through which we can respond to moral disagreement, and I demonstrate that recognizing one another as conscientious requires a continuing dependence on practices like these.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the argument about the conditions for the achievement of recognition that Hegel sets out from Chapters IV-VI of the Phenomenology. I consider the ways in which the conclusions of this argument are significant for the project of the text as a whole, pointing to the role of the idea of the self both in the Phenomenology’s “Preface” and account of “Absolute Knowing,” and in the Science of Logic. At the same time, I also argue that the account of reciprocal recognition is completed in Hegel’s account of “spirit,” and so does not depend on the subsequent accounts of religion or philosophical science. I conclude by stressing the precarity of relations of reciprocal recognition which are dependent on the achievement of moral agreement.

This chapter explores the place of compromise in transitional justice. While all-pervasive in politics, compromise is a neglected topic, almost a non-topic, within the current transitional justice literature. The chapter is an attempt to reverse this tendency and rehabilitate the notion of compromise. If, as pluralists hold, we are often faced with cases of hard moral choices where, whatever we do, something of value is irreparably lost, then the best we can hope for is some kind of acceptable compromise between clashing goods. The question about the limits of compromise thus features centrally in this chapter. How far should transitional societies go in their willingness to compromise? When is a compromise acceptable, fair, guided by principle, and when is it rotten to the core, simply illegitimate? To what extent is it acceptable to compromise deeply held values such as justice and truth for the sake of other equally important values such as, say, civil peace and democracy? While doubtful that we can settle such issues once and for all, the chapter identifies a range of questions that should be part of the collective conversation about when a political compromise is acceptable and when it is not. The discussion begins, however, with a concrete historical figure, the communist leader Joe Slovo, who played a critical role in South Africa’s negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy. Slovo’s reflections on the nature and limits of compromise in the South African context serve as a central reference point for my discussion throughout this chapter.