o the best my knowledge, most of the major social evils do not occur in a vacuum.  The Holocaust cannot be characterized as a bunch of people living quite independent and autonomous lives who just so happened to have the same views.  The same holds for the Inquisition or American Slavery.  The backdrop against which all of these social evils occurred is enormous social pressure. 

Not only that, there is almost no reason to for most us to believe that we would not have succumbed to that social pressure were we to have been subjected to it.  Many of us might not have committed this or that egregious wrong, but we would have participated in what I called the cooperative silence that allowed others to do commit such wrongs with impunity. 

The social pressure ranges from the threat of direct physical harm to an individual or her or his loved-ones to quite ephemeral of social distancing and the loss of benefits that came with that. 

I begin my first boo, Living Morally, with the assertion that we are quintessential social creatures; and now I see that claim as true in ways that I never fathomed when I first penned those words.  The major social evils stand as incontrovertible proof of the truth of the assertion.  If given the choice between doing that which is evil or losing the social approval of those with whom we profoundly identify most of us will find a way to excuse our committing the evil.  This is what history reveals.

We do not have to turn to atrocities in order to see this.  The hazing that takes place in fraternities stands as s vivid illustration of the point.  If something goes wrong during a hazing session, what every fraternity members knows is that neither he nor anyone else knows anything about what happened.  And that simple code of silence is damn near impenetrable. 

Philosophers such as Margaret Walker and Thomas Nagel, among others, have invoked the saying “But for the grace of God there would go I”.  The saying speaks to the moral luck of not having been born in a society with an evil moral climate.  But if whether we are morally decent or not is much more a matter of moral luck than an expression of our inexorable Kantian-like will and resolve to do what is morally right, then it might very well be the case that our moral posture to wrongdoers who show genuine contrite should be rather different. 

Whether someone is genuinely contrite or not is, of course, an extremely difficult matter to determine.  And I surely have said nothing to the contrary.  But that, alas, is true of lots of things, including love and trust. 

I do not see genuine contrition as performative utterance whereby one simply cries with a loud voice “I am sorry”.  I would need to see a profound disgust on the person’s part over the fact that her or his moral character had been sullied.  And I would have see to an abiding commitment on the person’s part to make amends in some way or the other.  Further, I would have to say that the person has no qualms in owning in public the wrong that she or he committed.  Thus, I do not accept what I shall simply call religious forgiveness, where we forgive regardless of what the wrongdoer says or does.  The Amish come readily to mind here. 

Now, suppose that in the course of 10 years, I see all these things in the life of a wrongdoer who was part of a climate of social evil.  What reason would I have for not forgiving that person?  Indeed, I ask: Do we not exhibit considerable moral arrogance in not forgiving such a person, given the terribly poignant truth that had any of us been in that evil climate it is highly likely that we would have behaved in the very same way?

Now, to be sure, some things in life cannot be replaced.  Life is an obvious example.  But there numerous things other than life that cannot replaced.  The sense of loss occasioned by rape cannot be replaced.  Likewise for a sense of loss that comes with a profound instance of public humiliation. But surely the argument is not that we should forgive only when the harm or loss can be either repaired or replaced. 

I distinguish between two cases of probability.  (a) There is the very low probability, if history is any guide, of people exhibiting genuine contrition for the evil they committed.  (b) Then there is the probability of a genuinely contrite person, as characterized above, doing what is now morally decent. 

I simply maintain that we must not use the truth that the first probability—probability (a)—is very low as a reason to ignore the reality of probability (b).  As far as I can see, that constitutes committing a moral wrong. 

If a person has changed for the better, what is surely true is that we have an indisputable moral obligation to acknowledge it.  And it is this profound truth that underscores the propriety of forgiveness. 

If a person has morally changed for the better, then we have an unquestionable moral obligation to acknowledge that.  And given that on my view a truly contrite person is always willing to acknowledge the wrongs that he committed, then acknowledging that a person has changed for the better does not require us to put into the sea of forgetfulness, as they say, the wrongs the person committed. 

Now, the moral distance between genuinely acknowledging that a person has changed and forgiving an individual are functionally indistinguishable from one another.  If the first has happened, then one cannot continue to excoriate the person’s moral character.  Quite the contrary, one surely has a moral obligation to give moral testimony on the person’s behalf. 

Now, one can refuse to do so and that constitutes holding a grudge.  And it seems to me that we often use wrongdoing as an excuse to hold a grudge.  And if that is true, then there is a very important respect in which we are contributing to evil. 

One would think that moral healing beats moral divisiveness any day.  And this raises the very important question why we, who would very likely have committed the very atrocities that we condemn cannot, see our way to forgiving those who display genuine contrition.  I do not claim that we are under any obligation to wait for such contrition.  I claim only that if moral luck should allow for it to occur, then we are a morally obligation to acknowledge it.  And if I am right in claiming that there is no significant moral distance between doing this and forgiving a person, then it would seem contrary, to what so many suppose, that we can have a moral duty to forgive.  This has to be right; for there can be no good moral argument for dismissing the genuine moral transformation for the better of a once evil person.