Forgiving unbound: emotion, memory, and materiality in extended moral processes

Abstract What does it take to forgive? Forgiveness is often thought to involve an internal, intrapersonal process: it happens within the subject. Drawing on the idea that many of our mental states and processes can extend into the material environment, we argue that this is not always the case: forgiving is often a world-involving, extended process. This means that its mechanisms do not always stop at our brains, our bodies, other people, or the institutions we may appeal to, such as legal systems: they often encompass objects and spaces that evoke memories of past wrongs and the actions we perform upon them. These actions allow us to forget the emotional details of events involving wrongs and to preserve neutral or less emotionally charged memories of such events. By doing so, we can later retrieve memories of past wrongs, reflect on what happened, and morally evaluate the wrongdoer’s actions. Importantly, we can do so without experiencing (or by experiencing fewer) negative emotions towards the wrongdoer and the past wrong. This is significant, because, according to emotion-based accounts of forgiveness, thinking about the wrongdoing and the wrongdoer in this emotionally distant way is what underpins forgiveness. Our proposal is empirically-informed but theoretical. Still, we hope that it will serve as an input to design new strategies for forgiveness, which are particularly useful in cases in which the person wronged cannot (or does not want to) interact with the wrongdoer or appeal to existing social and legal institutions.