Philosophers Have Agreed On Forgiveness For Decades. One Researcher Says They’re All Wrong.

For a field defined by disagreement, philosophers who study forgiveness have been remarkably united on one point: wrongdoers cannot have a right to be forgiven. It doesn’t matter how sincerely someone apologizes, how thoroughly they make amends, or how much time passes. Forgiveness, the consensus holds, belongs entirely to the victim. Nobody is owed it. Nobody can demand it.

Sam Ridge thinks that consensus is mistaken. A philosopher at the University of California, San Diego, Ridge has published a paper arguing that wrongdoers can, under certain conditions, hold a genuine right to be forgiven: not a hope, not a polite expectation, but an actual right that places a real obligation on the person they wronged.

That argument puts Ridge at odds with nearly every major scholar in the field. And his case rests on something most people encounter in daily life without giving it much thought: a promise.

Why Philosophers Have Always Rejected A Right To Forgiveness

The breadth of the existing consensus is worth pausing on. Scholars who disagree sharply about what forgiveness even is have still arrived at the same destination on this question.

Lucy Allais argues that forgiveness “involves giving someone something they are not entitled to demand from you.” Espen Gamlund writes that we “cannot be compelled to forgive someone, and thus forgiveness cannot be demanded.” Dana Nelkin acknowledges that a person “simply ought to forgive” in some situations, but insists this does not mean the offender “is entitled to demand that you do; he does not have a right to it.” Charles Griswold is direct: “An offender has no right to forgiveness.”

These are not fringe positions. They represent the mainstream across multiple competing theories of what forgiveness is and how it works. Ridge’s paper, published in the journal Acta Analytica, walks through this literature in detail precisely to show how thoroughly the consensus has held, and how much is riding on it.

Why A Promise Is More Than Just Words

Ridge’s argument begins with a simple observation. On any standard account of promising, a promise generates a right. If a friend lends money and expects it returned by Friday, they have a claim. If a neighbor promises to mow a lawn and doesn’t, the neighbor who was promised can justifiably complain. Promises create obligations, and obligations have corresponding rights on the other side.

People promise forgiveness. Ridge argues this happens more often, and in more varied forms, than most people recognize.

A father, knowing his daughter is afraid to admit she broke a cherished vase, might tell her: “Even if I do get mad, I promise to forgive you.” A friend who has held a grievance for months might finally say, “I will forgive you eventually, I promise. I just need some more time.” Someone trying to break a grudge-holding habit might tell a close friend, “I promise I’ll be more forgiving.” Each of these, Ridge contends, creates a genuine right for the person on the receiving end.

That right isn’t instant. Promises come with reasonable leeway, and demanding forgiveness thirty minutes after a hurt was caused would be unreasonable. But leeway has limits. If the father in Ridge’s example is still making pointed comments about the broken vase months after promising to forgive, his daughter can justifiably say he has failed to honor his word. At that point, “You have to forgive me already, you promised you would and that was months ago” isn’t an imposition. It’s a legitimate claim.

He also acknowledges that promises can fail. If the father promised forgiveness without knowing the full story, and the truth turns out to involve something far more serious than a careless accident, an implicit “unless” clause in the promise may have been triggered. No promise covers every conceivable outcome. But in the ordinary range of moderate wrongdoing, the kind all people commit and all people experience, promises to forgive generate rights to be forgiven, and Ridge argues this is hard to dispute once the logic of promising is taken seriously.

How Close Relationships Can Generate A Right To Forgiveness

Ridge’s more far-reaching argument is that promises are only one path to a right to forgiveness. The same normative logic, he suggests, can arise from patterns built up over time in close relationships, even where no explicit promise was ever made.

He draws on a scenario from philosopher Margaret Gilbert about two colleagues who, without ever formally agreeing to it, have gotten coffee together after every departmental meeting for months. Neither person promised to keep doing this. But if one of them simply stops showing up without explanation, the other is right to feel that something has been violated. An implicit commitment formed, and it carries real moral weight.

Ridge applies the same reasoning to forgiveness. Consider two lifelong friends, he names them Jem and Kyle, who have each forgiven the other for countless minor failings across decades. Kyle forgets Jem’s 75th birthday, goes to considerable lengths to make up for it, and still isn’t forgiven. On Ridge’s account, Kyle has a legitimate grievance. Decades of mutual forgiveness have created a reasonable shared expectation. Jem’s refusal to honor it isn’t simply a personal choice beyond reproach. It is a failure to meet a commitment their friendship itself established.

Ridge goes further still, raising the possibility that forgiveness may function as a constitutive norm of genuine friendship: one of the things friends owe each other that strangers don’t, the way trust and loyalty are owed. He points to the film Banshees of Inisherin, in which a man abruptly ends a long friendship for no clear reason. When a character reacts with outrage (“You can’t just all of a sudden stop being friends with a fella!”) Ridge suggests that reaction reflects something morally real. Meaningful relationships carry a kind of normative inertia. They cannot be corroded by permanent grudge-holding, or abandoned without cause, without moral cost to the person doing the corroding.

What The Consensus Got Wrong, And Why It Matters

Ridge takes care to head off a predictable response: that victims already carry enough of a burden without being told they can be blamed for failing to forgive. He takes this concern seriously. Victims deserve considerable leeway in how they handle the aftermath of being wronged. But leeway, he argues, is not the same as unlimited discretion. Nobody would argue that victims are free to pursue wanton vengeance without moral accountability. A victim who spreads vicious lies about the person who wronged them can be criticized for it. Ridge’s position is that, under specific conditions, the same logic extends to a refusal to forgive.

The argument also carries consequences for how philosophers define forgiveness itself. Any workable theory, Ridge contends, must be able to account for cases in which a wrongdoer holds a genuine right to it. He calls this the “Rights Desideratum.” Theories that treat forgiveness as a voluntary act, choosing to release someone from a debt, or consciously deciding to let go of resentment, handle this relatively cleanly. If forgiveness is a choice, a right to it is a right that someone make that choice. Theories that treat forgiveness as something more involuntary, like an emotional shift that simply occurs over time, face a harder problem. Rights typically attach to things within a person’s control. Those theories, Ridge suggests, require considerably more work to survive this challenge, and all else equal, that is a reason to prefer theories with a voluntary element.

Forgiveness has long been understood as something that belongs, entirely and exclusively, to the person who was wronged. Ridge’s argument doesn’t erase the victim’s role. It doesn’t minimize what being wronged costs. What it does is put a boundary on the idea that victims hold total moral authority over whether to forgive, and argues that boundary has always been there, even if almost no one in the field was willing to say so.

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