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The inspiration, as well as the nomenclature for this distinction is derived from W. D. Ross,The Right and the Good, Oxford, 1930, pp. 19–29, andFoundations of Ethics, Oxford, 1939, pp. 84–86. My account differs from Ross'.
I am assuming for the sake of argument that there is some connexion between liability to punishment and forgiveness. I reject this connexion in section III.
This is not uncommon in personal relationships. Someone has acted untowardly but the act is so minor that it is not worth the effort to find out if it A-ought be held against them althoughprima facie it ought to be.
Nor is it necessary to be in a position to punish or remit a penalty in order to forgive; for example one can forgive one's aunt for leaving one out of the will or one can forgive the executioner before he does the deed. This is why we are able to forgive an agent without knowing whether he A-ought to be punished. In fact we do notnecessarily even need to know whether he P-ought to be punished, since liability to punishment by agent Y has no effect upon agent X's capacity to forgive Y.
We can imagine a child saying “Now that you have punished me, father, do you forgive me?” Or a parent saying to a child “I do forgive you but I am still going to punish you!”
There is, of course, a sense of ‘forgive’ which means “remit a penalty”. A glance at theConcise Oxford Dictionary reveals this. However, my point is that this is not a necessary part of the concept of ‘forgiveness’. Rather, as originally used, ‘forgiveness’ necessarily refers to other agents and our attitudes towards them rather than their actions or the remission of a penalty.
This insight provides a defence against a possible countermove, namely that IMAs, since they are the sort of beings they are, will always do the full calculation to determine what an agent A-ought deserves. Indeed they would. However, because remission of penalty has nothing to do with forgiveness or an act of forgiveness having its full intended illocutionary force, the IMA can forgive for he can do so with out altering the penalty. This being the case, premise 1 would never be true since clause iii is false. Hence the universal conclusion cannot be drawn and the argument is invalid.
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Brien, A. Can God forgive us our trespasses?. SOPH 28, 35–42 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789857
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789857