Forgiveness is unethical. Shut the fuck up and stop shoving it down everyone's throats Forgiveness is unethical and I'm sick and tired of seeing it pushed around by everyone as some holy untouchable panacea that would cure world hunger, cure cancer, bring Friends back, stop all wars and end all world ills. It's not; what it demands that people do is fucking horrible, everyone just accepts it as the right thing to do with no thought put toward it what-so-ever, and if you have the nerve to disagree with anyone about it you can be sure you will be ganged up on and yelled at.
The argument goes like this: there is lots of hatred and violence and war in the world. This is because people hold resentment against each other for past wrongs. People also hold resentment against other individuals for past wrongs. People who do this are wrong, because we are supposed to love everybody; because it's wrong to feel hate, resentment or anger toward anybody; and because it causes and perpetuates conflict. The only way to peace is for people who have these resentments to abandon their grievances, because doing so will end these conflicts. They must accept that we do not always get justice in this world, so what else are you going to do but forgive?
There's so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start. Wait, I do -- this whole philosophy is based on the idea that the victim bears all the responsibility for a conflict and not whoever hurt them. I feel like it should be self-evident why this is wrong but so many people believe in this crap that I guess I'll have to break it down: victims are not responsible for conflicts, the assholes doing horrible shit to them are. See, we in the real world believe in this thing called "personal responsibility" which holds people responsible for their actions and the effects of those actions on innocent people. That means when you do something wrong to someone else, it is not their fault for being mad or hurt, it is your fault for doing that to them in the first place. Therefore the onus is on the person responsible, and the culture at large, to hold them accountable for their actions. That is what resolves conflicts and that is the very basis that almost every culture around the world is based on. It's why we even have legal systems in the first place. The reason that there is so much violence in the world is because of greedy douchebag countries that do horrible shit and are never held accountable for their actions.
Secondly the argument presumes that hatred, anger and other negative emotions are bad things. No they're freaking not. They're emotional responses partly biological in nature that are hard-wired into us to ensure our survival. That's like saying sexual arousal is bad. Like happiness, love and any other emotion they are part of our humanity and to demand that we give them up in the name of peace is essentially to ask us to give up our humanity. It's not even bad to hate or be angry at bad people who hurt us. They're not causes of great suffering, they are symptoms of great suffering and instead of getting at the root causes of what's triggering those responses we instead choose to treat the emotions themselves as problems and try to excise them, and that's just ineffective and wrong.
Nor is conflict an inherently bad thing, nor is getting rid of conflict the one way to a better world. Not everyone is on our side, we won't get along with everybody, there will be clashes and differences of opinion because we are so individual and varied. Conflict is bound to happen and isn't something to necessarily be shied away from. It's not a good thing to try to love everybody either, for those reasons and because you shouldn't have to like everybody, you shouldn't try to force yourself to be around other human beings who make your life miserable. You have the right to decide who you keep around and who you keep away, that's a crucial part of what autonomy is all about. You cannot stand up for yourself or have boundaries if you forgive because when you do so, you are acting on a grievance of some sort, which you can't do if you forgive because forgiveness is is dropping a grievance.
One of the most heinous things forgiveness does is put the burden of responsibility for a conflict, and the psychological effects of evil acts on a victim. Victims who refuse to forgive will be bullied; they'll be accused of being angry, vindictive, resentful, cruel, and often they will end up being the ones looking bad while whoever hurt them will look better. You can look for almost any post arguing against forgiveness on Reddit and see how they get downvoted, no matter how egregrious the action against the victim was or how clearly justified that victim's grievance is. It shouldn't be hard to see how an evil person could exploit that to smear everyone they harm and basically be able to get away with the things they do scot-free. Why bother being a decent person when you can accuse everyone you hurt of being unforgiving and then be able to act with impunity?
People who argue for forgiveness have an inherent cruelty and selfishness that shows in their arguments. Have you ever heard anyone argue that a victim is only hurting themselves by being angry or resentful? That someone else did something terrible and nothing will be done about it (implying that they themselves will not help the victim pursue justice and won't do anything to the accused), so their only option is to forgive? That's something a bully or, dare I say it, someone who did something evil to you would say to you if you called them out on their actions. That's just rubbing it in their faces. People who believe in forgiveness who do that are no better than the assholes who did something horrible to whoever they're arguing with in the first place.
It's not even the truth -- this is my own experience talking but there are plenty of other people who go through this shit, especially sexual assault victims: the only thing that often stops people from being able to pursue justice is being bullied into silence by fuckwits who demand that they just let it go. Forgiveness is inherently antithetical to justice, because the whole point of it is to just let shit go instead of making sure whoever hurt you has to deal with the law, or their employer/school, or whomever. It inherently protects the accused from accountability.
It's also intellectually and morally lazy. We do not simply stop the pursuit of justice because it appears difficult or impossible to get. We do not simply drop grievances or allow bad people to be around us if they get away with the horrible shit they do. The idea that a victim is responsible for an accuser's actions and their effects is only there because victims are easier targets than the accused; people who argue for forgiveness think that by going after the easier and weaker target that they can end a conflict faster. It should be obvious how horrible that is. We are supposed to be better than that. The idea that a victim should just conform to horrible circumstances like that is just not acceptable. At least it shouldn't be.
Forgiveness does so much harm to people at large, not even in terms of justice but in quality of life. Abuse victims will often keep very toxic people in their lives, subjecting themselves and those they love to continuing abuse and misery, because of this bullshit. And I think perhaps more importantly forgiving stops people from being able to truly move on from these sorts of things because of the fact that it keeps people in these situations and doesn't allow them the ability to simply tell these horrible people to go fuck themselves and leave. People who argue for forgiveness will say that forgiveness is something you do for yourself. Maybe not forgiving is something we ought to try to do for ourselves given how prevalent domestic violence is across the world.
We need to give universally accepted memes like forgiveness real rational thought, because people are dumb as hell.
by throwaway2001million
