Original Research Article

Studies in Christian Ethics

‘Who Can Forgive Sins but

2024, Vol. 37(4) 844–866
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/09539468241285757
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Practice

Andrew J. Peterson
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Abstract
In recent years, third-party forgiveness has received renewed attention, much of it negative. While
a few have undertaken important attempts to defend or expound accounts of third-party forgive-
ness, many suspect that it is incoherent, vicious, or both. If true, this would be bad news for
Christians, for Christians rely on notions of third-party forgiveness for their accounts of salvation
and pastoral authority. I think there is reason to think that some notions of third-party forgiveness
can overcome the critics’ worries. In what follows, I argue that third-party forgiveness is more
common, coherent, salutary, and diverse in species than many critics suppose. After considering
key objections to third-party forgiveness, I offer a constructive account of it that makes sense of
these objections while also defending the underlying concept and act. What emerges from this
defense is a newfound appreciation for the diverse species of third-party forgiveness. Still, some
of these species are more intelligible and safeguarded from declension than others, and I conclude
by examining the limits of third-party forgiveness by considering its most contentious species.

Keywords
Forgiveness, atonement, reconciliation, third party, forgiving for another, justice, God’s
forgiveness

Introduction
Of the Gospel writers, Luke has the most to say about forgiveness. Following the
so-called Nazareth Manifesto scene which Luke uses to frame the beginning of Jesus’
ministry in Galilee, Luke offers a series of short healing stories—first the man with the
unclean spirit, then Simon’s mother-in-law and the sick in her neighborhood, and
finally a leper. Then we come to the story of Jesus and the paralyzed man. Finding

Corresponding author:
Andrew J. Peterson, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.
Email: peterson.andrew@gmail.com
Peterson 845

Jesus mobbed by people seeking his healing, the paralyzed man’s friends go up on the
roof and lower him down into Jesus’ presence. Where in the previous stories Jesus dir-
ectly confronts demons, fevers, and diseases, here Jesus’ healing intervention is more
curious. As Luke tells it, Jesus ‘saw their faith’, and ‘he said, “Friend, your sins are for-
given you”’ (Lk. 5.20). Somehow healing comes by forgiveness.
The forgiveness at hand proves intriguingly contentious. The scribes and Pharisees
who are apparently already in the crowd are scandalized by Jesus’ forgiving act.
‘“Who is this who is speaking blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”’
they wonder aloud (Lk. 5.21). Jesus perceives that their question concerns his authority.
Jesus is offering forgiveness in God’s stead; is he authorized to do so? So, Jesus makes it
clear that by healing the paralyzed man he will demonstrate to the scribes and Pharisees
‘that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ (Lk. 5.24). Jesus commands
the paralyzed man to get up and take his bed and go home, and the paralyzed man does.
Then Luke concludes the story by noting that the crowd was seized by amazement, glori-
fied God, and said, ‘“We have seen strange things today”’ (Lk. 5.26). Somehow a crowd
that had come for miracles seems to find Jesus’ strange forgiveness more miraculous than
the healings he likewise offered.
The scribes, Pharisees, and crowd in Luke’s story identify an important worry about
forgiveness. The sort of forgiveness Jesus offers here—forgiveness offered by someone
other than the victim—belongs to a genus of forgiveness that moral philosophers call
third-party forgiveness. In recent years, third-party forgiveness has received renewed
attention, much of it negative. While a few have undertaken important attempts to
defend or expound accounts of third-party forgiveness, many suspect that it is incoherent,
vicious, or both.
If true, this would be bad news for Christians, for Christians rely on notions of third-
party forgiveness for their accounts of salvation and pastoral authority. I think there is
reason to think that some notions of third-party forgiveness can overcome the critics’
worries. In what follows, I argue that third-party forgiveness is more common, coherent,
salutary, and diverse in species than many critics suppose. After considering key objec-
tions to third-party forgiveness, I offer a constructive account of it that makes sense of
these objections while also defending the underlying concept and act. What emerges
from this defense is a newfound appreciation for the diverse species of third-party for-
giveness. Still, some of these species are more intelligible and safeguarded from declen-
sion than others, and I conclude by examining the limits of third-party forgiveness by
considering its most contentious species.

Christians and Third-Party Forgiveness

But first, why should Christians care about third-party forgiveness? There are, I think, at
least two reasons for thinking that the coherence of important Christian claims and prac-
tices depend on the coherence of third-party forgiveness. The first concerns the hopes that
Christians have for God’s redeeming activity. The second concerns the nature and func-
tion of ecclesial expressions of God’s forgiveness. Let me briefly say a word about each
of these reasons.
846 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

First, consider the peculiar nature of God’s saving forgiveness. In scripture, forgive-
ness first appears on the scene as something that God does. Many instances of God’s for-
giveness are straightforward cases of victim’s forgiveness. The drama between God and
God’s covenant people which stretches through the Hebrew Bible is repeatedly marked
by God’s people’s communal failures to obey God and offer God exclusive worship. God
typically forgives these transgressions. The historical and prophetic literature repeatedly
return the trope of a stiff-necked people forgiven by a generous God, harkening back to
the autobiographical proclamation which God delivered to Moses in response to his plea
for God’s forgiveness (Exod. 34.6-9). But even in the Hebrew Bible, some instances of
forgiveness seem to imply God’s ability to forgive as a third party. The prophet Jeremiah,
for example, seems to fear that God will forgive his would-be murderers against his will.
He prays to God, ‘Yet you, O Lord, know all their plotting to kill me. Do not forgive their
iniquity, do not blot out their sin from your sight’ (Jer. 18.23).
But more generally, many Christian accounts of salvation accord God the ability to
forgive all sins, not just those committed against God. As the author of the Epistle to the
Colossians powerfully puts it, ‘when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision
of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses,
erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to
the cross’ (Col. 2.13-14). This divine prerogative is important for the coherence of
Christians’ salvific hopes if, as we might reasonably suppose, many sins will go unforgiven
by their direct victims. Some victims will have good reasons not to forgive their offenders.
Perhaps their offenders never achieve appropriate remorse. Moreover, our ability to sin often
outstrips our ability to keep track of and atone for our misdeeds. Can God redeem us never-
theless? Most Christians join the author of Colossians in believing that God can, since God
has the power to forgive all sins. This power requires a form of third-party forgiveness, since
God forgives without being the victim of each and every sin.
How we understand God’s saving third-party forgiveness is open to debate. Perhaps
God forgives sin by taking up the victim’s cause and forgiving in their stead. Or
perhaps God has the ability to forgive sin generally, and God simply forgives sin for
God’s own sake because it is ultimately God’s judgment about a person’s continuing
blameworthiness that matters for redemption. Either way, what matters is that salvation’s
coherence is ultimately dependent on an account of third-party forgiveness unless
Christians deny God’s prerogative to forgive all sin and claim that God saves in a
twofold drama: forgiving the sins committed directly against God and gracing all
victims with the ability to forgive their offenders. While most Christians suppose that
their own forgiveness is caught up in the great drama of salvation, they likewise
expect God’s forgiveness to outstrip their own both in power and in reach. If so,
Christians need an account of God’s forgiveness that makes sense of God’s saving inter-
ventions in our inter-personal affairs.
Consider also a second case of Christian third-party forgiveness. In Christian tradi-
tions which share a high view of clerical authority, theologians commonly suggest that
the universal Christian practice of confession and forgiveness involves a special role
for ordained ministers. Thomas Aquinas, for example, describes what is sometimes
called ‘the power of the keys’ by affirming both the primacy of God’s authority to
forgive sins and God’s transmission of that authority to clergypersons. He claims, ‘God
Peterson 847

alone can forgive sin. For only one against whom an offense is directed can forgive the
offense’.1 But while ‘God alone absolves from sin and forgives sin authoritatively; yet
priests do both ministerially, because the words of the priest in this sacrament work as instru-
ments of the Divine power, as in the other sacraments’.2 The Catholic and Orthodox tradi-
tions are not alone in thinking that clerical authority includes the power to forgive on God’s
behalf. In his Small Catechism, Luther describes confession in similar terms as a twofold
movement of Christian repentance and forgiveness. After confessing sin, Luther writes,
‘we receive absolution or forgiveness from the confessor as from God himself, by no
means doubting but firmly believing that our sins are thereby forgiven before God in
heaven’.3 For both Thomas and Luther, this form of third-party forgiveness is understood
as an extension of priests’ and pastors’ power to speak on God’s behalf.
Whether it takes place in the confession booth or in the sanctuary during ordinary
worship, priests and pastors in these traditions are thought to carry special representa-
tional authority. When they offer forgiveness to an individual’s confession or proclaim
it to the congregation, they do so on God’s behalf, enacting God’s forgiveness. What dif-
ferentiates this practice from the practices of confession and forgiveness common to low
church traditions is the claim that the pastor or priest does more than report on God’s
activity. When they proclaim God’s forgiveness, they really forgive, doing so on
God’s behalf through an act which God joins or affirms. For many Christians, as
Luther’s phrasing of it emphasizes, the third-party forgiveness offered by priests and
pastors is an important source of spiritual comfort, one God provides for the church in
order to preclude any doubt that God’s forgiveness will fail to overlap with a minister’s.

What is Forgiveness?
If third-party forgiveness is essential to Christian accounts of God’s saving grace and the
transmission of it through the church’s life and witness, then Christians should have
something to say to those who doubt third-party forgiveness is coherent and morally
sound. But before we can consider any objections to or defenses of third-party forgive-
ness, we first need to say what it means for someone to forgive another. Forgiveness
itself is as contested as its third-party variant. Scholars disagree about forgiveness’s
aims, rationale, and potential effects. Some consider it an attitude, others an action.
Some think of it as paradigmatically a victim’s response to a repentant offender, while
others view it as a gracious gift that is not beholden to contrition, repentance, or restitu-
tion. Some consider it an act normed by justice. Others argue that it floats free of justice as
it is fundamentally an act of love owed to everyone.

1. CT 146, p. 165. Trans. Cyril Vollert, S.J. in Aquinas’s Shorter Summa (Manchester, NH:
Sophia, 2002). ‘Peccata vero remittere solus Deus potest. Culpa enim contra aliquem com-
missa ille solus remittere potest contra quem committitur’.
2. ST, 3.84.3 ad 3, p. 2525; ‘solus Deus per auctoritatem et a peccato absolvit et peccata remittit.
Sacerdotes autem utrumque faciunt per ministerium, inquantum scilicet verba sacerdotis in
hoc sacramento instrumentaliter operantur, sicut etiam in aliis sacramentis’.
3. Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert and Charles P. Arand (eds.), The Book of Concord: The
Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000).
848 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

In what follows, I limit my considerations to the resentment-based accounts of forgive-

ness that have achieved prominence among moral philosophers for two reasons. First,
most critics of third-party forgiveness assume this account. By meeting their concerns
within the framework of the account they assume, we ensure that we are talking about
the same thing when we use the term ‘forgiveness’. Second and selfishly, I think
resentment-based accounts of forgiveness are the most promising of the many options
currently available in the moral philosophy literature. I cannot defend that claim here,
but it is nonetheless worth making explicit.
Resentment-based accounts of forgiveness trace their origins to the Anglican bishop
and theologian Joseph Butler who in 1726 published fifteen of the sermons he delivered
during his ministry at Rolls Chapel. Two of the sermons take up the problem of being a
victim of an injustice and offer a sophisticated account of what forgiveness is and how it
sets wrongs right. Crucially, Butler understands forgiveness as a response to resentment,
the feeling or response that victims normally feel when their dignity and worth are
besmirched by a wrongdoer’s injustice.
Resentment is an ugly word. In its ordinary use, it is often used to imply a moral
failing. We suspect that someone who resents another is bitter, angry, vengeful, or
even hateful, often in excess or for bad reasons. For Butler, resentment is more
nuanced. He distinguishes between ‘two kinds’ of resentment: ‘Hasty and sudden, or
settled and deliberate.’4 The first kind tracks some of the negative behaviors implied
in our ordinary use of the term. It is often employed to identify instances when ‘we
imagine an injury done to us, when there is none’ or when we experience some ‘pain
or inconvenience, without injury’.5 He thinks these are ordinary but mistaken uses of
the term. Against its misuse, Butler defends a second kind of resentment as an appropriate
response victims take up in response to an injustice they suffer. Resentment understood in
this way is a reasoned response to suffering injustice. It is a considered response whereby
a victim tracks the evil they suffer and holds their offender to account. Butler spares no
praise for resentment understood in this way. He argues that this kind of resentment is a
gift given to humans by nature in order to protect us ‘against injury, injustice and cruelty’;
that it is ‘one of the common bonds, by which society is held together’; that it is another
term for the holy anger that Paul commends (Eph. 4.26).6
Many resentment-based accounts of forgiveness follow Butler in understanding
resentment as reason-bound anger. Anger is one emotional response which appropriately
tracks a victim’s sense of being wronged. But is it the only emotional response compat-
ible with being wronged? Victims often report feeling more hurt, lost, disappointed, des-
pondent, or depressed than angry. When applied to these cases, resentment-based
accounts that too narrowly focus on anger imply that victims who respond to wrongdoing
with emotions other than anger respond deficiently, perhaps failing to achieve the resent-
ment appropriate to their worth.

4. Joseph Butler, Joseph Butler: Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and Other
Writings on Ethics, ed. David McNaughton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 67.
5. Butler, Joseph Butler, p. 70.
6. Butler, Joseph Butler, pp. 67–69.
Peterson 849

Better resentment-based accounts of forgiveness turn to P.F. Strawson’s famous essay

‘Freedom and Resentment’ in order to more precisely specify the nature of resentment.
For Strawson, resentment belongs to a class of ‘attitudes and feelings to which we … are
prone’ in response to ‘the attitudes and intentions’ directed ‘toward us’ from other
people.7 He calls these ‘reactive attitudes’.8 There are, he thinks, a wide range of reactive
attitudes which express the range of appropriate ‘reactions to the quality of others’ wills
toward us, as manifested in their behaviour: to their good or ill will or indifference or
lack of concern’.9 Resentment is the appropriate ‘reaction to injury or indifference’.10
Resentment thus has a particular warp and weft. It is inherently second-personal, directed
by a victim toward their wrongdoer. In substance, the attitude expresses the victim’s disap-
proval of the wrongdoer’s will or intentions by blaming them for their unjust conduct. It is
always directed toward the wrongdoer as a claim that you ought not to have done this to me.
Whether or not they follow Strawson’s revised notion of resentment, resentment-based
accounts of forgiveness understand forgiveness to be an action that overcomes resentment
in a particular way. There are other ways in which resentment can be extinguished.
Justifying, excusing, or accepting an injustice are some possible alternatives. Forgetting the
injustice entirely is another. Any of these can extinguish resentment, but none of them
counts as forgiveness. In these alternatives, resentment is alleviated by downplaying,
denying, or simply forgetting a wrongdoer’s blameworthiness. Forgiveness works differently
because it involves affirming the full measure of the offender’s blame and overcoming it.
As Jeffrie Murphy has it, forgiveness does not simply involve overcoming resentment but
‘forswearing resentment on moral grounds’.11 Or as Charles Griswold puts it, ‘forgiveness is
a certain kind of ethical response to injury and the injurer’.12 What sort of response is it?
Forgiveness on this view is the victim’s act or process of letting go of and forswearing their
resentment. Note that resentment-based accounts of forgiveness specify that only the release
of resentment is required in order for a victim to achieve a genuine act of forgiveness. The
victim may still feel a whole range of negative feelings toward the offender or retain a host of
other negative reactive attitudes. But they will still have forgiven the offender if they overcome
and forswear their resentment of the offender for having mistreated them in a particular way.
What does it mean to forswear resentment and what reasons appropriately license
victims to do so? In other words, what does it mean to forgive? On this question,
resentment-based accounts of forgiveness disagree, and the result is a wide range of
views on what is required in order for forgiveness to be possible or achieved. Many
argue that a range of considerations can make forgiveness appropriate. Perhaps the
offender has repented or suffered some punishment proportional to their injustice. Or

7. P.F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, 1st edn (New York: Routledge,
2008), pp. 6–7.
8. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 6, original emphasis.
9. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.
10. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.
11. Jeffrie Murphy, ‘Forgiveness and Resentment’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7.1 (1982),
pp. 503–16 (508), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1982.tb00106.x.
12. Charles L. Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 39.
850 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

perhaps they are a good friend or intimate partner deserving of forgiveness for the sake of
the relationship. Or perhaps we should forgive because we know that we will need for-
giveness ourselves in the not-too-distant future. These examples are meant to be suggest-
ive, not exhaustive. What they suggest is that there are likely many potential reasons for
forswearing resentment. What matters is that the reasons in any given case justify the
victim’s act of forswearing their resentment.
Resentment-based accounts of forgiveness have many further nuances we could explore
and differences we could note. Some resentment-based accounts of forgiveness are condi-
tional; that is, they hold that resentment can only be appropriately overcome when contrite
offenders offer repentance or restitution. On these accounts, the reason victims are able to
forgive is that their resentment has been transformed by the offender’s expressed remorse.
Others think of forgiveness as a gift and hold that victims can willingly overcome their resent-
ment for their own reasons even absent any change on the part of their offenders. While
important, these differences are largely inconsequential for the purpose of evaluating and
defending third-party forgiveness. What unifies these views is the shared commitment that
forgiveness involves overcoming the blaming stance that a victim has toward their offender.
This need not mean that they forget the wrong or that the offender perpetrated it. But it does
involve a commitment to no longer treat that wrong as live and unaddressed.

Third-Party Forgiveness and Its Critics

Many theorists of forgiveness have found it impossible to square resentment-based
accounts of forgiveness with the practice of third-party forgiveness. By third-party for-
giveness, I mean any form of forgiveness offered to an offender by someone other
than a victim. These critics object to third-party forgiveness on the basis of two
worries. The first doubts the coherence of third-party forgiveness. The second doubts
the moral legitimacy of third-party forgiveness. Consider each objection alongside an
example or two that helps press its most important concerns.

Objection 1: Third-Party Forgiveness is Incoherent

The first objection to third-party forgiveness aims to rule it out a priori on the basis of
resentment’s internal structure.13 Resentment-based accounts not only share a

13. Versions of this objection can be found in Berel Lang, ‘Forgiveness’, American
Philosophical Quarterly 31.2 (1994), pp. 105–17; Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton,
Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joram Graf
Haber, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Study (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991);
Geoffrey Scarre, ‘Forgiveness and Identification’, Philosophia 44 (2016), pp. 1021–2028,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9688-9; Trudy Govier and Wilhelm Verwoerd,
‘Forgiveness: The Victim’s Prerogative’, South African Journal of Philosophy 21.2
(2002), pp. 97–111, https://doi.org/10.4314/sajpem.v21i2.31338; H.J.N. Horsbrugh,
‘Forgiveness’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4.2 (1974), pp. 269–82, https://doi.org/10.
1080/00455091.1974.10716937; and Piers Benn, ‘Forgiveness and Loyalty’, Philosophy
71.277 (1996), pp. 369–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100041644.
Peterson 851

commitment to thinking of forgiveness as paradigmatically the work of victims but also

to understanding resentment as a reactive attitude exclusive to victims. Recall that resent-
ment understood as a negative reactive attitude is inherently second-personal. I resent
your injustice against me. Resentment is not an abstract status with a neutral point of
view. In this way, resentment is distinct from a normative status like guilt. Any
number of parties can regard a wrongdoer as guilty. They might do so on the basis of first-
hand observation, reliable testimony, or authoritative decree. In none of these cases is the
party’s own affective response to the wrongdoing a necessary or constitutive feature of
the wrongdoer’s guilt. Resentment is different. It is always perspectival, directed by
some victim against an offending agent by virtue of a particular injustice.
As a result, forgiveness’s paradigm case turns out to be interpersonal, and forgiveness
requires a particular social position that only victims have. Only they can resent a wrong-
doer for an injustice. Likewise, only victims can do the required work—forswearing
resentment, moderating their lingering feelings of hurt, anger, or the like, committing
to seeing the offender in a new light, etc. Jeffrie Murphy summarizes the most
common phrasing of this position well:

To use a legal term, I do not have standing to resent or forgive you unless I have myself been the
victim of your wrongdoing. I may forgive you for embezzling my funds; but it would be ludi-
crous for me, for example, to claim that I had decided to forgive Hitler for what he did to the
Jews. I lack the proper standing for this. Thus, I may legitimately resent (and hence consider
forgiving) only wrong done to me.14

As Murphy has it, the problem with third-party forgiveness regards standing. Only
victims have the proper sort of standing because only they are licensed to take up the
second-personal attitude that forgiveness addresses. For this reason, Margaret Urban
Walker objects to third-party forgiveness, since she deems victims’ exclusive standing
to forgive a ‘conceptual truth, true by the definition of what we call “forgiving”’.15
Importantly, this objection can accommodate complicated cases in which multiple
parties might offer forgiveness to the same offender. Suppose I lie to my brother about
my ability to repay a loan I request from him. When I fail to repay my brother, he is
forced to renege on his promise to cover our mother’s upcoming medical procedure. In
this case, who has the standing to forgive? And for what? Some defenders of third-party
forgiveness argue that cases like this require a notion of third-party forgiveness where my
mom has indirect standing to forgive by virtue of my brother’s victimization.16
But this is not right. One can deny third-party forgiveness and still make sense of the
intuition that my brother and mother both have the ability to forgive me. By lying to my
brother about my ability to repay him, I have performed one action that produces mul-
tiple, distinct injustices. My brother’s case is straightforward. He is doubly harmed.

14. Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, p. 21, original emphasis.
15. Margaret Urban Walker, ‘Third Parties and the Social Scaffolding of Forgiveness’, Journal
of Religious Ethics 41.3 (2013), pp. 495–512 (495), https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12026.
16. Brandon Warmke, ‘God’s Standing to Forgive’, Faith and Philosophy 34.4 (2017), pp. 381–
402 (385–86), https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil201711690.
852 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

My lie deprives him of the repayment I have promised and causes him to fail to meet his
responsibilities to our mother. He should resent me for both of these reasons, and he may
forgive me for these wrongs under the right circumstances. I also, separately, wrong my
mother, culpably depriving her of the funds she needs for her medical procedure. She
should resent me for depriving her of her medical care, and she likewise may forgive
me for this. She is a secondary victim of my injustice, and her forgiveness does not
depend on my brother’s standing or his own offer of forgiveness. Her forgiveness, if
offered, can likewise be hers, generated by her standing as a victim of a distinct injustice.
If she expresses her forgiveness by saying that she forgives me for lying to my brother, I
could understand her to mean that she forgives me for depriving her of her medical care by
virtue of lying to him. Ordinary language often masks the precise nature of our acts, so this
misleading semantic formulation need not be a strike against the coherence of third-party
forgiveness’s critics. Thus, one can object to the coherence of third-party forgiveness and
still make sense of how injustices spread through our intricate webs of interrelations to one
another where one injustice often generates many secondary and tertiary victims.

Objection 2: Third-Party Forgiveness is Unjust

Even if third-party forgiveness proved conceptually coherent, many of its critics nonetheless
doubt that it is morally permissible. As with the objection to third-party forgiveness’s concep-
tual coherence, moral objections to its permissibility tend to focus on the privileges uniquely
held by and the risks uniquely faced by the direct victims of an injustice. These privileges and
risks, the critics argue, make third-party forgiveness dangerous at best and vicious at worst.
The moral salience of these objections, I think, highlights a number of critically important con-
cerns for any account of third-party forgiveness to address, for third-party forgiveness should
not come at the expense of further victimizing those who suffer most in an injustice’s wake.
Consider the two most pressing moral objections to third-party forgiveness.
Dostoevsky gave powerful and dreadful shape to one sort of moral objection in The
Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan digs up an illustration which he forces upon his
pious brother Alyosha. In a famous scene, Ivan retells the story of a Russian peasant
boy whose family lived as serfs on the property of a wealthy general. ‘One day a serf
boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general’s favorite
hound.’17 The general’s response is characteristically cruel and disproportionate. ‘The
general looked the child up and down. “Take him”.’18 The general orders his dependents
to strip the child and make him run in a field before the general’s hunting dogs. ‘The
hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!’ Ivan exclaims.
As he mulls over the murder, Ivan despondently grills his brother on whether and how
this horror could be atoned. ‘How are you going to atone for’ the child’s murder, he asks
his brother. ‘Is it possible?’19 Punishment, even eternal torment in hell, he concludes, is

17. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, trans. Constance
Garnett (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 223.
18. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 223.
19. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 226.
Peterson 853

woefully inadequate, for it does nothing to restore the child’s life. Besides, ‘I want to
forgive. I want to embrace’, Ivan confesses. But at the same time, he insists,

I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not
forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will; let her forgive the torturer for the
immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has
no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him!
And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole
world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?20

Some of Ivan’s pained exclamations cast doubt on the coherence of the mother’s third-
party forgiveness, but others address the moral permissibility of her third-party forgive-
ness. ‘She dare not forgive him!’ he repeatedly claims; ‘she has no right to forgive’ on her
son’s behalf.21 Margaret Urban Walker helps to specify one way of understanding this
moral objection to third-party forgiveness. She argues that third-party forgiveness is
unjust because it pretentiously involves forgiving without bearing the costs of the wrong-
doing. On her view, part of being a victim involves being saddled with some exclusive
costs of another’s wrongdoing. These costs are often horrendous. As she puts it,
‘Grave wrongs done to us can deprive us of important goods (such as trust, self-
confidence, ease, security, or people and things we love) and they saddle us with predica-
ments that range from difficult … to disastrous and life-changing’.22 Even where wrong-
doers are ‘already punished’ or ‘have made amends’, they cannot undo or erase many of
these costs.23 Just these costs, she thinks, make ‘forgiveness so hard and so valuable’, and
‘it is precisely this plight that “third parties” do not share’.24 Because the most costly
burdens imposed by injustice can only be borne by its victim, third parties lack the
license to forgive.
Urban Walker’s objection is rooted in a further suspicion that third parties equate their
indignation with the victim’s resentment. In Strawsonian terms, we might understand this
as conflating resentment with the appropriate response a third party feels in response to
the victim’s suffering. Urban Walker suspects the mistaken third party also treats their
‘moral response of indignation or outrage at wrongs to others as a kind of harm one
suffers … a kind of harm in some way akin to the damage with which victims of
serious wrongs struggle’.25 She concludes that to ‘represent oneself as forgiving just
because one is aware of a wrong and enters into the fellow feeling of resentment, is
myopic, or even self-indulgent or presumptuous’.26 Returning to the example Ivan
gives, Urban Walker suggests that the mother’s third-party forgiveness is only possible
on the basis of a morally mistaken and repugnantly self-indulgent assumption that her

20. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 226.

21. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 226.
22. Walker, ‘Third Parties’, p. 501.
23. Walker, ‘Third Parties’, p. 496.
24. Walker, ‘Third Parties’, p. 496.
25. Walker, ‘Third Parties’, p. 502.
26. Walker, ‘Third Parties’, p. 502.
854 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

own suffering and outrage are sufficiently sympathetic to her son’s resentment to author-
ize her to forgive in his stead. For Urban Walker, this is a moral mistake because the right
to forgive requires bearing the costs of an injustice in a way only victims do. Victims’
suffering generates exclusive standing to forgive, and no amount of moral solidarity
can make it possible for a third party to bear those costs and achieve that standing.
Consider another literary example which raises a distinct moral objection to third-
party forgiveness. In The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal’s memoir of his experiences in
a Nazi concentration camp, Wiesenthal recounts an encounter he had with a dying SS
officer. With his last breaths, the officer requested Wiesenthal’s forgiveness. The
episode haunts Wiesenthal, and he repeatedly recalls conversations he had about it
with his compatriots in the camp. Wiesenthal recounts how Josek, one of his friends,
reacts to Wiesenthal telling him about the request. ‘Do you know’, Josek says, ‘when
you were telling me about your meeting with the SS man, I feared at first, that you
had really forgiven him. You would have had no right to do this in the name of people
who had not authorized you to do so.’27 Arthur, another friend of Wiesenthal’s,
agrees, counseling Wiesenthal that ‘surely’ he ‘must know that there are requests that
one cannot and dare not grant’.28
One way of understanding Josek’s view is that victims have a unique prerogative to
forgive that renders third-party forgiveness impermissible.29 This view can be distin-
guished from the objection Urban Walker specified above. Here, as Linda Radzik
aptly summarizes it, the idea is that it is ultimately up to victims to determine ‘whether
the wrongdoer is forgiven or counts as forgiven’.30 The proposed prerogative consists
in the fact that ‘the victim’s decision to renounce moral anger or normalize relations
with the wrongdoer (or to refuse to do so) must be treated as authoritative for everyone
else’.31 Perhaps this right obtains, at least in part, because forgiveness involves the ‘right
to restore the wrongdoer’s position as a member in good standing of the moral commu-
nity’, and victims have the exclusive right to do so.32
It is easy to appreciate the protection such a right would offer victims, guarding them
from further victimization caused by acts of third-party forgiveness. When other members
of a moral community defer to a victim to assess and forgive an offender, they show
respect for her moral worth and bestow the sort of dignity infringed by the offender’s
injustice. Their recognition can be healing, since it reaffirms what the injustice attempted
to deny: that she is a person unworthy of that treatment. Third-party forgiveness risks
doing the opposite. When third parties intervene and offer their forgiveness before the

27. Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, ed. Harry
J. Cargas and Bonny V. Fetterman, revised and expanded edn (New York: Schocken Books,
1998), p. 65.
28. Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, p. 66.
29. Govier and Verwoerd, ‘Forgiveness’; Benn, ‘Forgiveness and Loyalty’.
30. Linda Radzik, ‘Moral Bystanders and the Virtue of Forgiveness’, in Christopher Allers and
Marieke Smit (eds.), Forgiveness in Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), p. 75, original
emphasis.
31. Radzik, ‘Moral Bystanders’, p. 75.
32. Radzik, ‘Moral Bystanders’, p. 75.
Peterson 855

victim or apart from the victim’s judgments of its appropriateness, they risk trampling her
right to determine whether the offender is worthy of being released from the negative con-
sequences of their offense. In so doing, the compound the injury to the victim’s moral
worth implied in the offense, ‘suggesting that the victim is not a morally significant
person’.33 While it is sometimes left implicit, I take it that this risk of further victimizing
those already most impacted by an injustice is what the critics think justifies a victim’s
exclusive prerogative to forgive.
There underlie the major moral objections to third-person forgiveness. Victims and
only victims can forgive, for they are saddled with unique costs and maintain an exclusive
prerogative to oversee the wrongdoer’s moral reassessment. I think these objections are
immensely valuable because they name important risks that third-party forgiveness poses
to victims. If third-party forgiveness is coherent but can only be defended by ignoring or
downplaying these risks, we should dispense with it. The question, then, is whether this is
the case.

Defending Third-Party Forgiveness

Can we identify coherent practices of third-party forgiveness that are sensitive to these
concerns? I think we can. I think third-party forgiveness has forms that are more ordinary
and mundane than the critics suppose. I also think Christians need such an account for the
coherence of their beliefs and practices. What then can we say to the critics?
In this section, I offer two sets of responses, one directed at the objections to third-party
forgiveness’s coherence, another directed at the objections to its permissibility. In answer to
the first, I argue that the critics’ conceptual objections are too circular. They presuppose the
incoherence of third-party forgiveness by exclusively aligning forgiveness as victim’s for-
giveness. We should resist this temptation, and I offer a general account of a paradigm
case of third-party forgiveness that gives us reason to do so. I then take up the objections
to third-party forgiveness’s permissibility, arguing that each of these identifies a way that
third-party forgiveness can go wrong. We should be alert to these possible dangers. But
dangers abound in most of our ordinary practices, and these particular dangers do not invali-
date the permissibility of third-party forgiveness generally. Along the way, it will become
clear that the question of third-party forgiveness is not limited to whether third parties
can forgive on behalf of victims. To be sure, this is one important question we should
ask about third-party forgiveness. I return to it in the final section.

A Defense of Third-Party Forgiveness’s Conceptual Coherence

Let’s begin with third-party forgiveness’s conceptual coherence. Notice that the objec-
tions assumed that forgiveness is something exclusively undertaken by victims. This,
they argued, follows a priori from the idea that forgiveness involves overcoming a
victim’s resentment understood as a reactive attitude to which third parties have no
access. Victim’s forgiveness, therefore, was not only a paradigm case of forgiveness

33. Radzik, ‘Moral Bystanders’, p. 76.

856 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

but the paradigm case of forgiveness. If the critics are right that victim’s forgiveness is the
only species of forgiveness, then third-party forgiveness is indeed incoherent. Without
superhumanly occupying another’s moral psychology, it is difficult to imagine how we
could possibly intervene in another’s affairs in a way that could effectively produce for-
giveness. It is seemingly ruled out by definition.
This strikes me as overly circular. By defining all forgiveness as victim’s forgiveness,
it does follow analytically that only victims can forgive, but that is what we would have
expected. The conclusion is assumed in the definition. The question is whether this is a
full and adequate definition of forgiveness. I doubt that it is. We can believe that victim’s
forgiveness involves the forswearing of resentment without conceding that all forgive-
ness involves the forswearing of resentment. I think that the assumption that third
parties must offer a form of victim’s forgiveness is therefore misleading. By reframing
this question, we can uncover another paradigm case of forgiveness.
As we do, we should be careful to pick our examples prudently. We should note that the
significant objections raised above concerning third-party forgiveness’s coherence and moral
credibility leave the impression that third-party forgiveness is odd and fails in important
respects to conform to the norms of everyday forgiveness. The extreme cases (Nazi repent-
ance, horrific child murder, etc.) which frequently appear in these objections help to reinforce
this impression and confuse our moral intuitions. But I also doubt that third-party forgiveness
is as uncommon or extraordinary as these objections suggest. In fact, I hold the opposite intu-
ition. I find acts of third-party forgiveness to be ordinarily mundane and salutary. Paying
closer attention to more ordinary cases will help recalibrate our intuitions.
Revisit, then, the definition of forgiveness already traced above with reference to P.F.
Strawson’s famous essay. For the resources for constructing another species of forgive-
ness are already present there too. In his account of the reactive attitudes, Strawson
reminds us that resentment belongs to a class of reactive attitudes that address ‘the
quality of others’ wills towards us, as manifested in their behaviour’.34 As a class,
these reactive attitudes are always self-interested; they always take shape as judgments
about something that should or should not have been done to me. He calls these the ‘per-
sonal reactive attitudes’.35
But this is not the only form reactive attitudes can take. Alongside the self-interested
class of reactive attitudes to which resentment belongs, Strawson identifies a class of
‘sympathetic or vicarious or impersonal or disinterested or generalized analogues’.36
What this other class of reactive attitudes has in common is that they are ‘reactions to
the qualities of others’ wills, not toward ourselves, but towards others’.37 Many of the
reactive attitudes in this second class are very nearly identical to ones in the first, distin-
guished only by their generalized, impersonal, or vicarious character. In short, they are
distinguished by the attitude holder’s third-personal relation to the injustice.38

34. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.

35. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.
36. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.
37. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.
38. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 15.
Peterson 857

Resentment, thus, turns out to have a twin appropriate to third parties, namely indignation.
For Strawson, indignation is the reactive attitude that third parties take up in response to wrongs
committed against others. It shares all of resentment’s content save the attitude holder’s relation
to the victim. So instead of resentment’s judgment that that ought not to have been done to me,
indignation objects that that ought not to have been done to them. Crucially, like resentment,
indignation is second-personally addressed to the wrongdoer. It is not simply a judgment about
the unjust nature of an action but an attitudinal stance, a demand that a third party takes up
toward an offender. The indignant person holds an offender accountable for their failure to
exhibit ‘a reasonable degree of goodwill or regard … towards all those on whose behalf
moral indignation can be felt, i.e., as we now think, towards all [people]’.39
Like resentment, indignation is an ugly word. But in Strawson’s usage, it performs
crucial salutary work aimed primarily at protecting victims. By taking up this attitude,
third parties enact a commitment which confirms the worth of the victim and condemns
the injustice done to her. It is, therefore, an important act of solidarity by which victims
are recognized as members of the moral community, members who have been unduly
harmed and are worthy of being made whole. It is easy to imagine how important such
responses are in cases of identity-based discrimination. The white bystander to an act of
racist redlining and the straight witness to an insult directed toward a non-binary stranger
can and should track this injustice by taking up negative attitudes toward the offenders. By
doing so, the bystander and witness reaffirm the worth of the aggrieved party and the
responsibility of the offender to make amends. In short, they express ‘exactly the same
expectation or demand’ contained in the victim’s resentment, but ‘in a generalized form’.40
Attending to Strawson’s treatment of indignation makes it possible to furnish third-
party forgiveness’s paradigm case. Where victim’s forgiveness involves the victim’s for-
swearing of resentment, third-party forgiveness involves a third party’s forswearing of
indignation. As in the case of victims, this forswearing involves the same commitments
to moderating one’s lingering anger and ill-will, seeing the offender in a new light, return-
ing them to good standing in the moral community, and so on. Likewise, forswearing
indignation will require the right sort of reasons. Recall that resentment-based accounts
of forgiveness often disagree about what sort of reasons are required, especially whether
an offender’s contrition and restitution are prerequisites for forgiveness. The same sorts
of disagreement can be anticipated with regard to indignation-based third-party forgive-
ness without raising any concern about the act’s underlying coherence. We may disagree
about which reasons appropriately license a third party to forswear indignation. What
matters is that we agree that this change of heart requires appropriate reasons.
As with victim’s forgiveness, the quality of the third party’s reasons is what will
prevent forgiveness from collapsing into one of its semblances. Third-party forgiveness
is not the only way in which indignation can be discharged. As with resentment, indig-
nation could be extinguished through justifying, excusing, accepting, or forgetting. Just
as victims tempted by these acts fall short of forgiveness, so too third parties that give up
indignation by means of these acts do something other than forgive.

39. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 16.

40. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, pp. 15–16.
858 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

This gets us to what is so valuable about third-party forgiveness. Were third parties
only capable of discharging their indignation by justifying, excusing, accepting, or for-
getting, they would be left with no means of appropriately transforming their stance
toward a worthy offender. Even reformed and repentant offenders would remain
damned by virtue of their past behavior. We need third-party forgiveness in order to
capture the ordinary but morally crucial act by which third parties overcome their nega-
tive attitudes toward wrongdoers and release them from the ongoing ill-will they may
otherwise deserve. I think this finding is uncontroversial; it tracks a nearly universal intu-
ition that wrongdoers generally have the ability to overcome the stigma of their wrongs.
That such a widely shared intuition is rendered unintelligible on exclusively resentment-
based accounts of forgiveness provides good reason to suspect that something has gone
wrong with these accounts.
If this account of indignation-based third-party forgiveness is right, notice how
common opportunities for third-party forgiveness turn out to be. Whenever a third
party can appropriately take up the attitude of indignation toward an offender, they sim-
ultaneously achieve at least the necessary preconditions for third-party forgiveness.41
Indignation is exceedingly common, and it is plausible that third-party forgiveness
may be as or more common than victim’s forgiveness. Victim’s forgiveness is limited
by each individual’s experiences of enduring injustice. Indignation is only bound by
the limitation each of us has in attending and appropriately responding to the injustices
others incur. Perhaps our greater or more consistent tendency to privilege our own self-
interest helps even the tally. Whatever the case, the point is that third-party forgiveness is
neither odd nor necessarily extraordinary. It is an ordinary and exceedingly common
activity by which the forgiving navigate their indirect relationships with other fallible
creatures.
We can see the utility of this account by revisiting the example I offered above where
I failed to repay my brother the money he intended to use for our mom’s medical care.
I suggested that my intuition is that both parties have standing to forgive. How so?
Above, I suggested that critics of third-party forgiveness can make sense of this intuition
by distinguishing the injustices I create. My one act produces two sets of wrongs, one direc-
ted toward each family member. Both of them are therefore victims and can offer forgive-
ness for the distinct injustice they endure. Importantly, my mom will not be forgiving me for
what I did to my brother. She will forgive me for how what I did to him wronged her.
The account of third-party forgiveness I have just offered suggests another sort of for-
giveness is possible. My mom is indignant over my treatment of my brother. She is an
invested third-party witness. Advocating for my brother’s personal dignity and keeping
track of slights to it are part of the work she routinely performs by virtue of her love
for him. She simply cares about his wellbeing. When I wrong him, she is indignant.
As a third party, she takes up an attitude toward me that communicates to me that I

41. I will return to clarify this point in my defense of third-party forgiveness’s moral merits. Refer
to that section for a discussion of how the general freedom to take up indignation is defeasible
in some circumstances and constricted in many cases by the type of third-party relation being
occupied.
Peterson 859

ought not to have done that to him. She is right to do so by virtue of her social position,
and she is right to maintain that attitude until its precipitating conditions are meaningfully
transformed. Suppose I apologize to my brother. He tells my mom about it. On my
account, she is then in a position to forgive, to forswear her indignation and lay down
her blaming stance toward me. This seems thoroughly ordinary to me, and in many
cases its stakes are neither significantly greater nor less than those of the rest of our ordin-
ary lives. No doubt there will also be attempts to offer third-party forgiveness in extreme
cases, but we should come to those ready to deliberate over them with a clear sense of
how third-party forgiveness operates in our everyday lives.
Finally, return to the explicitly Christian cases we considered at the beginning of this
article. The generic form of third-party forgiveness just elaborated is how I think we
should understand God’s forgiveness of sins between two other parties. When God for-
gives me for wronging my brother and our mom, I don’t think we need to understand this
to mean that God forgives in their stead. Nor is God’s forgiveness exclusive of or com-
petitive with their own offers of forgiveness. Rather, God forgives for God’s sake when
God releases me from the indignant stance God takes up in response to my misdeeds by
virtue of God’s love and care for my family members. I may also directly wrong God.
Perhaps wronging anyone is also a sin against their Creator and Redeemer. But we
should understand this as additive and distinct. God may forgive me for this injustice
that I do to God while simultaneously forgiving me as a third party for the wrongs
I do to my brother and mother. Both acts are required for God to forgive the full effect
of my sin.

Just and Salutary: Third-Party Forgiveness and Victims’ Welfare

In advancing my account of third-party forgiveness, I insisted that whenever a third party
can appropriately take up the attitude of indignation toward an offender, they simultan-
eously achieve at least the necessary preconditions for a paradigm form of third-party for-
giveness. This is not the same thing as claiming that any and all indignation licenses a
third party to forgive. One of the things that the extreme examples do help capture is
our intuition that there are cases where a third party’s indignation is an appropriate
response to an injustice, but nonetheless they would be unwise, imprudent, or unjust to
offer forgiveness. In other cases, a third party may simply be unauthorized to forgive.
Can my account of third-party forgiveness successfully take these concerns on board?
I believe it can, and I think attention to these moral concerns helps distinguish third-party
forgiveness’s right practice from its unjust and improper semblances.
The two main objections to third-party forgiveness’s moral permissibility I considered
above both concern the justice of its practice. They ask: Isn’t third-party forgiveness
unjust, given the unique costs victims exclusively bear? Isn’t third-party forgiveness
unjust, since it usurps the exclusive prerogative victims have to offer forgiveness and
release an offender from continued blame? Let’s address each of these in turn.
It is important to consider the potential harm third-party forgiveness can do to victims
saddled with the unique and sometimes ineradicable costs of an injustice. No doubt,
victims do face costs no one else does, often in kind, quantity, and degree. Do these
costs, then, make third-party forgiveness impermissible? In some cases, I think this
860 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

dynamic does invalidate a third party’s right to forgive. In others, I think the costs borne
by victims don’t in any obvious way impinge upon a third party’s right to forgive. In other
words, I do not think that the nature of victims’ unique costs invalidates third-party for-
giveness generally, though it may invalidate its practice in some cases.
The question is whether it is plausible that all or even most instances of third-party for-
giveness wrong a victim by ignoring the costs they uniquely bear. I see no reason to think
this is the case. In cases of appropriate third-party forgiveness, the indignation a third party
holds against the wrongdoer will have these unique costs in mind. Put differently, a third
party normally achieves the preconditions for offering forgiveness because they recognize
and rightly condemn the harms the victim endures. Third parties’ deliberations over
whether to forgive will ordinarily revolve around their satisfaction with the offender’s
attempts to apologize and compensate for these harms. In many cases, third parties will
look to the victim for guidance here. If the victim considers a wrongdoer to have addressed
the victim’s unique harms through genuine apology, extensive reparations, and the like,
then a third party will normally have strong reasons to conclude likewise. Of course,
these judgments can come apart. Victims can be over-exacting, perhaps by virtue of
their intense suffering. But third parties can be over-exacting too, perhaps inclined to over-
indulge in indignation on behalf of a beloved victim. So too victims and third parties can err
on the side of leniency, and it is just this sort of error that the critics suppose makes third-
party forgiveness impermissible. But victims can and often do err on the side of leniency in
just the same way, and we generally do not think that this is a compelling mark against
victim’s forgiveness. The same should be said for third-party forgiveness. Excess can
and will occur in both directions—overly exacting and overly lenient—and the right prac-
tice of third-party forgiveness will achieve the mean between these extremes, just as the
right practice of victim’s forgiveness also does.
Let’s turn, then, to the second objection. Do victims have an exclusive right to forgive
their victims, a right that invalidates third parties’ ability to offer their own distinct sort of
forgiveness? Again, I think that this objection to third-party forgiveness fails to invalidate
the practice while simultaneously revealing something important about its limits. The
objection supposes that there are cases where third parties lack the standing to forgive.
This is right. Critics often use abstract and remote historical cases to motivate this intu-
ition. For example, do I, a twenty-first-century American man of European descent, have
any claim to offer forgiveness to the Roman legions who murdered, brutalized, and
enslaved the people of Epirus in the aftermath of the Third Macedonian War? Even if
I were able to stir up an earnest indignance for the Epirotes’ maltreatment, I think the
critics are right that this seems counter-intuitive and implausible that I would be in a pos-
ition to forgive their Roman tormentors. What is more, I think the critics are right that my
offer of forgiveness in cases like this would be hazardous. What should we conclude as a
result? Is third-party forgiveness impermissible because it too readily licenses forgiveness
in cases like this? Or is there something importantly different about these cases that does
not extend to other cases of third-party forgiveness?
We should notice that the more abstract and remote a case, the more difficult it is to
imagine a third party occupying a role in which third-party forgiveness is appropriate. My
relationship to the ancient Epirotes is tenuous, my familiarity with them mediated by cen-
turies of distance and custom. Perhaps they would have had the right to forgive their
Peterson 861

offenders should they have so chosen, but I lack this right. I lack it because third-party
forgiveness requires a more invested sort of standing than the one I occupy in this
case. In any given case, third parties are not automatically adequately positioned to
offer forgiveness. Rather, third parties typically must be invested bystanders or witnesses.
Third parties need the requisite authority to keep track of the offender’s wrongs and hold
them against them and, in turn, to offer their own forgiveness.
There are a great many criteria by which third parties achieve the status of an invested
bystander or witness. The most ordinary sort will achieve this status by virtue of relationships
of love, care, and mutual good will. When someone wrongs my spouse, I don’t expect every-
one who witnesses or learns of the injustice to be indignant. But my spouse would surely be
justly disappointed in me if I failed to be indignant at her mistreatment. Our responsibility to
appropriately witness and track the wrongs others endure generally scales with the love and
intimacy we share with them. As they do, we are increasingly in a position where our indig-
nation against a wrongdoer is personally and socially salient and worth addressing through
forgiveness. Something similar occurs when one becomes a direct bystander to an injustice
perpetrated against another, even if that person is a complete stranger. If I witness an old
woman tumble to the sidewalk during a purse snatching, I would be wrong to shrug my
shoulders and go about my day. I should help to the best of my ability. I might help her
up, ensure she has the means to call for help and report the theft, and, crucially, reaffirm
her sense of worth by communicating to her my indignance at her mistreatment. As a result,
I am again positioned to offer forgiveness, should the appropriate circumstances arise.
What about a victim’s prerogative to forgive? Are third parties invalidated from for-
giving by virtue of a victim’s exclusive right to do so? And even if not, must they defer to
a victim’s decision about whether and when to forgive an offender? Again, it seems per-
fectly plausible that there will be cases where no third party achieves the requisite stand-
ing to forgive. Perhaps a secretive wrong affects a victim in a private and deeply interior
way, and an otherwise invested third party has little or no access to the offense, the
victim’s unique costs, or the offender’s remorse and restitution. Third parties in situa-
tions like this may fail entirely to have the standing to forgive. But ordinarily, our
social lives are intertwined with others, and their longstanding interest in us and the rela-
tionship we share will be enough to warrant their indignation at our mistreatment. So
too, it will often be prudent for third parties that do achieve the standing to forgive to
defer to the victim’s judgment about whether an offender has achieved appropriate
remorse and has been offered appropriate restitution. The victim is typically best posi-
tioned to do so.
But not always. Victimization can happen to anyone—the well-adjusted as well as the
morally stingy and embittered. Victims can and sometimes do fail to forgive when they
should. The hurt of injustices sometimes festers, and victims are tempted to seek retribu-
tion through their refusal to forgive. In these cases, third parties with the standing to
forgive will sometimes not only be licensed but required to forgive in advance of a
victim. The ordinary epistemic privilege a victim enjoys can be invalidated and
thereby overridden. Third parties will need to take extreme care in these situations,
and their extension of forgiveness may also need to be accompanied by attempts to
reassure a victim that the third party does not mean to condone or minimize the
wrong, though they recognize it may seem that way to the victim.
862 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

If all of this is right, then third-party forgiveness’s justice is not directly targeted by the
objections the critics raise. Rather, like all ordinary moral practices, third-party forgive-
ness can be done well or poorly, justly or unjustly. Third parties can trample over victim’s
suffering or prerogatives by offering forgiveness too readily. But third parties can also get
forgiveness right. They can and do rightly witness the wrongs victims endure and the
costs they bear as a result, taking up an appropriate stance of indignation as a result.
So too, third parties can and do carefully judge whether and when the conditions for for-
giveness have been met and when their own forgiveness might be most prudently offered.
None of this is very unusual.
So, we can agree with Urban Walker that what ‘third parties can do in the wake of
wrongdoing is distinct from what victims do’ without concluding that ‘[t]hird parties
have nothing to forgive’.42 Third-party forgiveness is often possible without amplifying
or exacerbating the costs that victims uniquely bear. So too, by forgiving, third parties
need not downplay, give up concern for, nor ignore victims’ costs. Clumsy and presump-
tuous offers of third-party forgiveness cannot be ruled out in advance just as mistaken
offers of victim’s forgiveness cannot. At this most general level, third-party forgiveness
is on the same moral footing. But these worries do helpfully identify the added risks that
third-party forgiveness necessarily involves, since the forgiving party occupies a social
location distinct and distant from that of the victim. Awareness of the delicate nature
of their social position will be what helps prudent and wise third parties to forgive
when the time is right, in the right way, and for the right reasons.

Proxy Forgiveness: Forgiving on Another’s Behalf

In the preceding sections, I have argued that third-party forgiveness has been poorly
understood and wrongly maligned. It is more ordinary and salutary than its critics sup-
posed. When philosophers consider cases of third-party forgiveness, they sometimes
identify a number of related but distinct types of third-party forgiveness, each of
which has its own structure and moral considerations. Because most accounts of forgive-
ness assume that victim’s forgiveness is the only sort, they understandably investigated
third-party forgiveness by asking whether and how a third party could offer the
victim’s forgiveness. Importantly, I have argued that the paradigm case of third-party for-
giveness is not an instance of a third party offering the victim’s forgiveness. Rather, I
think we should understand third-party forgiveness as a genus that refers to any
species of forgiveness offered to an offender by someone other than the victim. Its para-
digm case, I argued, involves a third party offering their own forgiveness. This forgive-
ness typically does its own work, neither replacing nor impinging upon the victim’s
forgiveness when performed well.
But return to the examples from Christian faith and practice with which I began. The
sort of third-party forgiveness I have outlined offers us the tools to make sense of one of
these cases but not the other. God’s forgiveness of sins committed against someone other
than God comes into focus if we understand it as an instance of generic third-party

42. Walker, ‘Third Parties and the Social Scaffolding of Forgiveness,’ 506.
Peterson 863

forgiveness. But the forgiveness that priests and ministers offer on God’s behalf is differ-
ent. They forgive in God’s stead, and this makes these acts of forgiveness exactly the sort
that most troubled the critics. Call this proxy forgiveness, a species of third-party forgive-
ness where a third party forgives on a victim’s behalf. Can this type of forgiveness be
vindicated too?
I think it can, though this sort of forgiveness is more conceptually and morally difficult
than the paradigm case of the broader genus of third-party forgiveness. Nonetheless, I
think the account of generic third-party forgiveness that I have provided helps reframe
the question in a way that enables us to make progress on it. For once we notice that for-
giving is a more complex phenomenon than simple victim’s forgiveness, we are well
positioned to ask again whether and how third parties can be involved in helping a
victim extend forgiveness to their offender. The case of a priest or minister’s forgiveness
is one example. But the most ordinary cases of proxy forgiveness will be non-clerical,
even non-religious. I am thinking of any case where a non-victim purports to offer for-
giveness on the victim’s behalf. Here is one example: Suppose someone insults my
spouse. The slight is offered in our combined presence in a moment of elevated passions.
My spouse storms off, and I leave to look after her. Some time later, the offending party
apologizes to me. He is genuinely remorseful, his apology is comprehensive, and so on. I
forgive him on her behalf, and my apology resolves the discord in their relationship.
As above, there are both conceptual and moral worries about proxy forgiveness like
this. Because this is the type of third-party forgiveness most critics had in mind, these
worries are already enumerated above, but they stick better to proxy forgiveness than
they did to the generic form of third-party forgiveness I defended. Is forgiving on
another’s behalf possible? How can a third party achieve the right transformation of
the victim’s moral psychology for forgiveness to have been achieved? And even if this
is possible, is it permissible? Isn’t this a clear-cut case of a third party not knowing
their limits and exceeding their place? In doing so, doesn’t a third party rob the victim
of their right to harbor the self-affirming resentment to which they are entitled?
The conceptual difficulty here can be resolved by thinking of proxy forgiveness as less
mysterious and magical than it seems at first blush. When I forgive on my spouse’s
behalf, I do not directly or immediately transform my spouse’s resentment. Rather, I
offer to her offender a commitment on her behalf. I communicate that he is forgiven
because she commits to overcoming her resentment. Of course, the success of my
offer requires two things. First, it requires the truth of my offer. She does need to
make such a commitment for the forgiveness I offer to succeed. But suppose I return
home, tell my spouse of her offender’s remorse and my offer of forgiveness on her
behalf. Where successful, I will have represented her faithfully, and she will take up
the commitment to forgiveness on the merits of my testimony. The forgiveness I
offered in her stead will thereby become fully successful and effective. Importantly,
my role in the drama is more than that of a proleptic messenger. I do not just pass
along her forgiveness. Rather, I offer to enact it in my encounter with her remorseful
offender, and my offer receives its full force after the fact by virtue of my further role
in communicating this commitment to my spouse.
It is easy to imagine how this can go awry, and it is in no way an entailment of my
account that such acts of forgiveness are always and everywhere successful. Where the
864 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

direct victim declines to take up the commitment made for them by a relevant third party,
the act of forgiveness undertaken on their behalf fails. Failures present an opportunity for
further harm to both victims and offenders. A victim might be hurt by a third party’s offer
or the level of remorse and restitution the third party deemed sufficient. Likewise, an
offender will naturally feel jerked around when the forgiveness extended by a third
party is later revoked by the victim. These are the risks inherent in the practice, and
anyone who forgives on another’s behalf should have them firmly in mind when delib-
erating over the best course of action.
But the success of forgiving on another’s behalf also requires an even more important
second ingredient: genuine representational authority. The crux of the debate over third-
party forgiveness really hinges around the ethics of representational authority. When we
ask whether it really is permissible for another party to forgive on a victim’s behalf, we
are primarily asking whether anyone can have sufficient representational authority to take
on this task. In many of the examples the critics raise, it is difficult to imagine how anyone
could have the representational authority required. Can anyone have the authority to
forgive Hitler for the Holocaust? Does the poor Russian boy’s mother have the authority
to forgive on his behalf? The goal of these examples is to animate our intuition that such
authority seems exceedingly difficult—perhaps impossible—to achieve.
But let’s return to the spousal case. Spousal relations are commonly recognized as
authorizing an extremely high level of representational authority. Sometimes this author-
ity is exercised in mundane ways. When my spouse writes a thank-you card and signs
both of our names, she speaks on my behalf as well as hers. At other times, this authority
is revealed in dire and extreme circumstances, as when a spouse is authorized to make life
or death medical decisions on the other’s behalf.43 What matters is that the authority in
question is legitimate and extends to the action undertaken on the other’s behalf. In many
cases, the acts of a representative party require post-facto endorsement for their success. I
suggested some cases of proxy forgiveness work this way in the spousal example above.
But not all representational authority requires this. Some relationships are so intimate
that a party is prospectively authorized to speak and act on the other’s behalf. A good deal
of spousal representation works like this. My spouse, for example, has the representa-
tional authority to make a great deal of decisions on my behalf. When she declines a
party invitation and then forgets to tell me about it later, her representational activity is
not invalidated because her authority to perform it does not depend on my post-facto
endorsement. It simply was effective the moment she declined on my behalf. It seems
just as plausible to me that some acts of forgiveness work this way where one party
has prospective authority to forgive on another’s behalf.

43. While Murphy and Urban Walker are right to highlight instances where another’s represen-
tational authority is misplaced or misused, it ’s important to acknowledge that failure to rec-
ognize another’s representation authority can also result in injustice. Think, for example, of
how gay and queer partners were long denied this sort of recognition and therefore denied the
ability to make important medical decisions for their partners, the deciding power often
unjustly passing instead to alienated family members.
Peterson 865

As in the spousal case above, it is easy to imagine how this sort of activity can break
down. Having prospective authority does not mean being immune from retrospective
challenge. My spouse might well have the authority to decline a party invitation on
my behalf. But if later I learn of it and decide that I would actually like to attend, her com-
mitment on my behalf is defeasible. All the same, it did not depend on my post-facto
endorsement for its validity. Her act of declining was fully effective, just as my later deci-
sion to override it also is. This perhaps seems odd until we realize that our own decisions
for ourselves work in just the same way. If someone invites me to a party and I decline
only to later change my mind, we don’t doubt that I had the authority to make the first
decision. The same is true of representational authority in many cases and so of instances
of proxy forgiveness undertaken with prospective authority. This, I think, also helps to
allay worries about the permissibility of proxy forgiveness.
Return to the case of the liturgical and sacramental practices of priestly and ministerial
forgiveness. It seems to me that Christians have offered different accounts of these acts.
Some understand them to be cases of prospective authority. Some Christians hold that a
priest or minister has the authority to forgive on God’s behalf by virtue of the power
invested in them or their office. But perhaps more commonly, many Christians understand
this to be an odd case of post-facto endorsement where the endorsement proleptically pro-
ceeds the offer. God, this account might say, forgives all sins eternally or perhaps defini-
tively in Christ’s Passion. This endorsement proceeds the offer a priest or minister makes
on God’s behalf, endorsing the forgiveness of each particular sin not just the authority to do
so. There is some theological flexibility here, and I do not mean to suggest that the account
of proxy forgiveness I have provided settles the theological questions in advance. Rather, I
think that attending to the nature of proxy forgiveness helps clarify our options for how best
to understand the liturgical and sacramental practices of forgiveness we routinely practice.

Conclusion
I have argued that Christian faith and practice implicitly and explicitly depend on third-party
forgiveness for their coherence. But, as it turned out, social practices of third-party forgive-
ness are more diverse and complex than its critics supposed. I have focused specifically on
two sorts. The first, the genus of third-party forgiveness generally involves any act where a
non-victim forgives an offender. The paradigm case of this involves the ordinary moral work
that bystanders and witnesses routinely perform. This sort of forgiveness also helps us under-
stand how it can be the case that God forgives sins of which God is not a victim. As we
might expect given its divine endorsement, this sort of forgiveness is both more ordinary
and more salutary than its critics suppose, though it is nonetheless subject to danger and
declensions, as all moral practices are. Alongside it, I defended an account of proxy forgive-
ness where one person forgives in the victim’s stead. This sort of forgiveness is more fraught
and more uncommon, depending as it does on a level of representational authority common
only to more intimate relationships. That said, it is by no means rare, since the authority it
requires is common to some of the most universal relationships we inhabit. This sort of for-
giveness offers Christians a vocabulary for talking about how priests and ministers forgive
on God’s behalf, though it does not determine in advance exactly how these acts should be
theologically understood.
866 Studies in Christian Ethics 37(4)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Andrew J. Peterson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6796-3448