Balter Lecture: Monique Wonderly (UCSD)

Forgiveness, Trust, and Betrayal

While “affective shift” views of forgiveness have tended to characterize forgiveness as overcoming (some degree of) resentment felt in response to a moral violation, some add that, where relevant, the forgiver must also overcome negative emotions associated with broken trust, including betrayal and distrust. Whether or not construing forgiveness as overcoming this package of negative emotions is correct, it risks conflating importantly distinct species of interpersonal repair. While disappointed trust and moral violations often coincide, they are different types of interpersonal injuries, and their associated reactive attitudes – along with the reparative processes of overcoming them – have different normative shapes. In this paper, I articulate and examine how the nature and norms of overcoming (the attitude of) betrayal, construed as a species or analog of forgiveness, diverge from those of the more familiar notion of forgiveness as overcoming resentment. As I will argue, disentangling these socio-affective processes can help to illuminate an important, but relatively underexplored, species of interpersonal repair.