{"id":14602,"date":"2026-11-11T17:20:32","date_gmt":"2026-11-12T00:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/?p=14602"},"modified":"2026-11-11T17:20:32","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T00:20:32","slug":"unconditional-forgiveness-and-the-case-of-president-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/11\/11\/unconditional-forgiveness-and-the-case-of-president-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Unconditional Forgiveness and the Case of President Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conditional versus unconditional forgiveness<\/em><\/p>\n

Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission. I catch you at it and express my moral objection. You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it. I forgive you. I forgive you, but only because you have admitted guilt, apologized, and made restitution. My forgiveness is conditional\u00a0 upon your having done these things. Had you not admitted guilt and made restitution, I would not have forgiven you.\u00a0 My forgiving you is conditional, not unconditional.<\/p>\n

By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your immoral behavior. This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.\u00a0 My conditional forgiving is good for you and good for me.<\/p>\n

\n

The example given shows that there are cases of conditional forgiveness.\u00a0 I hope we can all agree that conditional forgiveness is a good thing, and surely better than angrily breaking off all relations with the malefactor. What I have maintained so far ought to be uncontroversial. But I want to take it a step further.<\/p>\n

Forgiveness cannot be unconditional<\/em><\/p>\n

My thesis is that a necessary condition of an act’s being a genuine act of forgiveness is that the malefactor admit wrongdoing, show some remorse, and make amends in some way or other, by restitution, paying a fine, serving time in jail, and so on. My claim is \u00a0that forgiveness is morally permissible only if the malefactor sincerely admits guilt and makes amends in some way or another. That is, one ought not forgive those who refuse to admit guilt, make amends, etc.<\/em> For it is an offense against justice if I let you get away with your wrongdoing and award you the benefit of my forgiveness for nothing. For then what I am doing in effect is condoning<\/em> your immoral behavior.<\/p>\n

Condonation is well-defined as follows. To condone an offense is to be aware of it and to disapprove of it, but deliberately to refrain from a retributive response.\u00a0 As Aurel Kolnai puts it in his seminal article “Forgiveness,” ” . . . condonation acquiesces in the offence.” (In Aurel Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality<\/em>, Hackett Publishing, 1978, p. 215) Note that ‘retribution’ is used in two very different ways. It can be used to refer to revenge, or to a species of justice, retributive justice.\u00a0 I am obviously using it in the second, academic sense, not the first hoi polloi<\/em> sense.<\/p>\n

When Bill Clinton, exercising his presidential power of pardon, pardoned Marc Rich, that was an affront to justice and in a two-fold way. Rich got away with his wrongdoing, and it was unfair to similar others who did not get away with their similar wrongdoing. Of course, what Clinton did was legal<\/em>, but the legal and the moral are two and not one, which is itself a controversial claim: legal positivists will balk.\u00a0 \u00a0(I also note that a proper discussion of presidential pardons would bring us into political theology, a further hornet’s nest of controversies.)<\/p>\n

My thesis, then, is that genuine forgiveness is conditional in its being and in its moral permissibility.\u00a0 It is morally permissible only if it is conditional. If so, unconditional forgiveness is morally impermissible and therefore cannot be morally obligatory.<\/p>\n

The case of Donald J. Trump<\/em><\/p>\n

The following is borrowed from Rod Dreher’s Diary<\/a>.\u00a0 Dreher is commenting on the 60 Minutes<\/em> interview by Ross Douthat of President Trump, a link to which Dreher provides.<\/p>\n

\n

An incredulous Douthat says, \u201cMr. President, you have had the most charmed and remarkable life of any person in my lifetime, and you are telling me that before the judgment throne of God, you could not find it in your heart to forgive some of your enemies? After all that\u2019s been given to you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump: \u201cRoss, can I be honest? I probably cannot do that, no. Because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There you have it. If Donald Trump dies in his sleep tonight, barring the extraordinary mercy of God \u2014 and I am very glad God makes these calls, not me or you \u2014 he will go to Hell. Scripture could not be clearer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first thing that strikes me is the incredibly demanding standard Trump is being held to, a standard that the ‘legacy media’ would never apply to the vicious individuals and groups that have wronged Trump in ways that are now well documented.\u00a0 He is supposed to forgive unconditionally evildoers who will never admit their crimes! But no surprise here. As some wit once observed, “If leftists didn’t\u00a0 have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.”<\/p>\n

The second thing that struck me is the irrelevance of Trump’s “charmed life” to the issue at hand.\u00a0 The issue is whether or not Trump is morally justified in not unconditionally\u00a0 forgiving his sworn enemies, enemies who would never under any circumstances unconditionally forgive him for anything. That and that alone.<\/p>\n

He hates them, no doubt about it.\u00a0 He hates them because he loves his country. If he didn’t hate his enemies, where would he get the moral energy to oppose them as they ought to be opposed? Hate has its uses. On many, not all,\u00a0 fundamental questions bearing on the survival of civilization, and humanity itself, he is right and they are wrong.\u00a0 How could he hate the sin while loving the sinner, when the sinner personifies the sin?<\/p>\n

In third place is Dreher’s cocksurety about where Trump will end up post-mortem, and about what the Scriptures teach. What they teach depends on how they are interpreted, and they don’t interpret themselves. If I am right in my main claim above, then they don’t teach what Dreher thinks they teach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conditional versus unconditional forgiveness Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission. I catch you at it and express my moral objection. You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it. I forgive you. I forgive you, but only because you have admitted guilt, apologized, and made restitution. My forgiveness … Continue reading “Unconditional Forgiveness and the Case of President Trump”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,512,27,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-doctrine","category-forgiveness","category-maga-matters","category-political-morality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14602"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14604,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14602\/revisions\/14604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}