Contemporary Justice Review

Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2010, 121–124

BOOK REVIEW

Getting Even: Forgiveness and its Limits, by Jeffrie G. Murphy, Oxford, Oxford
Contemporary
10.1080/10282580903343308
GCJR_A_434508.sgm
1028-2580
Book
Taylor
402009
12
aacorn@law.ualberta.ca
AnnaliseAcorn
000002009
Review
andFrancis
& (print)/1477-2248
Francis
Justice Review(online)

University Press, 2003, ix + 138 pp., £12 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-515149-6

In his book Getting Even: Forgiveness and its Limits, Jeffrie G. Murphy defends
the claim that forgiveness is not always and completely good, and vindictiveness is
not always and completely bad. Murphy’s analysis aims at illuminating the moral
status of the forgiving and the vindictive emotions in their relation to virtue – ques-
tioning both the impeccable moral credentials of forgiveness and the reprehensible
rap sheet attached to vindictiveness. Murphy does not – as his title might suggest –
focus on the centrality of reciprocity of benefit and burden to our understanding of
justice. Indeed, unlike William Ian Miller’s (2000) Eye for an Eye, which explores
with admirable precision both the why and how of the lex talionis; Murphy’s
Getting Even does not focus on why getting even might have a robust relation to
justice or how evenness is to be measured and meted out in situations of wrongdo-
ing. Murphy’s Getting Even is more an extension of the essays he published in his
famous book Forgiveness and Mercy written in 1988 with Jean Hampton (Hampton
& Murphy, 1988). As in that work, here Murphy explores questions of why
forgiveness might not be seen as an unqualified good, why sincere repentance
ought to be a precondition of forgiveness, and why it is sometimes OK to feel
vindictive.
In his introduction Murphy reveals the centrality of the question: ‘How should we
respond to evil?’ to his thought and sensibility. Evil seems to be Murphy’s premier
counterexample, his knockout punch to the presumptive good of forgiveness: all very
well if we are talking about stealing a loaf of bread, but what about the concentration
camps? Here we can compare Jacques Derrida who argues that horrific or unforgiv-
able wrong is essential to the very idea of forgiveness: ‘If one is only prepared to
forgive what appears forgivable … then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 32). Murphy, however, takes the view that in relation to such
diabolical wrongdoers surely we may justly say along with Elie Wiesel, ‘God of
forgiveness, do not forgive those who created this place’ (pp. 44, 84). Murphy appears
initially to aspire to a distinctive territory for evil; making use of Robert W. Adams’s
term ‘moral horror’. He suggests that in relation to these acts which ‘assault human
dignity at its most fundamental level’, forgiveness is not obviously a great idea, is
probably inappropriate, and is arguably unthinkable (p. 10). Murphy writes: ‘As long
as there is evil in the world – and I would not advise holding one’s breath until there
is not- we should not, I think, welcome a world free of resentment and the vindictive
passions’ (p. 38).
However, the significance of this line of argument becomes ambiguous as the
boundaries of Murphy’s notion of evil becomes less apparent. Murphy writes:

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DOI: 10.1080/10282580903343308
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122 Book review

The evils most of us experience are probably not in the same league as rape or torture.
But they can be very deep and in no sense trivial. Consider betrayal by a friend or spouse,
for example. This is for most normal people, a terrible wound - one that is very hard to
forgive, and a book on forgiveness that had no bearing on injuries of this nature would
be overly narrow. (p. 83)

This looks like equivocation – gaining our consent to the proposition that forgiveness
is problematic in the face of evil – moral horrors like lethal experimentation on Jewish
children (here we can consider Murphy’s discussion of Joseph Mengele) then shifting
the meaning of evil to conclude that forgiveness is also problematic in the case of
everyday ‘evils’ like adultery and gossip.
When Murphy moves to his discussion of forgiveness, punishment, and Christian-
ity the category of evil however, is invoked again in way quite different from the initial
move from moral horrors to everyday wrongs. Here Murphy bases his qualified rejec-
tion of the desire for revenge on an assumption that this desire is fundamentally tied
to the hatred of the evil in the wrongdoer. Murphy’s argument that the desire for
revenge and the hatred of evil are fundamentally intertwined is not entirely persuasive.
Consider the familiar ‘Don’t get mad, get even’ or ‘Neither spare nor despise’. These
maxims demonstrate the potential irrelevance of notions of evil and hatred when one
desires to settle the score. Rejecting the desire for vengeance as a form of hatred of
evil, Murphy then argues for a Christian justification of punishment which eschews
judgments about evil and feelings of hatred and is grounded rather in the confined set
of judgments humans have it within their skill set to make – judgments about the
confluence of actus reus and mens rea. Vengeance belongs to God in the sense that if
judgments of evil are to be made they must be made by Him. Our epistemic limitations
preclude us from purporting to make accurate judgments about the evil in others; and
therefore, no human practice of punishment which makes such judgments can be
justified within Christian terms as Murphy understands them.
Given the various and perhaps conflicting uses Murphy makes of the category of
evil in his argument it is difficult to ascertain with clarity what sort of conceptual work
Murphy is trying to get the category of evil to do. Murphy’s definition of forgiveness
is also somewhat perplexing. Murphy adopts the definition of forgiveness he first
proposed in Forgiveness and Mercy. Following a short discussion of Joseph Butler’s
sermons, he defines forgiveness as ‘the overcoming, on moral grounds, of what I will
call the vindictive passions - the passions of anger, resentment, and even hatred that
are often occasioned when one had been deeply wronged by another’ (p. 13). This
definition makes the presence of the vindictive passions a precondition to forgiveness.
Yet does this not disqualify too much of what we intuitively count in our understand-
ing of forgiveness?
Are the moral accomplishments of the famously forgiving – the likes of Gandhi
and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. aptly described as an overcoming of vindictiveness?
These men seem to be exemplars of forgiveness precisely because they have no
vindictiveness to overcome. They may seek to inspire others to overcome their vindic-
tiveness. But part of their saintliness lies in their profound sense of brotherhood with
the wrongdoer. From the outset, they view the other’s wrongdoing as the occasion for
grief, not vindictiveness. Moreover, their forgiveness does not entail an overcoming
of that grief.
Or consider Dostoyevsky’s (1869/1992) Prince Myshkin who makes such a
moral principle out of self-effacement (he is like the servile, too willing, forgiver
Murphy cautions us against becoming) that he instantly forgives every wrong done
 Contemporary Justice Review 123

to him – even blaming himself for the wrong (Dostoyevsky, 1869/1992). Or

consider perhaps a powerful general who decides to forgive a soldier for an error on
the grounds of the soldier’s bravery in another context. Must the general have
responded to the initial misstep with vindictiveness, anger, hatred, or resentment
before his decision that the soldier deserves another chance can count as forgive-
ness?
The second element of Murphy’s definition of forgiveness is also perplexing – that
one must forgive on ‘moral grounds’. He gives only one example – the overcoming of
such feelings as a result of sincere repentance by the wrongdoer. Yet, though Murphy
thinks forgiveness is more appropriate where sincere repentance has been shown, it
would not seem that he is positing repentance as a necessary condition of forgiveness.
Without this notion of moral grounds, however, Murphy’s definition of forgiveness
potentially collapses into forgetting. Nietzsche (1887/1989) aptly describes the
distinction in On the Genealogy of Morals where he remarks that a particular states-
man of revolutionary France ‘was unable to forgive simply because he forgot’ (p. 39).
Nietzsche celebrates forgetfulness, as distinct from forgiveness, as an attribute of the
noble soul. It should be noted here again that Murphy gives greater attention to the
distinction between forgiving and forgetting in his earlier book.
A likely conceptual candidate to fill out this idea of ‘moral grounds’ that would
distinguish forgiving from forgetting for Murphy might be found in a notion of relat-
edness – that forgiveness is done – however notionally – in relation to the wrongdoer;
that one gives forgiveness to the wrongdoer. Yet in his brief discussion of forgiveness
of the dead, Murphy appears also to reject the idea that forgiveness must be done in
relation to the wrongdoer. So Murphy’s idea of ‘moral grounds’ remains vague.
Murphy distinguishes forgiveness from four other related ideas: justification,
excuse, mercy, and reconciliation. Murphy does not, however, distinguish forgiveness
from amnesty – the forgoing of state punishment for instrumental reasons not related
to the desert or rehabilitation of the wrongdoer. A discussion of the distinction
between forgiveness and amnesty might have been more apt to Murphy’s discussion
of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) than was his
discussion of the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation in that context. In
Forgiveness and Mercy, Hampton and Murphy (1988) distinguished forgiveness only
from justification, excuse, and mercy. In the more recent book Murphy adds this
distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation apparently in response to the South
African TRC.
Discussing whether Christianity is compatible with the death penalty, Murphy
argues that the worst thing a Christian can do is to impede the path of the sinner back
to God (p. 112). He uses Hamlet to illustrate the point (Shakespeare, c.1602/2003).
Speaking of Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius at prayer, Murphy writes:
‘Hamlet’s desire was, of course, deeply sinful’ (p. 112). The claim is arresting.
Hamlet’s desire to make sure he was sending Claudius to hell – or at least to purgatory
– was precisely the desire to get even. It was a desire to fulfill his obligation to his
father by putting Claudius in at least as bad a boat as Hamlet the elder. The scene as
a whole reflects the age-old critique of the Christian notion that one can get away with
murder by repenting at 11:59 p.m. One wonders what Murphy thought Hamlet ought
to do. (Shakespeare, I think, asks us to wish Hamlet had skewered Claudius whose
prayers were, by his own very authentic admission, phony.) After calling Hamlet’s
desire deeply sinful, Murphy leaves us in the dark as to whether he thinks that Hamlet
should have killed Claudius on the mistaken assumption that he was sending him to
124 Book review

heaven, or whether he thinks Hamlet ought to have naively rejoiced in Claudius’s pose
of repentance and forgiven him. Perhaps Murphy means that a less sinful executioner
would have made Claudius aware of his present intention to kill him and given Clau-
dius the opportunity and incentive to perfect his prayers. But Murphy’s discussion
gives us no indication of the essential substance of his response to the example.
A couple of final quibbles with the book. In a chapter entitled: ‘Repentance,
Punishment and Mercy’, Murphy begins by citing some examples of institutional
apologies for historical wrongs, including those by John Paul II, Jacques Chirac,
Junichiro Koizumi, amongst others. He then writes: ‘In sharp contrast to this talk
about what might be called collective or group repentance … we rarely hear much
talk these days about individual repentance’ (p. 40). It is unfortunate that Murphy
does not engage with significant literature on restorative justice or the many restor-
ative justice projects which have cropped up all over the Anglo-American world in
the past decade and a half. The burgeoning restorative justice movement – in as
much as it places the repentance of the individual wrongdoer and forgiveness by the
individual victim as central to the attainment of justice – would seem to be quite
close to the kinds of topics Murphy has had an interest in for so many years.
Lastly, a word about attribution. Murphy explains that his book is written in a
‘non-technical, non-scholarly form (no footnotes, for example)’ (p. viii). Yet we soon
meet with Murphy’s idiosyncratic concern for scholarly citation. Speaking of a
psychotherapist, Richard Enright, who seeks to incorporate both philosophy and
forgiveness into psychotherapy, Murphy writes: ‘Enright is aware that some philoso-
phers have argued that resentment of injuries may be a sign of self-respect and that
therefore a too ready willingness to forgive, rather than being a virtue, may actually
exhibit the vice of servility. (Enright cites Joram Graf Harber for this view, but Harber
clearly gets the view from me, who, in turn, probably got it from combining the views
of Joseph Butler, Peter Strawson, and Tom Hill.)’ (p. 77). One struggles to fathom
Murphy’s sensibility. Both Murphy’s claim to intellectual property in such a common
place – that too ready forgiveness can be servile – and his claim that he synthesized
three different thinkers to come up with this idea are mystifying.

References
Derrida, J. (2001) Cosmopolitanism and forgiveness (Thinking in action). London: Routledge.
Dostoyevsky, F. (1869/1992) The idiot. (A. Myers, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hampton, J., & Murphy J.G. (1988) Forgiveness and mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Miller, W.I. (2006). Eye for an eye, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1887/1989) On the genealogy of morals. (W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale,
Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Shakespeare, W. (c.1602/2003) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (P. Edwards, Ed.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Annalise Acorn
University of Alberta, Canada
aacorn@law.ualberta.ca
© 2010, Annalise Acorn
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