Recent philosophical accounts of interpersonal wrongdoing and the ways of moving beyond such wrongdoing often focus on serious, life-changing wrongs: treacheryFootnote 1, severe betrayalFootnote 2, the murder of a family memberFootnote 3, and so on.Footnote 4 Fully mending and moving beyond such wrongs seems to require forgiveness. Forgiveness has thus been the phenomenon on which accounts of moving beyond interpersonal wrongdoing focus, at least in recent analytic moral philosophy.
Not all interpersonal wrongs, however, and not all appropriate ways of moving beyond such wrongs, are alike. Crucially, serious and life-changing wrongs of the kind that tend to be focused on in accounts of interpersonal wrongdoing make up only a small minority of our moral lives together. When we wrong each other, our doing so much more commonly consists of mundane and negligible wrongs – minor rudeness, insensitivity, and so on. But in response to such mundane and negligible wrongs, forgiveness is often both unnecessary and out of place. Consequently, focusing solely on forgiveness as the sole appropriate way of moving beyond interpersonal wrongdoing would seem to be a mistake.Footnote 5
Since the philosophical literature on interpersonal wrongdoing has focused largely on serious wrongs, and these plausibly require forgiveness in order to mend and move beyond them, it has seemed natural to think that the only positive alternative to blame after wrongdoing is forgiveness. The other alternatives to blame or forgiveness are often regarded as involving something morally problematic such as ignorance or denial, whether of the wrongness of the act, the moral standing of the wrongdoer, or one’s own moral standing. This may well be so in the case of serious wrongdoing. But at least in the case of more minor wrongs, we think that there is an alternative that can be morally acceptable and even play a positive role in our lives: letting go. Often, that is, we simply let go of blame and move on.Footnote 6
The notion that there is a distinct phenomenon of ‘letting go’ has recently been introduced into discussions of moral psychology by Per-Erik Milam (Reference Milam2019) and Per-Erik Milam and Luke Brunning (Reference Milam and Brunning2018, Reference Milam and Brunning2023).Footnote 7 Like forgiveness, letting go can serve as a route out of blame and resentment. Like forgiving, letting go is something one can do. But letting go does not require the kind of engagement with the wrong and the wrongdoer as such that forgiveness plausibly does. It can thus be an easier task than forgiveness, enabling us to more straightforwardly move on from the wrong – something that can be particularly useful in the case of minor wrongs, which may merit little attention.
Can letting go avoid amounting to ignorance or denial of the moral significance of the wrong? Like Milam and Brunning (Reference Milam and Brunning2023: 727), we think that letting go can be (in the terms of Hieronymi Reference Hieronymi2001) ‘uncompromising’; it can involve a clear-eyed recognition of the wrongness of the act, the moral standing of the wrongdoer, and one’s own moral standing. But how can it avoid amounting to ignorance or denial of the moral significance of the wrong? Our primary focus in this paper will be to answer this question. We take it that showing that letting go can be ‘uncompromising’ is at least necessary for showing that it is a positive part of our moral psychology.Footnote 8
Our explanation of how letting go can be uncompromising centres on the idea that resentment often subsides over time, and that it can be appropriate for it to do so. To make sense of this, we suggest that we should not understand blame merely as a matter of recognising a wrong. Rather, we should understand blame as also involving a wrong being significant to me in some way. We then suggest that this ‘significance’ is something that will often appropriately wane over time. As such, we often let go of blame as time goes by, and this is often appropriate. With this in mind, we offer an account of how letting go can also be an active phenomenon. We can sometimes influence the significance that a thing has for us, and thus the speed at which we let go of blame. This is because the significance that a thing has for us can be influenced simply by our own take on it.
The notion of letting go can also help us understand why minor wrongs within close relationships such as friendship can be easier to move beyond than wrongs committed by strangers. It is standardly noted that if a wrongdoer and person wronged are in a close relationship, serious wrongs become even more serious. This is in turn understood as making forgiveness in such cases even more difficult. Forgiving someone whom you trusted for a serious wrong is plausibly much more difficult than forgiving someone whom you did not trust. Standard accounts of interpersonal wrongdoing, focusing on serious wrongs, thus have a surprising result: they tend to depict close relationships as a barrier to mending and moving beyond wrongdoing, rather than as being what we might hope them to be: an aid to doing so. We’ll be suggesting that proper consideration of the phenomenon of letting go helps us to see close relationships in the light that they deserve: as often playing a positive role in mending or moving beyond interpersonal wrongdoing, rather than only as a barrier in that respect.
The outline for the paper is as follows: In Section 1, we briefly outline the phenomenon of letting go and contrast it with forgiveness. In Section 2, we begin to approach this phenomenon by considering why the fading of resentment over time can be appropriate. This, we suggest, provides a piece of the puzzle to begin explaining how letting go can be uncompromising. In Section 3, we expand on this to explain how letting go can be not just a passive phenomenon but sometimes an active or agential one – that is, something that we actively rather than passively do. Finally, in Section 4 we return to the notion of friendship and other close relationships, and we explore how such relationships tend to influence one’s ability to let go. We suggest that contrary to what standard treatments of interpersonal wrongs tend to suggest, close relationships can make letting go of wrongdoing an easier task and that this can be well-understood in terms of the general explanation of letting go that we offer in Section 3.
Before we begin, a note on our general framework is due. A large part of our task in this paper is to explain the phenomenon of letting go in relation to blame and forgiveness. In doing so, we will be taking for granted that to blame another is to hold a purported wrongdoing of theirs against them.Footnote 9 So, blame is not merely a judgement of wrongdoing. Rather, one blames someone when one understands some act or state of theirs to be wrong and responds with hostile reactive attitudes toward them or their act. For ease of exposition, we will refer to all such hostile reactive attitudes as ‘resentment’.Footnote 10 In line with this conception of blame and resentment, we will understand forgiveness as either the forswearing of such resentment or as otherwise overcoming (or at least committing to overcoming) it.Footnote 11
1. Letting go in everyday life
Humans are social creatures. We are vulnerable to one another and, as such, all too often end up hurting others or being hurt by others’ wrongful treatment of us. Sometimes this wronging is followed by an apology, and this in turn often prompts forgiveness. When it does, the situation is morally ‘resolved’; the individuals concerned can move on from the wrongdoing, and their relations are no longer blighted by it. The antagonism between them that was present when the wronged individual resented the wrongdoer is overcome, and they can move on.Footnote 12
However, not all wrongdoing is followed by such a process of apology and forgiveness. Sometimes, the wrongdoer issues no apology for their actions. This can be for morally concerning reasons, such as that they don’t realise that their action was wrong. But it can also be for innocuous ones: they may simply be too busy doing other important things, for example, or perhaps an appropriate moment for apology simply never arises. Sometimes an apology can even be an unwelcome imposition on the other’s time and energy and, so, is better omitted.Footnote 13
On the other hand, sometimes the person wronged offers no forgiveness. This, too, can be for morally concerning reasons, such as excess pride or exaggerated indignation (hurt can be a powerful bargaining tool). Sometimes, however, wrongs are simply too minor to be worth explicitly addressing or, conversely, are too painful to be addressed. Sometimes, the wronged party’s moral-emotional focus is simply elsewhere. Forgiving a wrong may sometimes even be morally inappropriate.Footnote 14
Such cases in which apology and forgiveness are absent highlight another possibility: in these cases, we may just move on; we may just let go. Letting go, though compatible with forgiving, is thus a distinct phenomenon from it. And in fact, once we reflect on it, the phenomenon of just letting go of blame seems at least as common as the phenomena of apologising and forgiving. We take the following to be three paradigm cases of letting go:
Confidence Betrayal: one friend tells another about an incident they found (merely) embarrassing, trusting in their friend’s discretion. They haven’t told anyone else about it, and they communicate that they expect the friend not to share it. However, the friend later discusses the incident with others. They shouldn’t have broken their friend’s confidence in such a way; it was wrong of them to do so. The friend whose confidence was betrayed initially feels significant resentment towards the betrayer, but over time these feelings abate. After a couple of months, the friend whose confidence was betrayed ceases to think any further about it and lets go of their resentment.
Rude Commentator: a commentator at an academic presentation makes snide remarks about the speaker, who did nothing to warrant such attacks. Such remarks are clearly wrong. But the speaker reflects that it’s not worth worrying about such things and quickly ceases to blame or resent the commentator.
Tardiness: two colleagues are meeting up for dinner. One colleague turns up enormously late, without making any effort to apologise or explain their lateness. Nothing particular has caused their tardiness; they should have made more of an effort.Footnote 15 It is plausibly wrong (though not seriously so) to turn up significantly late to social events without any acknowledgement of the lateness or apology for it. The punctual colleague, though recognizing the rudeness of the lateness and lack of apology, simply continues with the dinner, glad to see their colleague and spend time with them.
There are important differences between these cases. In the first case, letting go takes time. The friend initially blames and resents the betrayer, and it takes months to stop doing so. In the second case, the speaker also initially blames the commentator, but they take an active role in letting go of the blame: they choose to do so, cutting their resentment short. Finally, in the third case, letting go is immediate. The punctual colleague does not feel resentment at all: they simply immediately move on from their colleague’s lateness and lack of apology. However, there are also core commonalities between them. In all of these cases, a wrong has been committed, and it is recognised as such by the person wronged. Yet in all three, the person who has been wronged comes, with varying degrees of quickness, to not blame or resent the wrongdoer. The general shape of letting go is thus that a person who has been wronged, and who continues to recognise the wrong as such, comes to cease to blame or resent the wrongdoer.
In claiming that the person wronged lets go of their resentment over time, we do not mean to suggest that they simply do not experience the occurrent attitude of resentment. Someone has not ‘let go’ of their resentment simply because they have to attend to certain other practical concerns for a period, for example. In such cases, philosophers typically say that the person wronged still blames the wrongdoer if they have a disposition to resent the wrong when they think about or remember it. Our suggestion here takes a parallel form: that the person lets go of their resentment when they are no longer disposed to resent the wrong when they think about it, or when the disposition to resent weakens.
Given the general similarity between forgiving and letting go, how do the two phenomena differ? In general, there are conditions on forgiveness that are not necessary for letting go. As we’ll elaborate in what follows, forgiving someone, firstly, requires a kind of engagement with the wrong as a wrong and the wrongdoer as a wrongdoer, whereas letting go does not. Relatedly, forgiving seems to require attending to the wrong and to the wrongdoer, and emotionally or psychologically processing these as such, whereas in letting go one’s attention may be elsewhere altogether.Footnote 16
Various conditions that have been proposed as conditions for forgiveness do not apply to letting go, precisely because forgiveness seems to require engagement with the wrong and the wrongdoer as such. Firstly, some have thought that forgiveness is necessarily an active or even a difficult thing. As Hughes (Reference Hughes1995) puts it, forgiveness involves ‘self-activity or effort’ (Reference Hughes1995: 107). Letting go, on the other hand, can be an effortless or even instantaneous thing, as in Tardiness (though it is no doubt compatible with effort, as in the other cases). Secondly, some have thought that forgiveness is a communicative act, but letting go need not involve communication.Footnote 17 Thirdly, some have thought that forgiveness requires some kind of positivity or goodwill towards the wrongdoer.Footnote 18 But again, though positivity or goodwill towards a wrongdoer is compatible with letting go, letting go does not require positivity towards the wrongdoer. In Rude Commentator, for example, the speaker chooses to move on because resentment is not worth it, not because they feel underlying goodwill towards the commentator. Finally, many have thought that forgiveness is a response to something specific about the wrongdoer, such as a change of heart.Footnote 19 Whilst one can also let go for such reasons, reasons for letting go can be broader than this and can also involve strategic or self-interested reasons (such as that resentment is too tiring or unpleasant, or that the wrongdoer is one’s boss and one wants a promotion). None of the above cases, for example, involve perception of a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer.Footnote 20
Quite how forgiveness and letting go are related will depend on one’s account of forgiveness, and we don’t offer such an account here. One might think that forgiveness is a subtype of letting go, or that they are distinct but overlapping phenomena, for example. For our purposes, what is important is that though the two are compatible, there are some cases of letting go that do not involve forgiveness, such as the paradigm cases outlined above.
Forgiveness fulfils various important functions in our social, emotional and moral lives. In one way or another, it allows us to overcome the antagonism implicit in blame, antagonism that is generally psychologically, emotionally and socially burdensome to both parties. As such, we might worry that without forgiveness such situations would remain importantly unresolved, with some kind of morally poisonous matter remaining in the relationship between the wrongdoer and the person wronged. In cases of very serious wrongdoing, this may well be so – there may well be no way of morally resolving the situation without forgiveness.Footnote 21 Nonetheless, in cases of minor wrongdoing (which are much more common), we wish to suggest that this need not be so. A very plausible thought, which we’ll return in Section 2, is that, at some point, wronged parties tend simply to let go of blame; they tend to move on from the wrongdoing and cease to resent the wrongdoer. It’s not that the person wronged has forgiven the wrongdoer, or that they’re unable to recognise that the other’s action was wrong. Rather, at some point, they simply let go of blame and move on.
Whilst we believe that letting go is common as a phenomenon, it can nonetheless be difficult to make sense of as a moral possibility. In particular, it can be difficult to see how one could let go of blame without forgiving, excusing, condoning or simply failing to recognise the wrong as such. In fact, excusing, condoning, and simply forgetting or ignoring are often regarded as the only alternatives to forgiveness.Footnote 22 Admittedly, there may be many cases in which what seems to be an instance of letting go is in fact one of these other phenomena. Our aim, however, is to explain how it is that letting go can allow us to get over the antagonism involved in blame without the need to compromise on any of the requirements that the person who lets go (1) recognises their own moral standing, (2) recognises the moral standing of the wrongdoer, or (3) recognises the wrongness of the action.Footnote 23
Our immediate question, in other words, is ‘how is it possible simply to let go of blame in a clear-eyed way?’ In answering this question, we are at the same time interested in how such clear-eyed letting go can result in a kind of resolution of conflict, rather than merely ignoring it or denying the grounds for it. Answering these questions will enable us to delineate a conception of how letting go functions that explains how it can be both morally and epistemically appropriate.Footnote 24
2. Resentment and time
To begin to see how letting go can be an appropriate response to being wronged, first note that in the absence of a re-evaluation of the significance of the wrong done, resentment generally subsides over time. A stinging wrong about which one initially felt deep resentment often turns into a minor irritation with the passage of time and is at some point left behind. The further one stands from minor wrongs, the less resentful one generally feels about them.Footnote 25 Take the first two cases of wrongdoing outlined above, Confidence Betrayal and Rude Commentator. In both of these examples, at the time of the incident, the person wronged resentfully blames the wrongdoer for their actions. The wrongdoers ought not to have acted in such a way, and so the initial resentment of the individuals wronged seems justified. It seems equally likely, however, that these levels of resentment would subside over time. Barring special circumstances, the people wronged would likely feel only mild resentment by a week later, and by ten years later, they would likely feel no resentment at all.
In simple cases where there is no change in one’s evaluation of a minor wrong, resentment, then, tends to subside over time.Footnote 26 And this subsiding of resentment intuitively seems not only common but also morally appropriate. Someone who resented a minor wrong just as much a year later as they did at the time of the wrong would seem to be petty or grudge-bearing. It would seem mean-spirited to continue to forcefully resent the wrong; one would seem to be having an overblown reaction to the event, or to be being insufficiently generous. Importantly, resentment usually seems less appropriate with time (at least in the case of minor wrongs) even if the original cause of the resentment is otherwise unresolved – even if the wrongdoer has not apologised, say, or made amends for the wrong. The mere passage of time usually seems to make a difference when we consider how much resentment is appropriate.
Moreover, resentment is not the only attitude that seems appropriately to diminish with time. Guilt, for instance, seems also to do so. The amount of guilt that it’s appropriate to feel about a wrong one has committed plausibly partly depends on how close to the wrongdoing one is.Footnote 27 In the immediate aftermath, a much higher level of guilt is usually considered appropriate than after more time has passed, particularly in the case of minor wrongs. For example, in Confidence Betrayal, the friend who broke the other’s confidence should probably feel a high level of initial guilt and spend a sleepless night wishing they had been more worthy of their friend’s trust. But assuming that the betrayal has no long-term impact on the person wronged, a decade down the line it would seem inappropriate for them to still feel the very same level of guilt. A decade down the line, no further guilt seems to be called for.Footnote 28
Why might this be appropriate? The beginning of an explanation for how it can be appropriate for resentment to subside with time is that resentment (and blame) is plausibly not only a response to an action’s wrongness. Resentment also indicates that the wrong action is somehow significant to me – that it matters to me in some way. We do not generally resent every wrong done in the world but, rather, only those that have some kind of special connection to us. Riedener (Reference Riedener2022), for example, points out that whilst we may deeply resent those who betray our friends’ trust, we may (appropriately) be ambivalent about identical cases involving strangers, despite judging the cases to be equally morally bad:
Suppose Lila knew that Emperor Hadrian was wittingly betrayed by his friend and predecessor Trajan in second-century Rome. And suppose she also knew that her husband, Robert, was wittingly betrayed by his friend Marcelle in precisely the same manner. Suppose she responds with some mild indignation to the first case, but with quite strong indignation to the second. This would be entirely natural. We would say that she cares more about Marcelle’s fault than about Trajan’s. (Riedener Reference Riedener2022: 92)
Riedener’s idea is that reactive attitudes like resentment are not merely a response to the fact that another person has done wrong. Rather, they are a response to ‘their blameworthiness being significant for you, or worthy of your caring, in virtue of your relationship to it’ (Riedener Reference Riedener2022: 83). In blaming, we represent an action as wrong and as important for us.Footnote 29
This seems right to us. No one feels resentment towards Trajan today, we assume, and this does not seem to betray an overly lax condoning of his actions. Rather, his actions are simply too removed from us to be significant for us, or to be worthy of our caring about them. That is, we can recognize actions as wrong without thereby blaming the wrongdoers. Blame involves an extra element of investment in the situation, of importance for us, and this can legitimately be lacking even if the situation is one of genuine wrongdoing. The same seems true, for example, of certain instances of casual rudeness that we might encounter in brief interactions with strangers. Sometimes, we might not particularly resent the rudeness or blame strangers for it, not because we think that such rudeness is permissible, but simply because the interaction is not of any great significance in our lives.
The idea that resentment concerns acts that are important to us seems to explain why it can be appropriate for resentment to subside over time. We are time-bound beings, and undoubtedly the ‘moment’ that we feel most keenly is the present. The strength with which we care about an event, or the degree of its significance for us, thus also depends on how close it is to us in time. As time-bound beings, caring about the present moment more than the distant past is appropriate. I may well care about my slight hunger now, for instance, even if it is something that I will not remember in a week’s time. And, since I am a time-bound being, such care might well be appropriate now in a way that it would not be in a week’s time. Similarly, a mildly irritating noise that I will have forgotten by tomorrow may well be something that I nonetheless care about at the time of having to listen to it. It might be appropriate to feel relief immediately after the noise stops but would seem strange to feel relief weeks afterwards. The present moment, and the near future and past, have a special significance for us, and various responses to events seem to be called for only for a short period of time.
Our proposed explanation of the subsiding of resentment with time is thus that it generally subsides because, over time, the events that resentment is a response to generally become less significant to us.Footnote 30 In the moment, a friend’s sharing an embarrassing story about you might matter a lot to you. But over time it will likely become less significant to you, and this can be appropriate given your temporal distance from it. Of course, major life events may remain equally significant to us across time. But many day-to-day happenings that make up our lives become less significant with the passage of time. Resentment, then, as a response not only to wrongness but also to the significance that wrong actions have for us, tends to appropriately subside with time because the events that it is a response to cease to have the same significance to us that they did at the time of their occurrence.Footnote 31
This can be spelled out with reference to Hieronymi’s (Reference Hieronymi2001) influential account of blame. On that account, blame and resentment are understood as a kind of moral protest against the meaning that an action has. A wrong action, at least in the absence of apology, makes the threatening claim ‘that you can be treated in this way, and that such treatment is acceptable’ (Reference Hieronymi2001: 546). Blame is a way of protesting this: ‘resentment protests a past action that persists as a present threat’ (ibid.). We might analogously understand the subsiding of resentment as a response to the diminishment of the threat that the action constitutes. Immediately after the wrong is committed, it might be very threatening to the moral standing of the person wronged, but with time, minor wrongs plausibly become less and less threatening, until at some point they cease to threaten us at all.
Importantly, note that resentment can thus subside even whilst we continue to recognise the three things identified above: the wronged party’s moral standing; the wrongdoer’s moral standing; and the wrongness of the action. This is because there is a further condition on resentment (or blame): that the event be something significant in one’s life. A wrong action can cease to be significant to us, or to matter to us, simply due to its temporal distance from us, even while we retain a clear-eyed view of the above morally relevant features.Footnote 32
What should we make of cases of repeat offenders? These seem common in everyday life: minor acts of rudeness or lateness, for example, often reflect wider patterns of behaviour. Our suggestion is that in such cases the victim’s evaluation of the wrong should alter. Something initially (reasonably) seen as a one-off wrong of minor significance might well be much more serious if understood as part of a wider pattern of behaviour. In recognizing a wrong as part of a vicious pattern, its significance might well change. It might, for instance, cease to be a minor instance of rude lateness, and come to seem part of a wider pattern of disrespect for others’ time and efforts, a much more serious moral issue. In this case, one’s judgement about the nature and seriousness of the case has altered, and as such, the appropriateness of letting go is affected. The initial wrong may no longer be regarded as a distant incident, but as part of an ongoing pattern with continuing significance in the victim’s life.Footnote 33 Our claims that letting go can be appropriate are thus limited to cases where one’s judgement of the case remains unaltered, and this excludes many repeat offences.
3. Letting go as an active agential phenomenon
Time, then, plausibly diminishes the amount of blame that it’s appropriate to feel in response to (at least) minor wrongdoing. Over time, the significance that minor wrongs have for us tends to diminish, and thus our resentment at those wrongs thus also diminishes. In such cases, we tend over time to let go of blame, and this can be an appropriate response to the diminishing significance that such events have for us.
Letting go in this sense is largely a passive phenomenon, or at least not something that one exerts any significant degree of agential control over. This kind of letting go is a mere result of the diminishing significance that something has in one’s life, not something that one actively does. Sometimes, however, the kind of significance that a thing has for us is in part actively up to us, and this points us towards an active agential phenomenon of letting go as well.
We can sometimes influence the significance that a thing has for us by taking it to be significant or insignificant. By regarding and approaching a thing as something of significance or insignificance in our lives (say, dwelling on it, making decisions concerning it, acting and shaping our self-conception in the light of it, and so on) we can sometimes thereby contribute to it becoming so. Of course, we’re not fully free to determine what is of significance in our lives, or what matters to us, and there will be constraints on the kinds of mattering that are appropriate. But there does nonetheless seem to be some degree of discretion here. Our own ‘take’ on a situation influences the actual level of significance that it has for us: merely taking something to be significant in our lives can give it a significance that it would not otherwise have had. In other words, what matters in our lives, at least in certain cases, is to some degree up to us.Footnote 34
The facts about events do not themselves always fully determine the significance of those events for us. In many cases, there are a range of responses to events that would be morally and epistemically appropriate, amongst which we can choose. This is plausibly the case with many acts of minor wrongdoing. In such cases, we have some discretion over the level of significance that the event in question has in our lives – it is at least to a great extent ‘up to us’ to determine how much it matters. This is in keeping with our ordinary ways of talking about such wrongs. We might ask each other, ‘Are you going to dwell on that?’, ‘Does it really matter that much?’ ‘Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?’; and it seems that these questions can be ours to answer. As such, how and when letting go of resentment is appropriate (and likely to happen) can be up to us. We can sometimes decide that an event is not so important to us, and thereby make it so. We can thus shorten the time it takes for our resentment to subside. This is letting go as an active agential phenomenon.
Take the above example of Confidence Betrayal. In that case, there are various ways in which it would seem reasonable for the friend whose confidence has been betrayed to regard the incident. They might regard it as a serious offence, something incompatible with the kind of close friendship that they sought and took themselves to have. It would seem reasonable to treat the betrayal as something important, something significant in the friendship. But it might also be just as reasonable to regard the incident as an unfortunate blip in an otherwise close friendship, and more or less brush it off. Neither response seems required, and the significance that the betrayal has will thus in part depend upon the person wronged and their take on its importance. To some extent, it is up to them to determine its significance in their life.
This fits very naturally with some of the common explanations that people offer for letting go of blame. We might simply decide that the wrongdoing is not worth our time or energies, for example, or that we do not want the wrong action to dominate our life or relationship with the wrongdoer. The following example of Milam’s (Reference Milam2019) is very naturally understood in this way:
Suppose Ripley hears Burke make an offensive remark about immigrants during a political conversation with friends. There are many ways in which she might react, but imagine the following: Ripley is initially upset, but quickly thinks to herself, ‘It’s just not worth blaming him for this. Our relationship isn’t worth the effort and pain it would take to confront him and resolve this conflict’. (Milam Reference Milam2019: 246)
There are of course many different reasons for moving on, but many of these capture the idea that continuing to resent gives the wrongdoing a level of significance in one’s life that one wishes it not to have. Whether it has such a significance, we have suggested, can be to a significant degree at one’s discretion.
To summarise, we have so far suggested that resentment often aptly subsides over time and that this is because the significance that events have in our lives often diminishes over time. Moreover, in the present section we have suggested that the rate at which resentment aptly subsides can be to a significant degree up to us. Letting go can thus be an active agential phenomenon, not merely something that we passively do.Footnote 35 This, in turn, makes sense of the claim that people who fail to let go, or fail to do so sufficiently quickly, can be criticisable. We might understand them as ‘grudge-bearing’ or ‘ungenerous’ precisely because whether they let go is to some extent up to them.Footnote 36 Letting go, then, can fulfil a positive role in our moral psychology, because it allows us to overcome the antagonism involved in blame without thereby failing to acknowledge the wrongness of the action.Footnote 37
4. Close relationships and letting go
What difference do close relationships with the wrongdoer make to the phenomenon of letting go? One thought that has been popular is that committing a wrong against a friend or loved one is prima facie worse than committing it against a stranger. Friends and those in close relationships seem entitled to expect more of one another than of strangers and to be more deeply hurt if the other fails to live up to standards of moral decency. Hieronymi, for example, suggests that ‘the more we care about the offender, the more important she is to us, the more angry we are likely to be [at their wrongdoing]’ (Reference Hieronymi2001: 539). This in turn suggests that overcoming blame or resentment at friends’ and loved ones’ wrongdoing is likely to be more difficult, effortful and costly than overcoming blame directed at those with whom we have no personal relationships.Footnote 38 We don’t wish to question the thought that we sometimes blame or resent friends more than strangers for equivalent wrongdoing. Sometimes, especially when the wrongdoing is severe, the fact that the wrongdoer is (or at least was) someone with whom one has a close relationship can add insult to injury and make the wrong all the more painful. However, in less serious cases, we think the opposite can also be true: being in close and positive relationships with those who have done wrong can enable one to let go of blame more easily – indeed, sometimes can even enable one to move on without having resented in the first place.
Deep friendships (hereafter, just ‘friendships’), which we will think of as the paradigm of close positive relationships, are clearly important to us.Footnote 39 It is difficult to define quite what ‘deep friendships’ involve, but the general contrast here is between close, intimate relationships with people we care about and merely friendly relationships with people we are not particularly invested in: in other words, between relationships that are particularly important to us and those that are not. To the extent that one does not really care about one’s friends, or does not really care about the friendship, one does not have a friendship: friendships, in this sense, are necessarily significant to us. We will only consider generally good or healthy relationships here, which seem like the paradigm of friendship.Footnote 40 Being in such friendships, we want to suggest, can help to insulate one against the antagonism involved in blame. This is because many minor wrongs become insignificant to us when considered against the backdrop of friendship. Contrary to the popular suggestion, then, friendship can make it easier to let go of wrongdoing.
One reason for this is that the significance of a wrong is affected by the way in which it shapes the relationship, or the norms for interaction within the relationship, in which it occurs. Wrongs that deeply shape the norms within a relationship (e.g., by ‘normalising’ such behaviour) seem much more significant than one-off anomalous occurrences. Friendships and close relationships typically involve much more strong, stable norms of (positive) interaction than the norms of interaction with mere acquaintances. It may therefore be natural to regard minor wrongs committed by friends as less significant than wrongs committed by strangers, precisely because they are likely to have a less significant role in ‘shaping’ the norms of the relationship.Footnote 41
Moreover, we have suggested that blame and resentment are in part responses to the significance that an action has for the person wronged. In determining the significance of an event for us, we work with some sense of our life as a whole and the things within it that matter to us. As it is itself significant for us, friendship is thus something that can alter the significance for us that events between the friends have. Getting a particular job, for example, might be something significant to you not because you care about the job itself, but because you care about living closer to those you care about. It might be very important to you, not for its own sake, but because of its relations to other things that are of great importance to you. Friendship is a paradigmatic instance of something that matters to us; to fail to see a friendship as significant in one’s life is to fail to have a friendship at all, to reduce the relationship from a friendship to a perhaps merely friendly relationship. As such, the significance of wrongs committed by one’s friends is measured within the context of the friendship, rather than as just another wrong.
When the importance of a wrong is understood in the context of a friendship which is itself important to one, the importance of the wrong can be diminished. In a context where one is loved, supported and cared about, minor wrongs that might otherwise be significant for one can diminish in significance. Wrongs that could otherwise seem troubling or worthy of resentment can, in contexts of caring relationships, seem less significant because they are overshadowed by a wider history of love and care and can thus be of little significance. This is in contrast to a wrong that a stranger commits against one, which may be the most significant event (indeed, the only event) within one’s relationship with them. In Rude Commentator, for example, the commentator’s personal remarks may well be the most important feature of the relationship between the speaker and commentator and may thus dominate those relations.
Take the case of Tardiness, outlined above. In the case as described, it is a work colleague who is late. The punctual colleague may thus find it easy simply to move on precisely because they don’t feel particularly invested in the relationship, so the wrong is not particularly important to them. In place of this, imagine that it is two friends meeting, friends with a long history of care for one another. In this case, the importance of the wrong for the punctual friend might be diminished, not by the fact that the punctual friend does not particularly care about the relationship, but precisely by the fact that the significance of their friend’s lateness is eclipsed by the general positive significance of the relationship. It would be perfectly reasonable for them to regard the late friend’s lateness as rude and wrong, but of little significance within their relationship as a whole. It would thus be reasonable, and often good, for them simply to let go of the wrong.Footnote 42
Given that we are imperfect beings who frequently fall short of our ideals in many minor ways, that friendship and close relationships afford us this ability is fortunate. Cases in which our interactions fall short of moral standards are a common part of our everyday lives: we often say the wrong thing, fail to pick up on others’ needs, fail to express gratitude at help from others, hurt their feelings and so on. But we’ve suggested that such wrongs need not always lead to conflict between the wrongdoer and the person wronged, and neither need we always move on by addressing such wrongs in forgiving the wrongdoer. Sometimes, we simply let go of wrongdoing, sometimes even instantaneously, and this ability is important for the maintenance of strong and steady relationships with those we care about.Footnote 43
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