Beyond Redemption

[MetalSkulkBane]

Shadow the Hedgehog, , Endevor from My Hero Academia, Zuko from Avatar and little army of My Little Pony villains.

That's just a fraction of characters that were to some degree evil and got turned good. People love good redemption arc.

But as I've been playing Witcher 3 (game that regularly forces moral dilemmas on you), I asked myself:

if person is genuinely regretting his past, does he/she always deserves forgiveness and second chance? Or is there a line when it's too late?

Witcher had a classic example (spoilers for very minor sidequest) where leader of bandit group gave up life of crime and started a family, but he already killed many innocent people in the past.

At one side murders can't be undone, nothing he really can do to properly redeem himself. Past just doesn't disappear.
On the other, killing him won't bring back the dead, nor will it prevent next kills since he already stopped. So killing him will won't help anyone, but bring grief to his new family.

And that's one of simpler examples. I haven't watched "Loki" yet, but I know that guy who invaded  New York, unquestionably causing many death by his free will, now gets to be a protagonist.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Redemption is the journey, not the destination.

That’s not saying that one can’t fully redeem themselves, but the long one continues with doing the wrong thing, the longer their journey to redemption will/should be; the more you sacrifice on the wrong path the more one has to pay to set themselves right.

Being beyond redemption means that person has shown, no matter what you try to do to prove otherwise, that they will not back off the dark path they’ve chosen. But if one wants to redeem themselves, they need to prove it, and at all times—one slip up can send them back to square one.

[Dr. Mechano]

8 hours ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

if person is genuinely regretting his past, does he/she always deserves forgiveness and second chance?

I think we need to separate these two.

Forgiveness isn't up to the repentant. It's up to the people they've wronged, and it's ultimately a personal decision.

But getting a second chance at changing their life, redeeming themselves, and choosing to be a better person whether or not others forgive their past actions is within their control.

So let's say - hypothetically - a former bad guy did some awful things. They develop as a character and genuinely change their outlook and change their actions as well. They're redeemed whether or not others forgive them, because they've objectively stopped being bad. 

It's still valid to not forgive that person, but a lack of forgiveness does not mean a lack of redemption. Others forgive you (or don't), but you redeem yourself.

So we can talk about whether or not someone "deserves" forgiveness, but I don't think it makes sense to talk about whether someone "deserves" redemption. Redemption isn't deserved - it's earned through objectively changing. You either do it or you don't.

[Kuzu]

I think the collective conflate the idea of redemption with forgiveness when they're actually two entirely different things. 

Redemption does not require forgiveness, and as mentioned, the latter is more about the victims than the oppressors. A former villain or terrible person can seek redemption, but their victims don't HAVE to forgive them.

The short version is: Redemption =/= Forgiveness. 

[Starry Skydancer]

Old thread, but I'm trying to work out a working "moral hypothesis", and it might help me if I put it into words.

People mean different things when they say forgiveness.

People mean different thing when they say deserve.

Whether or not someone deserves forgiveness depends what you mean.

In Buddhist philosophy, everybody deserves forgiveness, everybody deserves love, and you should probably give it to them, and I agree. This describes the Buddhist concept of "metta", unconditional love for all conscious beings.

A lot of people think of forgiveness or kindness as going back to square one; if you hurt someone, then you can be friends again, there can be trust again.

A lot of people will exploit this semantic problem, people will say that someone inherently deserves forgiveness or love like they mean it in the first way, but they're trying to manipulate you into the second. Some forms of love are conditional, and that's ok.

----

Unconditional love/forgiveness sounds a bit vague and poorly defined, so here's what I mean by that:

People are animals, they respond to their environment, act on their instincts and beliefs.*

Feelings have inherent value, positive feelings are good and negative feelings are bad, by definition. This is a fact.

People are not inherently good or bad.

Nor can your actions make you dirty or clean, you do not acquire karma; good or bad karma, you cannot accumulate sin, etc.

Hurting someone is an inherent bad and benefitting them is an inherent good, regardless of that individual's actions or intentions.

That's not to say punishment should not exist, but that it should be corrective, hurting somebody for the sake of hurting somebody is not tenable. Revenge is wrong.

When I say that all people deserve forgiveness, I mean that nobody deserves to feel bad, regardless of their actions.  In fact I think they deserve to feel good. When I say that people deserve this, I mean that feeling bad is inherently bad and feeling good is inherently good. (intrinsic)

I also think the word deserve can be used in a corrective, or reinforcing way. (extrinsic)

But like the word forgiveness, the two meanings of the words should not be confused, and we should be very careful what we are talking about, nobody intrinsically/inherently deserves punishment, but they might do extrinsically.

The problem with loving "bad" people, even in an intimate way that would make them feel that would they have true friends that would protect them, isn't that they don't deserve it, it's that they pose a danger to you or others that also deserve to be safe, and often it's wise to prioritise oneself in that situation.

In other words, the point of morality is not to reward the good and punish the wicked, it's to make the world a nicer place for affective beings, which sometimes includes being nice to people who do bad things.

 

I think a lot of people see the end goal of morality as to reward the good and punish the wicked. This is wrong.

This appears to be a principle of India's caste system, which is based on a belief that the circumstances that you are born in reflect your actions in a past life.

This is also a principle of Christianity's heaven and hell, in which you can accrue, or be "dirtied" by sin and therefore deserve punishment.

People who sin are sent to hell, everybody sins, so everybody is sent to hell, except if you are Christian, then Jesus cleanses you of your sins

It seems the reason that people are sent to hell is assumed to be intrinsic; people are dirtied, sinful. They aren't being corrected, becuase they live in hell for the rest of their (immortal) lives.  I've often had it explained to me that sin cannot enter heaven, implying that we contain the component that is called "sin".   As Christianity sees sin as something that we contain, it also sees it as something that can be cleaned from you, like a mysterious goo. 

This is what I call essentialism. I think essentialism is...hard to define. It's kind of like when people assume a thing comes before it's parts, like believing chairs are defined by a single trait of chairness (mysterious goo), rather than a collection of traits that we've decided are chair-like and could be called "chairness". 

Many people believe that good people contain "goodness" or bad people contain "badness", like goo. When you believe things like that, you start believing in silly things like revenge, that you need to be punished to be redeemed, or you can give your bad goo to somebody else and be resolved, you might start believing in moral licencing, or "I'm not the sort of person that does that."

 

*In my unhumble opinion, to say that people act on free choice/free will and therefore can genuinely deserve punishment, leans on a nonsense concept of free will, AND forgets that bad feelings are inherently bad.

The universe is completely deterministic.

Either acts of will are deterministic, or they are truly random or nonsense, and I fail to see how that is any more free than determinism (and I fail to see how nonsense is correctable.)

 

God this is a ramble and I'm really sleep-deprived.