We have thus far considered interpersonal forgiveness and its modulations. The focus has been on forgiveness in what one might call a private context. Can forgiveness be conceived of as a public, civic, or political virtue as well? The term is certainly used today in a political context, but its meaning is vague and its legitimacy disputed. At times “political forgiveness” seems to describe exchanges that look rather like the giving or the appeal for pardon, clemency, debt relief, or reconciliation.

The backdrop to our inquiry continues to be the fact of imperfection, as well as a critique of the impulse to respond to imperfection by fleeing, in one way or another, from the world. What would reconciliation with the moral imperfections of the political and social world look like? Perhaps the chief reason for despairing that anything like forgiveness or apology could provide the answer is the sheer magnitude, pervasiveness, and on-goingness of wrong-doing and injury. The chronicle of peoples devouring each other and themselves is almost too painful to contemplate. The incalculable extent of suffering that humans have caused throughout their short history, the immense mountains that the bones of the unjustly killed would form, the vast lakes their blood would fill, not to mention the evidence that the rate of slaughter is increasing rather than decreasing, encourage the judgment that collective human life is irredeemable. Slivers of hope would hang on the chance that an individual soul may somehow escape the wheel of suffering.