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Forgiveness and Clemency (Episode 99)
662 Plays1 year ago
Caleb and Michael talk about forgiveness and clemency. How does the Stoic idea of forgiveness differ from the popular account – and when should we pardon other’s wrongdoing or address it head on?
(01:16) What Is Forgiveness?
(15:59) The Stoic Account
(25:00) Forgive Everyone At Once
(28:18) Clemency
(35:10) Is Clemency Only A Tool For The Strong?
(45:07) Challenges
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Forgiveness
00:00:00
Speaker
Perhaps some of these symbolic moves, apologies, and so on carry less weight in the stoic picture. But again, it almost doesn't matter. What are you called to do? Show justice and compassion. The stoic picture has that almost comforting simplicity in that sense, even if it's a demanding one. Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Antaveros. And I'm Michael Trombley.
00:00:26
Speaker
And today we're going to be talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness from the Stoic context or from the Stoic perspective.
00:00:36
Speaker
Michael and I will be talking about it. I did have a recent episode with Jeremy Reid, and that focused on stoic forgiveness. He has a new paper on that as well as anger, which he takes correctly, I think, the stoic account of anger to be central to how they think about forgiveness as well.
00:00:56
Speaker
But I thought it'd be good to chat with Michael about it some, go over some of the things we didn't get a chance to cover with Jeremy, just because it is such a huge topic. How do you think about forgiveness from the stoic lens? And then contrast that with some other accounts as well. Yeah, sounds great. Looking forward to it.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I think in this conversation, I'll start by giving the standard account of forgiveness or I think how many people tend to think about it and then we'll rehash the stoic account and then talk about this issue, some of these issues that come up.
00:01:36
Speaker
with forgiveness.
Criteria and Tensions in Forgiveness
00:01:37
Speaker
So one issue is clemency. That's sort of like how do you actually respond to wrongdoing and then some of the other practical and theoretical challenges one faces.
00:01:51
Speaker
So just diving right into it then. When people typically think of forgiveness, I think they're bringing to mind something that meets the following criteria. It's a response to wrongdoing. It doesn't make sense to forgive someone if they haven't done anything wrong. That would be a bit presumptuous, I think.
00:02:11
Speaker
So, part of that is recognizing that the other did wrong. They made a mistake. And when you forgive someone, you're not condoning. You're not saying that it was not, in fact, a mistake. In fact, you are recognizing that wrong was done somehow.
00:02:29
Speaker
Then it also involves this idea of showing mercy, perhaps not punishing to the degree warranted or acquired by justice. And that is related to this other trait of reconciliation. So you have recognizing the other did wrong, showing mercy, and reconciliation that's bringing the relevant parties together.
00:02:52
Speaker
The last feature you might add to this definition may be that forgiveness must come from the appropriate person. You can't forgive someone for doing wrong to someone else. It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. So putting those all together, you have that recognition, mercy, reconciliation, and it comes from the appropriate person.
00:03:17
Speaker
You can think about this, I think there's an intuitive way where if we connect it to our episode on punishment, episode 89, where a common view of punishment is it sort of restores the balance between the victim and the wrongdoer. You know, an eye for an eye, that's one way to restore moral order, as it were.
00:03:38
Speaker
But another way to restore balance is through forgiveness, is by recognizing the wrong was done, showing mercy, and then reconciling with the wrongdoer.
00:03:50
Speaker
This account, this sort of has some initial puzzles. So the main one just being this tension between justice and mercy. If you're forgiving someone, there's this worry that you're ignoring what's maybe required or at least permitted by justice. So I think that's a common tension that many people have, both I think in the personal case as well as the philosophical one.
00:04:19
Speaker
Any thoughts on that way of hashing out how people tend to think about forgiveness? Yeah, I think that
Virtue and Justice in Forgiveness
00:04:26
Speaker
makes a lot of sense. So there's this idea of like, I mean, I think this episode might work better if we can think of an example and kind of ground it in an example. Well, somebody's just poked out your eye, right? Somebody has taken your eye and you're, you're, I don't know if we want to stick with that one, but you're, you're by kind of the laws of justice or at least
00:04:49
Speaker
colloquial understanding, you're allowed to get some sort of revenge or punishment to correct for that, and maybe that's to poke out their eye, but maybe it's they go to jail, or maybe that's, you know, you punch them in the face or something, there's some sort of way to restore balance. And then forgiveness is a kind of, it's a gift in a way, it's to say,
00:05:10
Speaker
Look, I'm going to show mercy and instead of enacting that revenge, I'm going to, uh, not do that. I'm going to give you forgiveness instead. What's interesting in this account of forgiveness, I guess, as you talked about that, that, um, those problems is why it's seen as a virtue then, because it would seem like, well, if a virtue or, you know, if justice desires or demands a punishment.
00:05:35
Speaker
uh then you're being unjust by not acting out that punishment and you can say well that's because you know they wronged me so i'm forgiving them but then it seems that you're treating yourself unjustly and that's the whole thing that i was thinking about was like how do you draw the line you know we just had an episode on um healthy boundaries and how uh you know how uh stoic would stand up for themselves in a healthy way and how do you you can think of somebody who's
00:06:06
Speaker
always forgiving and the person who's always forgiving just seems to be a pushover. It seems to be somebody who's being unjust towards themselves in a way where someone who's never angry, maybe because I'm a stoic, so I'm biased. I don't think there's something wrong with somebody who's never angry or someone who's always kind, but someone who's always forgiving seems to, again, as you said,
00:06:28
Speaker
ignore justice or actually act against justice. That's a little weird. I was thinking about how, I read this paper once about the contemporary account of forgiveness and they were talking about how forgiveness has to be almost spontaneous
00:06:47
Speaker
I would say almost like non rational or non reasoned choice. Whereas if you're reasoning it where you're saying, well, um, you know, they stole a hundred dollars from me and then they, they gave me back 200 while I forgive them. But then you're, you're, you're almost not, you're not forgiving them in that case because it's kind of a, and I think that connects back to that justice idea where you're saying, well, you know, justice has been.
00:07:15
Speaker
met, so I'm actually not holding a grudge against you anymore, or I'm not unjustly staying angry at you. And the point is like, that's not forgiveness. When somebody makes up for it, it's not forgiveness. Forgiveness has to be when they haven't made up for it. And then that's when we get that tension with justice. And their view is that it has to be almost the spontaneous thing that you arrive at, almost like a creative act, not a reasoned one. That tension, I mean, you hit it perfectly.
00:07:41
Speaker
Justice seems good, forgiveness seems good, forgiveness seems to entail ignoring justice. That's pretty confusing. Yeah, I think you see it. Maybe if you want to think of some different, some modern examples we could point to are
00:08:00
Speaker
large-scale reconciliation with racial injustice, and you always have, say, divisions in, if you think about South Africa, where Nelson Mandela takes a much more reconciliation-related approach. And of course, you have many who are fellow members of his political party, the ANC, who are not
Justice and Mercy in Stoicism
00:08:25
Speaker
exactly happy with that. They think now that apartheid is done to forgive others in the way that Nelson Mandela proclaimed others were forgiven, to seek a message of unity is in a real sense unjust given all the apartheid.
00:08:45
Speaker
So that's the way in which it might come into a political discussion. And you can see how that, at least I think initially, that's going to be a persuasive case, right? At least you can see why someone would understandably think that, you know, sometimes it's better to pursue justice than this message of mercy.
00:09:09
Speaker
We might get to that a little bit as well when you talk about clemency. So when Seneca talks about clemency, he's talking about the art of knowing what approaches are most beneficial to both sort of restore social order, I suppose, but also transform an individual so they can behave better and to grant clemency as to pardon.
00:09:35
Speaker
someone for some act they Committed and but you wouldn't want to do that to in every case that would be anarchy so you can see that sort of if you define that you can think of clemency almost in an Aristotelian sense where clemency is that mean between being too harsh pardoning no one and also the extreme of
00:10:02
Speaker
being too lax. And you can see this in parenting as well. I think parenting is an explicit example that Seneca makes that you might return to as well, but you don't want to be too harsh. You want to communicate what is right, what you believe at the same time. You don't want to, in many cases, let children run around willy-nilly, especially when they've done something that's seriously wrong, even if they didn't know any better.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that's my like, maybe, maybe we'll get into this in this view of clemency, because I was thinking about this idea of, you know, if forgiveness is to show mercy, it's to recognize that somebody recognizes that the other person is done wrong, but not requiring the punishment from them. Then it's like,
00:10:54
Speaker
Can it ever be justified to forgive somebody? Basically what I want to call out, you've presented this philosophical account of forgiveness, but I don't think it matches on to how people use the word today. What I think people use the word today is they mean, I'm not mad at you anymore, which can map on to this example of, you know, you hurt my feelings, but then you apologize, then you got me a gift, so now I forgive you.
00:11:21
Speaker
But that's not forgiveness in the account that you gave because this is something where, well, things are actually corrected. Justice has been served and I'm now not holding the grudge anymore. And I guess I almost want like a different term for that. So there's like, there is, um,
00:11:36
Speaker
there is being kind of a pushover and not holding grudges or not demanding justice when you deserve justice, then there's I think the virtue of not continuing to hold a grudge after justice has been met, right? Well, this person did their time.
00:11:52
Speaker
You know, they committed a crime on me, they went to jail for three years, and now we're okay because they paid their dues. That wouldn't be forgiveness either on the account that you're providing, although I do think we use it that way today, you know? It's almost like, again, not holding a grudgeness. Yeah, yeah, I do think there, that's interesting because I do think there's a sense in which if someone does something wrong to you and then they pay the cost and it's a just cost,
00:12:19
Speaker
and you say afterwards, you're
Forgiveness as a Tool in Stoicism
00:12:21
Speaker
forgiven, then, I mean, that might be a legitimate message to express in a sense that, you know, we're reconciled now. But I would there, I would think, at least in a way that some people might use the word, they're not actually doing, performing the act of forgiveness in that case, because they've served their time as they were. You're just kind of saying, we're good. You're communicating a kind of a,
00:12:48
Speaker
And maybe you can see that in the case where someone refuses to forgive the other person and it seems almost inappropriate in the case where they've actually served their time.
00:13:01
Speaker
Whereas in legitimate cases of forgiveness, I think you're almost shocked. You're like, wow, the person could have been much more aggressive on how they responded to that wrongdoing. They would have been in their rights to advocate for a serious response, but they didn't.
00:13:25
Speaker
Yeah and in terms of the like in terms of that use as well there's also something to be said for the pushover example or whatever we want to call it where if you did something awful and you're like I'm sorry and somebody's like well don't worry about it doesn't matter it's no big deal that almost as you said doesn't feel you're not hit with that experience of wow that's a really profound gift of forgiveness you feel like oh that person's not really
00:13:47
Speaker
not really getting it, not really understanding how much they were wronged or really holding their own space in that. So yeah, I think if you think of that paradigmatic case where people were like, wow, you didn't have to do that, that was incredibly generous. That's from somebody who recognizes the wrong and is giving this gift without before the person has earned it, I would say.
00:14:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's one, at least a standard philosophical account. I think you're right to point out that people, we use the word in different ways. And I think once you look at it closely, there's a sense in which it becomes rather confusing.
00:14:25
Speaker
And that's part of the reason probably why there are many debates around forgiving whether someone should be forgiven or not because people have different accounts of what the criteria are for forgiveness, what it amounts to. Just as you see sort of related debates, I think around apologies and what does a good apology look like is another matter and maybe another good one to tackle at some point too.
00:14:52
Speaker
One nuance I wanted to add to this, because it's an interesting topic before we jump into the Stoke account, is you could almost have forgiveness to different people, because you said someone else can't forgive you. But let's say somebody murders someone or doesn't, you know, let's say they murder a family member. There's almost like a harm done to society.
00:15:11
Speaker
And then society almost forgives you once you've paid your time and like you should, okay, well they murdered somebody, but they've been in jail for 20 years and they've. But then there's this, so there's this question of like the harm to society or that breaking of the social contract, but then there's that harm to the individual or the family. And you could almost say like.
00:15:29
Speaker
Cause cause basically the point is like harms don't always harm one person. They harm many people in, in different severities. And you can have something where you could, you could live up to the justice to the people that were harmed less, but maybe not have done your, your due to the people that were harmed more. And so you could rightly have some people forgive you while rightly not, uh, or, or, you know, some people think justice has been met while other people are not and are still holding out for that justice.
00:15:59
Speaker
Right, right. Yep.
Practical Applications of Forgiveness
00:16:01
Speaker
Well, all right, so those are some of the tensions with thinking about forgiveness, especially around that division of justice and mercy. And I think what's unique about the stoic account is that on the stoic account of forgiveness,
00:16:18
Speaker
There is no tension between justice and mercy. What you ought to do for the Stoics is do the just thing. Grant clemency when that's required by justice, pardon people when that's required by justice, or dispense with punishment, whatever that looks like when that's required.
00:16:41
Speaker
And I think that that has led some people to argue that even this notion of forgiveness doesn't make sense in stoicism. But if you listen to the episode with Jeremy, you know that that's not the position that he takes. And I think we can say there is at least a legitimate sense in which we can talk about forgiveness in stoicism and especially this
00:17:08
Speaker
Idea that Seneca has that we must forgive everyone at once so the first pass, you know I think the account solves this initial tension by saying there's no no tension between justice and mercy You just ought to do the right thing the right reason at the right time and that's that's where you should be focused on but it does turn out to be rather rather radical so I suppose to explain it more and
00:17:32
Speaker
If you think about wrongdoing, that's fundamentally what we're thinking about forgiveness as. It's a response to wrongdoing and there's a question, what's an appropriate emotion for the Stoics? They hold that anger is never appropriate to the extent that we can. We should diminish our anger or not be angry at all.
00:18:00
Speaker
And then when you think about forgiveness, it's a matter of knowing that someone else made a mistake, knowing that mistakes in general are expected, and then shifting the focus to knowing how to respond appropriately.
00:18:24
Speaker
What that might look like is you have that famous passage from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations 2 where he reminds himself that he's going to meet with, you know, he says every morning remind yourself that you're going to meet with the ungrateful, the busybody, the envious, and the unsocial.
Historical Examples of Clemency
00:18:53
Speaker
There he's setting that expectation that you will meet others who do wrong. In fact, they will likely do wrong to you. And of course, as that passage continues, not out of some essential malice in their character, but out of ignorance because they do not know the nature of good and evil.
00:19:17
Speaker
You have that expectation, so there's no surprise when others do wrong, or at least there's less surprise when others do wrong. Once you have that expectation in place, then it's easier to know how to respond.
00:19:34
Speaker
One example we mentioned before is this example from Marcus Aurelius' life where one of his generals, Avidius Cassius, plans a coup. And Marcus, or at least his immediate response to this is to both issue a pardon to Avidius Cassius that's conditional on him immediately standing down
00:20:02
Speaker
And he was able to do that in a relatively persuasive way because Avidius Cassius had, I believe, heard mistaken information that Marcus Aurelius had died or something like this. So he could say, look, there's some story there, you know, Avidius Cassius could trust Marcus Aurelius' word when he said, you know, you'll be pardoned as soon as you stand down.
00:20:27
Speaker
But he also knew that he needed to respond appropriately and prepared for war if that's what it came to. Yeah, let me try to summarize what I'm taking from this. So there's the view that
00:20:41
Speaker
Forgiveness is showing mercy where punishment is deserved in a non-Stoic context. And the Stoic points out, hey, well, if punishment is deserved, give the punishment.
00:20:59
Speaker
If punishment is not deserved, because, uh, you know, like the Marcus Rales example, you haven't thought of, you haven't, you're just getting overly angry because you haven't thought about how some people are ungrateful or ignorant or things like this, then don't be angry. Don't pursue punishment. So it's that, it's that kind of, it's that very, there's no mercy in, in, in substitution for punishment because of
00:21:25
Speaker
If it's deserved, you give it. And if it's not deserved, then you interrogate these reasons for anger. Sorry. Um, which to me is compelling. I think the, I think the general example is compelling the one of the say, well, look, I will, I will forgive this. Um, I'll forgive this discretion because that's, that's what's deserved in this moment, but I'm also not going to be a pushover and I will prepare appropriately, um, if needed.
00:21:52
Speaker
Am I getting that right? Is that the kind of thing? Is that the right picture? Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think you don't need to be a stoic, per se, to object to the account of forgiveness I gave earlier, but I do think that's a key aspect of it. One thing for me to push back on here is this idea of like in the stoic picture, and I'm curious if you agree, Kael, forgiveness is actually not a virtue.
00:22:21
Speaker
So I was thinking about this kind of hierarchy of actions. And so there are certain things that are required of us and then certain things that are exceptional for us to do. You can think of this in terms of charity. Maybe it's required of me to not go around assaulting people and bullying people, but it's exceptional of me to give away my money to charity. And nobody's going to judge me if I don't give away my money.
00:22:43
Speaker
And we typically view forgiveness like that, which is like, I don't expect you to forgive them, but if you did, it would be really, really nice of you. That's in the kind of non stoic sense. But in the stoic sense, in this picture, if I'm understanding correctly, then, um,
00:22:58
Speaker
not having forgiveness doesn't become the exceptional thing to do, it becomes the baseline. And not forgiving the person doesn't become reasonable, it becomes unreasonable. And so it actually kind of shifts everything a level down. And so the people who are like, I'm not going to forgive, they go from being not giving the charity to actually being
00:23:24
Speaker
ignorant or bad or incorrect, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. One way to think about this is you have the virtue of justice. There are many different aspects to justice treating others well.
00:23:40
Speaker
And that's going to break down into other traits like compassion, showing others compassion, being a compassionate person, knowing what approaches would be most beneficial for wrongdoing. And I think instead of.
00:23:56
Speaker
I think the stoic, when they're faced with wrongdoing, is going to think about what's the most compassionate response, the most just response, where I can show the skill of clemency or not, if it's appropriate to do so. Instead of thinking about, well, I can forgive them and that'd be very nice of me, but I'm not required to. That's not exactly the stoic frame. I think exactly as you said that
00:24:25
Speaker
The stoic is required to almost expect these kinds of wrongdoing, not respond with anger, but use these ideas we have around forgiveness to motivate justice and compassion, really treating others well. And depending on the context, that might look like the forgiving response and other contexts that might result in a different one. It's a high bar.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's a high bar. So it says I'm nearly always a high bar. Hey, this is tough. Yeah. Speaking of that, one interesting argument that Jeremy talked about that I think is worth noting from him that he pulls from Seneca is this idea that we must forgive everyone at once. And I think this is such a
00:25:16
Speaker
compelling and challenging thoughts and worth discussing too, just because it does help us understand this stoic idea of forgiveness. Two different things, I suppose. Why would you forgive everyone at once? First, because you should expect wrongdoing. It's just expected as a matter of
00:25:43
Speaker
human nature because of our histories, societies, biology, people are going to act poorly. We ourselves are going to make mistakes. And by saying we ought to forgive everyone at once, Seneca is urging us to see reality as it is. We're imperfect, imperfect beings.
00:26:10
Speaker
And then this other important aspect is our job is always to respond with justice and compassion when that wrongdoing emerges. That act, that line of forgiving everyone.
00:26:26
Speaker
at once is symbolic of expecting wrongdoing, reminding yourself to always greet whatever moment with that aim to be just, be compassionate, be virtuous. Yeah, I think that we both read
00:26:49
Speaker
Jeremy's new chapter before this conversation and he has this really beautiful part where he talks about how you're not wrong when you look at somebody else's life and you are like, oh, that's not, you shouldn't hold that grudge or you should let that go. You're not wrong when you say that.
00:27:08
Speaker
And then we don't feel that way about our own life. So there's two ways of looking at it. We're uncaring about other people, we're unempathetic at other people. The point is that no, actually the distance allows us to get the correct perspective, the objective perspective in that other situation. Whereas our subjectivity, our myopic view on ourselves pulls us into that.
00:27:30
Speaker
the forgiving that you can forgive everyone at once the way you could forgive somebody that lived in Athens right the way you could forgive somebody who lived that's one thing I think like you forgive somebody who lives in Athens you go well they're a product of their time right like they they acted giving the information that they had to the best of their ability and it's really easy to kind of see that causality uh when you're thinking about somebody who lived
00:27:52
Speaker
for, uh, you know, 2000 years ago or somebody who lived in a culture less familiar to ourselves. We say, well, of course they thought that way. That was how they were raised or what they knew. Um, so they responded to it. And so to, to almost assume that perspective throughout time and then throughout the people in the present now, uh, is challenging, but I think that connects with what Seneca is saying there about forgiving everybody at once. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's a, it's good to,
00:28:23
Speaker
note how we often recognize that others' responses done out of anger are often inappropriate, and there's sort of two lines to that. There's one, we can use that same objective distance, that third-person perspective, to our own responses, and that's a useful thing to do.
00:28:49
Speaker
But there's also the thought that if you're noticed responding with anger or disappointment at other people's anger, then you just haven't stepped back far enough. You haven't truly forgiven everyone at once because you should recognize that that too is just a product of their history, our society, and the fact that we're imperfect, imperfect human beings.
00:29:15
Speaker
All right, so that, yeah, that's, that's a stoic view on forgiveness. The thought is first, you know, anger is not an appropriate response to wrongdoing. And to think of forgiveness as a matter of knowing that others do wrong, it's expected. And that our focus is knowing how to respond appropriately with the virtues of justice, compassion, and of course the, the other cardinal virtues as well.
00:29:45
Speaker
So that you can think of forgiveness. It's closely related to clemency, this skill of knowing when a gentle approach is beneficial.
Clemency as Power and Authority
00:29:57
Speaker
So as I said earlier, you can almost think of, you can think of clemency as that perfect mean between harshness in responses and also laxity being far too lax or pardoning far too often.
00:30:15
Speaker
Jeremy describes it as follows, he's a nice definition.
00:30:34
Speaker
A forgiving judge will need to give out harsher penalties on particular occasions, but they are rightly said to be forgiving insofar as they are disposed to give lighter penalties and benefit others in doing so. And it's especially these last two ideas of gentle penalties as a judge and not doing them for the sake of anything other than thinking about the social benefits.
00:31:04
Speaker
That's that's the account of clemency Did you want to say something quickly or yeah? I mean I want to jump into some etymologies here, which is I want to pull us down into the weed um
00:31:17
Speaker
because we don't we don't talk about clemency really you know if i if i you know if i did something to my sister and i was like please clemency there would be no i don't think she would understand what i like you know what are you talking about when i like when i get back at you more uh just for using those silly words but
00:31:37
Speaker
So I'm looking at forgiveness. Forgiveness means, I mean, etymologically comes from Old English, which is to like completely give. So it's this, it's almost the means to pardon, or it's that idea of mercy of like, I had the ability to punish you. I was in justice. I was justified in punishing you. And I'm giving up that authority to do that. And that's that kind of that, that, that actual avoidance of your authority position.
00:32:04
Speaker
You're stepping out like the judge who says, I'm not actually going to judge here.
00:32:09
Speaker
I have the robes, I could judge, but I'm not going to. And then clemency, I looked up, comes from the Latin for being mild. So it means the mildness or gentleness shown in the exercise of authority. So it means you still judge, but you do so, I mean, as you were saying with your example, in a mild, compassionate, plugged-in way, a way that is sensitive to the fact that there's another human here, that you're understanding, well, do they need
00:32:39
Speaker
Do they need a lesson? Do they need to be punished harshly because they're quite, this is not their first offense. These kinds of questions. So I love that idea of like, well, it's exercising power kindly as opposed to giving up your power. Um, that for me is a pretty profound, uh, profound shift. I've never really thought of clemency before. Yeah. There are a number of interesting examples of.
00:33:04
Speaker
I suppose it is rooted to this idea of authority, right? Authority figures, usually granting clemency, relate to kings, Seneca writes, de Clementia, and that's too Nero advising him how to think about his role as emperor, and especially these problems he's going to face of, you know, what do I do with these people when they do things I don't want them to do?
00:33:28
Speaker
But there are, I think, some instructive examples from Roman history if we stay in the past. So if you think about Octavian, Octavian later becomes Augustus. He is battling Mark Antony. That's from Mark Antony and Cleopatra. And he wins, victoriously. He wins, and he's on his way to become the first emperor of Rome, essentially.
00:33:57
Speaker
And there's a famous story where on his way back from victory he meets a merchant person. He meets a merchant who had trained a parrot to say, you know, hail Octavian or praise Octavian. And of course everyone's pleased, everyone's laughing and then...
00:34:12
Speaker
some other parrot flies out from behind everyone and the merchant's like, oh no, no, it got away and it starts saying, you know, hail Antony, praise Antony. And of course, you know, he was just hedging his bets like any wise merchant might do.
00:34:33
Speaker
And Octavian's response is of course to laugh, I think so. And that's really the best thing one can do in that situation. But of course you can imagine other emperors responding to that as a large personal front or offense.
00:34:51
Speaker
And I think one reason I like that story so much is just that all this talk about clemency, punishment, and so on is rather serious, but often I think the right response just for many cases just is to laugh or appreciate the absurd of many of our actions.
00:35:10
Speaker
So here's a question that comes from this example. You just said clemency has to do with authority, has to do with kingsing. Is it easy for Seneca to talk about clemency?
00:35:21
Speaker
August this talking about clemency Nelson Mandela after you know he's in a position of power talking about clemency like what role for there is clemency towards your bully if you're in high school is it right to talk about it as like maybe you have a kind of ethical authority
00:35:41
Speaker
as a human being in this world that has been wronged, you have an ethical authority to be angry, but you don't have any sort of practical authority, right? Maybe it's clemency if the teacher says, well, should we expel your bully or just, you know,
00:35:56
Speaker
just give them a bunch of detention. Maybe you would now have the opportunity for clemency, but it seems to me maybe you only have forgiveness. You only have mercy if you're weak. That's why maybe it's more of this Christian value. What do you think about that? Yeah, well, I think that was a classic, almost Nietzschean-type critique of some of these elements in Christianity of forgiveness, humility, compassion, is that they're tools of
00:36:26
Speaker
the weak that are only popular because there are things that help the weak survive at best. So another ancient example, it's an example of how clemency can reveal power at any rate. You know, power is always shifting. So Julius Caesar was famous for not assassinating his rivals. When he defeated generals, he would often give them
00:36:55
Speaker
the chance to join his cause, which is relatively rare for that time. He even wanted to pardon the Stoic Cato, who was one of his mortal enemies. And part of that pardoning was, I think, on a positive side, sort of de-escalating a
00:37:17
Speaker
this cycle of violence that Rome was in at the time where you had one faction killing another faction that faction gets in power and then things shift and now there are all these debts that need to be repaid in blood and Caesar wants to end that but another thing he's doing by communicating this forgiveness is he's saying I'm powerful enough that I don't need to kill you you know come to my
00:37:44
Speaker
side. I don't need to punish you in any way. You're on my side now, essentially. And if he had been better at personal security, he probably would have been able to prove that out during his reign. And maybe I think that example is maybe just useful because it's sort of thinking about
00:38:02
Speaker
how does turning the cheek sometimes, how it does sometimes work and how it does communicate that you don't have the need to seek vengeance because you are resilient enough. And I think it's sometimes even a move that people make when they are in the weaker position. So of course you see it in
00:38:24
Speaker
civil rights. People were exceptionally disciplined in the American civil rights protests around not responding with violence to police brutality and using the fact that they didn't do that. They didn't respond to violence with violence sort of as a tool to convince the rest of the Americans that they were being
00:38:50
Speaker
oppressed, that justice was not met. And I think you also see that in other classic cases in India where many have argued that this can be a very powerful political tool, especially when it's used in a disciplined, disciplined way.
00:39:09
Speaker
All that to say is I think maybe a better way I should have framed it is that sometimes showing clemency is a way to almost gain power by communicating to whoever you're pardoning that you are in fact in the
00:39:24
Speaker
more powerful position. That's a little bit too coarse, but I think I hope I'm trying to understand what I'm trying to say or communicating to observers. Going back to the bully example, maybe the person who's weak and does view themselves as a victim, not to say you shouldn't think of yourself as a victim in some sense of bullying, but like
00:39:43
Speaker
especially in high school, you're not a stoic sage at this point or anything like that. But the person who views themselves as a victim maybe cannot give clemency. But the person who says, look, I'm not even going to get mad at this. I'm above this. They're establishing their power, demonstrating their power in that situation, or really gaining power in a certain sense.
00:40:04
Speaker
by I guess stepping outside of the game but stepping not outside of the game or the back and forth or that kind of dynamic by mercy but by almost stepping above it. Yeah it's almost if so if you're responding to wrong as if you're responding to a
00:40:25
Speaker
It's almost like what you ought to do if you think of these playground examples, playground scraps, is change the frame and there are a variety of different ways to do that. People, if they're able to confidently express that this doesn't matter to me, this doesn't harm me.
00:40:48
Speaker
then that can be I think compelling to the bully who's ever watching and so on. In other cases, if that's, in other cases, I think people just respond by asserting themselves either verbally or sometimes physically and that works out well too. Or I remember a goofy story that someone once told me about how someone was trying to fight him on a playground and he just started
00:41:17
Speaker
making obnoxious dog sounds or something like this and which, you know, just doing like these absurd sounds to throw off. That's what I think sort of gets to the same idea of trying to break the frame. One way to do it is through acting and absurd or mildly comical matters. So there are different ways to do it. And I think maybe that's, that's how you think about saying that to bullies, but I don't know.
Character Development and Preparedness
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. I mean, what do you think about that? Because that's something you probably talk about. Or at least people who bring their kids to VJJ probably have this in mind. They're like, I want to
00:41:59
Speaker
know, train someone so they're physically confident enough on the playground. There's this idea in martial arts, always in Spider-Man, right? With great power comes great responsibility. And so this idea that once you gain authority, you have a responsibility, it gets to have clemency. I never thought about it in these terms, but to be mild and gentle in
00:42:22
Speaker
and appropriate in the doling out of that authority. But I do think what martial arts does differently is it's a, unlike stoicism, it steps outside the world of the souls and the character and says, well, no, the way you gain authority is being cut by becoming the kind of person that could beat other people up, right? You kind of recognize this power dynamic. And that's at a very individual level, but you could view it in a macro level, right?
00:42:47
Speaker
you know, the political leader gets to be forgiving because they have political power. And the first thing you do is you get the power, you dominate this game of possession, material power, and then you then are nice about it once you do it. But I think that's the difference with martial arts is it says, look, like, yeah, like
00:43:07
Speaker
There is, um, there is an internal kind of confidence that needs to be developed and you get that by having teammates doing sports, developing a skill, having role models, but there's also just the fact that like, yeah, like your, you want to be able to actually do the defending and actually have the power and the authority if push comes to shove. And that's a skill that you develop through training, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
00:43:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a useful example because it's almost like instead of thinking about should you, you know, what's the right thing to do in this situation? It's thinking about how do I become the kind of person who has the physical confidence needed to do the right thing if I need to without also relying on that, without immediately thinking I need to play the physical dominance game in the playground example.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah, and perhaps that's one of, especially for many of these, I think, personal cases of thinking about forgiveness. It's almost the question is maybe of a lot of these different circumstances, you know, what's the right thing to do? What's the right action? You can almost make more progress by thinking about, well, how do I become the kind of person who immediately responds to people with that intention of showing justice, showing compassion?
00:44:29
Speaker
and then thinking about how would that person respond to these different cases. Yeah. The point there being that it's very easy to think of stoicism in terms of it taking place in a series of moments. You receive an impression, what do you do with the impression? Then as if that is stoicism and that's something that you then pull up in the difficult moments, but it's not. It's a period of doing that for weeks, months, years before the difficult moment.
00:44:58
Speaker
so that you become the kind of person, both internally and externally, insofar as that's up to you, prepared to handle those kinds of situations well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's well put. Yeah, so there are a number of challenges, of course, with applying this. And I think one of the main ones is just that
00:45:22
Speaker
It is often difficult to know what
Clemency in Business Decisions
00:45:27
Speaker
to do. We often need to balance many different factors depending on our roles. So in interesting cases, I think there's an example from a book called The Hard Things about hard things written by
00:45:39
Speaker
former CEO, now investor, Ben Horowitz, about a case he had to deal with as a CEO where he realized, I believe one of his salesmen were lying about their figures or just doing something beyond the pale that he couldn't have. So a natural response, I think, of course, would just be to fire that salesman. You can't have a salesman.
00:46:06
Speaker
doing that sort of thing. But he thought it was important to communicate this lesson that as an organization, we don't do that at all. And he decided I need to fire the salesman and their manager.
00:46:22
Speaker
And you could argue that that is too harsh, right? He legitimately doesn't know whether the manager bears responsibility for that salesman's behavior. Should the manager have known earlier? Should they have reported on him sooner than they did? He doesn't know. There's some chance that the manager should have been fired, but there's also some chance he fired someone who, for all he knows, did their best. But I think that's an example of
00:46:51
Speaker
Plausible to me that he made the right decision. I don't know. That's why the book's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things, right? But shows how you need to balance these many different factors between.
00:47:04
Speaker
Ensuring that you know if you're in the business context if you want to run this kind of business that might involve making certain people object lessons of these are our values and we're going to We're going to hold to them even when you know doing so and some circumstances might might hurt So I thought I thought that was an interesting example and be curious to get your uh your reaction about it. I
00:47:29
Speaker
And the example there is that sometimes clemency is not the most important thing because sometimes you have obligations to other people or to this business. I think everyone would agree that you shouldn't pardon the person who is lying on their figures. That's just not something you can have going on in a business. And then the question is,
00:47:51
Speaker
How do you deal with people who may or may not have been responsible for this behavior or perhaps should have reported it earlier? And that's where you could have someone respond gently and just leave it at that. Or you could say, we really don't do this in this organization.
00:48:15
Speaker
If you have any sense of this at all, you should report it to us. Otherwise we don't want to work with you anymore. I mean, that seems to me like a consequentialist, like you could say, well, I wasn't very forgiving here.
00:48:31
Speaker
Because, I mean, this would be, I guess would be a stomach claim. Forgiveness was not the right thing because I had other obligations to other people, for example, like the people in my business. And if there was a 10% chance, this was the kind of manager who had liars. That's like not enough of a chance. Uh, a, because there's a message that you're sending and B because, um, there's too much of a risk. But for me, the clemency is the opposite to punishment, right? So it's like.
00:48:59
Speaker
Was that a punishment or was that a business decision based on the message that it sent and the chance that this person wasn't good for the business? This manager was a bad, a very bad manager. And so for me, that doesn't really feel like punishment because I don't know how you can give punishment.
00:49:17
Speaker
when you're not really sure, but what you can do is you can make a call that like, well, it doesn't matter if it's punishment or not. I'm going to make the call for other reasons. And so that's what it seems like to me. And so clemency, I mean, maybe doesn't even come into the factor because it wasn't really a you wronged me decision. It was a what's right for the business decision kind of thing. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But I think there's also this point of uncertainty. And I think probably a lot of people face
00:49:44
Speaker
situations where we don't actually know whether someone wronged us or not or whether you can miscommunicate. So I guess there's some of that. But maybe one other point I think your comment does bring out that's important is that I think I can imagine someone doing this in a non-stoic way where they think about
00:50:05
Speaker
firings both of these people for purely material reasons, because that's what seems easier or something like that. Or now we have a convenient reason to get rid of this manager that I actually didn't like very much anyway. Whereas the stoic approach would be thinking about this from, you know, what are my responsibilities as CEO to rest of my employees, my customer, and does that necessitate ensuring that we don't have any of this at all in my company.
00:50:35
Speaker
Um, yeah, I think that idea of uncertainty was interesting too, right? This idea of like, where does clemency and forgiveness come in? If someone's like, well, I wasn't lying to you or I didn't know, I swear. And then you're kind of left in that moment of trusting or not trusting, because that would have been the position that the manager presumably would have said, well, I had no idea. And I guess that question of what does trust mean? What?
00:51:02
Speaker
What, what are the requirements of justice in terms of trusting? Like what should we do in terms of trusting people? Is it just a consequentialist decision or should we lean towards trust?
Conclusion on Stoic Forgiveness
00:51:12
Speaker
That's, that's to me the, I guess the interpersonal dynamic of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That you can imagine if we know more about the characters in this story going in a different way or having a different impression. And I think there is also that question of how to think about trust with.
00:51:27
Speaker
other people with building that in organizations and that's a whole other matter. One other challenge I want to mention here just as we
00:51:36
Speaker
wrap up is in Jeremy's paper he has this reminder that neither gentle or harsh responses to wrongdoing necessitate character change. So he writes, rapid character changes are unlikely
00:51:57
Speaker
Thus, given that character and habits are formed over long periods of time and are not easily altered, if someone apologizes by saying that they've changed and won't do it again, most of the time we shouldn't believe them. So there's that issue of trust again, and I think that reminder
00:52:21
Speaker
And that we can also apply to ourselves that building, changing character requires a non-trivial amount of effort over a significant portion of time. And that means we should set our expectations appropriately, going back to Meditations 2, of course.
00:52:42
Speaker
and that perhaps some of these symbolic moves, apologies, and so on would carry less weight in the stoic picture. But again, it almost doesn't matter. What do you call it to do? Show justice and compassion. A stoic picture has that almost comforting simplicity in that sense, even if it's a demanding one.
00:53:07
Speaker
Well, I also kind of read that a different way too, which is that, you know, we talked about this in terms of punishment and in terms of clemency, was that, you know, part of the reason you might punish someone is to improve them and to help them, like a kind of justice for the sense of, you know, helping somebody learn their lesson, so to speak. And so in a world where change is uncommon, or at least quick change is uncommon, does that mean we still, that's the way I go, does that mean we still,
00:53:36
Speaker
can justify our clemency in terms of improving other people or do the demand of justice require harsher punishment that we suspect? I think at least at the very least we can like lean a bit too much to like, well, you know, they learned their lesson and you can kind of maybe if you're more of a gentle person, you can not live up to the stoic demand of justice.
00:54:00
Speaker
by over rationalizing how much these kinds of your forgiveness will change or help. Yeah. It serves as a reminder to check in. Are you
00:54:16
Speaker
rationalizing, I suppose, well, if you're thinking about a harsh response because that is going to transform the other person, that'll give them a lesson. Or alternatively, are you thinking about, I'm going to respond in a gentle manner because that is what will cause them to change for the better.
00:54:34
Speaker
I serve that reminder to check in. Is that just some reason that serving as a rationalization to punish the person because that you feel vindictive or be lax with a person because you don't want to assert yourself by punishing them or you're nervous about doing that. You don't want to look like an addictive person or what have you. Yeah, I like that as an ending point. Just this idea of
00:55:05
Speaker
Change is more unusual than we suspect. It's harder to do than we suspect. So if ever you're thinking either in terms of more punishment or less punishment and justifying that in terms of changing somebody, check into if you're not just like kind of post hoc justifying yet your initial emotional impression. That's, that's, that's, that's a good reminder. That's, that's my takeaway along with the idea of clevency. Those are my two, definitely my two takeaways.
00:55:33
Speaker
Nice. Excellent. Well, I hope everyone else that found this was, found this is valuable. If you haven't listened to the Jeremy episode, do that as well. And he does have this stoic forgiveness paper that the two of us read in preparation for this discussion on his website. That's just Jeremy Reid, if you Google his name, I'm sure.
00:55:54
Speaker
You will find it and then reach out to us as always if you have any comments, questions, suggestions for additional topics or guests. Thanks, Michael. Awesome. Thanks, Gil.
00:56:09
Speaker
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00:56:39
Speaker
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00:57:02
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.