Public Lecture by Miranda Fricker

Date: 

Thursday, March 3, 2016, 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Location: 

Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall 110, Harvard Yard

"Constructions of Forgiveness"

Forgiveness takes place in time. Obviously. But I shall explore the temporally extended nature of forgiveness with two particular aims in mind. First, the aim of explaining how forgiveness that must be earned through the culprit’s remorse is of the same moral genus as forgiveness whose distinct value resides precisely in the fact that the culprit has done nothing whatever to earn it. And second, the aim of explaining how acts of forgiveness can be acts of social construction, both in relation to the wrongdoer and in relation to the forgiver. Moreover, once we have these constructive mechanisms clearly in view, we are in a position to explain how certain deformations or corruptions of either kind of forgiveness are the result of their intrinsic proneness to such corruptions.

Miranda Fricker is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her research is mainly in Moral Philosophy, and Social Epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. Currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow she is working on a book on blame and forgiveness. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing; and co-editor of a number of edited collections. She was Director of the Mind Association until 2015; and now serves as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.