Mostafa Malekian's Lecture: Forgiveness in Restorative Justice

One of the most important factors in the expansion and, more importantly, the deepening of restorative justice is the virtue of forgiveness or forgivingness.

Law, by virtue of being law, must have limits and boundaries. One cannot conceive of a legal system that lacks the concept of justice. And justice is nothing other than the safeguarding of rights. In fact, it is through justice that human beings protect rights.

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Mostafa Malekian's Lecture: Forgiveness in Restorative Justice[1]

Tarbiat Modares University – Conference on Forgiveness in Restorative Justice – April 29, 2017

One of the most important factors in the expansion and, more importantly, the deepening of restorative justice is the virtue of forgiveness or forgivingness.

Law, by virtue of being law, must have limits and boundaries. One cannot conceive of a legal system that lacks the concept of justice. And justice is nothing other than the safeguarding of rights. In fact, it is through justice that human beings protect rights.

For the law to orient itself increasingly toward restorative justice, there is no escape or alternative to culture. As long as the culture has not changed, one cannot, after a murder, immediately go to the victim's family and request restorative justice. Before that murder occurs, the culture of restorative justice—of which forgiveness is a central pillar—must already exist within the victim's family. Forgiveness belongs to the category of voluntary matters that require temporal continuity (extended over time). Some voluntary matters do not require groundwork over time. If we ask a person to raise their hand or to be silent, they can immediately raise their hand or be silent. Here, no preparatory groundwork over time is needed. However, if we ask a person to lose weight, losing weight is a voluntary matter, but it is not the case that the person can lose weight immediately. In fact, losing weight belongs to the category of voluntary matters requiring temporal continuity and necessitates a plan and time. Pardoning or forgiving belongs to this category of matters. That is, a human being cannot accomplish it merely by willing it. In fact, the prevailing culture of society must have prepared this groundwork beforehand so that, when necessary, the individual can forgive and pardon. It is through the existence of such groundwork that individuals become forgiving, and then one can go to the victim's family and request pardon from them, because the virtue of forgivingness exists in these individuals. In fact, for the development of restorative justice, in addition to paying attention to legal and juridical obstacles, one must also endeavor to remove psychological obstacles, and this requires a cultural change. Cultural change here means a change in beliefs, feelings, emotions, and desires. If, through a particular educational system, a set of beliefs becomes firmly established in individuals, a set of feelings and emotions is cultivated in them, and a set of desires emerges in them, then the individuals of this society, belonging to this culture, are ready for pardon and forgivingness.

For a person to be able to forgive when necessary, they must have cultivated forgivingness within themselves beforehand and become a forgiving person. In fact, through the creation of specific beliefs, feelings, emotions, and desires, the individual becomes more compassionate and forgiving. A just legal system, coupled with a compassionate culture, removes the obstacles to restorative justice. In the continuation of the discussion, the compassionate culture will be addressed.

Forgivingness has two distinct dimensions. A forgiving person requires a set of inner attitudes and a set of outward behaviors. In restorative justice, it is the outward behaviors that play a more prominent role. When a person pardons their father's murderer (outward behavior), they have realized restorative justice. However, for their own moral and inner transcendence, they need to also reform their inner attitudes. The goal of a social reformer is to reach a point where, for example, the individual refrains from punishing their father's murderer, but the satisfaction of a moral philosopher does not stop at this outward behavior; they desire that the individual's inner attitude also be reformed so that a moral-psychological transcendence occurs within them.

To change and reform outward behaviors, an individual’s beliefs, feelings, emotions, and desires require revision, and in this discussion, among these three influential factors, beliefs will be addressed.

To bring about change in outward behavior through beliefs, there is a specific set of beliefs that must be presented to children, audiences, and learners by way of reasoning. And this reasoned presentation is different from mere repetition and declaration. The audience must be persuaded that these particular beliefs correspond to reality, and in this endeavor, rational and empirical arguments must be employed. After these beliefs are taught to the audience in a reasoned manner, these individuals become predisposed to forgive when necessary. These beliefs that must be learned fall into four categories:

* Psychological beliefs

* Sociological beliefs

* Prudential beliefs

* Ethical beliefs

Psychological and sociological beliefs, by the nature of their kind, are based on empirical arguments (life experiences and laboratory experiments).

Psychological beliefs:

These are beliefs that hold true regarding the human psyche, and a person must seek out these beliefs and, once they have found sufficient and adequate arguments in their favor, incorporate them into their belief-epistemic system.

1) Human beings are not as free as is often supposed. One of the greatest epistemic errors of every person is that they imagine themselves to be more constrained than they are, while considering others to be freer than they actually are. For example, imagine a person who goes to the bank for a banking transaction. The bank employee does not treat them well and is somewhat ill-tempered. Now, when this bank customer goes home, they tell their spouse that these bank employees sit under the air conditioner, always have a cup of tea beside them, do nothing but cash a few checks and pay a few bills, earn three or four million tomans a month—money that comes from our own investments—and yet they still behave badly and are ill-tempered. Here, the customer imagines that the employee, in a completely calm environment and without any pressure whatsoever, decided to say something hurtful. Now, if this same person were the bank employee and had an argument with a customer, they would tell their spouse at home:

Today a customer came in and I treated them badly. Though they had it coming, really. The branch’s air conditioner has been broken for three days. Our salaries are four months behind. And they say Mom’s illness might be malignant—and you saw last night what the kids put me through!

By recounting and expressing these facts, this person tries to find mitigating circumstances for their own behavior. Not to morally justify their action, but they try to say that they were not all that free.

When judging another person, they considered them entirely free and held them guilty without any excuse or justification. But when it came to themselves, they brought up excuse after excuse to find an accomplice, to grant themselves a reduction, and to lighten the burden on their own shoulders.

In other words, when judging themselves, a person imagines themselves to be far more constrained and compelled than they really are, but when judging others, they become very strict and portray them as far freer and more autonomous than they actually are.

Psychological research shows that the observer imagines the agent to be much freer than they are. And this causes the potential for forgiveness and pardon to decrease, because the offender and wrongdoer are seen as entirely free and autonomous in committing the error.

Therefore, we must strive to be fairer and more realistic in our judgments.

2) Forgiveness does not mean not loving the victim; it means loving the offender. When someone is asked to forgive, they usually say that if they forgive the offender, people will say, for instance, what a heartless mother she is for forgiving her child's murderer! As if she never loved her child at all, since she forgave the murderer. Indeed, there are those who think that if they forgive their child's murderer, they are heartless. It must be noted that forgiveness does not signify a lack of love for the victim, but rather an abundance of love for the offender. The forgiving person not only loves the victim but also loves the offender, and this does not negate love for the victim.

3) In the words of Victor Hugo: He who knows through what corridors a crime has passed, forgives the crime. One of the reasons a person cannot forgive a criminal is that they see only this one slice of the criminal's life. People usually look only at that segment, that slice of the criminal's life in which they committed a crime, and it goes without saying that this slice of life is just one slice of that person's life, not their entire life. And if we are to reduce the life and characteristics of the criminal to a single incident, we have presented an incomplete analysis of them. The more we consider the person's past, their family upbringing, their genetic traits, their school environment, and their social circumstances, the more our mercy and compassion toward them increases. In fact, there is a significant correlation between knowing a person more deeply and feeling mercy and compassion for them.

4) Not knowing is a boundless matter. Part of the lack of compassion toward criminals stems from the fact that the offender's wrongdoing is attributed entirely to their ill intent. It is the sum of ill intents and instances of ignorance that leads to crime, not merely ill intent. It must be noted that ignorance is not a crime. Moral philosophers say that for an ethical judgment about an individual, one must consider their awareness at the time of committing the act. One should not think that criminals are omniscient and their ill intent is absolute. It is a combination of ignorance and ill intent that brings about a crime, and at times, it is ignorance that bears a greater burden for the occurrence of the crime, not ill intent.

5) One of the differences between the empirical human sciences, such as sociology, psychology, and politics, and the empirical natural sciences is that in the human sciences, small effects are observed that become the cause of great causes, and apparently, this is not the case in the empirical natural sciences. When a father is killed, his child thinks that the murderer has robbed them of their father's right to life, and this is a great crime. But there may also be a truth behind the curtain: that the father had, for years, accused the murderer of something unfounded and tormented them for years with slander and jokes. These small annoyances and torments accumulated together and created the motive for murder. These small incidents are usually not recorded, because it is not expected that, for example, a joke would be a motive for murder. In the empirical human sciences, a king being bitten by a monkey might start a war. The point is that in the human sciences, small effects may create great causes.

Sociological Beliefs

1) Violence can never be eliminated by violence. When an act of violence occurs, if the response is violence that is lesser, equal, or even greater, one should not expect the elimination of violence. Violence is not a self-destructive phenomenon and is not eliminated by itself. Violence against violence means the reproduction of violence.

2) What drives a person not to forgive is that the criminal is not recognized as deserving forgiveness. We humans must consider that when we do not forgive a murderer and decide upon their elimination, we may needlessly inflict pain and suffering on other innocent people, including their family. And these pains and sufferings encompass a wide spectrum of emotional and social pains and sufferings. When a being is lost from the causal system of the world, it does not leave that system untouched.

Pragmatic Beliefs:

These beliefs are beliefs that say if you are not bound by the moral life, know that your actions also produce effects and consequences for yourself.

1) Is a human being immune from committing an error for the rest of their life? Is there a guarantee that an individual will never commit a murder? Does a person not consider the possibility that in three minutes, an event could turn them from a good, orderly, and law-abiding citizen into a murderer? There are not a few people who have had such histories. Prudence dictates that one might commit a crime themselves, or one of their loved ones might. Given this prudence, the spread of a culture of forgiveness will also encompass the individual and their loved ones.

2) When a person does not forgive, they harm themselves. They initially think that by not forgiving, they will find solace. Revenge provides a temporary gratification and solace, but research has shown that over time, the negative aspects of vengefulness reveal themselves. Regret over losing a good opportunity, remorse for seeking revenge, and a simultaneous love and hatred for the victim are among the effects that arise in a person after not forgiving.

3) The spread of forgiveness that arises in society as a result of the forgiveness of individual human beings has a positive impact on the factors influencing social cohesion. Forgiveness, in addition to promoting itself, affects three things:

First) People's tolerance towards one another increases. Because each person understands that they live with human beings who, of necessity, forgive. And this means strengthening tolerance.

Second) Compassion arising from a sense of shared nature and shared destiny. Compassion is a kind of mercy that arises from awareness of being of the same nature and sharing the same destiny.

Third) Creating optimism in society.

Moral Beliefs:

All three schools—consequentialism, deontology, or virtue ethics—hold that forgiveness and pardon create an unpredictable pleasure in the human being. In fact, there is a concomitance between the moral life and profound pleasure.

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Audio of Mostafa Malekian's lecture titled Forgiveness in Restorative Justice

PDF file of Mostafa Malekian's lecture titled Forgiveness in Restorative Justice

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[1] .Prepared in Mostafa Malekian's channel

https://t.me/mostafamalekian