Even if you think that every “should” is a command, as Kant thinks, and that “should’s” are ubiquitous in everyday life, as when you should mind your mother and grant favors to friends and comply with reasonable requests by employers, and ubiquitous as well in collective or political life, as when Jesus commands that people be kind to one another, or that Martin Luther king, Jr. commands that we look to people’s character rather than their race, that does not mean that the moral life is neither the only life or even a predominant aspect of life, even though religion feels that it has accomplished and made more powerful and attractive the association of religion with morality, something that emerges with Abraham, who criticizes God for not meeting a higher standard of morality by imposing conditions whereby God will forego the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah, and where the charismatic power of Jesus is wedded with a morality of compassion. Rather morality, as a whole, is just one of the affective affinities and has to be properly placed within the passions, however much religion has stated otherwise.
The point of view most opposite to mine is presented by Dante, who regards the emotions and acts of immorality as defining the nature of a person as being the essence of the person, and so some signal event of immorality is sufficient to condemn a person to everlasting pain or at least to a very long time in suffering and atonement and redemption, even though hell and Purgatory are very long and a single life where moral failures take place and earn such judgments is very short and yet, to Dante, more than enough a set of risks so that a great many people are to be found wanting. Why should an immorality be enough or even the prime basis for condemnation? Why not fault people for failing to appreciate beauty or to understand the heavens by whatever theory is available at the time, whether the zodiac or the Big Bang? Why is morality so elevated?
Think of a contemporary case whereby to test the Dante Doctrine. Colin Powell was in many respects an accomplished and admirable man. He had risen from a poor boy who entered ROTC to the highest level of military and political powers in the nation when moving upward was difficult for a Black man, and he declined running what seemed to me his likely nomination and victory. But there is one major event in his life where he did not meet the test of the highest level of morality. He knew there were no weapons of mass destruction when he said there were when addressing the United Nations and so the population accepted his word and so the United Nations went to war for reasons still unclear, some twenty years later. Should that moral failure be regarded as discarding his other virtues and his other characteristics of characteristics that are admirable or just part of his nature, whether they are moral matters or not, and be condemned into the equivalent of Hell, which is the disdain to which historians are condemned to past lives they judge/ That would seem harsh and unnecessary even though I would classify powell as having been overcome by a tragedy whereby his loyalty to the people who had made him great became his fatal flaw and so he overcame his reluctance to do what a statesman or a Secretary of State should do, which is to act truthfully and out of principle. But there is no need to make moral failure the main measure of a person even though the Abrahamic religions do say that.
There are a variety of sentiments other than morality, that sentiment of right and justice, that motivate people to act. There are traditions and usages and a sense that other people will be pleased at your action, your mother proud you became a doctor. There is a sense that truth should prevail and your action is in line with truth rather than with the good, as when people think that eugenics or social darwinism or the definitive nature of norms is the reason for action. But everywhere we trumpet morality as having the highest and preferred claim on why to do things, to be a final arbiter in that other considerations are to be put aside to accomplish a moral thing. It is a far, far better thing to sacrifice yourself for another even if it does bad things to you. Why is that the case? It seems to me because morality presumes willingness to suffer or at least to be subject to privations. Morality means giving up something and therefore better, for moralists, than those who get pleasure from their actions. Consider the Ten Commandments in this way. Don’t think of them as useful adages to allow society to function or as the accumulated wisdom of a people. Think of them rather as each one of them as tempted to transgress and so obeying them means limiting oneself about something that might be satisfying in its results even if not in its commission. Stealing may be difficult but if you manage it, you get your reward. Murder might be emotionally upsetting, but there are people so opposed to you in their interests or in their emotions that getting rid of the person would give some solace at least temporarily, And the pleasures of adultery are obvious. So being moral is to limit oneself, either because of a consideration of the long run, or because it is good for the society and therefore made honorable, everyone self-sacrificing for the common good, the compact whereby people come to peace. But imagine that no sacrifice is needed to have people get along, and so there is no necessary sacrifice. Maybe people prefer to get along and so will make recurring social contracts with relative ease, nations reconstituting their constitutions when they see fit, as happened often in the French Nineteenth Century, or because England is constantly modifying its constitution in the course of four or five hundred years. Morality is a way everyone becomes heroic but maybe that is not a necessary way to be heroic, there are many other candidates in one's work or one’s art or in the struggle to define the kind of person or identity that person is. We can just eliminate morality as a cause or a requirement, just an unpleasant way to manage things.
There are, therefore, what we might call “command morality”, which stretches from the Ten Commandments through Kant, which says that morality is contrary to nature in that it asks us to stifle impulses in the pursuit of the greater good and so to elevate the emotions of people to a higher, more just way of doing things, rather than allow themselves to continue on in their more benighted ways of life. It should be added that it is not at all clear that Jesus is offering command morality because He suggests that life in fact will be easier if people give off their bitterness and accept one another’s frailties. People will be free when they rid the individual and social world of their illusions. The alternative to command morality is behavior in keeping with nature, which means people indulging their needs for fod nd sex and art to the point where morality disappears as a word because the term is associated only with command morality, something imposed on people rather than congruent with nature. Yes, people sometimes do bad things, like murder and steal, but that is not the ordinary course of life as that has evolved, people preferring to use the garden hose to wash the dog and cool the children. Life is not, as it has become, neither short and brutal nor bloody, and the ways in which people are can be alleviated through medical science and the better distribution of food and other goods and services readily provided if people of a collective mind are turned to that. There are many needs to be met but few obligations, other than promises to loved ones or to oneself, and only the person to leave off his or her own hook for non-compliance, mourning a broken love affair or a failure of planned achievement, no judicial court or sense of sin burdening the aftermath with punishment for one or another failure. Thinking so is both cruel and unnecessary.
If, as I argue, that morality is overrated as the way people do or should conduct their behavior, then it follows that forgiveness is overrated or even barely needed as a response to moral transgressions. Sure, there would still be the need to say a person is sorry for an insult that is just part of normal interaction. You are sorry for having offended someone’s feelings or for having stubbed on a toe or being sufficiently diligent in attending to their needs, but it is not necessary to apologize and gain forgiveness for moral lapses, which is just as well, because it is not clear that it is possible for people to grant forgiveness on the part of those who have been morally hurt in that the fact cannot be erased, the hurt unwritten, even if the person hurt wants that to have happened.You can say that an offended person has restored a relationship to the status quo ante, but that may not happen whatever the desire to make amends. Wounds stay deep. All that can be done is abide with them, understand that things have changed and move forwards nonetheless. Old friends can be lost and lost lovers can only gradually fade away even if there was a moral commitment for the two to stay together. That is just the way it is and people are also reluctant to give their forgiveness for a moral lapse because it means to redefine a moral flaw or think the moral flaw of an opponent can be altered. What is the point of asking or gaining the forgiveness of Germany to the Jews? The atrocities were a fact and reparations and a more humane German nation is a way to go forward rather than a way for kissing and making up. We all carry with us the moral failures of each of us, anyone with any perspicacity able to remember the moral shortcomings in the way they dealt with parents and children and peers. Live with it and be better. Moral failure is mitigated slowly by events not by an agreement to forgive.
It is therefore remarkable that sometimes forgiveness can become an important political and historical point, just as happened when Desmond Tutu formulated and carried out the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa so as to allow the Black-white divided nation to deal with the transfer to Black rule. Tutu was motivated by the political need for the South African nation to bind together and also to his deeply religious conviction that forgiveness was an important part of moral life. It did the job, but I would suggest that the most important part of the exchange was recognition of atrocities done on both parts rather than emotionally moving past what had happened. The recognition was to acknowledge and bury the dead, as happens whenever there has been a war or other moral conflict that has come to an end. I do not think that abortionists will forgive their beliefs to pro-life people if Roe v. Wade is overturned. They will just accept that they will have to return to state laws, largely in the North and on the Pacific Coast, to retain those rights and accept that Southern states and plains states will be adamant in enforcing their own victory. It is also to be noticed that there is no recognition of moral failure on the part of Congresspeople and Senators about having sided with the insurrection of Jan. 6th. They are not like Grant allowing Lee to have his soldiers keep their horses so that they could go on with the spring planting. That is forward looking rather than forgiveness.The only way to deal with those Trump and insurrectionist sentiments is to defeat them at the next elections.
Life is unburdened if we give judgment a break. You don’t have to forgive people if you don’t ve to judge them. You may keep people who are murderers for a long time so as to keep then from reoffending without having to hate the person jailed and you can let a person who killed in a crime of passion because he or she is not likely to reoffend even if people believe that making a criminal suffer is recompense for the wrongs done. A more public real life situation offers itself. Rev. Al Sharpton was a prime bete noir of mine. As best I got the story, he had claimed that tawana Brawley had been racially and cruelly abused but when the story began to unravel, he and his colleagues had doubled down by accusing other people had done the deed and continued to obfuscate the matter by not coming clean about what they knew. Should I hold a grudge? Over the years, Sharpton seems to have become a good deal wiser. He advocates for those who really have been victimized, and says reasonable things about trying to eradicate wrongdoing and how to heal wounds between the races. As far as I know, he has never apologized for his earlier transgressions, just weathered them. My current view is to leave the matter past, neither a martyr or a martyrer, not a fatal flaw nor a life redeemed, just a person who moved on, which is all that the rest of us can do, making terms as we cn to what have inevitably been our own transgressions. Those are just part of life.