The best post I read this week was written by Julian Baggini of Talking philosophy. The post was about a program on British radio, which focused on the story of a mother who had forgiven her husband and taking him back after he had abused their daughter because the child told her that she didn’t want her dad to go away. Baggini takes on the story takes it away from the sensational to focus on the essential moral and philosophical, the most important of which is my opinion whether is moral not only to forgive pedophiles, but also to make them a part of one’s life:
But several years later, and after treatment, he’s back in the family house, and apparently everybody is happy.
But still, this seemed warped. Why?
Well, first of all I wonder why the mother still wanted to live as man and wife with a man who had sexually touched her daughter. That’s odd enough.
Then I was worried about the totally future-looking consequentialist nature of the couple’s thinking. It was as though what had happened in the past was in a sense irrelevant: all that mattered was putting things right in the future.
But this seems odd to me, and it perhaps reflects some unease I have over exclusively consequence-based thinking. The fact is that what happened cannot be just erased or cancelled out by fixing the future. We can’t just be amnesiacs about past wrong doings, can we? The world changed when the father touched his daughter, and it seems naive to think it could put back together again in something like its previous form.
Also, perhaps it is true that in this case it all worked out. But what a risk, surely? We have to act on what we can rationally expect is likely to happen, not on what is logically possible. Sure, I can imagine that this story is how they told it, but the mother was perhaps still foolish to hope it would turn out like this. (An extreme example of moral luck, perhaps.) Indeed, it worked out after the father was taken away, imprisoned and so on. What she had actually wanted was for him not to go away at all. So maybe it worked out despite the mother’s extremely forgiving attitude, not because of it.
Honestly, it is difficult for me to look at this issue any other way than emotionally even though I admit that it may not be the best way to look at it. Still, I wonder whether it is possible to make the kind of decision make by the mother in this case without putting some blinders on. What bothers me most of all in this case is the fact that she asked her child who had been abused what she wanted to have happened thus putting on her the burden to make a decision that she wasn't equipped to make and that would have changed their lives. There are no easy answers, but the issue is whether even the most outrageous and painful acts forgivable once the people who can forgive forgive and chose to patch up their lives.
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