The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at Drkenner.com and Amazon.com.

Thank you all for coming. And I think there's been a serious misunderstanding. I want you all to know that everything that you have seen in my theater is an illusion. It's a trick. It's not real. I can't bring loved ones back from the grave. I can't receive messages from the other side. I apologize if I've given you any false hope. My intention has only been to entertain, nothing more.

And can you imagine hearing that said by some of these scam artists? There are so many of them out there. In this case, this is from the movie The Illusionist. If you haven't seen it, I will say nothing else about it. See it, enjoy it, have fun with it. It is a passionate movie. It is a wonderful, wonderful movie. And with me to discuss forgiveness and apologies is Dr. Tara Smith, a specialist in ethics and a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she currently holds the Anthem Foundation Fellowship. She is also the author of Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics. Now get this, the subtitle is The Virtuous Egoist. Imagine loving your own life and having it be moral and virtuous. Welcome to the show, Tara.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

And you know, people will say, I get many cases where people will come in and a wife or a husband has cheated on one another, and they say, "You know, but it's my husband's duty to forgive me. He should have mercy on me," or, "It's my wife's duty to forgive me. I had a few affairs, but she should be able to just turn the other cheek and go light on me. And she doesn’t. She's real angry with me." Can you talk about forgiveness?

Yeah, yeah. I think that is a very prevalent attitude—that we all owe one another forgiveness, whatever the misdeeds or wrongs that may have been committed. And I think it's a completely unfounded, misguided, destructive idea. Forgiveness can be appropriate in some cases, but it's got to be earned. That is, I mean, the basic scenario in which the possibility of forgiveness even arises is one in which one person has, in some way, shape, or form, wronged another. It could be something as serious as the grave marital infidelity example that you raise. It could be breaking a confidence, and depending on what that confidence was about, that could be a more or less serious thing. There are all sorts of ways, minor or major, in which one person can wrong another or transgress. When one is the victim of this, you face a choice of how should I view this person?

Exactly.

How should I understand—

I've had people say to me, "How do I judge my wife's character? How do I judge my husband's character now that he's cheated on me?" They get confused.

Well, what you've got to do is look at all of the evidence: the person's previous track record, how serious this offense was, what the person's own attitude toward the offense is. You know, is it a kind of casual, "Oh, what are you so upset about, honey?" or, "Yeah, I'm sorry. Come on, I told you I'm sorry," expressed in just a cheap or hollow way. Alternatively, it's clear to you—and this is the kind of thing that can usually only be made clear over some period of time—that the person himself truly, sincerely regrets what he did to you, that he doesn’t want to be the kind of person who did that thing, or could do such a thing. He is taking steps to try to strengthen himself so that he won't do it again, to repair his character. There will be objective evidence about this person's character, and that is what you're assessing when you're choosing whether or not to forgive a person. To forgive a person is to reach a certain kind of judgment about that person, a certain sort of moral conclusion. It's in effect to say, "While what he did here was wrong, I'm not going to write him off completely on the basis of that," or, "I'm not going to take that misdeed as a sign of an irredeemably bad character." But if that's what the judgment of forgiving another person is, then you have to have good reason to not write him off on that basis. To think, "Yes, this was a terrible thing he did, but—" and there's got to be a follow-up to that "but": "But he's also done A, B, C, D, and E, and he's trying to make it up to me." And I have these reasons to think—

Let's say, in the case of an affair, he's trying very hard to make it up, and let's say we give him 100%, a gold star for his effort. He does everything right, and the wife still sits there and says—

Hey, I gotta interrupt this because we’ve got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that’s it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where’s that ad I saw? Ah, here it is—The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it at Amazon.com. Hmm, The Selfish Path to Romance, that is interesting.

And the wife still sits there and says, "I went through, I don’t know, months or years of hell, and the damage and the scars are so deep that even if he's repaired his character, I never want to see his face again." Assuming they don’t have kids, is that legitimate? Even if the person has gone on and made themselves a decent person again, is it legitimate that you have been so personally wounded by that person that you don’t want to connect with them anymore?

I think that’s a very interesting question, and I think we have to distinguish between two things, two different aspects of the woman’s response to the husband in this case. One is whether or not she forgives him; the other is whether or not she continues to have a relationship with him. Forgiveness, as I was saying a few minutes ago, is a kind of judgment that you make of another person; it's an assessment of his character. And if, as you said, this guy has truly earned the gold star, he has distanced himself from that sort of action, etc., then he has earned your forgiveness in the sense that—

Your evaluation has to be truthful to what all the evidence is, and if he truly is a good guy who regrets this terrible transgression, you have to honestly forgive him. However, that doesn’t entail that you have to get back into bed with him.

So you don’t have to love this person. The damage may not be up to speed with your conscious evaluation, and he did do real damage to you. Why wouldn’t that be integrated?

That kind of breach of great marital fidelity is typically searing to the victim, and it is natural that her emotions may not yet have caught up—and they may never catch up. You don’t owe it to a person to have an ongoing relationship with them. You owe it to yourself to be honest and evaluate. She would be—

Go ahead.

She would be accurate in saying, "I can see that he's changed his character, but he is the individual who damaged me in the past, and I choose, because of the harm he did me in the past—even if he's changed and I recognize that fact fully—that I don’t like him. I never want contact with him."

Well, I also think that would probably be one possibility. I would see it slightly differently in this way: a person might think, "Yes, he has reformed that bad part of himself, and he is basically a good guy," but simply, it’s too painful for me. The memories of the affair still flood back whenever I'm with him. So it’s not even that I don’t like him; it’s just that I do like him, but the emotions are still alive, and I don’t have any obligation to put myself through that if that’s what maintaining the relationship would entail.

Very good point. Very, very good point. So forgiveness is not taking an eraser, like in the Judeo-Christian ethics, and erasing their past the way we would erase a traffic violation off a record. It has to be earned by an accurate evaluation of a person’s character, by rational standards.

Exactly, and sometimes it will be earned, in which case you do owe it to the person to forgive him, and sometimes it won’t be earned. I think forgiveness itself is not a virtue; it’s not an unconditional good. The propriety of forgiving somebody really depends on the evidence about what that person is doing to reform themselves and their attitude toward the transgression.

It's always being reality-based. I'm with Dr. Tara Smith, who is the author of Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. Thank you so much for joining us, Tara.

Thank you.

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