Imagine that a friend shares something you told them in confidence. Their apology matters, but you want to know whether they understand what they exposed and why you trusted them with it. Another conversation may be necessary. Yet imagine a different continuation: your friend acknowledges the harm, corrects what they can, and respects your distance, while every meeting becomes another occasion to demand a confession. The same request for remorse can belong to very different relationships. In one, it helps make an injury visible. In the other, forgiveness remains a prize offered from a position of permanent authority.

Martha Nussbaum calls this kind of conditional pardon transactional forgiveness. Her concern is that confession and repentance can become demands for abasement, allowing punishment to continue within the promise of forgiveness (Nussbaum, 2016).

The difficulty is that acknowledgment can also be an expression of respect. We may reasonably need someone to recognize what they did before we can imagine a different relationship. Understanding transactional forgiveness requires holding both possibilities in view, while distinguishing the conditions for forgiveness from the evidence we need for trust. Neither an apology nor an offer of pardon settles everything that follows.

What We Ask an Apology to Accomplish

An injury can leave us struggling over what happened as well as how it felt. When another person calls a betrayal a misunderstanding, we may be asked to carry the damage while also defending our account of it. An apology that identifies the wrong and accepts responsibility can answer this additional burden. Schumann’s review describes acknowledgment of responsibility and recognition of harm among the elements of a comprehensive apology (Schumann, 2018).

Confession, remorse, and repentance contribute different things to that response. Confession acknowledges what one has done. Remorse involves regret about the wrongdoing and the harm it caused. Repentance adds a turn toward different conduct. Philosophers disagree about which of these forgiveness requires, but the distinctions help explain why saying the expected words may leave the central problem untouched (Griswold, 2007; Pettigrove, 2012).

A person may acknowledge breaking a confidence while minimizing its importance. Another may express intense distress while avoiding responsibility for correcting a false account. Pettigrove distinguishes performing the speech act of apologizing from being apologetic: the latter can involve an understanding of the harm that becomes apparent through subsequent behavior. Someone who expects a serious betrayal to disappear immediately after an apology may still fail to appreciate its significance (Pettigrove, 2012).

Wanting acknowledgment, then, need not mean wanting another person brought low. It can mean wanting to stop being alone with a truth that the relationship must now accommodate. The moral question concerns what the acknowledgment recognizes and what the person requesting it hopes to make possible.

Nussbaum’s Critique of Transactional Forgiveness

In Chapter 3 of Anger and Forgiveness, Nussbaum examines a familiar sequence: wrongdoing, confrontation, confession, repentance, and the eventual lifting of resentment. She worries that this arrangement can give the injured person a disciplinary role. The wrongdoer must expose their failings and demonstrate sufficient contrition before receiving release. What appears generous at the end may have included considerable punishment along the way (Nussbaum, 2016).

Her concern is partly about status. An injury may leave us feeling diminished, and another person’s abasement can seem to restore the balance. But their humiliation does not return a lost confidence, restore damaged opportunities, or make a relationship dependable. It may instead create a new inequality in which the injured person occupies a superior position and the offender remains indebted. Nussbaum asks us to examine whether the wish for repair has become entangled with satisfaction in this reversal (Nussbaum, 2016).

She develops the argument through selected Jewish and Christian traditions of repentance and forgiveness. This is a philosophical genealogy, not a settled description of every religious practice. She recognizes competing strands within those traditions and explicitly warns against assuming that a concept can be understood or evaluated simply through its origins. Her historical discussion opens a question about the present: which features of a practice deserve our endorsement, and which may conceal control (Nussbaum, 2016)?

Her criticism is also broader than the claim that a good process occasionally becomes excessive. She questions the backward attention and hierarchy that a penitential transaction may encourage. That is a demanding position. It deserves to be heard alongside accounts in which looking back and acknowledging responsibility provide reasons for forgiving, rather than a means of extracting suffering.

When Unconditional Forgiveness Also Asserts Superiority

Removing explicit conditions does not resolve every problem Nussbaum identifies. Someone can announce unconditional forgiveness while remaining condescending, enjoying the position of the morally generous person above the morally deficient one. A forgiving gesture can even be offered in the hope that it will intensify the offender’s shame. In her account, the wish to dominate can survive the abandonment of a formal demand for repentance (Nussbaum, 2016).

Nussbaum therefore prefers a further possibility: love and generosity directed toward a constructive future, without first cultivating a wish for retaliation and then ceremonially waiving it. She distinguishes this orientation from simply releasing anger. Releasing anger may remove an obstacle, but it does not by itself specify what people will build afterward. Her argument asks what our response contributes to the future, as well as what it relinquishes from the past (Nussbaum, 2016).

Conditional Forgiveness and Moral Respect

There is a substantial counterargument. If a person has treated us as though our interests do not matter, asking them to recognize the wrong can affirm an equality that the injury denied. Such a request need not demand submission. It may ask the offender to meet us as a responsible person who can understand another person’s claim upon them.

Acknowledgment and Self-Respect

Pamela Hieronymi understands resentment as a way of saying that we should not have been treated this way. A past wrong can seem to leave that treatment unchallenged. An adequate apology answers the message by acknowledging that the act was wrong and should not define how we may be treated. We can then forgive while still judging that the offender was responsible and that we deserved better. Forgiveness does not require making the injury acceptable (Hieronymi, 2001).

This gives acknowledgment a different role from suffering as payment. The apology matters because of what the offender recognizes and repudiates. Hieronymi explicitly distinguishes an apology that is humbling from one understood as punishment or humiliation. Her analysis does not require us to treat resentment as a wish to harm; protest can seek recognition without seeking another person’s pain (Hieronymi, 2001).

Responsibilities on Both Sides

Charles Griswold develops a more extensive account of forgiveness at its best. The offender acknowledges responsibility, rejects the wrongdoing, expresses specific regret, commits to change through conduct, understands the injured person’s perspective, and offers an honest account of how the wrongdoing occurred. These conditions are intended to provide moral reasons for a changed relationship to the offender. They are not presented as a therapeutic program (Griswold, 2007).

Crucially, Griswold also places demands on the forgiver. Forgiving includes giving up revenge, working toward relinquishing resentment, and seeing the offender as more than the person who committed this wrong. It also involves abandoning a presumption of decisive moral superiority. He explicitly warns that claiming to forgive while using reminders of the offense to manipulate or humiliate can turn forgiveness into revenge. His account therefore already opposes an important part of the conduct Nussbaum criticizes (Griswold, 2007).

Recognizing shared humanity does not require equalizing responsibility. One person may have committed a serious wrong against another who bears no responsibility for it. The point is that justified moral judgment need not establish a permanent hierarchy of human worth. Griswold also discusses imperfect forms of forgiveness, allowing that actual cases may approximate his ideal rather than satisfy every condition completely (Griswold, 2007).

Nussbaum herself allows a constructive role for requesting an apology in Chapter 4. In discussing parents and adult children, she distinguishes abasement before parental anger from an apology that demonstrates understanding and reinforces attention to future conduct. Renewed trust may be reasonable when the adult child gives grounds for hope. She nevertheless separates this constructive response from the angry transaction she questions. Her qualification supports a careful distinction without resolving the larger philosophical disagreement (Nussbaum, 2016).

Forgiving Without Repentance

The disagreement among philosophers becomes especially important when the offender never apologizes. Pettigrove argues that forgiveness can be appropriate even when the wrongdoer remains unapologetic. He challenges the claim that such forgiveness must condone the wrong or betray the injured person’s self-respect. On his account, a person may relinquish hostile attitudes while continuing to oppose the wrongdoing and declining to resume a relationship (Pettigrove, 2012).

This differs from Griswold’s view of forgiveness at its best, in which the offender’s response helps make the process possible. The disagreement should remain visible. It concerns whether repentance is necessary for forgiveness, rather than simply whether repentance helps a damaged relationship. Nor does Pettigrove’s position mean that nothing further can be required: forgiving someone can coexist with expecting them to repair material damage (Griswold, 2007; Pettigrove, 2012).

These philosophers disagree about what forgiveness requires, but each leaves room to condemn a wrong without measuring its seriousness by how much the offender suffers. Hanna Pickard offers a related idea: we can hold someone responsible without treating them with hostility or contempt. Drawing on clinical work, she explains how accountability and respect can coexist. Her framework helps clarify the possibility; it does not show that this approach will resolve conflict between friends or partners (Pickard, 2017).

What Apology Research Can Tell Us

Psychological research contributes a narrower but valuable perspective. It can examine how people construct apologies and how others evaluate them. It cannot, by itself, settle the philosophical question of when forgiveness is deserved or morally appropriate.

Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin, and Robert Lount examined apology components in two experiments involving 333 U.S. online participants and 422 undergraduate business students. Participants evaluated components or statements within a hypothetical trust violation involving an accounting job applicant. Acknowledging responsibility and offering repair were among the more highly valued elements; asking for forgiveness was the least valued individual component in both studies. Other rankings varied with presentation and context (Lewicki et al., 2016).

These findings direct attention toward what an apology communicates about responsibility and repair. They do not establish sincerity or demonstrate restored trust: participants evaluated written material without a real history of betrayal or the speaker’s emotional tone. Fuller apologies were also longer, making some comparisons difficult to attribute solely to their components (Lewicki et al., 2016).

Karina Schumann’s experiments approach the question from the offender’s side. After reflecting on important personal values, participants wrote responses to someone they had hurt. Across two main studies involving U.S. online adults and community college students, those given an opportunity to affirm their values offered more comprehensive apologies and used fewer defensive strategies than control participants. These written responses concerned recalled, unresolved offenses; the studies did not establish lasting reform or directly test demands for humiliation (Schumann, 2014).

Fuller acknowledgment can therefore coexist with support for a person’s broader sense of worth. Schumann’s later review also describes low concern for the injured person and doubts about whether an apology will help as possible barriers to apologizing. Understanding threats to self-image does not excuse avoiding responsibility or explain every inadequate apology (Schumann, 2014; Schumann, 2018).

The social meaning of an apology matters as well. In retrospective surveys of U.S. and Chinese university students, Zhang and colleagues found that reported apologies were positively associated with forgiveness in both groups. The study cannot establish causation or represent either culture as a whole, but it cautions against treating one familiar apology ritual as a universal measure of moral seriousness (Zhang et al., 2019).

Together, the philosophical accounts and apology studies give us reasons to attend to what a person acknowledges and does over time. Emotional intensity may communicate real remorse, but it cannot settle whether responsibility has been accepted. These considerations can guide reflection, but they cannot reliably reveal another person’s sincerity.

When Accountability Becomes Humiliation

These accounts suggest a way of examining a request for remorse: consider its connection to the injury and the future it makes possible. This is an interpretive approach, rather than a psychological test for determining someone’s motives. Most relationships do not offer a clear view of another person’s intentions, and our own motives can be mixed.

Return to the broken confidence. Asking the friend to identify what they shared and stop repeating it addresses the harm. If the disclosure created a false impression, asking for a correction may also be appropriate. Requiring them to condemn their entire character before an audience adds something different. The correction gives others needed information; the declaration of worthlessness establishes the offender’s degraded position. Public acknowledgment can be warranted when the harm was public, so publicity alone cannot decide the matter.

The offender’s discomfort is not sufficient evidence of humiliation. A truthful account may be painful because it confronts conduct the person would rather forget. Responsibility may entail restitution or consequences that they strongly dislike. Calling every uncomfortable request shaming would give the wrongdoer another way to avoid listening. Hieronymi’s distinction between humbling acknowledgment and humiliation leaves room for difficult moral recognition (Hieronymi, 2001).

Remorse Does Not Require Self-Condemnation

Remorse directs attention toward wrongdoing and the person harmed. It need not require a judgment that the wrongdoer is worthless. Tangney and colleagues’ review describes a related distinction between guilt focused on a particular behavior and shame focused on a negative evaluation of the whole self. Their review connects these different emphases with tendencies toward repair, withdrawal, and defensiveness, while recognizing that moral emotions are complex (Tangney et al., 2007).

Shame does not always lead people to hide or give up. Leach and Cidam brought together findings from 90 samples involving 12,364 participants. Shame was linked with more constructive responses when people had greater prospects of addressing a failure, and with less constructive responses when the failure was harder to repair. The possibility of doing something useful matters. This does not show that deliberately shaming someone helps, and the research did not directly test conditional forgiveness (Leach & Cidam, 2015).

Research on humility offers another useful qualification. Across two self-report studies, Onody and colleagues found that humility was associated with less defensiveness and greater self-forgiveness following interpersonal wrongdoing. The cross-sectional findings cannot establish that humility caused these responses, and they do not compare humility with imposed humiliation. They nevertheless give us grounds to distinguish a realistic acknowledgment of one’s limitations from a demand for self-abasement (Onody et al., 2020).

An emotion and a way of treating someone are also different things. A person can feel ashamed during an honest, respectful conversation. Another can be subjected to degrading demands without visibly expressing shame. We therefore need to examine what is being asked and how the person is treated, rather than deciding the matter from their distress alone.

Whether Repair Is Allowed to Count

Another revealing question concerns whether responsible change can alter the offender’s standing. A person may reasonably need time to assess whether a commitment is credible. But an arrangement in which every acknowledgment becomes evidence of further hidden guilt, and every change produces another unrelated demand, offers little room for responsibility to accomplish anything. The promise of forgiveness can maintain indebtedness when the offense becomes a permanent definition of the person (Nussbaum, 2016; Griswold, 2007).

John Braithwaite’s Crime, Shame and Reintegration provides a related distinction. His theory contrasts stigmatization, which casts the offender out and fixes a deviant identity, with disapproval that preserves bonds of respect and provides for reintegration. Developed as a criminological account, it does not establish how personal forgiveness should proceed. Applied cautiously, it helps us ask whether condemnation addresses conduct while leaving room for the person’s future, or continually renews their degraded status (Braithwaite, 1989).

In the friendship example, repair might involve correcting a false impression, protecting other confidences, and respecting the injured person’s decision about contact. Those actions can matter without restoring the friendship. Recognizing them does not mean erasing the disclosure, declaring the loss fully repaired, or owing forgiveness. Some injuries cannot be undone; acknowledgment and efforts to prevent further harm can remain meaningful in their aftermath.

An apology also does not purchase pardon. Pettigrove’s account allows forgiveness to coexist with expectations of restitution, while Griswold rejects an offender’s unilateral claim to being forgiven. A further ethical implication follows: responsibility for correcting what can be corrected continues even when forgiveness is withheld. Otherwise, the offer of repair becomes another bargain in which the injured person must provide emotional release before the offender will act (Pettigrove, 2012; Griswold, 2007).

The injured person’s continuing pain is equally insufficient evidence of punishment. Further conversations may reveal consequences that an earlier apology missed. Remembering a betrayal, grieving it, or remaining unable to forgive does not establish a wish to dominate. Griswold recognizes that forgiveness unfolds over time and that sorrow can remain after it. Deliberately using an injury to subordinate someone differs from still living with its effects (Griswold, 2007).

This distinction therefore concerns the content and use of a demand, the relationship’s power differences, and respect for both people’s agency. It cannot be reduced to a deadline for recovery or a prescribed display that proves the offender has suffered enough. A possibility of moral change need not include renewed access to the person who was harmed.

Forgiveness, Trust, and Reconciliation

Trust involves a further question about the future. Hieronymi distinguishes accepting an apology as sincere from trusting that the person will never repeat the offense. Griswold likewise recognizes that forgiveness need not restore friendship or a former intimate relationship. We may believe someone regrets a betrayal and still decide that closeness would ask more of us than we can reasonably give (Hieronymi, 2001; Griswold, 2007).

These distinctions also protect against a second kind of coercion: pressure on the injured person to forgive. Pettigrove distinguishes judging forgiveness admirable from being entitled to urge it upon someone else. He emphasizes motives, social support, and the dangers of using forgiveness to silence people facing injustice. In an abusive situation, attending to protection and the possibility of leaving may take priority over the question of forgiving (Pettigrove, 2012).

An offender therefore cannot turn a critique of humiliation into a demand that the injured person become generous on schedule. Safety and personal boundaries remain legitimate concerns, as does continuing opposition to harmful conduct. Responsibility includes accepting that an apology may not produce forgiveness and that forgiveness, if offered, may not restore access. Even Griswold’s conditional account rejects the idea that an offender can declare themselves forgiven simply by completing the required steps (Griswold, 2007).

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

The friend who broke a confidence may need to hear what the disclosure changed. The person who was hurt may need more than an apology, or may decide that the friendship cannot return to what it was. A respectful response leaves room for those possibilities. It does not require either person to pretend that the right words have finished the work.

There is dignity in acknowledging that we have done wrong. There is also dignity in refusing to let another person’s wrongdoing determine our worth or dictate our future. Forgiveness becomes difficult when these recognitions are replaced by a contest over who may judge and who must remain ashamed.

Perhaps the more useful question is what our next response will ask of the people involved. A correction can acknowledge an injury. A boundary can protect something still vulnerable. An apology can begin a change that its recipient is free to assess. None requires a promise that closeness will return. The possibility worth preserving is a future in which responsibility has meaning and no one’s humiliation must serve as proof that justice has been done.

Associated Concepts

• Transition-Anger: Outrage directed toward correcting or preventing wrongdoing without seeking suffering as payback; a companion to Nussbaum’s account of forgiveness.
• Social Emotions: Emotions shaped by social relationships and evaluations, including shame and guilt, that can influence acknowledgment and repair.
• Emotional Safety: Conditions that allow honest expression without humiliation or retaliation, including during difficult conversations about harm.
• Self-Forgiveness: Working through one’s own wrongdoing while accepting responsibility and leaving room for repair and renewed self-respect.
• Self-Kindness: Responding to personal suffering or failure with understanding while remaining able to face what needs correction.
• Self-Trust: Willingness to rely on one’s judgment and conduct while staying open to evidence and accepting responsibility for mistakes.

References

Braithwaite, John (1989). Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521356688.
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Griswold, Charles L. (2007). Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521878821.
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Hieronymi, Pamela (2001). Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62(3), 529–555. DOI: 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00073.x.
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Leach, Colin Wayne; Cidam, Atilla (2015). When Is Shame Linked to Constructive Approach Orientation? A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(6), 983–1002. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000037.
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Lewicki, Roy J.; Polin, Beth; Lount, Robert B., Jr. (2016). An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 9(2), 177–196. DOI: 10.1111/ncmr.12073.
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Nussbaum, Martha C. (2016). Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199335879.
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Onody, Alison P.; Woodyatt, Lydia; Wenzel, Michael; Cibich, Mikaela; Sheldon, Amanda; Cornish, Marilyn A. (2020). Humility and Its Relationship to Self-Condemnation, Defensiveness and Self-Forgiveness Following Interpersonal Transgressions. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 48(2), 118–130. DOI: 10.1177/0091647120911111.
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Pettigrove, Glen (2012). Forgiveness and Love. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199646555.
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Pickard, Hanna (2017). Responsibility Without Blame for Addiction. Neuroethics, 10(1), 169–180. DOI: 10.1007/s12152-016-9295-2.
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Schumann, Karina (2014). An Affirmed Self and a Better Apology: The Effect of Self-Affirmation on Transgressors’ Responses to Victims. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 89–96. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2014.04.013.
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Schumann, Karina (2018). The Psychology of Offering an Apology: Understanding the Barriers to Apologizing and How to Overcome Them. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(2), 74–78. DOI: 10.1177/0963721417741709.
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Tangney, June Price; Stuewig, Jeff; Mashek, Debra J. (2007). Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 345–372. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070145.
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Zhang, Qin; Oetzel, John G.; Ting-Toomey, Stella; Zhang, Jibiao (2019). Making Up or Getting Even? The Effects of Face Concerns, Self-Construal, and Apology on Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Revenge in the United States and China. Communication Research, 46(4), 503–524. DOI: 10.1177/0093650215607959.
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