Abstract This article explores the concept of ethical unforgiveness as a legitimate and morally serious stance, drawing on my theorization of unforgiveness as a form of principled dissent. In conversation with Vladimir Jankélévitch’s nuanced reflections in Le pardon, I clarify the ethical boundaries of forgiveness and argue for the necessity of an alternative moral language when forgiveness becomes complicit with injustice. By juxtaposing the fragility and grace of Jankélévitch’s conditional forgiveness with my concept of ethical unforgiveness, I offer a framework for understanding refusal not as retaliation or ressentiment but as fidelity to memory, justice and the ethical weight of the irreparable. I propose a counter-genealogy of forgiveness rooted in a critical ethics of resistance, dignity, and truth-telling. The expanded analysis situates unforgiveness not as an anomaly, but as a coherent moral practice with philosophical depth and political relevance.
Introduction
In dominant moral discourses—whether in transitional justice frameworks, clinical psychology, theology, or political reconciliation efforts—forgiveness is often elevated to the status of a normative ideal. It is framed as the hallmark of emotional maturity, a sign of moral transcendence, and an essential step toward healing and social repair. From Desmond Tutu’s (1999) vision of national forgiveness in No Future Without Forgiveness to countless therapeutic models that treat forgiveness as a clinical outcome, the imperative to forgive has permeated not only personal relationships but also collective processes of recovery. Within this prevailing ethical imagination, those who withhold forgiveness may be seen as emotionally stuck, spiritually immature, or morally deficient.
In this article, I want to challenge that paradigm. I propose and defend a concept I have previously articulated as ethical unforgiveness—a principled, reasoned, and non-retributive refusal to forgive when forgiveness would entail complicity in injustice or erasure of historical harm. Ethical unforgiveness is not a failure of virtue, but rather an alternative mode of moral clarity. It insists on the right to remain unreconciled, primarily when the pressures to forgive serve to neutralize suffering or uphold unjust power dynamics.
In advancing this argument, I situate my position in sustained dialogue with the work of Vladimir Jankélévitch, whose seminal text, Le pardon (1967), offers one of the most philosophically nuanced accounts of forgiveness in the twentieth century. Jankélévitch defends forgiveness as a fragile, generous act—but one that must not be extended to unrepentant perpetrators or in response to radical evil. In the wake of the Holocaust, he cautions against “the premature pacification of memory,” warning that forgiveness, when improperly granted, can function as a betrayal of the dead (Jankélévitch, 1967/2005). While I share his conviction that specific harms rupture the ethical ground on which forgiveness can stand, I depart from his framework by affirming the moral value of refusal itself—not as tragic necessity, but as ethical resistance.
Ethical unforgiveness, as I will argue, is not merely a reaction to unforgivable acts. It is a conscious withholding rooted in memory, justice, and fidelity to those who have suffered irreparably. It resists being pathologized, privatized, or instrumentalized. Drawing on my previous work on Unforgiveness (Lozano, 2018), as well as broader philosophical engagements with trauma, affect, and justice, I explore how the refusal to forgive can be theorized as a meaningful and necessary stance—particularly in contexts where the imperative to forgive serves hegemonic ends.
This article proceeds in four parts. First, I examine Jankélévitch’s theory of forgiveness, attending to his emphasis on grace, remorse, and moral gravity. Second, I elaborate on my theory of ethical unforgiveness, situating it within a framework of critical moral dissent. Third, I examine the roles of memory, irreparability, and narrative refusal in both positions, highlighting how remembrance operates differently in forgiveness and its withholding. Finally, I offer a counter-genealogy of forgiveness that challenges its universalization and proposes unforgiveness as an ethical and political stance in its own right.
Throughout, my goal is not to reject forgiveness per se but to reframe the moral landscape in which it operates. Ethical unforgiveness is not the negation of ethics but its reconfiguration. It is an act of fidelity—fidelity to memory, to the unspeakable nature of some harms, and to the autonomy of survivors who refuse to be reconciled for the sake of others’ comfort.
I. Jankélévitch and the Moral Fragility of Forgiveness
Vladimir Jankélévitch’s reflections on forgiveness in Le pardon (1967/2005) present a vision of forgiveness that is deeply attuned to the ethical stakes of memory, remorse, and irreparability. He regards forgiveness as a fragile miracle, a gratuitous act that can never be demanded and never fully justified by logic. “Forgiveness,” he writes, “is a miracle of the moral order; it occurs where it should not be able to occur” (p. 18). For Jankélévitch, forgiveness is not something one can expect or calculate—it interrupts the regular order of ethics as a gratuitous gesture that goes beyond justice. However, this act is never morally neutral. Its power lies precisely in its rarity, in the grace it extends to the other who has erred but who also seeks to make amends.
Crucially, Jankélévitch insists that forgiveness must be conditioned by repentance. Without a sincere acknowledgment of wrongdoing, forgiveness not only loses its meaning but becomes an offence against justice. “We can forgive a repentant person,” he states plainly, “but we cannot forgive an unrepentant monster” (Jankélévitch, 1967/2005, p. 22). This position finds its most poignant articulation in his reflections on the Holocaust, a trauma that, for him, rendered forgiveness not just difficult but ethically inadmissible. Forgiving the Nazis, in his view, would be tantamount to forgetting the unthinkable. “There are crimes so grave that they silence even the possibility of forgiveness,” he writes, “because to forgive them would be to betray the dead” (p. 28).
In this sense, Jankélévitch does not offer a universal ethic of forgiveness. Instead, he presents forgiveness as a contingent, morally charged possibility—noble when sincere but perverse when misapplied. He preserves the sacredness of forgiveness by limiting its scope, insisting that it must not be reduced to political ritual or moral duty. He is particularly wary of institutionalized forgiveness, which he sees as undermining the personal, affective, and moral work that authentic pardon requires. “Forgiveness cannot be legislated,” he warns, “nor can it be collectivized; it can only be whispered by the heart of a single person” (p. 30).
My theory of ethical unforgiveness shares with Jankélévitch this deep concern for the ethical gravity of forgiveness. I agree that forgiveness loses its moral force when it is imposed as an obligation or reduced to a mere procedural reconciliation. Like him, I reject the commodification of forgiveness that occurs when it is instrumentalized to achieve closure or social harmony at the cost of truth. However, I part ways with Jankélévitch in his treatment of unforgiveness as merely the limit of forgiveness—a sorrowful acknowledgment that forgiveness is sometimes impossible but not something to be affirmed in its own right.
Where Jankélévitch maintains a tragic tone regarding the limits of forgiveness, I argue that the refusal to forgive can itself be a form of ethical action—a stance grounded not in bitterness or vengeance but in justice, memory, and political resistance. Ethical unforgiveness is not simply a passive impossibility; it is an active decision to refuse reconciliation when reconciliation would betray the integrity of the self or the memory of others. In this sense, I reposition unforgiveness from the margin of ethical discourse to its center, offering it as a coherent, deliberate, and, at times, necessary moral act.
This divergence is crucial. Jankélévitch mourns the impossibility of forgiving the Nazis; I argue that such impossibility should be celebrated as an expression of moral clarity. To forgive in such contexts would not be noble but complicit. My concern is that by portraying unforgiveness solely as a tragic necessity, we risk denying survivors their moral agency. We risk overlooking the ethical depth of those who say no—not because they are incapable of forgiving, but because they recognize that to forgive would be to lie.
Ethical unforgiveness, therefore, builds on Jankélévitch’s insight that not all can or should be forgiven, but it advances this position by giving ethical form to the refusal itself. It insists that such refusal is not a failure to transcend but a fidelity to what must never be transcended. Forgiveness, in this light, is not the highest ethical response—it is one possible response among others and not always the most just.
II. Ethical Unforgiveness: A Counter-Concept
My concept of ethical unforgiveness arises from a sustained engagement with the philosophical, political, and psychological consequences of forgiveness as it has been canonized in dominant moral discourse. Forgiveness is often treated as a telos—as the endpoint of healing, the highest moral gesture one can offer after harm, and a universal imperative that transcends time, context, and power. However, this framing erases the conditions under which forgiveness is demanded, often from survivors of profound violence. It conceals the asymmetries of power that structure expectations of pardon and place the moral burden on those already injured. Against this backdrop, I have argued for a theory of ethical unforgiveness: a refusal not rooted in anger but in a clear-eyed recognition that forgiveness, when rendered obligatory, loses its ethical meaning.
Ethical unforgiveness is not retribution. It is not the mirror image of vengeance or a failure to regulate resentment. Instead, it is a principled withholding grounded in the recognition that some harms—especially those rooted in structural injustice, historical oppression, and systemic violence—should not be closed with pardon. It is a stance that protects the moral autonomy of the survivor and challenges the narrative closure that reconciliation so often seeks to impose.
In my earlier work, I defined ethical unforgiveness as “a non-retributive moral stance for direct and indirect survivors to respond to harm and wrongdoing when forgiveness is not an alternative for them” (Lozano, 2022a, p. 6). This refusal is intentional. It emerges not from the absence of compassion but from the presence of moral clarity. It resists being pathologized by psychological models that treat forgiveness as necessary for well-being, and it disrupts political models that demand forgiveness in the service of national healing or transitional legitimacy.
Here, Jankélévitch’s reflections prove generative, even if they stop short of fully affirming the position I advocate. His insistence that forgiveness must be conditional—based on sincere repentance and moral transformation—offers a partial bulwark against the uncritical universalization of forgiveness. He draws a sharp ethical line around what he calls le pardon, a line that some harms must never cross. “There are crimes,” he writes, “that put the moral world itself into question. To forgive them would not be generosity, but treason” (Jankélévitch, 1967/2005, p. 28).
However, Jankélévitch frames this limit in a tragic register. He laments the fact that forgiveness must be withheld in some cases. He regards this withholding as a moral necessity, yes—but not as a value in itself. Forgiveness remains the ideal, the telos, even if it is not always possible. The inability to forgive radical evil, for Jankélévitch, is the failure of the moral order to hold. However, in this stance I disagree. My work reframes this so-called failure as a strength. Ethical unforgiveness is not a lament; it is a stance. It does not grieve its inability to forgive; it affirms its refusal as morally justified and politically necessary. This refusal becomes even more urgent in contexts where forgiveness is weaponized—used to legitimize oppressive institutions, erase histories of violence, or coerce reconciliation in the name of peace.
Forgiveness, in such contexts, becomes a tool of closure. Ethical unforgiveness intervenes precisely to interrupt that closure. It leaves the wound open not out of cruelty but out of fidelity to its gravity. It refuses to heal when healing is prescribed as forgetting. It refuses moral repair when repair is used to deny the depth of destruction.
Where Jankélévitch limits forgiveness in the name of gravity, I limit it in the name of resistance. I understand the withholding of forgiveness as a political gesture, one that affirms the survivor’s agency in refusing to normalize what cannot be normalized. Ethical unforgiveness functions not only as a personal boundary but also as a public statement: that some acts destroy the moral world so thoroughly that to forgive them would be to consent to their terms.
This position does not preclude compassion, care, or future-oriented responsibility. However, it resists the subsumption of these virtues into a single narrative of pardon. In resisting that narrative, ethical unforgiveness proposes a counter-ethics—one that dignifies refusal and insists that silence, withholding, and even rupture can be ethical responses to harm.
III. Memory, Irreparability, and the Ethics of Refusal
If forgiveness is, as Jankélévitch (1967/2005) claims, a miracle that cannot be forced or summoned, then memory is its moral counterweight—a reminder of what forgiveness must never efface. He writes, “To forgive everything is to remember nothing” (p. 35), cautioning against the kind of pardon that functions as erasure. For him, remembrance serves as a guardrail, preventing forgiveness from devolving into moral amnesia. In the shadow of historical atrocities like the Holocaust, he insists that the ethical obligation to remember exceeds any imperative to reconcile.
My position builds upon this insight yet reorients its ethical force. I understand memory not only as a barrier to inappropriate forgiveness but also as the very ground of ethical unforgiveness. It is not just that we must remember what happened; we must also refuse to grant pardon when such a gesture would falsify the meaning of that memory. Ethical unforgiveness is, at its core, an ethic of remembrance—a refusal to allow suffering to be folded too neatly into a redemptive arc.
In many transitional justice contexts, memory is publicly acknowledged but then quickly subordinated to the project of national healing. Victims are encouraged to share their stories, but only as a prelude to reconciliation. Their pain is instrumentalized—rendered legible for closure, unity, or future peace. In this moral economy, forgiveness becomes the price of recognition. However, recognition that requires forgiveness is not recognition at all; it is conditional legitimation. Ethical unforgiveness insists that memory be allowed to persist in its fullness without being sacrificed on the altar of collective comfort.
Jankélévitch gestures toward this danger but stops short of endorsing the ethical value of refusal. He is wary of institutionalizing forgiveness, but he still holds out hope for its moral beauty. I, on the other hand, argue that the insistence on moral beauty can become ethically perverse when it compels survivors to suppress their anger to offer pardon for the sake of appearing virtuous. In Unforgiveness (Lozano, 2018), I refer to this as the “dorsal wound” of moral coercion—a wound reopened each time forgiveness is demanded as a sign of moral health.
To forgive in such contexts is not merely generous; it may be violent. It may require the survivor to deny the gravity of their experience in order to satisfy a communal fantasy of healing. Ethical unforgiveness resists this. It protects the wound not to keep it festering but because the wound bears witness to something that must not be smoothed over. It insists that some memories—especially those that implicate systems of power—are ethically irreconcilable.
The concept of irreparability is central to this discussion. Jankélévitch acknowledges that some harms are so grave they tear at the very fabric of the moral world. He calls these acts impardonnables—unforgivable not because we are too weak to forgive but because the crimes themselves rupture the logic that makes forgiveness intelligible. “There are evils so total,” he writes, “that they elude all reconciliation, all moral economy” (Jankélévitch, 1967/2005, p. 41). However, even as he affirms this rupture, he mourns it.
I propose that we do not need to mourn irreparability. Instead, we must confront it directly. Ethical unforgiveness is one way of doing so. It is a mode of fidelity—to those who suffered, to the structural conditions that enabled their suffering, and to the limits of what can be ethically repaired. It recognizes that specific histories cannot be folded back into the present through narrative integration. Instead, they remain out of joint—what Derrida (1994) might call hauntological—insisting on their unresolved presence.
Forgiveness, in many ethical frameworks, seeks to restore a moral balance. Ethical unforgiveness resists this drive. It argues that, in some cases, the imbalance must remain. To insist on balance is to risk denying the singularity of what occurred. The asymmetry of suffering cannot be undone, and to pretend otherwise is not only false but dangerous. Ethical unforgiveness affirms this asymmetry. It allows memory to retain its jagged edge. It affirms the ethical value of rupture, refusing to let healing become another name for forgetting.
IV. Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Forgiveness
The final task of this article is to offer a counter-genealogy of forgiveness. This account challenges the moral, theological, and political assumptions that have elevated forgiveness into a universal virtue. A genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense, reveals not the origin of a concept in purity but its sedimentation within relations of power. Forgiveness, as it is commonly invoked today, has a history. It is not simply an ethical good; it is a moral technology—a dispositif—that has been mobilized to resolve conflicts, stabilize institutions, and manage the emotional labour of survivors. My aim is not to deny the value of forgiveness in every case but to interrogate the way it has become hegemonic: assumed, expected, and required.
Jankélévitch gestures toward this problem when he writes, “Forgiveness must remain exceptional; it must not be transformed into an institution or an ideology” (1967/2005, p. 44). He worries that forgiveness, once codified, risks becoming performative and hollow. While he frames this concern as a caution, I take it as a call to action. The institutionalization of forgiveness—from truth commissions to carceral reform to public apologies—demands a philosophical response that can account for the survivor’s right to refuse. This is where ethical unforgiveness intervenes.
A counter-genealogy begins by asking: Who does forgiveness serve? In whose interest is reconciliation invoked? What harms are obscured when survivors are compelled to move on? When forgiveness becomes normative, it often silences those who cannot or will not forgive—not because they are vengeful, but because they understand that some acts rupture the very grounds of moral repair. These survivors are often treated as pathological, unwell, or “not ready” to forgive rather than as ethical subjects making difficult but coherent choices. Ethical unforgiveness challenges this narrative. It affirms that refusal can be just as moral as reconciliation, and often more so.
In Unforgiveness (Lozano, 2018), I argue that forgiveness has been co-opted by dominant discourses that conflate healing with pardon. Survivors are encouraged—or coerced—to forgive not for their own sake but for the sake of social order. This is particularly evident in postcolonial and transitional justice contexts, where victims of state violence are expected to endorse reconciliation projects that often fail to deliver structural change. In such contexts, forgiveness becomes a tool of governance, a means of pacification rather than transformation.
Ethical unforgiveness resists this. It refuses to allow forgiveness to be universalized, instrumentalized, or fetishized. Instead, it demands an ethics of refusal—ethics that does not center the redemptive arc but instead honours the fracture, the discontinuity, and the unresolved. It is in this spirit that I advance a counter-genealogy of forgiveness: one that includes silence, interruption, and withdrawal as meaningful responses to harm.
Jankélévitch’s thought provides a crucial bridge here. While he does not develop a full-fledged alternative to the forgiveness imperative, he preserves the sacredness of forgiveness precisely by withholding it in the face of atrocity. He recognizes that the power of forgiveness lies in its rarity, its extraordinariness. “The one who forgives forgives because they can; but they must also not forgive when to do so would betray justice” (Jankélévitch, 1967/2005, p. 45). This tension—between gift and gravity—is where my concept of ethical unforgiveness finds its strongest resonance with his.
However, I take one step further. I suggest that refusal can be more than a last resort; it can be a moral orientation in its own right. Ethical unforgiveness does not mourn the impossibility of pardon—it affirms it. It reclaims the power of saying no. In doing so, it opens up a space for what I call critical fidelity: a mode of being with the wound, not in endless suffering, but in active refusal to allow the harm to be morally neutralized.
This is what distinguishes ethical unforgiveness from nihilism or resentment. It is not the inability to forgive but the decision not to. It is not a wound that festers but one that speaks. It testifies to the irreparable, and in doing so, it refuses to let the world forget. That refusal is not the end of ethics—it is its beginning.
Conclusion
To withhold forgiveness is often construed as a failure—of moral courage, of emotional maturity, of spiritual generosity. However, as I have argued throughout this article, ethical unforgiveness must be reclaimed as a coherent and principled moral stance. It is a refusal that honours the depth of harm, the irreparability of loss, and the dignity of survivors who choose not to participate in a moral economy that rewards forgetting. In dialogue with Vladimir Jankélévitch’s ethically profound and philosophically rich reflections in Le pardon (1967/2005), I have sought to both affirm and extend the space he opens up for refusal.
Jankélévitch taught us that forgiveness is neither automatic nor infinite. He reminded us that forgiveness must be rare to preserve its moral weight and that some crimes rupture the very fabric of the ethical world. However, while he approaches these ruptures with reverent sorrow, I argue that we must also approach them with ethical defiance. Refusal, in the form of ethical unforgiveness, is not the abandonment of ethics—it is its intensification. It is a way of saying that some wounds are too deep to close, some memories too vital to release, some harms too grave to neutralize through pardon.
This stance is not about seeking revenge nor about harbouring resentment. It is about fidelity—to memory, to justice, and to the survivors who refuse to be morally managed by the very systems that harmed them. It is about resisting the pressure to reconcile when reconciliation would mean erasure. It is about recognizing that not all healing looks like forgiveness—and that sometimes the most ethical act is to hold open the wound, to name the irreparable, and to decline the invitation to absolve.
In proposing a counter-genealogy of forgiveness, I am not arguing against all forms of pardon. Instead, I argue against its universalization, specifically its deployment as a moral expectation or political strategy. Ethical unforgiveness is a practice of resistance, a reclamation of voice, and a disruption of closure. It is a call to remain with the trouble, not out of despair, but out of care—for the past, for the truth, and for the radical possibility that refusing to forgive might be, in certain moments, the most ethical act of all.
References
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Jankélévitch, V. (2005). *Forgiveness* (A. Sherman, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967)
Lozano, H. (2018). Unforgiveness: An alternative space for people who cannot forgive Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University). Summit. https://summit.sfu.ca/item/35633
Lozano, H. (2022). Unforgiveness: An alternative space for people who cannot forgive. *Journal of Educational Controversy, 13*(1). https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol13/iss1/12
Tutu, D. (1999). *No future without forgiveness*. Doubleday.