在电影《口译员》中，妮可·基德曼饰演西尔维娅·布鲁姆。她在虚构的马托博部落的古族人中长大。当有人在古族人中杀人时，他们被允许活一年。然后他们被扔进湖里，双手被绑。受害者的家人必须决定是跳进水里救他们，还是让他们淹死。古族人的普遍看法似乎是，那些救了凶手的人，实际上是宽恕了凶手，并将自己从愤怒和怨恨中释放出来，这样会更好。
许多思想家同意Kus的这一观点，即宽恕对宽恕者是有好处的。Thus Francis Bacon:

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.

And Ann Landers:

One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything every night before you go to bed.

So perhaps it is a good idea to forgive others, to insure one’s own peace of mind, so that resentment doesn’t gnaw away at one.

但我们原谅的人就一定值得被原谅吗?宽恕不是公然违抗对正义的要求吗?此外，继续引用马拉松，还有尼采的洞察力。

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

But then, H.W. Longfellow seems to have a point when he says:

如果我们能读懂敌人的秘史，我们就会发现每个人生活中的悲伤和痛苦足以解除所有的敌意。

But then so too does George Bernard Shaw:

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

Can we make sense of the bevy of insight? Or should we just start over?

Something Empirical

Athttp://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040209-000022.htmlthere is a summary of an interesting article by Brenda Goodman. Goodman reports on the research of Jennie Nell from the University of Cincinnati, who studied 55 girls who had been sexually abused. She was interested in the effects of various aspects of forgiveness:

• giving up the desire for revenge
• letting go of anger
• moving on with their lives
• reconciliation with the offender

If forgiveness is taken to include the first three, the results of forgiveness are positive for the lives of the forgiver, as Ann Landers, Francis Bacon and the Ku and Nicole Kidman (at least at the beginning of the movie) suggest.

Noll found that abused girls who had let go of both anger and the desire for revenge had higher self-esteem, less anxiety, fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and better relationships with their mothers.

Reconciliation is a different matter:

But when the girls wanted to reconcile with their offenders, who were sometimes their fathers, they were more anxious, had more symptoms of PTSD and dissociation and were more likely to have bad relationships with their mothers.

The researcher Noll advises therapists:

与他们做一些工作，让他们克服自己的愤怒，让他们不再想要伤害对方，但不要鼓励他们恢复关系。”“这可能会把他们置于危险之中，让他们再次感到无力。

Getting the me out of it

According to this week's guest, Charles Griswold, Bishop Butler's take on forgiveness was that it required foregoing revenge, but not resentment. But the resentment ought to be proportioned to the offense. The way to do this is to think about what a disinterested spectator would take to be the gravity of the offense. (Disinterested in the sense of objective, impartial, and the like, not in the sense of "uninterested" or not giving a damn.) A sincere forgiver --- in Butler's framework, this means a Christian who is trying to follow all those injunctions in Matthew to forgive your enemies seven times seventy times and love more or less everyone, and to forget about the eye for an eye philosophy of the Old Testament --- need not get all teary and gushy about it, and need not have anything like feelings of love for the offender. To be such a forgiver, I need to get rid of the surplus of feelings and desires for punishment that have to do with the offendee being me. From an objective point of view, that person isn't worse for having insulted me, or not repaid money to me, or run over me, or pillaged my home, than for having done it to anyone else.

Remember Michael Dukakis, when asked in a Presidential Debate with George I how he would feel if his wife Kitty was raped and murdered --- Dukakis disapproved of the death penalty. Dukakis' reply was in accord with Butler, as I understand Butler (via Griswold), although, of course, terrible politics. He gave more or less the answer he might have given if the question had been about the proper treatment of the rape and murder of an anonymous person X. Even then it would have been bad politics.

事实上，朗费罗、萧伯纳和尼采都有自己的观点，关于任何冒犯者的优点，我们大多数人都可能被要求原谅。(也就是说，不是希特勒、杰弗里·达尔默(Jeffrey Dahlmer)或其他类似的人，朗费罗似乎对他们的看法是错误的)。很有可能，他们与我们互动的本质并没有很好地反映出他们的优缺点总和。我们可能会过度概括。我们应该努力从公正的角度来看待对我们的冒犯——尽管在花时间去认识和感受我们最终想要释放的负面情绪之前，否则我们不会很好地释放负面情绪。

A couple of years ago I gave a very nice introduction to a speaker at Stanford, who then spent the first ten minutes of his talk berating me for a metaphor he found unfortunate, and deftly related the sort of people who would use such a metaphor to war, pestilence, ecological destruction, and most other ills of humankind and animal-kind. As I sat there, embarrassed and resentful, I imagined the speaker in Dante's Hell, suspended by his heels over a vat of something unpleasant, while hot tar was poured on his feet. (I don't think this is the worst circle of Dante's Hell, so even at that moment my early training in Christian Charity had effect).

As time passed, I was able to look at it objectively. For one thing, it wasn't a very good metaphor. Then the Longfellow point, who knows what miserable childhoods or chemical imbalances underlies this fellow's life? Finally, the Nietzsche point, everyone is capable of really rotten behavior. Finally, the Butler strategy. He did behave like a jerk. Maybe he is a jerk. But being a jerk isn't the worst thing in the world, far from it. Indeed, the fellow has many talents, and has generously helped many people, all that in addition to the nice things I said about his work in the introduction.

So, no desire for revenge, at least not of the hot-tar-on-the-bottoms-of-the-feet variety. But also, no desire to get into the same situation again. I don't want to get into any position where this person is given an excuse to morally assess me, or make a cutting remark. I shouldn't treat him like a despicable human being, but there isn't any reason I shouldn't treat him like a bit of jerk. That's exactly how I would have assessed his offense to me, if someone else had been the target. And I would have found the situation sort of humorous in a pathetic sort of way, which indeed it was. How's that for Christian love and forgiveness?

That's my deep thoughts on forgiveness. I'll have deeper and better ones after our talk with Charles Griswold later today.