Abstract

This article is intended as a response rather than counterpoint to Bennett's careful argument that amnesty cannot amount to an act of collective forgiveness. I agree that a state cannot forgive perpetrators of grave human rights violations. However, I am concerned that conceiving the question of amnesty strictly in terms of a choice between the Art of Compromise or the Hard Line of retribution may unduly limit our understanding of the potential relation between amnesty and forgiveness in politics. To show this, I consider the question of amnesty in relation to the possibility of forgiving those ordinary citizens implicated in the perpetration of wrongs as bystanders and beneficiaries of an unjust regime. Following Arendt, I argue that political grounds for forgiveness in such circumstances are the frailty of the world and the natality of the other . On this account, forgiveness is not necessarily the final term in a process of reconciliation that restores a wrongdoer to the moral community. Rather, the disposition to forgive makes possible a politics in which members of a divided polity contest each other's understandings of the violence of the past and its significance for their political association