This response typically involves a process of overcoming angry or otherwise unhappy moral reactive attitudes directed toward a perceived wrongdoer.
As I have characterized them, Butler's and similar views articulate a conception of forgiveness as a process, which may involve dispositions or actions, the aim of which is to overcome episodic moral reactive attitudes occasioned by what others do to us, rather than a response to characterological shortcomings in others that may engender that wrongful behavior.
Although there seems to be no logical reason to think self-forgiveness as overcoming various forms of self-directed moral reactive attitudes such as disappointment or disgust is fundamentally unlike interpersonal forgiveness as a process, there are significant differences between the two.
Watson sought to elaborate upon it by thinking of our moral responsibility practices, and in particular the morally reactive attitudes, along the lines of a communication-based theory in which a morally responsible agent's competence turns in some way upon being a potential interlocutor to moral conversations between her and the moral community in which she operates.
Strawson invites us to see that the morally reactive attitudes that are the constitutive basis of our moral responsibility practices, as well as the interpersonal relations and expectations that give structure to these attitudes, are deeply interwoven into human life.
Fischer and Ravizza advise that moral responsibility be developed by thinking in terms of the propriety conditions for the morally reactive attitudes.
Others, most notably Gaus, argue that the idea of public reason follows from certain basic features of our everyday moral practices and reactive attitudes, along with certain claims about the nature of reasons (Gaus 2011).
On an account of this kind, there exists a close and essential relationship between being responsible, where this is understood in terms of being an appropriate target of moral sentiments or reactive attitudes, and being able to hold oneself and others responsible, where this is understood as the ability to experience and entertain moral sentiments.
We would then need to abandon what Strawson (1962) calls our "reactive attitudes", the moral attitudes and feelings (e.g., gratitude, resentment) so central to our interpersonal lives.
When the perpetrator wrongs another, some third party, the natural reactive attitude is moral indignation, or disapprobation, which amounts to a "vicarious analogue" of resentment felt on behalf of the wronged party.
Other views diverge in more radical ways from Butler's and derivative conceptions of forgiveness as a process of overcoming disagreeable or unhappy reactive attitudes for moral reasons, inasmuch as they ground forgiveness in dispositions or character traits.
