The Sunflower: On The “Limits” of Forgiveness

                  Although my scholarship on the Prisoner’s Dilemma stands for “turning the other cheek” (in a pre-print I’m still working on where I need help with a boundary condition, physicists who are interested in game theory and cosmology please contact me) in a symmetric 2-player, 3-player, or 4-player game or over time, I don’t want to generalize beyond my findings. While I personally believe in forgiveness, that doesn’t make it easy, and it’s especially not easy if the wrongdoer fails to take accountability. Should the people of the United States forgive Trump absent Trump doing the right thing? In my “Hollywood” world – or in the view of any dreamer like Dr. King – there are still “limits” on forgiveness. Even Dr. King himself was stabbed by a woman who claimed she was, in effect, a #MeToo victim before there was a movement, and the Southern Leadership Conference had wronged her. Now, I have no idea if she was telling the truth and it would take a historian to or journalist to dig up her story and tell it to the world (I nominate Adam Cohen, who I think is amazing and told the story of Carrie Buck who was essentially a #MeToo victim and was discredited and institutionalized because she was abused even though she was fully mentally competent), but I tend to believe women are unlikely to invent tales of abuse because there are powerful disincentives to come forward.

                  Dr. King was famous and if you believe his attacker’s story, she was essentially a battered woman. Obviously, that doesn’t justify her actions. Dr. King showed her no mercy and had her hospitalized in a psychiatric institution as “insane.” So, is Dr. King the man I really proclaim? He’s extremely complicated. Equally, it’s a little-known fact that President Barack Obama had a long romantic relationship with another woman prior to Michelle Obama and concealed this relationship from the public until his Presidency was over. (It would have been an interracial marriage, and the woman’s family opposed it.) So historical figures are complicated, and no person on the planet can survive this kind of “strict scrutiny.” But both Dr. King and Obama as I discussed in a previous post endorsed the use of force in defense of self and defense of other, and I presume this means there were “limits” on what actions they were willing to be subjected to, or have their movements or country subjected to, if one wants to define forgiveness in terms of actions. Equally, there’s a famous book called “The Sunflower” written about a Jew who refuses to forgive a dying Nazi who asks for forgiveness. 

                  Ideally, forgiveness is something I myself would embody at all times, but people are complicated, and Dr. King clearly was different from his famous speeches and letters, even if I think his “I have a dream” speech is the best speech ever to have been given. There’s not a human alive or dead, not even Jesus, who is/was always good, all the time. Does this diminish my love for these heroes? Of course not. It also doesn’t diminish my love for myself, or what I as an individual am willing to tolerate or put up with. (In Brene Brown’s language, it’s called having boundaries). 

This does mean that forgiveness is a process, and one day a person may be in a forgiving mood, and the next day not. And that’s okay. And how does the math speak to this? This returns me to Jack Balkin’s critique of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and game theory, which is that it is reductionist and over-simplified. And that’s why I want to learn math modeling, and to learn noisy systems and to model complex, multiplayer systems instead of popularizing this work. But right now, other scholars far wiser than me whose game theory I deeply respect suggest that if a person or community has repeatedly defected and been given chance after chance after chance, including via empathy, and attempting to treat the root causes of their defections, the best course of action is containment. Now, I’m an abolitionist, but I also supported jail for Donald Trump in the event he didn’t reform himself. Both/and.

My own scholarship currently isn’t sophisticated enough to model how to deal with repeated defections in a complex, multiplayer game. Other scholars suggest we can get to pure cooperation, eventually, but that’s their work I’m popularizing, not my own. And sometimes getting to pure cooperation involves excluding non-cooperators, meaning that Donald Trump should be resisted (even if I don’t do it) because he is a bad actor, and absent a miraculous spontaneous enlightenment T-minus yesterday, the pragmatic course is to resist him and do what we (society) can do to preserve what we have of democracy or if democracy falls to start a movement like the “vote no” campaign in Chile.  If Donald Trump were enlightened tomorrow, I’d forgive him if he put in the work to redeem himself, but absent concrete behavioral changes, I strongly believe he should be judged by the combination of his actions and words, and actions do indeed speak volumes. 

So, do I myself hope to be as forgiving and eloquent as Dr. King? Of course, but I recognize Dr. King is not his letters, and is not his personal life, it’s body of work he created, the vision he stood for, and the movement he formed, not himself as a person. Dr. King was, in the end, a symbol as well as a person, and that symbol lives on, just as President Obama is the best symbol of hope I’ve ever seen, as well as a deeply good person. But Dr. King showed forgiveness had real limits, and he sometimes acted in self-defense and in defense of other. As for Jesus, did he forgive Judas? It’s not in the historical record, but there’s a spiritual disagreement on this question, and forgiveness is for the person forgiving, not for the wrongdoer. And redemption in my view should not be extended to individuals unwilling to “do the work” after being given repeated chances. Even if forgiveness ideally would be. Both/and. Even Judge Roger L. Gregory, my greatest personal role model, still affirms cases involving jail time, including for violent men and I believe would endorse jail for someone like Jeffrey Epstein who engaged in sex trafficking and would not have been eligible forCommon Justice, and in my view the goal of abolitionism is prevention until we have a system that works. 

If I could figure out how to get Common Justice to work for everyone, I might, but it’s a community-run organization, and the math on Common Justice and other restorative justice programs suggests there’s a reason they don’t work with certain types of offenders, such as a say a complex criminal RICO conspiracy, or a ring of sex traffickers. Of course, I stand for a world absent prisons, but there’s a huge racial justice angle, and while Black persons may offend due to poverty and substandard education, etc., there are simply different questions to be considered for a person who abuses power like Trump or Epstein, both white men. And in general, abuse of power is a different type of crime than stealing because one is about to go hungry.  I would also say that in my view, forgiveness can never be extended on behalf of a third-party. Neither I nor anyone else can forgive someone for something they did to another person because there’s no authority to do so. 

Do I still believe no human, and by that, I mean absolutely any human, is beyond redemption? Of course, but redemption isn’t freely given simply by stating a person believes in Jesus or God, but by living the life of a truly decent human, genuinely righting wrongs that need to be corrected, and through atonement. One can live a Christian life even as an atheist, and before my spiritual awakening, many Christians told me my actions counted as more “Christian” than churchgoers in their community. And the same goes for persons of all faiths. Merely going to church, synagogue, or a Buddhist temple doesn’t make one a good person if one turns around and violates the word of these religions, and that’s why “belief” is not enough for redemption; living the teaching of these great religions is what makes someone a good human, though I have no direct knowledge of the afterlife, even if one of my greatest physicist heroes like Stephen Hawking believed in reincarnation, and compared his theory of time to being repeatedly reborn, as in one of my favorite books  about ancient and modern China called The Incarnations.  

Incidentally, I’d love to know Oprah’s view. In my opinion, she’s a great spiritual teacher, not just a journalist and TV magnate. Oprah, in the highly unlikely event you read me, what would you say?

-Cortelyou C. Kenney, 7/24/25 (7:35 am PT)