It is very fascinating to discover that emotions or virtues which we take to be part and parcel of being human were not, in all probability, shared by our ancestors. Embarrassment is one example of a word that Shakespeare did not have. But consider the virtue of forgiveness (hat tip: Lisa).

This is a doubly interesting case since forgiveness is a virtue for which evolutionary psychologists seek explanation. In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, Michael E. McCullough calls it part of our 'ultracooperativeness'. The context of his work is game theory, and so forgiveness is defined as not retaliating when an opponent makes a selfish move. This approach is limited in terms of its explanatory power, as McCullough recognises: it is abstracted from life context, for a subject in which context is everything, and so the evolutionary analysis is only indirectly relevant.

Nonetheless, McCullough's interest in the subject is powerfully motivated, and not just as a question of science. His desire is to show that forgiveness is good: it's written into our genes and brings about positive outcomes, namely reconciliation. My impression is that the desire to find naturalistic origins of virtues, in order to commend them by providing non-religious, non-rational grounds for them, is relatively common in contemporary evolutionary science.

A philosopher would, of course, raise questions about that. The most obvious concerns the difference between something being the case in the world and something that should be the case in the world - the difference between an 'is' and an 'ought'. If you follow David Hume, then there is a gap between the two, and so looking for naturalistic causes of morality is tricky, if not mistaken.

I'm not so sure the gap is so wide. After all, human beings are moral creatures who are not just in the world but of the world. However, there is another question to ask, namely whether our ancestors pursued the same virtues as us or whether, like embarrassment, new virtues emerged over time.

Forgiveness might well be a case in point. The ancient Greek philosophers, for example, don't seem to have had the same concept of forgiveness as us. For one thing, they do not list it as a virtue; it's not a central ethical concern. And if we define forgiveness as pardoning someone though they are clearly responsible for their wrong action, Aristotle, for one, discussed forgiveness in relation to pardoning someone when they are not responsible for their wrong action. Hence, he writes: 'there is pardon, whenever someone does a wrong action because of conditions of a sort that overstrain human nature, and that no one would endure.'

In Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, Charles L. Griswold comments that the ancient Greek discussion occurs in the context of a 'perfectionist' ethics. The ethically good individual, therefore, has no need of forgiveness in the stronger sense, since if they are culpable they will take responsibility for their actions. Similarly, they will not offer forgiveness, since the moral imperative is that ancient Greeks should take responsibility when appropriate, and not simply be excused.

The Christian dispensation could be said, therefore, to introduce a new element - and the one that arguably seems defining to us - namely the pardon of wrong action when responsibility for it has been explicitly admitted. Hence the sense we have that there is need for an apology from a perpetrator before forgiveness can be offered.

I think it's fair to conclude, therefore, that the evolutionary explanations possibly have some indirect bearing upon the virtue as we know it, perhaps setting some necessary but not sufficient initial conditions. But that as forgiveness itself has a history that is determining and, in terms of evolution, very recent, the evolutionary explanation is bound to fall short. There's no forgiveness without the rational discussion and religious innovation.