Harm, Forgiveness, Compensation: Legal and Ethical Perspective

Magdalena WILEJCZYK

Abstract

Harm, forgiveness and compensation are the fundamental legal and moral categories. The meaning of these concepts in ethics is usually more extensive than that of those used in legal sciences. The legislator, trying to respect fundamental ethical recommendations and basic moral beliefs of the society, is not able to fully implement these concepts on the legal grounds. This is partly due to the difficulty in proving certain categories of injustices, partly due to the lack of adequate legal instruments to compensate, and partly also because many events and life situations can only have a blurred moral qualification, resulting from the lack of a fully unambiguous moral evaluation of some phenomena. As a result, the legal limitations of the category of harm, forgiveness and compensation consist mainly in the fact that these terms are normative in the legal system, which means that only non-material damage as a result of violating any of the personal rights is recognized by law, forgiveness has legal meaning only in those situations, in which the legislator provided for it (donation, disinheritance, unworthiness of inheritance), and the claim for the strictly understood financial compensation for the harm suffered is available only in the event of violation of any of the personal rights.