Can I sever Ties With My Selfish Sister?

There’s a sense in which you seem to be collateral damage, an incidental casualty of your sister’s justified anger toward her mother. Knowing what you do about what your sister has endured, wouldn’t it be great if you could just let go of your own rancor? Well, something of a paradox arises here. Respond to someone’s shabby behavior with resentment, and you’re treating her as a moral agent capable of making her own decisions. Respond with irenic understanding, and you’re treating her as a patient or a puppet, someone acted upon and controlled by larger forces. It’s a distinction that the philosopher P.F. Strawson marked as one between “reactive” and “objective” attitudes. “To understand all is to forgive all,” the old French maxim insists. Such forgiveness comes at a steep moral price.

Respond to someone’s shabby behavior with resentment, and you’re treating her as a moral agent capable of making her own decisions.

At this point in your life, you may certainly conclude, adopting the reactive posture, that your obligations toward your sister have been eroded by her disregard for you; because she doesn’t seem to value her relationship with you, you struggle to find value in your relationship with her. You have commendably insisted that your strained relationship with your sister shouldn’t impede your daughters from establishing their own ties. If that hasn’t gone well, it isn’t obviously your doing.
But there is another relationship that you do value, which has associated obligations, too: It’s with your brother-in-law. You might want to spend some time with him and your sister, not for her sake but for his. That argues for trying to build a relationship with your sister that you can value — a relationship with a person, not a patient. The work of repair, I’d guess, would involve both hearing her out and asking her to acknowledge that she has let you down.

Editors’ Picks

Although certain religious traditions teach that we should forgive unconditionally, forgiveness is more naturally seen as a response to remorse. And if you and your sister fail to find common ground, you can tell your brother-in-law that you made an effort but no headway.

A friend of my husband’s has repeatedly voiced anti-vaccination views. Recently, I found that he procured vaccination papers without being vaccinated so that he could travel and go out in public. This act of fraud has crossed the line for me. He often travels to countries without high vaccine levels, so the chance of him hurting others is high. I asked my husband to consider drawing back from this friendship to show that he is not condoning this. Am I making too big a deal of it? During Covid, it’s been difficult to keep up friendships, so a loss of this one would be hard for my husband. Name Withheld