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Economists and regulatory agencies justify deposit insurance because they consider banks unique among capitalist firms. Because banks hold highly idiosyncratic portfolios that are hard for outside monitors to value correctly, macroeconomic shocks that threaten the viability of individual banks can threaten the entire system. Although deposit insurance diminishes the threat of bank runs and, thereby, creates a social benefit, deposit insurance also generates potentially large costs, which provides a justification for regulatory oversight and regulation. Like most bank insurance schemes, the Safety Fund was prone to moral hazard, or excessive risk taking by member banks and adverse selection, wherein better banks left the system, leaving only high‐risk banks as members. The system collapsed after only a small number of failures because of poor oversight, moral hazard, adverse selection, regulatory forbearance, and an under‐funded insurance.

In a world of becoming, of “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful” (Darwin), “disability” would seemingly be but variation. Culturally, however, disability has been affectively greeted with disgust, which “creates” disability as unpalatable otherness. This essay argues that “disability” names one location where existential resentment against life comes into political, economic, and theological formation, rupturing thereby “social flesh.” “Disability” names a judgment against life circulated in culture, religious metaphysics, ethics, and moral ideals that must be resolved if we are today—when even waking anxiety begins to assess “the inheritance of loss” (Desai)—to “believe in the world” (Deleuze). In that vein, Simone Weil encouraged us, spiritually speaking, to “put disgust to work” so as “to free it from its history of mediocre moral and religious conditioning.” Religious practice can further—by training one to still one’s judgments amid aversion—a “loving attention to the real,” a forbearance necessary to live and love life amid evolutionary becoming and postapocalyptic scenarios.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the work of forbearance in Iran's criminal justice system. In Iran, the codification of forbearance emerges from a hybrid crimtort justice system, complete with its own conditions of possibility. Iran's criminal laws are clear in defining certain categories of punishment as a consequence of specific injuries. The laws also stipulate the conditions for forbearance. However, the penal code is silent with respect to how parties should arrive at reconciliation. That is, the state encourages settlement, but for all intents and purposes, leaves to the parties themselves to determine what the substance and process of that settlement might be. The conjuncture of a clear legal and moral duty to seek reconciliation alongside the absence of specific guidelines on how to do so has a generative quality and produces an arena outside of the state's judicial apparatus, yet still of it, for bringing about a settlement short of retribution or for forgiveness work. Thus, the manifest moral and legal compulsion to forgive without meaningful guidelines on how to do so has produced an informal cottage industry of advocacy, one that is populated by diverse actors and which produces numerous avenues for negotiating forbearance by forging reconciliation and settlement.

This chapter discusses the foundational aspects of Iran's victim-centered justice system. Iran's criminal justice system allows a privileging of victims' rights over those of the state, even as the state's delegation of the right of life and death both legitimizes the system and makes the plaintiffs complicit in that system. It is, above all, a victim-centered system. The revised penal codes demand that judicial officials seek to reconcile and mediate between the parties, while also allowing them time to determine the conditions of their forbearance. One of the residual effects of customary practices on the codified system is the greater entrenchment of gender roles and the explicit concern with honor. Another trace of the orfi system, however, is that parties are not limited to seeking damages prescribed in the laws. The mechanisms for forging resolution are similarly unconstrained. In the context of resolving the dispute, there is a permeability of the border between judicial and extrajudicial remedies. The laws provide for, even prescribe, extrajudicial processes to unfold in the name of restorative justice, and directly charge judicial officials to seek as much through mediation and reconciliation.

This chapter studies the operations of the Iranian criminal law and analyzes how the procedural administration of the law animates the shariʻa. Iranian criminal laws provide many avenues for victims to forgo retributive sanctioning. But preserving the right of retribution serves several purposes: maintaining the sovereign's monopoly on legitimate violence, giving victims a sense of power, and halting the cycle of violence. The way Iran achieves this comprises an interesting balancing act between maintaining the monopoly over legitimate violence and granting individual victims the right of retribution, which its leaders believe, through their interpretation of the shariʻa, cannot be appropriated by the sovereign. Since the law categorizes intentional murder as qisas and leaves judges with no discretion in sentencing, the judges may use their considerable influence to pressure the family to forgo retribution. The chapter then considers the role of judges and examines how the laws (substantive and procedural) shape their reasoning and discretion in both sentencing and encouraging forbearance.

This chapter explores how the new provisions in the laws that encourage forbearance shape legal practices around post-sentence forgiveness work on the part of judges. It analyzes judges' motivations to work for forbearance by looking at the exigencies of the law, as well as spiritual and pragmatic reasons. In doing so, the chapter highlights the consequential aspects of time in forgiveness work. For many Muslims, the Qur'an is an immutable and unalterable text. The operations and practices to which its verses give rise, however, change and modify through the very human forces whose work both adheres to and animates the sacred texts. Through interviews with Shiʻi scholars and state bureaucrats charged with implementing this duty, the chapter shows how these religious prescriptions come to be translated into contemporary socio-cultural and legal praxis in the Shiʻi context.

This chapter evaluates the heavy burden of the decision that is placed on victims' families. While such decisions might appear as sudden moments, they emerge, rather, from a charged atmosphere saturated with the intensities, sensations, and emotions born of the burden of that decision. Few regulations guide how forbearance happens. However, this is no oversight on the part of the state. This is a purposeful ambiguity in a system that grows out of a need and desire not only to involve victims' families, but also to make the process emotional and sentimental because it is an important component of the faith, of healing, and of reconstituting a virtuous self-identity—both for victim and offender. Interestingly, the gendered affectations the system produces place the sincere forbearance of the victim's mother in concordance with the authentic grief coming from that of the perpetrator. The ambiguity in the law, moreover, permits tailoring the world of possibilities to the various situations that individuals encounter.

This chapter assesses social workers' diverse approaches to the affective labor that forgiveness work entails. A range of social workers, from pious religious actors to secular anti-death penalty activists, participate in cultivating affective sociolegal spaces, or a lifeworld, for their ethical practices. Through productive social engagements, these agents draw attention to a metaphysical rapture that forbearance affords, both for themselves and for victims' families. Their engagement with a kind of social work that extends directly from the potentialities made possible through Iran's Islamic justice system also serves to underscore a commitment to Islam publicly, whether intentional or not. Social workers' myriad activities also bring attention to and even solidify the rationalization or increased corporatization of otherwise loosely organized local, spiritual, and/or ritual practices.

The Conclusion weighs the evidence and assess when, how, and why scholars in the classical and medieval periods — exegetes,hadīth specialists and historians — increasingly chose to privilege a monovalent, belligerent interpretation of jihād roughly from the late second/eighth century on, which in turn instigated counter-narratives which foregrounded and praised its non-militant aspects. The historical and political motivations propelling these developments are reconstructed and the extent to which this broadens and nuances current perspectives on jihād are indicated. This chapter concludes by observing that the literatures extolling the excellences (fadā’il) of military combat and of patient forbearance in particular often encode a number of these concerns in a consciously vaunting manner, creating competing paradigms of piety while invoking, co-opting, and reworking the common idioms -- Qur’anic and otherwise -- of jihād and martyrdom broadly construed.

Even as “disability” constitutes an aesthetic judgment against certain human lives, increasingly disabilities accrue to human bodies as an effect of human-occasioned environmental damage. To love the world through the Anthropocene passage as well as to hold one another in the commons of social flesh, any number of us must work through habituated disgust, which threatens to expel the anomalous other. The theo-philosophical work of Simone Weil is here engaged in itself and as resource for thinking with “Christ as grotesque” (itself perhaps a version of corpse meditation)--as a way then to dampen the disgust reflex and to counter culturally induced exclusions.

This chapter is devoted to Locke's philosophy of action in the first edition of the Essay. It presents him as a volitionist who waffles between two conceptions of volition. Locke holds that to be free with respect to an action is to be able to perform it if one wants to perform it, but also to be able to refrain from performing it if one wants not to perform it. A person can do what she does voluntarily without doing it freely. Locke favors a robust conception of forbearing that leads to difficulties. He denies that it makes sense to characterize the will, or acts of will, as free. Finally, it is shown that Locke offers an account of motivation that combines egoism and hedonism.

Is God free in the way that humans have freedom of choice? To reply, we need to know what is required for humans to act freely. Three theories about freedom are discussed: liberty of indifference, favored by libertarians; liberty of spontaneity, championed by compatibilists; and liberty of rational optimality, favored by rationalists. They agree on one thing—if an agent freely refrains from choosing to do x, x may occur nonetheless. If, however, God is omniscient, God’s will cannot be thwarted; and if God’s knowing and willing are equivalent, then God’s refraining from choosing x entails that x cannot occur. God’s being thus universally decisive raises three objections. God lacks a freedom humans sometimes have—the freedom to forbear. God’s decisiveness leaves no room for human freedom. Finally, God is causally responsible for sinful actions. The chapter’s conclusion argues that these objections are not as bad as they seem.