Title: Forgiveness: Personal and Political

Abstract: What is forgiveness? And why forgive? I mean this in two ways: what reasons bear on the question of whether to offer or withhold forgiveness in a particular case? and why are we even in the business of forgiving at all—what role does it play in a life? The dominant approach to the topic is sentimentalist, seeing forgiveness as essentially involving the withdrawal of a fitting sentiment like resentment or (moral) anger. I argue against this approach. Taking the phenomenon of political forgiveness—widely thought to be distinct from interpersonal forgiveness—as a point of departure, I argue that forgiveness is the waiving of the entitlements one has to hold a past wrongdoing against a wrongdoer. Forgiveness is a kind of normative power or tool, in the same family as normative tools like consent and promising; its function is the shaping of the norms that structure our relationships—personal and political—by dropping past wrongs as a basis for ongoing relations. I argue for this view over sentimentalism on the grounds that in both political and interpersonal cases of forgiveness it better: captures the diverse array of occasions for forgiveness, explains the capacity to forgive conditionally and partially, makes sense of our reasons to forgive and not to forgive, and situates forgiveness within a broader context of our moral lives.