Forgiveness and Moral Understanding

This book sets out to deepen our moral understanding by thinking aboutforgiveness: what does it mean for our understanding of morality that there issuch a thing as forgiveness? Forgiveness is a challenge to moral philosophy, forforgiveness challenges us: it calls me to understand my relations to others, andthereby myself, in a new way. Without arguing for or against forgiveness, thepresent study tries to describe these challenges. These challenges concern bothforgiving and asking for forgiveness. The latter is especially important in thiscontext: what does the need to be forgiven mean? In the light of such questions,central issues in the philosophy of forgiveness are critically discussed, about thereasons and conditions for forgiveness, but mostly the focus is on new questions,about the relation of forgiveness to plurality, virtue, death, the processes ofmoral change and development, and the possibility of feeling at home in theworld.