Forgiveness and Retribution

Margaret Holmgren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. She co-edited Ethical Theory: A Concise Anthology (2000) with Heimir Giersson.

• 1. Introduction and overview; 2. The nature of forgiveness and resentment; 3. The moral analysis of the attitudes of forgiveness and resentment defined; 4. The moral analysis of the attitudes of self-forgiveness and self-condemnation; 5. Philosophical underpinnings of the basic attitudes: forgiveness, resentment, and the nature of persons; 6. Moral theory: justice and desert; 7. The public response to wrongdoing; 8. Restorative justice: the public response to wrongdoing and the process of addressing the wrong.

'Margaret Holmgren's book is a daring attempt to defend a new paradigm of forgiveness that would radically reorient our attitudes toward those who wrong us and our way of thinking about punishment and criminal law. No doubt the discussion it provokes will be intense.' George W. Harris, author of Reason's Grief: An Essay on Tragedy and Value