What can you expect to find in this book, and – perhaps just as importantly – what can you not expect to find? In these pages, we try to answer two central questions about forgiveness: first, what exactly are we doing when we forgive someone who has wronged us or behaved badly towards us? And second, what reasons are there to forgive, and what reasons are there to withhold forgiveness? Addressing these two questions is the central aim of this book.

People use the term “forgiveness” to cover a number of things. Thus we can talk not only about forgiving wrongdoers, but also about forgiving debts. In this book we are interested only in the first kind of forgiveness, not in the second. This is because to forgive a debt is simply to let the borrower off having to repay the money, with no implication that the borrower has done anything wrong. There are important and interesting questions about whether, for example, advanced industrial nations should forgive the debts owed to them by developing nations, but they won't concern us here, because what we're interested in is the fact that when we forgive a person, it must be because we think that they have done something wrong, something for which they need forgiveness. It's this forgiving attitude towards wrongdoing that we want to focus on, in order to see more clearly what it involves, and to find out what reasons (if any) there are for adopting it.