The Importance of Forgiveness

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Forgiveness is not easy to define, based on the many definitions that appear in the psychological literature.

It is vital to have a common definition of forgiveness for science to proceed.

Science, mental health practice, and self-help approaches all need to understand clearly what forgiveness is.

In February 2025, an entire issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology was devoted to the question of how to define forgiveness accurately (Song et al., 2025). It took six psychologists and three philosophers 68 pages to wrestle with the question posed here: What exactly is forgiveness, and can we reach an agreement on it? In this post, I want to share the struggles that these academic professionals had as they grappled with the question. I will pose nine statements about what forgiveness might be. Your task is to choose what you think is the one and only right answer. I then will give you my view on each of them so that you can continue to think more deeply about what forgiveness is, so that you can accurately and possibly successfully complete the task of forgiving if or when someone is deeply unjust to you.

Here is your forgiveness exam. Choose what you consider to be the best answer to the question, “What exactly is forgiveness?”:

This is a trick question because there are wide variations across cultures on how forgiveness is expressed.

When people forgive, the key issue is that they move on from the situation by putting it behind them.

When people forgive, they can forget what happened to them, so the unjust situation no longer bothers those who........

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