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Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred

Jean Hampton
All your life you’re told forgiveness is for you. But we’re never told why it’s for you. It means you’re working on owning your life.
Shani Tran
Therapist and Founder, The Shani Project
Forgiveness is nothing less than the way we heal the world. We heal the world by healing each and every one of our hearts. The process is simple, but it is not easy.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
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Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred

Jean Hampton
NO. of participants
Date
1988
Type of Evidence
Type of Paper
Theoretical/Conceptual/Review
Empiricism
open access
Yes
No
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We are constantly exhorted to forgive those who wrong us. However, in Chapter 1 Jeffrie Murphy is sympathetic to the Nietzschean thought that forgiveness may, at least in certain circumstances, be harmful and wrong, a vice rather than a virtue. Like Bishop Butler, Murphy understands forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment. But the failure to resent a moral injury need not be a good thing: “If I count morally as much as anyone else (as surely I do), a failure to resent moral injuries done to me is a failure to care about the moral value incarnate in my own person (that I am, in Kantian language, an end in myself) and thus a failure to care about the very rules of morality.”

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