Making Sense of Letting Go

Forgiveness is sometimes treated as the only appropriate way to move on after being wronged. That is, it is often seen as the only way of moving beyond the wrong while being ‘uncompromising’, as Hieronymi (2001) puts it, avoiding both ignorance and denial of the morally relevant features of the situation. The present paper suggests that ‘letting go’ of blame can also be uncompromising and offers an explanation of how that can be so. It goes on to claim that letting go can play an important role in close relationships such as friendship. It thus defends letting go as an important and valuable part of our moral psychology.