Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment

Given the current climate of political division and global conflict it is not surprising that there has been an increasing interest in how we ought to respond to perceived wrongdoing, both personal and political. In this volume, top scholars from around the world contribute all new original essays on the ethics of forgiveness, revenge, and punishment. 

This book draws on both historical and contemporary debates in order to answer important questions about the nature of forgiveness, the power of apology, the relationship between punishment and revenge, the path to reconciliation, the morality of blame, and the role of forgiveness in political conflict.

Chapter 16 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.


Paula Satne is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research engages in both theoretical and applied issues related to human evil, the ethics of forgiveness and, more recently, the ethics of memory, including related themes in political philosophy. Her recent research develops a Kantian approach to forgiveness, exploring the relationship between forgiveness, moral development, justice and self-respect. Her edited volumes include Kant's Doctrine of Right in the 21st Century (2018),and Construyendo la autonomía, la autoridad y la justicia. Leer a Kant con Onora O'Neill (2018). She is also guest editor of a Special Issue on Forgiveness and Conflict (Philosophia, 2016).

Krisanna M. Scheiter is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Union College. She specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. She has written on Plato and Aristotle's accounts of emotion, desire, imagination, and thinking as well as Aristotle's account of anger and revenge. Recently she served as guest editor for a volume in Philosophia entitled Ethics of Forgiveness and Revenge. She received a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for her project on virtue and vengeance in Aristotle.