ABSTRACT
In addition to exploring gratitude and forgiveness individually, recent work in psychology has also examined the relations between them. For example, Toussaint and Friedman found ‘an important connection between forgiveness, gratitude, and well-being’ (2009, 640; cf. Breen et al. 2010, Bono and McCullough 2006). McCullough, Emmons, and Tsang found that ‘grateful people … are more … forgiving … than are their less grateful counterparts’ (2002, 124), and Neto found that ‘gratitude predicts forgiveness’ (2007, 2314). Despite the growing philosophical interest in gratitude and forgiveness, there has been little if any philosophical work on their relations; philosophers have tended to treat them severally rather than jointly, when they treat them at all. My aim here is to play some philosophical catch-up and explore the relations between forgiveness and gratitude. In particular, I explore what I dub the symmetry thesis, which holds that departures from or variations on the paradigms of forgiveness and gratitude are conceptually and evaluatively symmetrical or parallel.
