Forgiveness is optional

51 snips

Dec 15, 2025

Myisha Cherry, a philosopher and associate professor at UC Riverside, tackles the complexities of forgiveness in this engaging conversation. She critiques the cultural pressure to forgive, especially on vulnerable victims, and questions whether it's always beneficial. Highlighting the 2015 Charleston church shooting, she explores the dangers of idolizing forgiveness as a remedy. Cherry emphasizes that anger can be a moral tool, advocating for intentionality in forgiveness and recognizing that some harms require more than just forgiving to heal.

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INSIGHT

Forgiveness As Magical Thinking

American culture treats forgiveness like a magical fix that promises reconciliation and repair for every wrong.
Myisha Cherry argues we idolize forgiveness and forgivers, which can sideline real justice work.

ANECDOTE

Charleston Families’ Public Forgiveness

Cherry recounts the 2015 Charleston church shooting families forgiving Dylann Roof at his sentencing.
Media focused on their forgiveness and used it to suggest others must forgive too, which she found troubling.

INSIGHT

Forgiveness Has Multiple Aims

Forgiveness serves different reparative aims: reconciliation, psychological relief, or freeing oneself from a wrongdoer's hold.
Apologies help when reconciliation is the aim, but forgiveness can still be personal and independent of the wrongdoer.

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You have to forgive people who wrong you…right? The world is filled with injustice and wrongdoing, and to live in the world — to not be consumed by anger — forgiveness is necessary. At least that’s what we’re told over and over again: By forgiving, we can set ourselves free.But is there a cost to forgiveness? Are we forgiving too quickly and too often?

Today’s guest is philosopher Myisha Cherry, whose book Failures of Forgiveness critiques our cultural obsession with forgiving those who have done us wrong. She’s not against forgiveness — that would be weird — but she says we ought to be more intentional about why we do it, more aware that the expectation to practice forgiveness often lands on the most vulnerable people, and more concerned about what gets lost when we treat forgiveness as the only path to healing.

Sean and Myisha discuss the 2015 Charleston church shooting, the legacy of slavery, and the real difference between accountability, reconciliation, and simply moving on.

Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)

Guest: Myisha Cherry (@myishacherry), associate professor of philosophy at the University of California Riverside, and author of Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better.

This episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

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