Should I forgive someone who isn't sorry is rarely a question about the other person at all, even though it sounds like one. They have not called. They do not think they did anything wrong, or they know and have decided it does not require an accounting. Meanwhile you are the one still replaying it, still deciding what to do with the weight of it.
Forgiving without an apology is not one thing. It can mean release, or it can mean surrender, and those are not the same act wearing different clothes. Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would take that question apart in three different directions, and none of them would hand you a clean answer.
Rogers: find the feeling under the performance
Carl Rogers spent his career listening to people perform emotions they thought they were supposed to have, rather than the ones actually underneath. He would suspect that the pressure to forgive quickly, gracefully, before you have even named what happened, is exactly that kind of performance. Forgiveness offered before the feeling has been felt is not forgiveness. It is avoidance with better public relations.
His approach would not start with the other person at all. He would ask you to sit with the actual feeling, the anger or grief or humiliation you have been managing rather than experiencing, without judging it as unforgiving or petty. Only from that honest ground, he believed, does anything real become possible, whether that turns out to be forgiveness or something else entirely.
What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.
He would ask you plainly: what are you actually feeling beneath what you think you are supposed to feel, and have you let yourself feel it yet, or have you skipped straight to the resolution?
Lorde: forgiveness is not the same as silence
Audre Lorde would push back hard against any version of forgiveness that functions as a request to stay quiet and keep the peace. She wrote about anger as a source of energy and information, not a failure of grace, and she would be wary of anyone, including you, who reaches for forgiveness mainly because naming the harm out loud feels unbearable or impolite.
For Lorde, the question is not really whether to forgive. It is whether you have first told the truth about what happened, to yourself and possibly to them, without softening it to make it easier for anyone to carry. Forgiveness that skips that step does not heal anything. It just buries the anger somewhere it will keep doing damage.
Your silence will not protect you.
She would ask you directly: what has your silence actually bought you, and is what you are calling forgiveness actually a boundary you have not yet had the nerve to draw?
Dostoevsky: suspect your own motives first
Fyodor Dostoevsky built entire novels around characters who insisted they were being noble while secretly working out something much stranger underneath. He would not trust your reasons for forgiving at face value, not because you are lying to others but because he believed people are experts at lying to themselves, especially about their own goodness.
He would want to know whether you are forgiving because you have genuinely metabolized what happened, or because forgiving lets you feel superior, or because you are terrified of what it means about you if you stay angry at someone who will not even acknowledge the wound. Sometimes, in his telling, people cling to their suffering because it has become the only thing that still feels like proof they were wronged.
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.
His question would not be about the other person's remorse at all. It would be about your own honesty: what do you actually want, beneath what you claim to want, when you say you are ready to forgive?
Where they disagree
Rogers says start with the feeling, not the decision. Whatever you decide about forgiveness will be false if it is built on top of an emotion you never let yourself have.
Lorde says do not let forgiveness become another word for silence. If nothing has been said plainly and no boundary has been drawn, forgiving early can look like grace and function like erasure.
Dostoevsky says distrust the whole transaction until you have interrogated your own motives. Noble-sounding reasons are often covering for something smaller and more self-protective.
The disagreement is not really about whether to forgive. Rogers would tell Lorde that insisting on confrontation before feeling is processed can turn healing into another performance, just an angrier one. Lorde would tell Rogers that endless interior processing can become its own form of silence if it never turns into a stated boundary. Dostoevsky would tell them both that neither inner feeling nor outer confrontation guarantees honesty, because people can stage both. None of them would tell you what to do.
The question you came here to avoid
You typed some version of "should I forgive someone who isn't sorry" because you wanted a rule, something that would apply regardless of what you actually feel about this particular person and this particular harm. There is no such rule, and the search for one is doing some of the avoiding for you.
So here is the question underneath it: if you never get the apology, and you already suspect you will not, what are you actually going to do with the years you would otherwise spend waiting for it?