It's a good question, and sent me digging.
I found a terrific essay on the film written by William Beard, and here is an excerpt that pertains to your question:
That he should get away with killing while Ned dies horribly for not
killing creates the moral abyss into which Munny plunges in forsaking
his “good” self and embracing again his “bad” one. Here lies a way to
an interpretation of the film’s cryptic title. Munny’s wife Claudia,
in attempting his regeneration, in pulling him out of the maelstrom of
nihilistic compulsive violence and drunken self-obliteration into a
world of principle and language and family and human self-recognition,
forgives him. The act of forgiveness produces the (feminine)
redemptive result of self-forgiveness. In addressing at last the
buried consciousness of horror and guilt, the fiery cycle of
repression and violence whose first victim is the perpetrator is
broken, and the functional person William Munny (the “good”) is
dredged up into view.
Once established in the social world of human relationships, gainful
occupation, the code of civility and “decency,” Munny is happier than
before. Even after the death of his wife, and despite the rather naive
and rudimentary nature of the precepts upon which he leans, he
continues forthrightly in the same path. The process which pushes him
back off that path begins with a condition of economic hardship and
the unfulfilling nature of his labour. Pig-farming is dirty,
frustrating, humiliating, and profitless. The temptation to move into
another form of paid work—killing for hire—is very strong, when that
work suffers none of the drawbacks just enumerated. In drawing Ned
Logan into the business, Munny wishes not only to provide himself with
a dependable co-worker, but to give himself a degree of orientation in
this strange endeavour. Ned, like Munny (and like the Eastwood persona
too), is a former hellraiser, now a respectable freeholding family
man.
As the film proceeds Ned develops into Munny’s anchor to the world,
his reassurance that he has forsaken the old ways (which Ned also
witnessed), and his guarantee that his actions have some foothold in a
worthwhile life-pattern, in decency and fellow-feeling. But Munny
makes the mistake first of returning to killing (however different his
motives this time) and second of pulling Ned with him. When this
happens the results are different from what was anticipated (this too
is morally instructive). It is Ned who is punished for the
transgression, a transgression he did not truly commit; Munny does
everything and goes free, and gets paid to boot. It is not just that
any notion of a higher system of justice and moral equilibrium is
derisorily contradicted by this development. The death of Ned is also
Munny’s personal loss of his “good” self, his loss of Claudia’s
forgiveness and his own self-forgiveness. When he walks into
Greely’s to kill Skinny and Little Bill he is a creature who has lost
salvation, a damned soul, “unforgiven.”
If that was too much to take in, in a nutshell Munny had been forgiven by his wife, society and, most importantly, by himself - but the lure of his old ways are too tempting and he regresses into the violent world he had left behind, ultimately destroying the last vestiges of his 'good' self through the death of Ned. Ultimately he realizes what he is, what he has always been; unforgiven.
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