A Plea Against Apologies

Abstract

Apologies and forgiveness are closely related. A wrongdoer, by offering his apologies, asks for forgiveness; the victim, by accepting them, grants it. In this talk, I aim at a normative assessment of apologies: what, if anything, gives us the right to ask the victim of our wrongdoing for forgiveness? After some conceptual clarifications, I attempt to lay open a paradoxical structure inherent in apologies. Apologies are made in a spirit of humility: if the offender recognises his guilt he will see the victim’s negative emotions towards him as proper and justified. Nevertheless, by begging for forgiveness, he tries to change the victim’s negative feelings towards him. Thus, by apologising, the offender tries to bring about a state of affairs which, if genuinely repentant and remorseful, he has no reason to want to bring about. In what follows I examine various attempts to dissolve this paradox. These include offering reasons for apologising that are independent of our wish to alter the victim’s feelings of resentment. I discuss four suggestions made in the literature on forgiveness, namely (i) that the offender wants to signal to the victim his feelings of regret, (ii) that he wants to regain his self-esteem, (iii) that he wants to regain his moral stature, and (iv) that he wants to indicate a separation between himself as a person and the act he has done. None of these suggestions, however, is persuasive. In sum, attempts to dissolve the paradox of apologies fail. An offender who recognises his own guilt and truly subjects himself to the victim’s judgement has no rational reason for asking for forgiveness. In many cases, not offering one’s apologies is a sign of taking guilt seriously. We should then see the refusal to ask for forgiveness as a virtue rather than as a vice.