Past Event: Rescheduled MPWG: Kirstine la Cour (UCL and Yale)

Title: What is the point of apology?

Abstract: We attach a great deal of importance to apology; that much should be obvious to anyone who has ever given or received one, or to anyone who has ever refused to give one, or been refused one. But why? What is the point of apology? The answer I consider in this paper is that apology, when successful, provides remediation in either one or several ways: by alleviating the burden of a past wrongdoing, restoring equality to an unbalanced relationship, or re-establishing the victim’s ability to rely on the offender in the future. However, subjecting philosophical accounts of apology’s remedial powers to closer scrutiny casts these promises into doubt. Delivering a three-pronged critique, I argue that extant accounts of apology, far from vindicating apology’s remedial potential, show our practice to be either irrational, committed to serious moral mistake, or in need of revision beyond recognition.

Faced with this result, I suggest that the problems we confront in accounting for apology’s remedial powers do not derive from the phenomenon itself, but from the theoretical framework philosophers have tacitly applied to it. Our theorising came up short because remediation of wrongdoing was treated as a problem of distributive justice; but it is not such a problem, and it cannot be adequately elucidated in these terms. In the place of this distributive construal of apologetic remediation, I therefore offer an alternative perspective. I argue that apologetic remediation aims at establishing interpersonal intimacy, rather than merely removing the obstacles to it. This requires a reorientation, replacing a focus on what the parties respectively have with attention to what they collectively do in communicating with each other.