Why Apology Matters

In principle and probably also in practice you know what an apology is. And you know what an apology does. As Kwame Anthony Appiah once noted in his Ethicist column in the New York Times, an apology is intended to repair a relationship. It is ritualized behavior, involving the admission of fault, the taking of responsibility for said fault, and the vow not to repeat the error. Or the slight.

You have offended someone. You apologize to show that you did not intend to do so. That means, you do not want the action to count as evidence of your character. You are making it as though it never happened, as though you did not do it. An apology repairs character, assuming that you have some.

Now, Agnes Callard, supposedly a distinguished philosopher, who teaches at the University of Chicago has written an essay about apology. To her discredit she churns out a series of incoherent ideas that count as a complete muddle.

Lately, serious people have regaled us with evidence of academic plagiarism. In Callard’s case and in the case of many other serious academics, the problem is not plagiarism, but incompetence. As I said, famed academic Callard is utterly incoherent when it comes to apology. 

Apology is a social ritual; it is prescribed behavior. Callard knows this, but then she starts mumbling about the Platonic Ideal of Apology. I put in a call to Plato and am still awaiting an answer, but I venture that an Apology is not an Ideal-- it does not correlate with truth, beauty, goodness and the like.

For the record, I do recall that Plato did write a short treatise called The Apology wherein Socrates, condemned to death, defends himself but refuses to apologize for his errant beliefs, but that is off the point here.

After discussing the importance of forgiveness, by the one who has received the apology, Callard starts musing about how the whole process constitutes a miracle.

One understands how she got confused. The whole essay is a tissue of confusions. Apparently, Callard believes that undoing what one has done counts as something of a miracle.

Unfortunately, a miracle, in religion, signals divine intervention, where God’s will supersedes the laws of nature. It would be a miracle if pigs start flying, but that is surely not analogous to what happens when you apologize.

Let’s try to be more rational here. Let’s forget Platonic ideals and miracle workers. When you apologize you are implicitly or sometimes explicitly vowing not to do it again. If I accept your apology, I accept that you are sincere in making the vow. As with any vow, the proof emerges over time. The more time passes without my going back on my vow, the more my apology counts as sincere.

There is more to sincerity here. For an apology to be sincere you need first to give up something. You need to make a sacrifice.

It might be the most radical sacrifice, like falling on your sword. If you failed as an executive you might resign from your position. Or it might be something simpler, like extending another invitation to someone you have uninvited from a party.

In Callard’s case, she was invited and then uninvited from a dinner party. She fails to inform us of the reasons for the invitation and the disinvitation, so we cannot rightly comment on the transaction, but surely, the person who has offended her is now in her debt. If he does not apologize and does not offer to make it up to her, we count his action as a meaningful expression of the value he grants to her friendship.

In that case she does better to take her distance from him. If she does not do so, she is expecting a miracle. As it happened, Callard was seriously irked by the offense, but then acted as though nothing had happened. 

Evidently, she suffers from a case of door-mat-itis.

To clarify the issue, because after reading Callard the issue certainly needs clarifying, when you commit a crime you also give up something, often your time and your freedom. Yet, when you are convicted you do not have a choice. You are forced to be incarcerated, or, in some cultures, to undergo physical punishment.

When you apologize you are voluntarily making a sacrifice. That makes you a better class of people than criminals.

And yet, the value of the apology gains substance over time, when you do not repeat the offensive action. There is no way I can know from the onset whether you will keep your word, but I grant you the benefit of the doubt. Your job is to prove your apology to be sincere.

When you apologize you are saying that you did it, but that the person who did it was not you. Fair enough, this is paradoxical, as Callard suggests. It suggests that our actions, such as they are, can be either intentional or unintentional. If I apologize I am saying that whatever I did was unintentional and that I will not do it again. It is more about who than about what. 

If I breached a contract or failed to catch a pass I want to make clear that I did not do so intentionally, and will not, all things considered, repeat the error. If I do it over again then I am showing that my apology was insincere and that I cannot be trusted in future transactions. If I never do it again, then the apology was sincere, though, obviously, only time will prove the point. 

One might consider an apology not to be a miracle but to be a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by experience.