Class 13.2: Apology

We have now spent several sessions thinking about how to manage ongoing conflicts. Today we’re going to pivot and start trying to think about how to move forward from conflict. Our topics are going to include apology, forgiveness, revenge, and giving up on someone. But we’ll start with apology.

Emerick, Stockdale, and Yap

Today’s reading is co-authored by three different philosophers: Barrett Emerick, Katie Stockdale, and Audrey Yap. Emerick teaches at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, and Stockdale and Yap both teach at Victoria University, on Vancouver Island in Canada. Emerick and Yap have also written other things together, including a new book about prison abolition.

Although most of the things that we have read this semester have single authors, and although single-authored work is still much more common in philosophy than in many other disciplines, there are no good general reasons why philosophy can’t be a collaborative effort. As you know from seeing the questions at David Shoemaker’s talk, a large part of trying out and improving your ideas in philosophy is sharing them with other people, seeing what they are persuaded by and what they still need convincing about, and learning from their objections and input. All published work in philosophy is the result of conversations like this - Langton notes in her article that even some of Kant’s major published work borrows whole passages from his letters to von Herbert, where he figured out what he thought about something by corresponding with her.

Emerick

Yap

Stockdale

Apologies

There is a relatively large amount that philosophers have written about apologies (and forgiveness, our topic for next time). Much more than philosophers have written about other topics concerning interpersonal relationships and interpersonal conflict. Lots of this work concerns what it means to apologize, or what apologies are. You will see that Emerick, Stockdale, and Yap don’t worry too much about this question. They say a very little about it, but they are mostly concerned about ways in which apologies can misfire or be abused or have unjust effects even if not abused.

Illocutionary Acts

One big word that the authors use in passing that they assume that their reader will be familiar with, is that they say that apologies are illocutionary. This word comes from the philosopher J.L. Austin, who wrote a book called How to Do Things With Words that is very helpful for thinking about… (surprise) what we do with words and how we do those things. Austin distinguished between three categories of things that you can do with words - or at least, which you can do by saying words. The first, which Austin called locutionary acts, just consist in saying some words. If you have said the words ‘where is the john?’, then there is a particular locutionary act - the act of uttering just these words in just this order - that you have performed and that is also performed by anyone else who says just these words in just this order.

But Austin pointed out that you can use these words to do different things. You can use them to ask where the restroom is. You can use them to express surprise that someone else doesn’t know where the restroom is. You can use them to perform a play. Austin called the things that you do with words that depend on the other people understanding what you are up to with those words - things like saying, asking, implying, telling, acting, and so on - illocutionary acts.

And the third kind of act distinguished by Austin is when your words have effects that are not part of what listeners need to understand what you are up to, but are downstream later effects of your having said those words. For example, you might offend someone by standing up during their lecture and asking ‘where is the john?’. Or you might reveal to them that you speak English, or perhaps lead them to think (since you asked this in Paris) that you don’t speak French. Those are all what Austin called perlocutionary acts.

The authors of our article say that apologizing is an illocutionary act. It’s not a locutionary act, because you can say the words ‘I’m sorry’ without genuinely apologizing. And it’s not a perlocutionary act, because whether you’ve apologized or not doesn’t depend on whether your apology is accepted or your relationship is repaired or any of those things that it might lead to.

Sincerity

One of the authors’ main theses in their article is that there are ways that even sincere apologies can go wrong. To appreciate what they are trying to say, it is important to keep track of several levels of ways in which something can fail to be a perfect apology.

First, someone can utter the words ‘I’m sorry’ without even counting as apologizing. You can do so while on stage - for example, while acting out a scene with someone who you have wronged. When you say ‘I’m sorry’ to them, you’re not apologizing; you’re just acting out your character apologizing to their character. Similarly, even if you are not acting, you could say ‘I’m sorry’ sarcastically or with other clues that make it clear that it is not a genuine apology at all.

But even once you do count as apologizing (say, because you are not being sarcastic). you might be insincere. Apologizing insincerely is like lying. To lie to someone you have to count as telling them something (saying the words in a way that is obviously sarcastic is not lying because it’s not even telling them something). But you can tell them something that you don’t believe - and that is being insincere in what you tell them. Similarly, if you apologize for something that you don’t regret, you are being insincere. Insincere apologies are bad - indeed, our authors take for granted that they are bad.

Our authors are trying to argue that apologies can be bad in yet one more way: even when they are genuine and sincere, they can be used as “weapons” or “shields”. Apologies that are used as weapons or shields do count as sincere, according to our authors, but they are bad in a third kind of way.

Importantly, one way that our authors could turn out to be mistaken is that even though they have correctly identified ways that apologies can be bad, they are mistaken to think that these are ways that sincere apologies can be bad. Maybe when apologies are used as weapons or shields they shouldn’t count as sincere, even if they express genuine regret. This is one of the things that we’ll talk about in class, and it will bring us back to the question of what is wrong with lying that we discussed earlier when we read Langton.