Some Notes on Political Apology
"I apologise for mistakes that may have been made in this article"
I.
Political apologies are cloaked in paradox. Voters demand apologies from officials all the time, but almost never accept them when they’re made. As philosopher Alice MacLachlan asks: ‘Why ask officials to tell us, “Trust me, I’m sorry” over and over again, when we can predict, with some accuracy, that we will find their utterances untrustworthy?’1
So? Why are voters like this, demanding apologies when they know they won’t accept them? One reason is political: Most of the time, political apologies embarrass the public officials who give them. So it makes sense to pressure a politician you don’t like to apologise, even if you have no plans to accept their apology.
But—as MacLachlan argues—there are a number good faith reasons why voters demand apologies, even when the odds they'll accept them are low:
“It was me!”: Apologies identify the wrongdoer. When state officials act badly, voters lose faith not only in the officials but in the institution itself. This loss of faith spans a number of dimensions: Voters lose faith in the structures they think should’ve prevented the failure, lose faith in governments per se, and lose faith in the idea that moral norms have governing force in politics. When an individual politician apologises, this gives the failure a name and a face: Blame shifts from the government as a whole to a specific person or group. That way, blame can be doled out while faith in government is restored.
“This happened because. . .”: Relatedly, when apologies include an explanation of what went wrong—personal corruption, misfiled paperwork, a check or balance bypassed—it’s easier to trust in government once the specific problem has been fixed. As MacLachlan writes: “If we know exactly what happened, we are less worried that anything could happen.”2
“We reject your apology!”: When officials apologise, they apologise to a specific group: The people of Winchester, the Polish community, the nation as a whole, or whatever. Thus, even if the apology falls on deaf ears, it was still up to the group—symbolically—to decide whether the apology was good enough. That way, apologies unify the groups they’re addressed to, even if those group reject the apologies.
“We are committed to. . .”: When officials apologise for this or that mishap, they typically reassert commitment to this or that moral norm—honesty, ‘the environment’, fairness, what have you. The more these norms are reasserted, the more people will take these norms to have authority (and—therefore—the more authority they’ll have, in the sense that when public standards are higher, officials face a higher bar of public scrutiny.)
Collectively, these points go a long way to solving the ‘paradox’: Yes, voters are constantly demanding apologies, yet consistently rejecting most of them. But both patterns are explainable and—quite often—rational.
II.
Sometimes, political apologies are conditional, expressed in the form: “If I have X-ed, then I apologise.” For example, in 2022 Boris Johnson told a reporter:
“I repeat my deep apologies for mistakes that may have been made on my watch.”
Johnson’s “deep apologies”—which were obviously bullshit—hung on a conditional: if mistakes were made on his watch, he is sorry for having watched over those mistakes.
Some think—as a matter of principle—that conditional apologies can never count. This thought is pretty alluring. “Sorry if you were offended. . .” is the classic non-apology. Moreover, there’s a semi-compelling argument for why conditional apologies can’t count.
Consider: For an apology to count as genuine, it plausibly has to meet (at least) four standards:
Acknowledgement of the facts: The apologiser has to acknowledge the relevant facts (“Last night I fed you my toddler instead of a chicken wing”).
Expression of remorse: The apologiser regrets what they did and gets that fact across (“We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness”).
Wishing they had done differently: The apologiser can’t be OK—in retrospect—with acting as they did (“That was like, NOT. OK. of me”)
Commitment to ✨do better✨: This commitment is loosely tied to the type of wrongdoing being apologised for. If a politician apologises for wasting public money and commits to ✨doing better✨ in future, her commitment has to do with governance and the use of public funds. Whether she goes on to do other good things is irrelevant.
But notice: conditional apologies don’t meet any of these standards! If you make a conditional apology, you’re saying: “On the condition that I did this thing—and I don’t yet know if I did do it—I apologise.” But if you say that, you can’t acknowledge what you did, wish you’d acted differently, or commit to doing better than you did, since you haven’t acknowledged that you did anything wrong in the first place.
You also can’t (reasonably) feel remorse. (Nor can you feel conditional remorse, since that’s not a real emotion. At any given time, you either feel remorse or you don’t. You can’t actually feel remorse conditionally. At most, you can flit back and forth between two frames of mind—a clean conscience and a guilty one.) Thus, the thought goes, conditional apologies don’t count in principle, since they they don’t meet the standards of a real apology.
Tempting though it is, this thought is misguided. Conditional apologies are apologies. As philosopher Peter Baumann has pointed out, when someone makes a sincere conditional apology, they still:
[accept] the relevant facts whatever they might turn out to be and rejects Xing, treating it as an offense,
[are] aware of and critical of whatever their own failings turn out to be,
[are] willing to improve whenever this is called for,
and [are] ready to accept the relevant status corresponding to their behaviour.3
In other worlds, when someone conditionally apologises, they make the same sorts of commitments they’d make if they were apologizing unconditionally. The only difference is that they haven’t acknowledged (yet) that they did anything wrong, and as a result are less specific about what they’re committing to (“accepting the relevant facts whatever they turn out to be” rather than just “accepting the relevant facts”, etc.)
Why does this qualify as an apology? Well, as Baumann writes:
even if the hearer doesn’t get an unconditional apology, they get something close enough in the way of apologies, namely the above complex commitment. Conditional apologies are quite different from unconditional apologies but still close enough to deserve the title “apology”. Apologies are a heterogenous bunch but still a bunch on their own.4
That seems right to me. Conditional apologies are close enough to unconditional apologies to fall under the same umbrella. Of course, if you know you did something wrong, a conditional apology is not enough. But in cases where the apologiser genuinely doesn’t know if they’re in the wrong, a conditional apology is the best that can be done.
Of course, it’s right to be sceptical of conditional apologies. Often, the conditional apologiser knows exactly what they did, but hides behind a “Sorry if!” to signal virtue while saving face. Still, conditional apologies are apologies, and there’s no reason why they can’t be sincere. A “Sorry if!” needn’t be a “Sorry. . . NOT!!”
III.
Sometimes, politicians say ‘sorry’ for things they didn’t do. In 2006, for instance, Tony Blair apologised for Britain’s role in the slave trade. When asked why he hadn’t explicitly said ‘sorry’ in a previous statement, Blair said:
“Well actually I have said it: We are sorry. And I say it again now.”
The Prime Minister’s remarks are puzzling. He played no part in the slave trade, nor did we. How, then, could it make sense for Tony Blair to apologise for it on our behalf, given that no living person had anything to do with it?
The answer, I think, is that not every apology presupposes moral responsibility for the thing apologised for. Sometimes, it makes sense to apologise for something simply because you’re narratively connected to it in a visible way.
Suppose tomorrow—through no fault of your own—you crash into a school bus and cause the deaths of 30 children. In that case, it makes sense to apologise—deeply, sincerely, profusely—even though you bear no responsibility for the crash. Intuitively, that’s obvious. Really obvious. But why? After all, you did literally nothing wrong.
The reason is not to appease parents who might mistakenly suspect that you’re responsible. Otherwise, your apology would be insincere.
Rather, I think, the explanation goes something like this. Sometimes, when you’re causally associated with a harm—in a conspicuous and visible way—you should apologise for it, even when it wasn’t your fault. The reason it (sometimes) makes sense to do this is that if you don’t apologise, you might inflict a new, expressive harm on the victims: In the bus case, the dead children; In Britain’s case, the 8 million Africans sold by Britain. (Note: I’m not necessarily assuming it’s possible to harm the dead [though for a defence of that view, see David Boonin’s book]. Presumably, there’s some explanation of why it’s expressively wrong—say—to urinate on a slave ship memorial. Whatever that explanation amounts to, I can invoke it to explain why failing to apologise for slavery might be bad.)
Consider: When you crash into the bus by accident, you don’t inflict an expressive harm on anyone. (An expressive harm, by the way, is a harm you inflict by expressing certain disrespectful attitudes about others. For example, if you steal one penny from a barista tip jar in front of her, you don’t harm her financially, but you do express how little you respect her.) It was an accident, so you didn’t express anything. You might be misinterpreted as expressing disrespect toward the children’s lives, but that doesn’t mean you really did.
Once you’ve crashed into the bus by accident, though, you would be disrespecting the dead children if you said nothing and went on with your day. Since you’re causally connected to their deaths, failing to say—Sorry, this is not the kind of causal impact I want to have on the world, their deaths were tragic, I’m sorry for your losses, etc., etc.—is tantamount to saying—Meh, this is the kind of causal impact I’m calm with having on the world, they weren’t my children, etc., etc.
Saying ‘sorry’ prevents this. If you apologise and mean it, you disavow the tragedy you’re connected to, and make it clear you’re not content with children dying. That way, you forestall the possibility that your silence will express a callous, disrespectful attitude. In Marc Cohen’s words, the “. . . apology counteracts the expressive harm caused by leaving the action unaddressed.”5
The same thinking applies, sort of, to apologies for historical injustices. For better or worse, the British government is connected—through the narrative sweep of history—to the government that enslaved 8 million Africans. If Parliament had abolished slavery but never apologised for it, the message expressed would be clear to anyone. Thus, it makes sense for a representative of that government—like, say, the Prime Minister—to say sorry on its behalf, even though he, nor anyone in it, was responsible for the British Slave Trade.
The merits of specific state apologies for historical injustices can be debated; I don’t think all of them are good. But there’s nothing philosophically incoherent about officials saying sorry for things that they themselves had nothing to do with.
MacLachlan, Alice. 2015. “‘Trust me, I’m sorry’: The Paradox of Public Apology” The Monist (98): p. 447.
Ibid. p. 450.
Baumann, Peter. 2021. “Sorry if! On Conditional Apologies.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (24): p. 1087.
Ibid.
Cohen, A. Marc. 2018. “Apology as Self Repair”. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (21): p. 593.