A Plea against 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 in apologies. Apologies are made in a spirit of humility: if the offender recognizes 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 apologizing, 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 apologies that are independent of our wish to alter the victim?s feeling of resentment and construing apologies as expressive or as mixed speech acts. All of these attempts, or so I argue, fail. Some of them fail to provide justificatory reasons for asking for forgiveness, others fall short of explaining why apologies can be accepted or rejected, still others cannot give a convincing account of the relation between remorse and asking for forgiveness or fail to distinguish between redressing a harm and redressing a moral wrong. The upshot of the argument is that an offender who recognizes his own guilt has no rational reason for asking for forgiveness. In many cases, not offering one?s apologies is a sign of taking guilt seriously.