Introduction: Apologies as a Source of Moral Meaning in Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
Summary
Maimonides' Hilchot Teshuvah, compiled between 1170 and 1180, arguably provides the most recent philosophical monograph devoted to apologies. Considering the relevance of apologies to moral philosophy and current general interest in acts of contrition, this surprised me. Philosophers have long delighted in scrutinizing suspect social practices, and apologies now seem more than ripe. We share a vague intuition that something has gone afoul with this ubiquitous gesture, a sense that apologies are rotting on the vine.
The arguments in this book track that intuition at various levels. We might think of our standards for apologies as buried deep within our evolutionary hardwiring, as primatologists have documented reconciliation protocols between chimpanzees. These “natural conflict resolutions” can look uncannily similar to handshakes, and from this perspective we might measure the quality of an apology by the amount of oxytocin released by the hominid on its receiving end. Bad apologies, like spoiled fruit, do not satisfy our primal needs.
Alternatively, we might consider the steady stream of odd apologies in the daily news to be like hiccups of etiquette, passing symptoms of normative dyspepsia as we become accustomed to a multicultural buffet of beliefs and manners. Taking the long view of history, we live in a transitional age for apologies and we will eventually settle into more stable habits. Technological shifts accelerate these growing pains, as a connected world creates more opportunities to offend each other, capture these transgressions digitally, and reproduce them on command for anyone across the globe who might take umbrage.
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- I Was WrongThe Meanings of Apologies, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008