Sorry but not sorry

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-the-apology-is-a-friend-of-the-powerful/

by bsbechtel • 12 years ago

106 9 12 years ago

yuhong• 12 years ago

Personally, I have been mentioning the idea of an admission of wrongdoing with an apology letter in the employee poaching scandal for a while now. I think the SEC is pushing admission of wrongdoing in settlements.

tehwalrus• 12 years ago

Plea bargaining, and racist/classist apology-rejecting, among factors like this, seem to be what's broken the US justice system. Or so it seems from articles like this, and the horrible reports of unapologetic police brutality in places like Ferguson, Missouri.

The USA really really needs to do something about this, if I'm (and many other aliens like me are) ever to believe a criminal conviction there has anything to do with reality.

funkyy• 12 years ago

In a world of couch people it seems this is OK to majority of society. They will be outraged, but only from safety of their houses, internet and tv.

We are in the age of people grown on no-stress doctrine, where people just dont really care.

The only people that care are either unemployed, immigrants or extreme right wing groups. Those people will never get proper attention of rest left-center oriented society. They are not being taken seriously.

The things will get only worse until something big happen to the world. Something that will make people get out to the streets and fight for the cause.

A1kmm• 12 years ago

I think that the article trying to imply a stronger link between apologies and the law than really exists in practice.

Corporate apologies are not about trying to win a lawsuit or reduce damages, they are about trying to regain trust and prevent or stem the loss of market share.

The public are not so stupid as to be significantly swayed if the company apologises publicly for some problem and doesn't say what they are doing to address the problem. For example, if a companies widgets were exploding, the company might apologise and explain that they have fixed the exploding component, and instituted review processes to stop it happening again. Sometimes the change will not be sufficient to fix the problem, and the public may not have the background to realise this.

The article claims safe apology "laws provide another way to protect wrongdoers from liability". But that is not really true - without the laws, companies in the wrong would not apologise at all, so there would be no more evidence against them. The laws allow companies to apologise without legally self-incriminating; the article takes a very law centric view, but I would think most people would value an apology even if it didn't incriminate the person making the apology - the apology (and particularly, the explanation of why it won't happen again) has value to the public outside of the legal system. Of course, the company apologising should still be able to be held liable if their explanation is untrue or misleading (for example, if the company says that the new version of their widget no longer explodes, but they are lying to get more sales, and it in fact does still explode, they should face an additional charge with big penalties for misleading or deceptive conduct in the course of trade, with the apology admissible as evidence).

kefka• 12 years ago

"I'm sorry you're stupid."

"I'm sorry you caused this."

"I'm sorry you feel bad."

"I'm sorry you were offended."

"I'm sorry you (apologize for your wrongdoing or feelings)."

And none of those mean anything in terms of contriteness. However, many of those are rather offensive. But they all express "Sorry".

Houshalter• 12 years ago

It's not just racism/classicism. A study found ugly people get sentences twice as long as attractive people.

hownottowrite• 12 years ago

Ref: The book by the article's author (Nick Smith) http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/jurisprude...

It's interesting to note the volume of literature on the subject. Check out the references at the bottom of this symposium page:

http://philpapers.org/rec/BENSTA-5

Freeboots• 12 years ago

Just pulling one point from the article; its interesting that sentencing is often based on 'gut feeling' of the offenders level of remorse. It makes me think of the research of John Gottman, who developed a system to predict divorce rates with surprising accuracy from analysing a single conversation. I wonder if his technique's could be applied for a more scientific and perhaps more accurate judgement of remorse.

ScottBurson• 12 years ago

What can be done? If we are to continue reducing punishments for apologetic offenders (and for the record, I think we should)

I completely disagree. The article already provides an excellent argument against this practice: it is inherently subjective and clearly biased.

I'll add another argument: the justice system will never be perfect. We'll always occasionally convict innocent people. Such people cannot be asked to be contrite about a crime they did not commit, nor does it make any sense to hold their lack of contrition against them, as we currently do.

I think the only fair way to do it is to base the initial sentence solely on the severity of the crime itself, and then, once the sentence is underway, to make parole decisions based solely on the prisoner's behavior in prison. Contrition should not factor into it.

Sorry but not sorry

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