Alexander Edlich – författare

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Apologies are an important part of our moral, social, and political practices. An apology can weaken the anger of someone who has been wronged and give them a reason to forgive. An apology can mend relationships and can even help countries reconcile after conflict. But how do apologies achieve this? In The Philosophy of Apology, a range of philosophers consider this fundamental question, necessary to understanding what an apology is, what it does, and what separates a 'good' apology from a 'bad' one. Key concepts explored in this volume include: what are apologies? When are they appropriate to give? And when should apologies be accepted? Detailed questions include: are apologies speech acts? Are they processes? Do they involve accepting blame? Do they involve dissociating oneself from an earlier act? Are political apologies a distinct phenomenon from interpersonal apologies? Through thorough exploration of a vast range of ideas, contributors to The Philosophy of Apology offer fresh perspectives on what an apology really is, setting the stage for future work.

The book highlights a neglected aspect of our moral practices: we can morally protest objectionable conduct without blaming agents for it. In this way, moral responses to wrongful conduct are possible without assessing the blameworthiness of agents.The book offers an account of moral protest as a type of stance-taking: in protest, the protester commits themselves to treating what they protest as morally objectionable, which is related to a specific class of moral emotions. The aptness conditions of moral protest and the concept of objectionability are discussed and this perspective is applied to a critical discussion of the attributionist view of blameworthiness and corresponding views of blame. It concludes that our moral practices allow for more variation than is often acknowledged, some of which unrelated to moral responsibility, and that this gives us reason not to insist on a broad view of blameworthiness. Specifically, it is argued that the significance of morally objectionable conduct and the needs of victims of wrongdoing can be done justice to without blame. The book thus suggests that moral protest without blame may be called for more often than we think, including for many types of wrongdoers whose culpability is disputed.