Hay, C. orcid.org/0000-0001-6327-6547 (2024) Reparative justice and the victim’s burden: Why accepting an apology is not a moral obligation. Contemporary Political Theory. ISSN 1470-8914
Abstract
A number of authors make a seemingly compelling case for holding the victim of a wrong morally obliged to accept the genuine apology of the wrongdoer. This is a crucial issue in questions of reparative justice, since reparation typically requires not just the giving but also the acceptance of an apology. Yet it is a case that we should ultimately reject. If it is credible to think that the victim might suffer anew in exercising any duty of this kind, that suffering must be factored into the moral reckoning from the outset. It is only if we can be sure that the victim will not suffer again by attending to, and ultimately accepting, the wrongdoer’s apology that it would be right to impose upon her any duty of this kind. Yet, in all non-trivial cases, the victim’s burden is unknowable in advance and has the potential to be considerable. In such situations, I argue, the victim has no duty to accept the wrongdoer’s apology. There are limits, too, to the utility of the bipartite victim-wrongdoer account of reparation on which such arguments are typically predicated. For the harm the wrongdoer causes is not exclusively suffered by the immediate victim but also by the community of all potential victims. Genuine reparative justice requires more than a recalibration of the relative moral standing of the wrongdoer and the victim through the giving and receiving of an apology. I consider how this might be achieved without imposing upon the victim a burden that fails to achieve the moral reckoning anticipated.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | victim; wrongdoer; reparative justice; apology |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Nov 2024 15:45 |
Last Modified: | 02 Jan 2025 09:28 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1057/s41296-024-00743-8 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:219677 |