In my opinion, there are some apologies that are worse than nothing. If a course of action is harmful or annoying to others, yet we choose to pursue it anyway, it is a considered action; presumably we have weighed the pros and cons and decided that it’s still worthwhile.
The process of considering the pros and cons of an action is the first quantum of morality. It is the moment when the authoritarian falls back on their authority – there will be differing opinions and arguments but someone’s got the power to make the decision, and they do. I struggled to phrase that correctly “someone’s got the power to make the decision” – often authoritarians will try to reify their decision as being necessary i.e.: “someone has to decide.” The subtle implication of that formulation is that it is necessary to act, therefore the authoritarian chooses this particular path. The Taoist/nihilist who watches this exchange knows perfectly well what is going on: the wise man might choose to go fishing, instead of to make the hard decision the authoritarian is pushing. My opinion, based on my experience, is that authoritarians pull this trick naturally and effortlessly; they possibly even believe their own bullshit. But it’s still bullshit: they made a choice and they own the consequences of that choice.
It gets more complicated when the choice is one that is hotly contested and there is public information and argument on both sides. Suppose it is a necessary choice; that doesn’t mean we can simply walk away and pat ourselves on the back, “I have chosen, it is done.” The authoritarian will do that, because it is their authority that matters to them; reviewing and possibly un-making a choice contradicts their self-assessment as being “right” about the decision. That is unbearably painful for many authoritarians so they may bury their involvement in the choice (“well, many experts say”) or downplay its significance (“it will sort itself out in the long term”). I would venture to argue that it’s possible to be a moral authoritarian, but only if part of the authoritarian’s acceptance of the mantle of authority includes both a sense of responsibility and the responsibility to review the decision. The quintessential example of that would be a ship’s captain on the high seas. They are responsible for the outcomes of their decisions and they could wind up in front of endless review boards dissecting every molecule of a fuckup; yet they are held as doing a good job even if they make a horrible mistake so long as the information that led them to make the mistake supported their mistake initially and they reviewed and updated the decision and did the best that they could under the circumstances. Captain Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez supposedly did a very good job of preventing the ship from breaking up entirely, and Captain Schettino of the Costa Concordia ran ashore to safety and allowed some of his passengers to drown. We judge those men differently for how they dealt with the fallout from bad decisions.
This brings me to a bit of fallout from a bad decision, which has been in the news lately.
Michael Bloomberg has decided to apologize for stop-and-frisk. [nyt]
Ahead of a potential Democratic presidential run, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York on Sunday reversed his longstanding support of the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that he pursued for a decade and that led to the disproportionate stopping of black and Latino people across the city.
“I was wrong,” Mr. Bloomberg declared. “And I am sorry.”
Can’t you afford a fucking shirt that fits, Bloomberg?
It’s obvious political pandering; the New York Times even manages to point that out – Bloomberg is floating the possibility of another billionaire vanity-run for president, and his public relations team told him that this would be a good move for getting the attention of black voters. Aside from telling black voters, “hey, I think you are so fucking stupid you may fall for this bullshit” it probably won’t accomplish much – but: why? In the #MeToo moment we’ve seen a lot of assholes try to repudiate their own decisions by publicly saying “I was wrong” and then botching the landing by failing to address the part where they don’t say “… but I did it anyway.” To me, Bloomberg’s decision to open his mouth about this topic is actually much worse than if he had gone to his grave a resolute authoritarian, saying “it was a tough decision but I made it and maybe now I’d make it differently” or some sort of other self-forgiving bullshit.
That’s the problem – stop-and-frisk was something that Bloomberg defended and expanded for over a decade. It was a racist, unfair, and unconstitutional practice from the beginning. And there was absolutely no way that anyone in authority, who gave it a moment’s thought, could not realize that there were and are solid arguments for and against it. One cannot have a considered opinion on the topic without having done the considering. One cannot defend a practice like that and then suddenly flip around and say “… and I just now realized that it’s been evil all along.” What I’m trying to get at is that being a good person is not a position one can adopt late in life, after decades of support for bad actions.
To me, the most generous possible interpretation of Bloomberg’s flip is that he’s a heartless asshole who was listening to some political consultants and really doesn’t and never has given a shit about the issue. When that is the most generous interpretation, he’s on some shaky ground, indeed. The less generous interpretation is that he always thought stop-and-frisk was a good idea, and he so totally doesn’t give a shit about its impact that he’s willing to throw his own decision under the bus because: power. He might get a little bit more power, by convincing a tiny handful of very gullible people that he’s a decent person after all. I am assuming there are at least a few dozen gullible New Yorkers still on the streets of the city, but the bad news for Bloomberg is that the population of gullible black people has been severely impacted in the last few decades. In other words, Bloomberg has compromised his own immorality for just a few votes.
I’m not sure what would have been an acceptable apology. First off, it would have to address the obvious fact that lots of people told him stop-and-frisk was a bad idea, and it was immoral and unconstitutional. He had that information, yet chose differently. As a billionaire businessman, Bloomberg is probably not used to having to stand in front of a review board and defend his decisions but in this case, he ought to. He’d need to defend his decisions in the face of professional criminologists who have studied the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement that Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton loved so much – criminologists who conclusively argue that it’s not true. The “broken windows” theory is bullshit some asshat pulled out of his butt one fine day, and it has always obviously been bullshit. [wik] [To be fair, I consider most of the social sciences to be bullshit some asshat pulled out of his butt] The point is: there was a lot of debate. Perhaps Bloomberg “had to decide” what to support, but when he made that decision, it hurt other people’s lives in a way that Bloomberg himself has never experienced. An acceptable apology would start with a discussion of that complex decision and would deconstruct it: “I believed that the ‘broken windows’ model as sold by Bratton worked, and gave it a chance so we could look at the results…” Then he’d have to explain why, in the face of continuing attempts to explain that it didn’t work, he supported it anyway. What I’m saying is that he’s got at least a decade’s worth of explaining to do, and you can’t just blanket that with an apology like, “I’m running for office so, sorry. Let’s move on!”
Clearly I don’t think Bloomberg is presidential material. He’s a cowardly old fartbag who should be chewing his cud on a golf course somewhere, with a herd of other old geezers and former dictators in ugly plaid golf pants. But he’s a billionaire; the obvious thing he could do, if he really has realized that stop-and-frisk was a bad idea, would be to drop a $5-billion apology* and start an organization dedicated to legally fighting any stop-and-frisk programs in any other US jurisdiction, and providing legal and legislative support to help out people who wound up being hurt while their constitutional rights were violated.
I think it’s sad that here am I, a nobody with a cup of coffee and a blog, and it took me 15 minutes to figure out something Bloomberg, a $54billionaire politician and authoritarian creep took a decade plus to figure out. Either I’m remarkably smart or he’s remarkably dumb and dishonest. Unfortunately, for me, I suspect it’s the latter.
* I fantasize about such things. But let me say for the record, if Bloomberg wanted to do such a thing, I’d work as a strategist for the project, pro bono. My first recommendation would be to take a long-term approach: find a few hundred of the children of people who were abused by the police during stop-and-frisk, and pay for great educations and tutoring for them, put them through law school, and let them pay it back by destroying those who have done them and theirs wrong. If someone wants to really fix this motherfucker, the way to do it is based on a multi-generational strategy in which the first decades of the program are focused on finding and creating the people who are going to drive it home. That, by the way, is the strategy that the christian right and proto-fascists have been using. Because it works.
Lately I find I am very interested in what I think of as “practical moral reasoning” – trying to pick apart how moral arguments are made and laid out. Considering that I think most such arguments are baseless, it’s a fascinating game of chess played against myself: how can you support or defend a decision without resorting to some kind of authority? As far as I get is drawing clear lines around where the authority kicks in and where facts are relevant. It’s complicated!
I think you’d be very interested in experimental ethics. Most meta-ethics (including the small bit of my own work that involved meta-ethics directly rather than ethics) involves “how should we decide what is ethical”? Experimental ethics attempts to examine “how do we decide what is ethical? Whether that is a good methodology or not, if that’s the method that actual humans actually use, then when persuading people that something is right or wrong, we’re eventually going to have to appeal to that reasoning.
You’re talking about how “authority” consistently crops up in your ethical decision making. While if your ethics tell you you shouldn’t appeal to authority, it’s good to monitor your thinking to notice that when it occurs and understand when and why it is most likely to occur. That’s experimental ethics. Understanding that can help you change (if you want to change) your habits of moral reasoning. And, if nothing else, it’s just plain interesting. At least to me.
> The authoritarian will do that, because it is their authority that matters to them;
> reviewing and possibly un-making a choice contradicts their self-assessment as
> being “right” about the decision.
This is true for everyone, not just authoritarians. Admitting failure, and apologizing sincerely, are largely lost arts, at least here in the west. They say the Japanese know how to apologize, but I don’t pretend to understand such nuances of Japanese culture, and consider that Japanese apologies are just self-serving bullshit wrapped up in a package I don’t understand.
One of the reasons my wife married me is because I can, if I really screw up my courage, count to ten, take a deep breath,
I can apologize, and I can say thank you, in ways that are not just time-filling polite noises. I find that both require tremendous
effort and focus.
… being a good person is not a position one can adopt late in life, after decades of support for bad actions.
Having done a lot of things I regret, if I adopted this understanding I don’t think I would have any choice but to continue acting out my worst urges. Giving up hope of amelioration would probably feel a lot better than my present feeble attempts at self-rehab.
Both perhaps? To remarkable or unremarkable degrees as folks mileages vary probly?
PS. From what I gather whch may be inadequate Bloomberg entered the Democratic nomination race because he was afraid that Biden wa slosing and Sanders and Warren were winnig and may raise his taxes and thsi is his cynical and illthouight pout attempt at thwarting the progressives in the party – by, erm, looking desperate and splitting the “moderate / conservative / Centrist” vote. Which kinda huts the idea that he suppsoedly belives in – whoch kinda supports the ” remarkably dumb and dishonest.”” case.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure this is how most humans operate on most issues, with politicians being a subclass of humans. Most people are only capable of holding strong personal opinions on a handful of issues. For the rest, we go with what’s expedient — what will make our social circle happy, or our family happy, or in the case of politicians, the majority of our voters happy. We saw this with Obama on gay marriage. One of the things I try to evaluate when I try to decide which politician to vote for is which are their core issues that they won’t compromise on, and which ones will they be likely to flip if the winds change. Of course, if they seem to have no core beliefs whatsoever other than “I should be elected,” then that’s a disqualifier. That may be the case with Bloomberg — I don’t care enough about him to find out at this stage.
I’m not sure if a politician who never flips on any issue is even a good thing. Certainly it’s good if they flip from being against me to for me. And isn’t a government that goes along with the will of the populace better than its opposite?
I have made some cynical apologies in my life. A cynical apology means that the person who is apologizing doesn’t feel truly sorry for what they did; instead they are being forced to apologize. In this blog post you described a situation where a powerful person who has acted like an asshole is forced to apologize, because the population disapproves of his actions. But it can also go the other way—a powerless person is being forced to apologize to some bully in a situation where they never did anything wrong in the first place. Consider domestic violence, for example. A parent does something stupid, shit happens, but somehow the child is demanded to apologize. Or the spouse who gets beaten up has to apologize for angering the abuser. I have never experienced serious domestic violence in my life, but there have been attempts to bully me into apologizing. For example, back when I was 17 I got stuck in a dysfunctional relationship. My boyfriend failed to keep a promise and lied to me. I complained about how I dislike the way I’m being treated. He got angry and started yelling at me. He expected me to apologize for, gasp, daring to express dissatisfaction about something he had done. I broke up with that guy, but I have made plenty of cynical/sarcastic apologies to my mother (ditching a parent isn’t as simple as ditching a problematic boyfriend).
A refusal to decide is still a decision with real life consequences for other people.
Let’s say a transgender person wants a surgery. They approach somebody who works for the government and can make decisions about what healthcare procedures are allowed or forbidden. The government employee doesn’t want to decide, it’s a hard decision for them personally. So they go fishing and ignore the transgender person’s letter. They refuse to make any decision. As a result the transgender person is denied the surgery, because it never got approved. In this case refusing to decide has an identical end result as deciding to forbid the surgery. (This is a real example. When I requested a surgery, no doctor or government employee wanted to approve it, telling me to go somewhere else instead.)
Many people change their opinions during their lifetime. For example, some children are raised by homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic and racist parents, and after growing up they take some time to figure out that everything they were taught as children was wrong. In general, changing one’s opinions about politics is common, especially among younger people who haven’t had much time to consider all those opinions they acquired from their parents and teachers.
Of course, if an elderly person decides to change his opinions in order to run for public office, I’ll be extremely suspicious. Like you, I will also assume the worst about him. I’m not defending this particular billionaire asshole, I just disagree with your overall attitude, because it might be problematic in other cases.
My guess is that he could be racist. Supporting stop-and-frisk policies that hurt people of color make sense only if a person is a racist and believes that people of color are dangerous and more prone to commit crimes and thus must be monitored for the sake of white people’s safety.
If you have to resort to some authority in order to support a moral argument, then your argument is very weak. Instead I’d defend moral arguments by talking about consequences of various actions, how they increase or decrease the wellbeing of sentient creatures, for example, how stop-and-frisk laws harm people of color. Or I’d talk about things people value, like fairness, equality, freedom. For example, stop-and-frisk laws treat people unequally and infringe the victim’s freedom; such laws are also unfair.
@ ^ Andreas Avester : Your comment about the forced and insincere apologies reminds me of this classic fictional example from the Babylon 5 series where Captain Sheridan makes a forced apology to the Centauri govt :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8vA0ANTUM0
FWIW. It makes sense in the context of the episode and wider story which youcan glean a bit of from here :
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/044.html
& here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6GhW1dFDVs
So much does depend on context.
Yes. I think there’s no doubt that Bloomberg is at least somewhat racist given the policy he espoused and its effects in practice and the near inevitable cultural racism that most priviledged white people (myself included) soak in over the years. There’s an informative good New York Times Op-ed piece “You Must Never Vote for Bloomberg – (subtitled) His expansion of the notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program is a complete and nonnegotiable deal breaker.” by Opinion Columnist Charles M. Blow published 10th Nov. 2019 available online which notes :
Given the recent nature of Bloomberg’s defense of the policy his apology now would have to be a lot clearer and powerful and convincing to make me think it sincere and anything other than a cynical political exercise. I think Bloomberg is still probly racist although not openly so. He’s no Klansman but he’s certainly NOT free of the effects of sub-conscious racism and maybe even some degree of conscous racism too and he’s not actively opposing and confronting racism for sure. Not that I am any expert but FWIW.
***
@ 5. Apologies for all my typos there. I was tired & minutes away from going to sleep at the time – & I suck at typing at the best of times. Hope yáll managed to follow it okay. Basic essence – Bloomberg is only in the race because he is worried a progressive probly Sanders or Warren will win the nomination then the election and then he’ll need to pay more tax. Cynical on my part maybe. Also the idea that by running he could actually win and won’t be actually hurting his own “centrist / moderate” factions cause in possibly taking a few votes off Biden or other more significant candidates suggest he’s also “..remarkably dumb and dishonest.”
@3.Pierce R. Butler :
Maybe, maybe not. You’d perhaps always know or maybe feel and understand that that was what you’d done and that you were giving up on being better and following those worse urges? Either way I wouldn’t recommend it & like you, don’t accept that understanding.
As for the quote there are some, not many but some counter examples to that notably George Wallace as Jim Wright observes in a Stonekettle Station blog post here :
http://www.stonekettle.com/2016/09/greatness-again.html
I also hope and try to be a similar case albeit at a much low level of prominece myself. Of course, fictionally / mythologically speaking there’s none other than Darth Vader too! So, I’d say it can always happen even if it only rarely does.
PS. Link to the anti-Bloomberg NYT op-ed by Charles M. Blow mentioned in 8 here :
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/michael-bloomberg.html
Worth reading in full.
I, for one, think Bloomberg’s apology is perfectly sincere. He recently realized it was wrong to institute and continue stop-and-frisk, because it turns out it now hurts his chances in the Democratic primary. I’m sure he genuinely regrets doing it, from this point of view.
Also, if he somehow wins the nomination, wouldn’t having done a pretty massive regressive thing help him in the general election? He would have ads about how brave he was to order his goons to terrorize those obviously guilty-looking people. If only there was a way to know the views of individuals, so that those ads would display only to people who appreciated that kind of thing, while not reminding the others about his vile policy at all. (You could really have your cake and eat it too, with that kind of technology.)
I have never heard of the “broken windows theory” of crime. What a horrible mess! Reminds me of EvoPsych circlical say-so.
What an utter racist asshole to even dare to say “Sorry”.
avalus@#11:
I have never heard of the “broken windows theory” of crime. What a horrible mess! Reminds me of EvoPsych circlical say-so.L
It was huge for decades. Part of what gave it “legs” was that implementing stop-and-frisk and “arrest everybody for everything” in NYC coincided with a drop in crime. Some criminologists mentioned that economic changes and decriminalization/de-enforcement of some things as crimes probably had much more to do with the drop in crime rates than stop-and-frisk. Another thing was that some areas of the city are gentrifying rapidly and that changes the crime mix, too.
The point is that Bloomberg, Giuliani, and Bratton had ample opportunity and input to learn about whether the theory was well-founded and whether crime was actually improving. But they didn’t. Why? I hypothesize that they didn’t give a shit because it was just brown people’s lives being jacked up. Hard to prove that, though.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden@#1:
think you’d be very interested in experimental ethics. Most meta-ethics (including the small bit of my own work that involved meta-ethics directly rather than ethics) involves “how should we decide what is ethical”? Experimental ethics attempts to examine “how do we decide what is ethical? Whether that is a good methodology or not, if that’s the method that actual humans actually use, then when persuading people that something is right or wrong, we’re eventually going to have to appeal to that reasoning.
Interesting! Do you recommend any particular book or vein of information, or should I just self-study? I find it’s a crapshoot when I do that because the internet has become such a mountain of disinformation that it’s awkward when you go to bone up on something and it turns out that you’ve actually started reading a secret scientologist website.
You’re talking about how “authority” consistently crops up in your ethical decision making. While if your ethics tell you you shouldn’t appeal to authority, it’s good to monitor your thinking to notice that when it occurs and understand when and why it is most likely to occur. That’s experimental ethics.
I may have mis-explained myself. I am concerned about authority and I try to notice it in anyone> since I consider arguments based on authority to be ill-founded. Well, more precisely, arguments based on authority are often ill-founded but sometimes are a concealing proxy for arguments based on force. “The gods favor King Thag and if the favor of the gods is not convincing enough for you, King Thag’s palace guard would be happy to show you how well their spears work.” As a proper nihilist, I am unconvinced of the validity of authority because authority appears to me to be self-refuting: you would not have to lean on authority if you had good arguments in favor of an action based on fact and analysis of self-interest. I.e.: nobody needs to say “King Thag says there is a tsunami coming, RUN!” – who gives a fuck what King Thag says in that situation, the tsunami will make its own argument based on its own facts.
That’s another way of saying that if Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” support was based on solid enough facts, the people on the neighborhoods where it was applied should have been eager and grateful. But somehow that was not the case.
cvoinescu@#10:
I, for one, think Bloomberg’s apology is perfectly sincere. He recently realized it was wrong to institute and continue stop-and-frisk, because it turns out it now hurts his chances in the Democratic primary. I’m sure he genuinely regrets doing it, from this point of view.
I love cynicism. Yours is so pure I could make a camera lens out of it.
I still reject the idea that Bloomberg is sincere, because he’s being dishonest about it. If he did a press release saying, “I have decided I no longer support stop and frisk because I am a cynical old fuck who is running for office” he might actually get my vote because he’s probably being more honest than any of the other political shitweasels running for the democratic nomination. [except Bernie: Bernie appears to be pretty honest for a politician]
Off the top of my head, Philippa Foot mentored some people doing early experimental ethics and I think co-edited some of the early collections that are worth reading, but the field has actually grown and matured quite a bit since the 60s when it first appeared as a notion and even since 1990ish when it began to be something that might be called a “field”, so more of the things that would be best are recent. In fact, Foot’s involvement really was more an outgrowth of her interest in applied ethics which she still studied in more traditional ways than experiment. As I said, it was more the folks whom she mentored and/or inspired.
Another interesting bit to know is that this grew out of moral ethnographic anthropology. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re not alone. The basics are these: there were people investigating how moral decisions were being made in different cultures. Foot was actually someone interested in this and her version of the Trolley Problem (which she is often credited with inventing, but really she just dusted off a similar old problem and then made it popular) became a question that was asked by ethnographers when interacting with a number of persons from a number of cultures around the world. The idea was to catalog whether or not there were inter-cultural differences in how a culture’s members tend to solve moral problems. Although this wasn’t experimentation per se, good ethnographic observations are usable data, not mere anecdotes. The problem came in interpretation, with some people eventually realizing that they were assuming that they knew why a person gave a particular answer when in fact there might be several possible routes of moral reasoning that could get one to an answer insignificantly different from other answers given by other persons. The decision to try actual experimentation was (at least for some early experimenters) an attempt to shift variables in ways that revealed how a person arrived at an answer, not merely what answer they landed upon. It was hoped that experimental moral philosophy or experimental ethics could help WEIRD researchers neutralize their own biases when attempting to interpret, among other things, just these kinds of intercultural differences.
Sad to say, but most of the best things to read in this area are probably from the last 10-15 years and about 12-15 years ago was when I stopped buying books of this kind. Though I’ve read journal papers, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend any of them without more background, and anyway I wouldn’t remember the titles of specific articles without looking them up again.
Give me a couple days and I’ll try to dig out some old books and consider which ones might be best, and maybe I’ll look up a bit of what’s current as well. Off the top of my head, I can’t even think of who the leading researchers might be just now.
I am generally cynical about apologies. I tend to think they’re made to make the person doing the apologizing feel better or gain some advantage. Some examples from real life:
“I’m sorry I missed your birthday, but you didn’t remind me. I feel bad about it (insert self-serving tears here)”. – Now, I’m expected to forgive and forget and make him feel better, so he can carry on unburdened.
Also,
“I’m sorry you were scared yesterday when I grabbed you from behind. Your skirt was riding up, and I was just being playful, It won’t happen again, so please don’t tell anyone else.” Insincere apologies are common with sexual abuse. You made me do it – You were provocative. It’s a misunderstanding, I’m not a bad guy.”
Blomberg’s apology sounds the same to me. He wants something, and his apology is not sincere. He didn’t mention any of the consequences of his action, nor did he apologize to the people he hurt. He wants forgiveness without action. Forgiving is a verb and requires action from the person receiving the apology – they are meant to forgive and forget. An apology should also require action to be sincere.
Marcus@#14:
I love cynicism. Yours is so pure I could make a camera lens out of it.
Coming from you, this is high praise indeed. Thank you!
I don’t believe Bloomberg is sincere for a moment, either.
“Apology” appears to be commonly confused with “PR Statement”.
Curious Digressions@#18:
“Apology” appears to be commonly confused with “PR Statement”.
That’s a 100% reliable way to tell if the apologizer let their marketing or PR department come up with the apology.
Fuck Bloomberg.