Time and date
Wednesday, 3 June 2026, 16:30 – 18:15
Venue
In-person: Lecture Theatre, The H B Allen Centre, 25 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN 📍 Find the venue on Google Maps
And online via Microsoft Webinars (link in registration).
Series title | Moral Pressures: Bending Time, Shaping Wills
Lecture 2 ‘Say you’re sorry!’ Apology as Foucauldian Avowal
Description
From childhood we learn what apology is through learning it can be required of us when we do wrong. Apology is something a wronged party has the moral right to demand from a wrongdoer. I substantiate the intuition that the practice of apology has essential moral value, because it confirms what Communicative Blame aims at—shared moral understanding—and it does so with some reparative commitment. The practice of demanding apology inherits the value of apology itself, but has the added value that it specifically empowers those who have been wronged to take matters into their own hands and set what is needed for moral repair. However, our starting intuition about the value of demanding apology has a darker flipside, for we also sense it is a practice that can all too easily deteriorate into moral coercion. I aim to substantiate this flipside intuition too, proposing we understand demanded apology as the ‘strange’ speech act which Foucault discerns as operative through many historical contexts: ‘avowal’ (aveu). Understanding that apology is a sub-species of Foucauldian avowal, I argue, provides a philosophical model of demanded apology that keeps both its special moral value and its inherent tendency to deterioration into coercion simultaneously in view.
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