The Promise and Pitfalls of Apology Trudy Govier and Wilhelm Verwoerd Introduction In recent years, apologies have become increasingly prominent in public life. Striking public apologies include that of the Japanese government, which apologized to Korean “comfort women” forced into prostitution during World War II; British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s apology to the Irish people for the nineteenth-century potato famine; Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s apology to the native people of Canada for abuses in government- sponsored residential schools; and the apology extended by Ontario Premier Mike Harris to the three surviving Dionne quintuplets for exploitation of their childhood and abuse of their trust fund. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a moral and political experiment on a vast scale. 1 Contemporary South African pol- itics in particular offers many examples of individuals and institutions strug- gling to make a moral response to the enormous evils that constituted apartheid. 2 The TRC transcripts provide examples of sincere and profoundly important apologies, illustrating the promise of apology as an important step toward rectifying relationships disrupted by wrongdoing. 3 They also provide illustrations of apologies severely flawed by hypocrisy, grandstanding, and denial. Our central thesis is that it is through acknowledgment that the importance of apologies to victims, and their power as a step toward reconciliation, can be explained. We discuss the relationship between apology and the means that perpetrator individuals or groups may employ to make amends to victims harmed by wrongdoing. We also seek to clarify the relationship between individual and institutional apologies. Throughout we draw on material from the proceedings of the TRC to highlight some of the pitfalls of public apologies. Dictionary entries for “apology” reveal three basic senses: the apology as a defense (as in Socrates’ Apology), the apology as excuse or account (“Sorry I was late, but I was interrupted just as I was leaving”), and the moral apology, which is an expression of sorrow for moral wrongdoing (“I am profoundly sorry I injured you”). The moral apology implies a request for forgiveness and is an initiative toward reconciliation. In this paper, we are concerned with moral apologies. We are not concerned with apologies for small matters such as arriving on a delayed flight or spilling fruit juice on a freshly washed floor. In particular, we are interested in public moral apologies for serious wrongdoing. A moral apology involves an admission of wrongdoing and will be weakened if it includes attempted justifications or excuses. A public apology is one that JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 2002, 67–82. © 2002 Blackwell Publishers, Inc.