I follow a similar policy of not apologizing unless I really mean it, and meaning it for me is acknowledging that I am ethically culpable for a harm caused. By this I mean something like I knew enough to have done otherwise, but through negligence or motivated reasoning either actively caused harm or through inaction allowed a harm to occur. In those cases an apology seems warranted.
I don’t apologize for lots of things, though. If I was ignorant of information that would have allowed me to avoid the harm and then I learn about it, there’s no reason to apologize, but there is need to acknowledge that I would have acted otherwise had I known and to publicly make that update. I think this serves much of the purpose of apology, but also recognizes there’s nothing for me to regret: I did the best I could at still failed and that’s okay.
(Of course, the real answer is that we all always do our best and couldn’t have done anything other than what we did, so none of us need ever regret anything, but that’s operating at the wrong level of abstraction. Apologies exist in the social ontology and need to deal with regret that can appear there even if there’s no causal regret because there is no free will.)
I follow a similar policy of not apologizing unless I really mean it, and meaning it for me is acknowledging that I am ethically culpable for a harm caused. By this I mean something like I knew enough to have done otherwise, but through negligence or motivated reasoning either actively caused harm or through inaction allowed a harm to occur. In those cases an apology seems warranted.
I don’t apologize for lots of things, though. If I was ignorant of information that would have allowed me to avoid the harm and then I learn about it, there’s no reason to apologize, but there is need to acknowledge that I would have acted otherwise had I known and to publicly make that update. I think this serves much of the purpose of apology, but also recognizes there’s nothing for me to regret: I did the best I could at still failed and that’s okay.
(Of course, the real answer is that we all always do our best and couldn’t have done anything other than what we did, so none of us need ever regret anything, but that’s operating at the wrong level of abstraction. Apologies exist in the social ontology and need to deal with regret that can appear there even if there’s no causal regret because there is no free will.)