Abstract
Are there wrongs for which states cannot apologise? In this chapter, I argue that the answer is ‘Yes’. I begin with the simple observation that reasoning as a state official requires a conception of what officials do, and so a conception of what is — and is not — properly undertaken on behalf of the state. To act as an official, then, requires a theory of what happens in a well functioning state: it requires a normative theory of the state. Whether state officials can recognise their own actions or the actions of past state officials as wrongs for which apology is required will depend on their theory of the ends and interests that state actors may, and must, have. What officials believe to be necessary for a state to be a good example of its kind will affect what they recognise as outside the bounds of what a state official ought to do.
The author thanks Mihaela Mihai, Mathias Thaler, Alice MacLachlan and Matt James for insights and comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Notes
On this, see Jean Hampton, ‘Rethinking Reason’, American Philosophical Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1992): 219–236;
Jean Hampton, The Authority of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
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For a discussion of this in the context of debates about public reason see Cindy Holder, ‘Rethinking Political Justification’, Journal of Value Inquiry 38 (2004): 511–529.
On this see Dennis Thompson, Political Ethics and Public Office (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987);
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On this, see Jane Jenson and Susan D. Philips, ‘Redesigning the Canadian Citizenship Regime: Remaking the Institutions of Representation’, in Citizenship, Markets, and the State, ed. Colin Crouch, Klaus Eder, and Damian Tambini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69–89;
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Tina Loo, ‘Dan Cranmer’s Potlatch: Law as Coercion, Symbol, and Rhetoric in British Columbia, 1884–1951’, Canadian Historical Review 2 (1992): 125–165.
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© 2014 Cindy Holder
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Holder, C. (2014). Reasoning Like a State: Integration and the Limits of Official Regret. In: Mihai, M., Thaler, M. (eds) On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies. Rhetoric, Politics and Society Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343727_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343727_12
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