 Waiting for forgiveness and apology. Professor Matt Miranda Frickr from CUNY Graduate Centre, City University of New York, based in Sheffield, is that right? That used to be a Sheffield, you're now in New York. You're now in New York, I did try to get that right. Professor Blaine Pettergrove from Glasgow University and Professor Eleanor mason, senior lecturer in philosophy at Edinburgh. I've got that right now. The first to speak will be Professor Heshygrove. So we'll have the light side for that. Thank you so much for being in attendance. I'm looking forward to our conversation together. I'll just want to talk about prettiness. Again, there's been a handful of people who find themselves approaching the lectern saying that everything you said pre-supposes that we know what we're talking about when we're talking about moral stuff. That we know where our moral decisions come from and when they're reliable. And I'm not sure that I know any of those things. So there's a question. So tonight, perhaps foolishly, I'm going to try and think about the question of prettiness and apology in relationship to a particular approach to theorizing about where ethics comes from. And the urgent question is, one that has a nice heritage going back at least to the 17th century in the work of Frederick Shastard. Also, it's developed more fully by Gloucester's own charitable philosophy and gets popularized by this other day of the year. Hugh, that's what I believe in his goodness, makes a following suggestion. When we're thinking about moral matters, we shouldn't be chiefly focused on reasoning. Instead, we should be focused on feeling, on emotion, or what he called passion. Suggesting that morality is more properly felt. Than judged of. In his characteristically dramatic form, another place that he is, he puts it the following. Suggesting that reason is and only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. This thought was echoed a few years later on the other side of the Atlantic by Thomas Dixon. At the same time Adam Smith is developing his own moral theory, rooted in the sentiments, and each of them, like Hugh, and I was just sitting in the shaft's right of boredom, thought that we should be looking at our emotions to explain where our moral ideas come from and how we come to make judgments about rights and wrongs, goods and bads, odds and but nots. That research program has recently been picked up again by a number of researchers who are drawing on work in neuroscience. In particular, they're drawing on a conception of the human brain that is described in terms of two processes. Dual process theory suggests that we have two ways of engaging with the world and processing information we perceive from the world. One of these is quick and dirty and intuitive and is largely driven by evolutionarily early bits of the brain. Another is slower or deliberative and largely driven by oceanally later bits of the brain. The question then is, if you think this is how the line works, which of these is doing ahead lifting when we make judgments about moral stuff? A number of psychologists have attended to design experiments to test out which of these might be more active at the time that we're making moral judgments? One of these is a guy named Jonathan Haight who, in one of his tests, decided to ask people to carry either a light or a heavy cognitive load. The cognitive load in question for the light case was he would just ask people to remember the number seven. For the heavy case, he would ask them to remember seven digit numbers, 7250475. Characteristically, if you're carrying a heavy cognitive load, then if the task figure set requires the use of a lot of deliberative thoughts, you will slow down in your processing of whatever the task is that you consent. Whereas if you don't have to use a lot of deliberative thoughts, you'll be able to answer favorably. One of the interesting things to come out of his experiments was that it did not matter whether you were carrying a heavy cognitive load or a light cognitive load, people made moral judgments at the same speed. A second kind of experiment that Haight has designed involves what he calls moral done facting. What he does is he gives his subjects a moral scenario and asks them to make a judgment about what's going on in that scenario and whether it's right or wrong. Characteristically, he gives them scenarios that they will judge to be wrong. He asks them for their reasons, they give their reasons, and then he redesigns the scenario in a way that eliminates or addresses those concerns. So, one example is an example of a medical student who is currently assigned to work with a cadaver, and this medical student finds herself wondering what human flesh tastes like. Because she has a particular desire to become a cadaver, but she's just curious, she's read about cannibalism, sounds kind of weird, and there's a fresh body that's just been healed in and they're not going to miss a plastic. So, she logs off a bit and she takes it home and she curts it really well to make sure that any germs or contaminants are taken care of and she makes sure that nobody's going to find out about this so that public trash won't be undermined in the hospital system or the medical training system, etc. So, he designs it to take away all of the things that you might point to and say that it's wrong. And then he presents subjects within it and characteristically the subjects respond in a way that your faces are showing you respond, right? Because most of you are doing something like this. What he thinks this suggests is that what's doing the work, as people are making a judgment about this case, isn't the set of reasons that they characteristically would offer and ask why the thing is wrong. Instead, he thinks what highlights is that they have emotional reaction and that emotional reaction is what determines the moral judgment they make. That reaction might be that it's disrespectful or typically that it's disgusting. Designed several of these, one involves inviting students to drink a glass of juice that has a roach in it. Lots of these experiments are done under graduates mostly in the United States and he offers them a couple of dollars in exchange for drinking the roach juice and then tells them, no, I know you're going to turn your head up at the thought of drinking juice that has this roach in it, but this roach has been raised in a lab environment in a hermetically sealed area where you did not have any exposure to germs or disease. A little more, adequate approach was humanely terminated. It was exposed to radiation but it would eliminate any possible germs. This is the clearest thing your lips will ever touch. Still, almost none of his subjects are willing to take the two to five dollars he's offering them in exchange for drinking this glass of juice of the roach in it. A third scenario that he's designed is aimed at seven ones at soul. What he does is he asks a group of students if they think you have soul and he looks at the hands of the air, okay, how many of you think humans don't have souls and I don't understand a hand to open and then only conducts the experiment on those who are in the second group who don't think that they have soul? So he then offers them a contract whereby they agree to sell their soul in exchange for two dollars or five dollars or ten dollars and even ten dollars he can't give these students that assign on the bottom line to give away this thing they don't think exists. So his question is why exactly are these responses so persistent and the answer he comes to is the following, that people in these experiments made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made. In other words, he thinks the reason given in the process is fundamentally a role like the role of C.J. Craig in the fictional tales of the West Wing where her role is out of the press secretary. The objective of reasoning is to sell someone else on what you have independently decided on other problems. To make allies and friends to recruit them to think about and feel about a scenario in the same way that you do. Now, there are a number of ways in which one might push back against Jonathanite's experiments and one might wonder whether he has in fact isolated the variables in the way that he thinks he has. I'm just going to set those to one side because my project isn't to convince you that moral judgment is grounded in motion. My project is just to say, here's one story with some plausible but not yet decisive evidence that has been developed in its support and you might be able to then think about some of our common responses to wrongdoing by making use of this resource. It can explain some of the attitudes that it had when we find ourselves in context where somebody is wrong. So, the next step in thinking at this is just to notice that there's a really strong and obvious connection between some of our moral judgments and emotions. Take the following kinds of judgment. The judgment that something is irritating. That's a judgment that is not going to be in its favor. You're not endorsing it when you say that's irritating. And obviously you're making an appeal to the emotion of irritation. Or to say that's an appeal. Again, you're making an appeal to an emotional state. To say that's funny or amusing again has built into it a claim about the goodness of the thing and the emotional response that people characteristically had to that kind of thing. And so, for lots of the terms of rule or discipline that we use in a big life we have already on the face of the terms you may employ and appeal to an emotional condition. The question is, is there a way to get to some other moral terms that we use from an emotional base? Terms that don't wear emotions on their face in a way that the irritable or the horrendous wear their emotions in the term itself. And one proposal is a proposal that we ought to be angry at wrongdoers. That anger is a fitting response to wrongdoing. So, you have on the screen a number of champions of this position. We've got Maisha Cherry and Charles Griswald. Charles is at Boston University. Maisha Cherry is at the University of California at British Science. Mike Romney is at the University of California at Los Angeles. Tara Smith is at the University of Texas. David Schumacher is at Tulane and Jeff Murphy at Arizona State University have all argued that the appropriate response, the fitting response to being wronged or to seeing others wronged is some form of anger. And so, you might time tie wrongness to experience designer the same way that might tie irritating to irritation or enviable to envy. If this is your story then it loses though there's a particular problem that is going to arise for anybody who's speaking about forgiving a wrongdoer. Why? Well, the opening step in the argument is that anger is the fitting response to wrongdoing and the next step is to note that forgiving involves letting go of anger. It may involve more than that we can talk at greater length in the question time if you want to hear additional discussions of what else might be involved in forgiving but in most of the instances really naturally think of where someone is forgiving someone else there's been some anger involved in the scenario at some stage and there's a letting go of that anger that's happening at a later stage. Anger is the fitting response to wrongdoing and forgiving involves letting go of anger then forgiving involves letting go of the fitting response to wrongdoing. And letting go of the fitting response to something is unfitting. So, forgiving is unfitting. That's the worry. If you're going to tie anger to wrongness in this way and your judgment of the wrongness of the thing involves you feeling anger about that thing then it looks as though forgiving, letting go of that anger is in some way abandoning the fitting response. But never fear there's a way to save this and to continue to map on some of the intuitions we have about places where it's a little bit different and we approve of it. So, one way to do this is to think about apologies. When the wrongdoer is apologised and made amends anger is no longer fitting and letting go of an unfitting response is fitting. Forgiving involves letting go of anger as we just noted so when the wrongdoer is apologised and made amends forgiveness is fitting. So, we can explain why we might be worried about somebody's forgiving or that looks like an unfitting response and why we might approve of someone's forgiving when the other party is apologised and made amends for the wrong thing. I want to problematise this and I'll do so quickly. One reason I want to problematise this is that the story that we're telling is one built around an assumption that there's one fitting response to the circumstances we find ourselves in but of course that's seldom the case. In many, maybe most situations where an agent has been wronged she should feel a number of different attitudes. If she sees this as an expression of frustration on the part of the other individual who's doing the wrong and as an act of last resort she might feel compassion for the circumstance in which they find themselves or if it's someone she knows and has admired who in this action has revealed a deep character flaw the fitting response might be a sadness at the weakness that has been displayed. If she realises that she does actually in that same way yesterday to somebody else then what she might feel is chagrin at her own behaviour. Or if the person you've done along is someone in normal development she's responsible for she might feel excitement at the teaching moment that has just presented itself. And if the wrongdoer is someone she loves but recognises is flawed she might just carry on loving them or hoping for their transformation etc. There are different responses and the thing to note is these responses don't play well together. So a human agent can't feel all of these emotions at the same time they have different facial expressions they have different skin conductins they have different blood pressure associated with them that's just thinking about two negative responses sadness and anger they have different ways of processing information of making predictions etc. So what we get is even with two closely aligned emotions we get a kind of conflict between them if we take some of the other emotions that I just mentioned well then the conflicts become more robust anger sees its focal object as something negative whereas hope sees its focal object as something positive the desires involved are different that an object sufferer is and anger is desiring whereas to alleviate suffering is what compassion is desiring and they come with different world authorities and action tendencies different physiology and different phenomenology. If it's the case that there are many situations in which multiple emotions are fitting and a single human agent can't feel all of these emotions at the same time and you think why is can I can't say you want to do something that is impossible for you to do is the thought then it's not the case that the virtuous agent ought to feel all of the attitudes that fit the situation that means that anger is one of the possibilities on the table but it's only one of the possibilities but if we still have an open question as to how will we become what we ought to feel and how will we ought to respond and front us but response in the very least even if it's rooted in some sort of emotional profile can't be one where we feel anger and we persist in feeling anger until the other party has done something to make themselves better at least we can't insist on that without offering an additional argument to say anger is the emotional response that is most fitting in certain circumstances like this trumps compassion and love and hope and excitement and sadness and the like last observation that last observation just notes there's an interesting relationship between anger and another emotion and angry fear the circumstances in which people are characteristically most angry are circumstances in which they feel most powerless and circumstances in which they feel their powerlessness as a vulnerability to continue aggression from another so in these contexts if you can eliminate fear often quite independently if anything else that's going on in the circumstances you can eliminate anger so any story about fitting attitudes in the aftermath of wrongs will need to pay attention to fear as well as to anger why is this interesting well here's one reason it's interesting no one has tried to argue that a victim's fear ought to persist until the wrongdoer has made amends or has repented of the wrong that they've done whereas lots of people have tried to argue that anger ought to persist until the wrongdoer has repented furthermore no one has argued that the accuracy or the utility of fear pose an objection to anyone who wants to develop courage which would involve overcoming or setting aside fear even in the face of objects fitting objects of fear namely dangerous ones why is this interesting well there are lots of people who have argued you shouldn't let go of your anger and tell the other party has repented and has made amends because anger's a fitting response to wrongdoers and you can't let go of that fitting response but notice in relation to another kind of emotion meaning fear we're happy to say it's okay to let go of that fitting response sometimes in fact it's virtuous to let go of that fitting response why well because we think it's possible for someone to overcome their fear without thereby becoming blind to moral matters that stand in front of them the goods or the bads that pose dangers to them the answer then of all this is just the following part even if you want to tell a story where moral judgment is rooted in emotion the story is going to need to be more complex than just this is a fitting object of that attitude therefore feel that attitude because there are too many other attitudes and there are too many other cases like the fear case where we think it's okay to let go of the fitting attitude that indeed maybe it's even virtuous why do we think it might be good to let go of it well there are lots of reasons but many of these reasons have to do with a kind of thing that David King was interested in way back at the beginning which is that when people do this when they let go of their anger even when the other person hasn't made it easy to let go of their anger we look at them and we think good on isn't that impressive that they were able to pass this and move on and so at least sometimes when agents are able to let go of that fitting response what we find ourselves doing is approving that emotion approval is what King thinks helps us identify the virtues and that needs to go in our taxonomy alongside these other fitting emotions in some complex way that I haven't yet spelled out to help us determine when we ought or ought not judge and feel certain ways about certain contexts thanks we'll take this idea forward thank you thank you very much okay so doctors are doing when they talk about things like blame, apology, forgiveness they're taking an idea that's used commonly and kind of looking at the way it's actually used and then trying to improve on that so when you actually use this comes out to be a mess so here's some neat thing up that we're going to do here's a target here's a way that it will be better to use it so more consistent more interesting, more useful something like that so that's what we're doing when we talk about things like blame, apology, forgiveness we're thinking what can we say to make this a bit neater, a bit more interesting a bit more useful so I've done a lot of work thinking about blame and blameworthiness the way that we could use those concepts better and say more interesting things and fit them together but I haven't really thought much about forgiveness and I haven't done any very serious work on forgiveness and so I was asked to talk about forgiveness I said well I should think about forgiveness because I'm thinking about blame I'm thinking about apology and these things seem connected right so I should think about forgiveness so I started thinking about forgiveness and then I realized I don't really think that forgiveness is a thing actually I think we use this idea, we use the word sometimes, that when I try to drill down into it and think about what it might be and how am I going to do better the conclusion I actually have to this is that it's supposed to get rid of that idea it's not one of a good one it's not a useful one so I'm going to try very briefly to defend that conclusion today so I'm going to start with just some observations about how we actually use the notion of forgiveness and they aren't really expensive but hopefully they're interesting to think about so why think about the phrase I forgive you has anybody ever said that to you and how did you feel so I think somebody using the phrase I forgive you comes across as a parody purpose that what what how did you do something wrong and you know you did something wrong somebody saying I forgive you man I remember just sort of awful so there's just a little bit of data what's going on there why would that be second thing I have young children and I've talked in a laugh about apology so you've got to apologise no not like that you've got to properly apologise you've got to mean it there's a lot of substance in the idea of apology and I've talked about blame too so blame is what they bring to me I might have imposed apology on that blame they bring to me or blame something else so I'm trying to teach them how to blame in a sensible way and when to blame as a product in these these ideas that I'm giving to them are not complex and philosophical but they're un-deal and they are as something relaxing on as a something important but we know too well about forgiveness so I don't bring it to them and they don't bring it to me forgiveness just doesn't come into our everyday lives now maybe I'm a parent I should be bringing it to them but somehow it seems to me forgiveness is something that's much more of a grown-up thing it's basically when people have affairs that's what we do about forgiveness and you know my kids are just going to need to get into that so again that's just an observation and it's a bit of data but maybe we could bind some of the useful forgiveness that will make sense to all of this so on to philosophical ways of meeting up the idea this comes from Christian Bluffer and this distinction is I think sort of commonly used there's two different dates first of all that we might mean by forgiveness so is forgiveness as a formative so that's the I forgive you I hear by forgive you in saying these words I have changed the situation you are now forgiven so that's one thing and then forgiveness go to the heart which is what Graham was talking about the letting go the rest of the couple of things about the formative idea so I'm skeptical that this is something that individuals can do it seems to me that this is an idea that's a slide however or borrowed from a religious or legal model so in a religious model you've got someone who's got authority so they have some kind of authority to forgive you, to make things different to alter your status in a kind of divine order in a legal model I think it's very easy to understand here are the things that would have happened but now you've been pardoned and I have some kind of legal authority to do that you've been pardoned then your faith is now different legally so you've got a religious absolution model or this legal pardon at all but I don't have that status with respect to other people who are just other individuals but I think that's why it's sense of confidence it's like you're pretending to an authority that you don't have so I think I'm not going to talk more about that we should just kind of abandon that it's time to take that seriously there's some of the mistake about saying I forgive you I mean that's also kind of backed up by the fact that it's much more common to talk about forgiveness than the person I have to forgive haven't you forgiven him? yes I have, I have to forgive him so I think a more promising model for understanding what's going on here is the from the heart model so that's what happens is the question for it and that is the what I'm going to talk about is letting go so on this model what's happened is that it changed your feelings about the situation so you're not angry or you're not resentful anymore okay so I think when we talk about that there are again various things that we might mean within that model so one thing that we might mean and I think this is common for me to talk about forgiveness in the past tense is that I have let go so in this sort of sense you can even discover that we've forgiven somebody you can say you know how do you feel about your ex and what he did at the beginning I'm over it I can go for lunch I'll be just fine so I can discover that by myself but although I didn't use it like that I think when we think about it on reflection we probably want to say no that's not we forgiveness because that just sort of happened and it happened to me it just kind of happened it wasn't voluntary it wasn't deliberate and what we're looking for if you think about the concept forgiveness as opposed to just changing the way that you feel is we're looking for something that you did deliberately something that you chose to do so I have forgiven him if it is a property shouldn't be an action of yours shouldn't just be something that happened to you and I think it should be something that you do for a reason so again I think that this was being embarrassing that it shouldn't just be something that you just do when I walked back I didn't have any reason to do that it should be something that you do for reasons it should be articulate should be something that makes sense this is what I chose to do and I have a reason to do this was the question what would the reason be so one kind of reason that I think would be a good reason to let go resentment is it's bad for you anger eats you up it's it's not nice to be angry with people so I think that's one thing that people need when they say you know I forgive them I did it because I was just eaten up and it wasn't good and again it doesn't quite capture what we want that's the one kind of reason I mean it's a good reason to let go of anger but it doesn't quite capture the things that we were sort of looking for so how about this alright I let go of the anger and the resentment because we had to move forward with our relationships so we had to reconcile we had to reason that reconciliation I had to let go and I had to do that okay that's a good thing to do and it's a thing people do and it's a thing people talk about as a beginner again it doesn't really look like the right sort of thing to use again it's too pragmatic it doesn't have the right kind of sort of moral element to it so I'm trying to make sure that we're latching on to the concept that we started with and not changing it too much what I need to think is something that makes sense or a sort of commitment but right I'm going to give you the word of the law that you force where I force where resentment it's not just a therapeutic way it's not something you just do so you can get along better it's like a commitment I'm going to force where resentment and what reasons to do it so that's I think now closer to what we might mean or what we might take seriously as a good sort of cashing out of forgiveness so here's one thing that's I think tempting but it would be a mistake so I force where resentment commit to giving up my anger because I found out that he didn't really do it or he had excused me or he was justified and that's not my work because they might should have given up my anger because he doesn't deserve it so again I'm repeating the plan said here it needs to be that you've still got the reason to be angry but you've also got to be not to be a company or a family that you do okay so he did it he did the thing and there's a sense in which I'm right to be angry with him but I've decided not to be so what kind of reason could there be for me to decided not to be angry with him even though he definitely did and he doesn't have any excuse one common thing is he's really sorry he's repenting okay he's repenting so I decided because he's repenting really sorry that I'm in the foreswear anger I'm going to forgive him definitely the people do and the people mean but here's the danger there it shouldn't be that him repenting and being sorry puts an obligation on me to forgive him first of all I'm still alive I'm angry if I want to be second that seems too transactional it just seems like a debt model or a legalistic model like you don't have a thing say you're sorry and that's it it's over and that's not how it works so forgiveness from the heart forgiveness can't be commanded or made a victory in that way so him being sorry or repenting came away with your reason for me to forgive but it's not clear exactly how it works why why I can't be sorry so I think maybe a way to understand what's going on there is that what happens is that we come to understand maybe why he did and I don't think it's excused we him repenting I think is part of part of part of understanding feeling kinder just taking a gentler attitude to it I don't think that's something that that happens just look back at the beginning so this again is looking like reconciliation it looks like what's going on here is that we just want to get back to friendship or at least a sort of peaceful state where I'm not eaten up by anger and now I'm able to do that because I've been able to see clearly a better life of his being sorry for helping to do that but you know all that's all I'm doing here is describing the very complicated ways that we're not to feel about each other and that's why I think forgiveness doesn't really come into more education earlier but also I think it's why there isn't really one thing what we've got is this cluster of things we have all these feelings we have complicated reasons for giving up on them but I just don't see a clear enough thing that we can do that to analyze and say that's the thing that's the thing instead we've just got a whole bunch of different things which are all good things to do but not clear enough to do something to analyze properly so that's probably going to be a work I do on forgiveness because it's like me I don't really see a thing there so thank you Professor Moretta You're going to be all right to learn or take out the money in the book I'll give you my booms I sound kind of boony in my own ears but hopefully not to you so I would like to invite everybody to think about a kind of little story of response to moral moral rendering which involves laying apology and forgiveness so you see that how well-functioning version of these things they are serial and how serial it's changed so you wrong me perhaps you're a good friend of mine and you tell me a lie about something really important I blame you for this I hold you blame rather than I find fault with you now I could just as well keep back to myself and holler at the galsy resentment that burns away at my soul and grows our friendship all better perhaps I might succeed in articulating that in communicating the pain to you in order to give you the chance to respond and indeed to help me get over my chest your response at that point might be to apologise or I suppose it might be to argue a little bit say well you're making a bit of a deal out of what I did let me explain let me explain why I told you this line you might find in the course of our conversation you'll push back shows me that actually there were a few mitigating servant acts that I haven't quite taken into account they might just be plain excuses and in your apology say I'm so sorry and what I'm thinking about now I'm going to a few days of autumn out of my judgement and it didn't work out recently or it might be well you really do give me a reason which is on the ropes and you explain that you had to tell me this lie there's always something that's after what have happened you're really sorry but I understand why you did it so this can be a conversation in which you presently with one or another kind of mitigating servant act which might need me to reduce the level of fame quite a bit perhaps just a little, perhaps a lot maybe even a zero and after I've received some sort of apology for where a degree of fame worthiness remains if you need to are coming down to apologise a normal run of things would have that cue me to give you to as my colleague said to let go of the resemblance or other sorts of main feelings that I've been feeling towards you for this lie that you told me so that's a little my ideal narrative of how these things can go and of course it doesn't always go that way you might be apologising to me I might totally have a crazy over response to your lie and fly off a handle and instead of doing a decent community job of explaining why I might fall with you I might just cause a massive rupture in our friendship which somehow ends it but when we're doing a decent job of responding to each other and responding to wrongdoing we want to succeed in communicating with an inappropriate register with appropriate kinds of resentments or disappointments or forms of sadness I think these are all appropriate emotions that can accompany the attitude of blaming, finding fault the wrongdoer will apologise and the game has made me whole to come that's not the only thing that comes off here though it's a kind of standard story and one thing to note I'd like to invite us to think about my little narrative of wrongdoing and one's response to it in relation to time and in relation to the purpose the moral purpose that we might think of is serving in relation to time partly just because these things are not in an instant not judgment, they are cognitive and emotional processes which have a duration and they might in fact have an extremely long duration I might warn you so directly that it takes you a lifetime to come to me sometimes people really look to try and forgive another before they die because they want to leave this world without any of the residual resemblance of the main feelings sometimes on the outland it just take us in an instance it's through your pace but it's still a duration in time and it's to be thought of as a process and I think in particular in connection with forgiveness it's very useful to think of forgiveness not only as a response in the moment but as a process and an effort and we might partially succeed in forgiving for a while and then realise that it feels present and it rise up again we've never lost it and then we try more and it can be a real job of work that has a long duration and effort put into it but these responses are also a healthy thought of as situated in time in another way which is that if somebody wrongs you and pretty badly say tells you a terrible lie and caught you by that something you can't believe that I do about this um you're holding them responsible by communicating blame to them is a way of looking to a future version of them the future version of them which is sorry does a knowledge that they shouldn't have done this thing so although you're right hand confronted with the person who seems to think it was okay to remind you about such a thing you're holding them responsible so that you're as well propelling imagine them into the future so that they will be when they acknowledge they should have known better that they're sorry that they did this thing so it's a hopeful attitude name when it's done in that way is a hopeful attitude and forgiveness too I think when you forgive someone who has wronged you and perhaps it's especially obvious if you've given without them apologize to you yet you are taking a hopeful attitude towards them so that you look to them this is a version of themselves that is sorry to face that doesn't acknowledge that what they did was wrong and that they shouldn't do it again so this is my hopeful attitude that I think can be implicit not only with forgiveness but also in lane is a kind of future oriented attitude which I think is worth noticing but a purpose I like a view of these responses which makes explicit what the use, the moral use and the useful form of these practices is naming can take many forms it can be uncommunicated it can be excessive it can be terribly angry it can be disproportionate it can be common and resentful there's lots of words of naming which I think we're probably better off without the kinds of name too which involve a kind of attributed attitude where you are only an amazing one to punish you I want you to suffer I personally don't believe in that lots of people do because they believe in a retribution of the moral response I personally don't know what that's meant to be it seems to me like it's really a botched version of what I call communicative naming which is a form of naming where after you're wrong you communicate with the wrong road you find fault with them for what they've done and what your aim is imagine the road that you find fault with them is to bring them to see what was wrong with their behaviour and this, as ever will of course not be the end of the conversation you might have got things a little bit out of proportion may have a turn to push back and say well actually I've been making a little bit too much of a big deal or presenting excuses as I said at the beginning but the aim I think of the best and the fact, honestly I think the only useful kind of name the only morally corrective kind of name is to bring the other to be able to say and make you use about what the moral significance of what they've done is and of course they might change your attitude to what the idea is of what will eventually come to a shared or at least more near their line towards a moral understanding of what they've done and what respects they've heard of you so I think that's a very useful form of naming so we might think that it's heard this being also situated in time to make a moral cognitive change in the wrong road so they come to see things differently, see the error of their ways as we sometimes see is a very interesting kind of response that one has to being named because apology is what one does one sets up and acknowledges yes, I shouldn't have done this you apologise, you put yourself exactly on the same page of the first new thing you were saying yes, hands up you're right, I don't know what I was thinking I should never have lied to you about this thing but I'm so sorry that is to perform and to express the fact that yes, you now are morally aligned in terms of your moral understanding of what you've done you are on the same page and that is why apology then curts the way it was or swearing, the attempt to let go of your feelings towards the person because they've said their thoughts and you've got them to see their of their ways and now they've shown you they see their of their ways and they should try and let it go now what's so useful about doing that for swearing and playing with feelings or resentments towards the person is that as we all know it's not always so easy to just let those back feelings go, you might think right now I really should know she said to you sorry I care about friendship I really need to let these feelings go that's appropriate and you might not manage it because we all know that can be very hard if it was very seriously nasty thing that was done to you so for swearing is to commit to trying to make those main things subside to render them irrelevant to how you act with your friend as part of an effort to get the relationship back on track so for swearing is a really crucial moment of forgiveness it might take as I said before a lifetime to really succeed in getting those feelings to actually go away all together perhaps you can't count that for swearing you can't have managed to make it go away at all Charles Rose-Walt who very mentioned as nice to count what for swearing is more or less in those terms you have had a little bit of success by any commitment you don't really count as committed that you've shown a little bit of success of living up to the commitment so saying this for swearing which is basically swearing you're going to be committing to every event so you don't quite count as doing that in terms of expressing the words or having the thought that you thought I had a little bit of success but full success may take much longer so name, apology and forgiveness are situated in time partly because they're processes and partly because they're processes which have a certain sort of aim or in mind you should have a certain sort of aim as you fully imagine takes time there are perhaps two broad kinds of forgiveness both in particular and forgiveness now so let's start with conditions for forgiveness a lot of people would say an ordinary forgiveness forgiveness of the kind that I've really just described that has a two sides to it there's a kind of exchange that's gone on and you've wronged me and I've blamed you and then you've apologised and because you've apologised you've shown me that you share your understanding of what you've done that I have, it's now time to meet your forgiveness that's called conditional forgiveness if I only forgive you or condition that you apologise and sometimes we might say to another I'm afraid to forgive you, I can't even say to you sorry but I'm standing there it starts, I think it starts a moral demand I'm not going to give you this release I'm going to show me you acknowledge what you did and that you understand in this way I do think that the blame for the forgiveness process is how the educated are all the time not just I feel we rely on each other to keep having each other on the shoulder and say hey that's not okay, this is why and in situations where our forms of moral understanding are socially changing quite rapidly we in particular rely on it to learn new forms of wrongdoing new things that are best of all new things that it's now okay to do so that we, as it were, stay on track with each other in terms of what feels like a wrong to build a receiving end of so conditional forgiveness is a stance of demand and it demands that shape our understanding ahead of time before the forgiveness is all coming by contrast and very marketing is a whole lot of condition of forgiveness and that is unconditional forgiveness where you are on me and maybe on all sorry you don't apologise and on all remorseful maybe I know full well that you really, you just don't care about the apology but I decide for whatever reason to meet you anyway I decided to bypass my entitlement to stand there and make a demand of the apology and I just need to know what I just want to live up front unconditionally and we have a lot of tradition of thinking about this is an expression of magnanimous thing to do and I think the reason it's expression of magnanimous is precisely because we are ledger over that entitlement to demand the apology kind of a literally example which I'm sure I will magnanimous terribly but in Victor Hugo's extremely long book there is an example of a character in the long one which I can't honestly say that I read the whole book but anyway here's the story I think it's not too magnanimous so of purpose famous example much use example of our conditional the forgiveness where John Van John is sort of a funny good guy near the beginning of the novel ends up around the middle doing some terrible things and being able to feed him and so on and the priest takes pity on you and takes him in for the night but unfortunately Van John through to a recent form gets up early and makes out in the morning with the raptory silver but later brought back a scruff of the network of the John Dan to re-present him to the priest and the priest does make sure what we think the priest number one says the solution lies so it's okay I gave him permission to take this all and I think he continues to insist that Van John keeps it but he also so goes for years Van John even Van John was fighting on a remorseful at this point in the novel and the story continues on but much later Van John as it were is in some sense a form restored to his form of self and that the unconditional forgiveness he was afforded is at least part of that story about why he comes to his senses and returns as it were a more honest version of himself has been stunned by the generosity of this gift of unconditional forgiveness that he received from the priest as I say apologies to specialists in there to healer but in fact our two versions do very nicely for what we want and what we see there remember I talked about what I think the most powerful of many of them is in terms of finding ways to align the moral understanding to renegotiate the moral understanding on the part of the Robin and Roger we see there that whereas unconditional forgiveness demands a shared understanding up front in the form of apology or some other expression of remorse the unconditional together one way of making sense of the purpose of that practice I would have to say it's the only purpose but one way of seeing it as belonging to the family of nuances through which we hold others responsible and through which we in the form of aim to establish share of our understandings is in fact when you are unconditionally forgiven the fact that the wrongdo is moved by the unprecedented generosity of your feeling up front makes it quite likely that he or she will come to their senses come to her, there is a disarm and then all that is come to a position of moral honesty about what they've done then if you just keep bashing on the blame and if we see it like that when unconditional forgiveness can work like that then we see it so in the same purpose as conditional forgiveness as a community of blame namely to prompt and inspire over time a share moral understanding of the wrong done shared by the wrongdo and the wrongdo party and so I present that to you as a little picture of at least what I think of as the kind of ideal practice of blaming the forgiving which gives us an answer to a question that I'm offering to ask how should we respond to wrongdo how should we step back from our conventional moral practice and we think which ones are the good more are the useful ones and which ones are just the bad ones that make things worse and create more resentment and I want to say well I like ones that encourage shared moral understandings so that our natural tendency towards selfishness to forgetfulness at other points of view or our natural finite inability to know how it is for everybody in the room to have already factored in other sorts of perspectives on what we do that's all corrected for by the fact that they all tell us, they all communicate to us when we get it wrong and they tell us that this wrongs them and this hurts them and we as well align our understanding to their that to me is a very hopeful picture and what our reactions to moral wrongdo really ought to be doing which is generating shared moral understanding and in fact to be honest I tend to think that once we see beyond the ground interpersonal attitudes and responses to wrongdoing in this way we might come to think of these as the most unknowable engines what we deserve to share in our life at all but marth a little set of points I'm particularly interested not only in what the useful moral purpose of our responses to wrongdoing might be so that we can have a select mental one and maybe put it out of service the ones that are doing their good the contributed ones or the excessive ones I'm also interested in how these factors might be intrinsic to deteriorate and to fall into dysfunctionality of various kinds of course any human factor is going to go wrong but some of our factors is very interesting because some intrinsic features of them make them especially susceptible to lapsing into bad faith forms of themselves or deteriorated forms of themselves like the deterioration that we've been kind of passive aggressive for or the expression of a kind of marth a complex or whatever it might be so let me just end by three points in connection with the forgiveness so I think help us understand why many of us feel that we have lived in a bad forgiveness and on one hand we can see that it's a more useful and generous and admirable thing to do and an essential thing to do if we're able to put wrongs into the past and so on but I'm never having a worry that quite often forgiving any expressed some of this but if you've lived on weird things to do something it seems like a kind of more moral contraception or sometimes reminding the person of a wrong name done well it feels that it's trustful about people it's a bit morally grand why do you think that? I think at the three points I'd like to make which I think help explain why you might feel that it's coming down those lines one concerns the verbals of forgiving in particular so I only said I to give you sounds like something that doesn't get said very often and could be said in a very annoying grandiose, morally consenting way well I agree, I think there could be apt versions of it but even in the apt versions of it it's a bit risky now this book is of the power in quite general the power of presupposition to any sort of conversational move so the sorts of examples and philosophy of language which are brought to remind us of the power of presupposition are things like supposing I've got a bunch of teenagers at home who have gone out so they can cook dinner with their friends and have a bit of a meeting and I'll be coming back and thinking a little about the conversation and finding the basis and I'll say to my friends that even Grace might have gone washing up what do you mean even even Grace when you meet she might never know when she does the meeting if you're applying she's just really a lazy person if she's never been washing up I think that's really unfair but I introduced into the conversation without saying that Grace is really lazy I introduced that idea by the way it can be challenged it can say what do you mean even Grace but very often these things have a sneak under the radar of challenge there's a bit of a rude thing to do to say what do you mean normally the conversation carries on and that presupposition stays in circulation and is accommodated which is the process of accommodation so we accommodate this rather than something like an idea that raises a lazy person or should I call it to herself in that some degree six and a half out of the challenges of the explicitly and a plausible reaction has taken us on in connection with the introduction of the prejudicial and stereotypical ideas into the conversation there's a way of explaining how they can be insidious in their influence in that some degree six and a half out of the challenges and she calls it back door testimony it's as if I said Grace is rude and lazy but I didn't have to say that through back door by the way a presupposition makes it difficult to challenge well a presupposition of I believe you is something bad enough that really has me losing to make this pronouncement and I say much more informally and more friendly say oh there are so many to give you it's time you're still thinking that's the same time you said that she's still mentioning the fact that you're giving me this this is obviously where he on mentioning that bad thing I did to you two days ago maybe I'm not without realising it's kind of surreptitiously naming still under cover back door name looks like the giving but really we all know what's going on and I still gave them that thing we did and I think we all can imagine or maybe know from experience but it's like you're receiving it but that's all just really I was going to say this in general I think it actually isn't I think one can't be really attempting to forgive trying to kind of busy for swearing no you're not only halfway in the process and the person knows it's all well what's really happening is you're just kind of going into backdoor name even though you perhaps don't realize it yourself so that is one way in which forgiveness in general when it's spoken can be prone intrinsically prone to deteriorate into backdoor name return of pain trying to get away from pain but it draws it back in there's another way in which I think all kinds of forgiveness even if they're unspoken has the kind of instability built into it and that is so long as the forgiving is a little bit hard I mean sometimes forgiving is just super easy so you borrow my book without asking and I go hey it was my book he's like oh sorry I took it here I was like oh no worry it's both of mine although easy, barely even while I'm falling for giving but so often the cause as with serious life it's really hard to care about and you're devastated that they lied to you about something like this but the pain is really hard so imagine they have apologised they're devastated that they did and it's caused a terrible rupture in your friendship and you really are trying to be different you want to move on you know they're sorry and you're trying you might do all sorts of very sensible therapeutic things like jumping it through or keeping on talking it through but sometimes that doesn't really work sometimes you need to also supplement anyway it's just a good old bit of trying not to go there in motion you kind of ignore the residual resemblance you're feeling towards so you can try and put me back on a normal footing just get past it by sort of suppressing these feelings that don't seem to be going away doing talking so I'm not going to think about it I'm just going to go on to normal do all normal friendly things have lunch and hope for the feelings to decide I'm not attending to them because I'm not really attending to them it doesn't seem to be happening now about family it does sound a bit screwed up and written down but it's actually it needn't be playing it now it can be a matter of attending to the positive and trying to let the negative feelings decide but the trouble is of course you can see it's active work very easily slips into a deteriorated form slips into the near denial of the kind of out of faith the kind of self-deception I think I've forgiven you because I'm just not going there I'm deliberately not attending to those feelings I'm getting on with my life as normal and yet and yet some have these old resemblance that are sneaking through and I don't do the last to know but I believe you're right not attending to those residuals but rather the mechanism of trying to move on which is intrinsically prone to deteriorating something more like denial and of self-deception last point the last way in which I think a certain tendency to deteriorate is to build it in not now to all kinds of forgiveness but just to the unconditional kind the kind where there hasn't been any apologize or expression of remorse from the person who hurt you but either whatever reason try to find it in your heart to leave them anyway to give them up front now that is a wonderful thing to be able to do I think there are many good reasons to do it if we can and some people can but one of the ways in which it one of those things that is distinct to features of it is that it's very one-sided some people call this kind of forgiveness not unconditional forgiveness but one-sided forgiveness because there's no exchange so supposing once again I, this person and my best friend has lied to me about something really important and I just cannot believe that she did this to me that I've talked about it she doesn't seem to be sorry she seems to think that she's got a reason for the excuses to have him done so I don't buy it, I don't agree with her that these are a reasonable excuses I think they're not good reasons to lie about that to me and I'm not having it and she's just not really sorry and I might think we can't come like this I love this friend I want our relationship to recover and there's just only one thing for her I'm going to have to just just go into one side of the forgiveness and she might keep and I say look I forgive you for betraying our friendship and she's like the whole point is I don't think I was betraying our friendship and I don't at the end of this conversation I'm going to forgive you don't say another word I'm there, I'm doing it on my own don't worry, this doesn't have to be that two-way thing I'm going to forgive you all on my own because I care so much about our friendship now what's happened then it seems to me is that my desire to have this friendship combined with my recalcitrance and my own willingness to accept her side of the story is that I am silencing her and I'm engaged in a kind of kind of moral role that is perhaps but it's certainly a kind of willful one-sided effort of forgiveness which is not going to be satisfying because she's going to feel totally unheard when I say I'm going to do this all on my own this is not a healthy version of our condition of forgiveness and we can see how the effort to do it on one's own can deteriorate into that sort of moral solitwism, the silencing of the other so I hope all this adds up to is a picture of the responsibility we're all doing in terms of playing perhaps in the coming of apology and forgiveness while we're the other which presents us with a good rationale of why we do it and why the forms in which we do it should take for what I've described so I suggest but also why we should treasure the possibilities of forgiveness because of how they succeed in restoring relationships and allowing roles to recede into the past we should be very aware of the fragility of the processes of forgiveness and very aware of our own affinity when it comes to our attempts at forgiving, especially when it comes to forgiving, on conditionally because if it's built into the practice of forgiving, built into human nature and indeed the situation of being morally wounded that making was returned is always just of stage thank you very much Just to leave early, would they like to leave now, which gives people time to process always different ideas and thoughts and think of their questions If you'd like to put up your hands if you'd like to ask a question and wait until the microphone reaches you I think you're all right I think it's too bad you've seen the masses I'm trying to always play a and remember to hold it like this like a pop singer okay and you might like to ask who you're asking the question of or it might be to the whole panel I'm not sure who you're asking to question because I have got a concern because I came along to hear about blame, forgiveness and apology and I'm not sure who I'm blaming who I should be forgiving or who should be giving me an apology because I thought you were going to mention companies and governments and blame one of the actors whereas I've been right now for 54 years and I've been through all this and I think that yes you should give your business forgiveness again I visited Auschwitz again after Gowdy I visited there for the first time after 61 years of life all customers should be forgiven well hold on this is like scaling up isn't it answer to the question is very complicated One feature, which will complicate it, has to do with who has the right sort of standing to take offence at what the Chancellor has or has not done in a certain sense like this. Second feature then, however, is in line with who has the standing to take offence, who has a reasonable standing to forgive the Chancellor in a certain sense like this. I don't think I'm going to have the right sort of standing for us to make sense of why I might fly off the handle and have the chance of not having to meet this person. Furthermore, she's not really going to care whether I forgive her or don't forgive her. There may be a question as to why I would even be rolling out the idea of forgiveness in the first place in a situation like that. But I think there's another complicating feature, which is that the kind of wronging question is a decidedly political wrong, a moral wrong against the backdrop of a great moral horror in a previous generation. And there's a question as to the kinds of implications one has as a leader of a country to recognise, remember and speak to the many wrongs that one's predecessors committed in the name of the country that one might own. This is, of course, still a living issue for Germans, and so it seems like the kind of wrong that she wants to have already been addressing, but of course there are lots of other ways in which she has been speaking to or addressing the case, that's not as well as she should. But I think all of those mean that this is a really difficult kind of case for us to speak out about who is doing the forgiving, when the forgiving is being done, and what exactly it is for which we think she stands in view of the blame and or forgiveness. Thank you. Is there a question here? Professor Mason, you were talking about one self and the other in the situations that you were, I've got the wrong name. And we can blame ourselves and we can feel it, forgive ourselves, but can we apologise to ourselves? Would you end the speakers, I can see anything about the self and those activities that we've been looking at? Thank you very much. I thought it was true. Yes, you've got the wrong name. Sorry, okay. I did. Yes, you're right. I think I just wanted you to express agreement so we can blame ourselves, and indeed once capacity to blame ourselves, I didn't have that capacity, I wouldn't be able to talk to the ladies at all. Being able to recognise that I've done wrong in both morally or even in other ways, like I've performed badly in somewhere and I might be allowed to remember if a team on my team might blame me having been so careless or I might be blaming my morally. This is really fundamentally part of being a responsible agent. Being able to forgive oneself is something that some people think doesn't make much sense. I think it makes eminent sense if we're thinking of forgiveness in terms of conditional forgiveness, because I can recognise that I'm the wrong-doer, I blame myself, and I am truly sorry for what I've done, and in the end, maybe even if the person who I wronged doesn't forgive me, I personally think it can be a moment when it's possible for me to forgive myself even if she doesn't. It may be that after all, she's been extraordinarily unforgiving and I can't do what I'm doing for me, so. But yes, self-apology, I can't make any sense of, but I think we can see why we wouldn't expect self-apology to make sense if we remember the purpose, or if we agree with the little picture I drew that the purpose of apology is to demonstrate to the person that you've wronged, the enunciated they do, or you recognise the full moral significance of what you've done. That's something that, since it's me, I already know. I don't need to perform it to myself or express it to myself, so it's already there, there are more in there. So I think that helps explain why self-apology has been your one out of the three. Thank you. Right, so I'd be interested in comments from each of the panellists, but I think I'd first like to hear the response from the second speaker, that's Eleanor, is that all right? I'd like to recommend to you, or if you've thought about it, tell me your reactions. The slightly archaic English phrase to forgive your debts, because I think that is very revealing. So today we're not allowed to lock up people indefinitely for debts. There's a whole process, partly by the state and partly not for forgiving that, and that this has been in place for what, a couple of hundred years, but still seems outrageous to an naive young boy. And why is that? It's because on the whole it seems to be better for everyone for that to be forgiven. And it is a formal process, it is a speech and legal act. So first of all I think that's important. Secondly I think it's in some sense an indicator of length between the nearly personal and the larger scale. But I also think it makes me disagree with the third speaker rather because I think you only have to be slightly cynical to think that the defining aspect of the human speeches is we bear grudges and none of you seem to want to say that. But I think that's extraordinary. It's unusual in animals. Why do we do that? And it's because we do keep records of other people and we hang on to them. And so I think it's that process that's built into us, because you see quite young children talking about justice. I think that the sense I have through a sense of forgiveness is that it's a personal decision about and no longer then to put that in place. Even if I'm a bit conflicted about that, that's a real two-track to my commitment about what I'm going to try and uphold. So that's how I see these things as physically together. Yeah, thank you. On the language thing, I forgive the debt. I think that's a common thing when you see the origin of an idea that is kept in language even if we're not using it in that way anymore. So I think that's a way. That's why I call it a performative version of forgiveness. It's hardening. I think primarily an impersonal sense of the debt is not what we need anymore. We need to let it go. Probably it's nice that you decide not to bear a grudge. I mean, what I was saying about being skeptical about that wasn't that it doesn't happen. It's just that there's a cluster of things and a cluster of reasons for deciding not to bear a grudge and that you can't have feeling down to something neat enough. But I do think, of course, you can decide not to bear a grudge. There's a question over here. He didn't forget after 25 years and went and assassinated the perpetrator of that awful act. I'm not a Christian, but I wonder what you would say about whatever idea on the news that someone is forgiving someone who has perpetrated a terrible act very quickly. I think there's a fair bet that that person has deep Christian faith. So why in the Christian religion is the tendency to unconditional forgiveness, the concept of original sin perhaps comes into it, and yours are a moral philosophy equivalent. Do we wear morality as social beings, or is there some innate thing? So C.S. Woods says we're all born. Why do we have a conscience at all and take that as evidence for God? No, I'm not a... Okay, is that the question? Would you like to address that? Just to be clear out what the question was. Yes, sorry. The question is, is there a secular version of the Christian impulse to forgive wrongdoers quickly that we could make sense of it? Is that weird? Yes, I'm an extreme wrongdoer. So I think there is a secular version. I think if we're going to make sense of a secular version, we'll need to have some analog to the role that forgiveness plays in our Christian community, which is that it shaped the identity of that community. They take it to be important in light of the recognition that we all make the lives of the people around us worse from time to time, and some of us make them a whole lot worse. And, can I tell you that, is the thought that within my Christian community, that individuals with a victim doesn't have to bear their victimhood alone, because there are others who will stand in solidarity with them, help them absorb the cost of the wrong to the extent that's possible for another party to help us bear that burden, and help them move on into a better future that isn't defined by that injury. And so, if we've got communities like that around us, then we can see a functional place for an attitude, a commitment to not letting this define who I am, who we will be together, and what our future looks like as we move on. But I think just a single individual on their own, who does that, will find ourselves asking, all right, is it so commitment that they have, or what exactly is going on here? Are they just in denial about the wrong aspect of that? Thank you. I think we have time just for two quick questions. One this side. Oh, good, okay. Steve over here. Tonight we have to talk a lot about feelings and emotions, and the last speaker seems to be quite pragmatic in our attitude, you know, but work has been good enough. I'd like to ask you, can we have a moral logic which applies to these things, and if so, are there moral items in which we do better? I say that to someone interested in personal knowledge. Thank you. I'm not sure what you have in mind by a moral logic, but one thing you might have in mind is a moral theory, which has been cooperated with strict principles, like the deontological theory, a theory which tells us what our duties are. So we can work out whether we have a duty to do this in certain circumstances from a set of principles. So I can't have a moral theory like that. And ultimately there was just one moral principle which could be interpreted in various ways, but here's a common interpretation that you only have to reasons that anyone could accept. And so any time you want to do something, you pause, you check whether it's morally permissible by thinking, is this a reason that anyone could accept? Does it make sense from every point of view? And if it doesn't, then you must refrain, I mean thereby discover that you have a duty to refrain and you either do what you don't do if you're a moral person, you refrain and you're not a moral person, you go ahead. So that's an example of something, a kind of moral theory that's as close to the idea as a moral axiom, as I can imagine. I love cancer moral theory, but I think it's completely wrong, because I think it abstracts from one feature of one bit of moral life, which is the experience of being absolutely bound by an obligation. And Kant begins all his work by thinking, look, if there's anything that's going to count morality, it's going to be a set of principles that absolutely binds us. So there's nothing about us that could get us off the hook. And he thinks, what sort of thing would that mean? Well, it's going to be something that binds us just in virtue of our being rational agents at all. And so he builds the whole theory on the idea of managing to act in a way that does not involve a contradiction of our practical reason. So if I act on a reason that someone couldn't accept, then I'm acting on a reason that I have will for the universality, in which case I'm acting on a reason that I both don't will and yet I do will when I act on it, and that's a contradiction in my practical reasoning. But I don't think that I think the awful lot of moral lives are just isn't like that at all, and I don't really believe in the idea that we can get all of our moral do's and don'ts from this attempt to avoid contradictions. I think there's so many questions where it's not at all clear whether I am acting on a reason that anyone could accept. It's just the reason to determine that answer to that question in so many circumstances. So I'm a skeptic for these reasons about the possibility of any set of moral actions. I think it comes from the heart and from the custom. And the best kind of custom is one that I've taught, I think, in the way that we communicate and exchange reasons to try and establish the moral status of the thing that was just done. And we come to an aligned form of understanding thing, and that becomes one of our shared reasons then, that we, as it were, by way of agreement, and understanding how we can and can't hurt each other, we come to a moment of ending and sharing moral way of life. But I don't think there's only one possible shared moral way of life. Now, somebody does have the microphone. Is it a very short question? Very quickly. I would agree with the gentleman sitting in front of me that this evening's session, I was married for 51 years, and I lost my wife last year. And yet, from the two lady panelists, I felt as if I'd gone through a marriage guidance counselling session tonight. To bring it to more than mundane question, these days with the political traumas that we're going through in television, it seems to become a way that interviewers are forced to ask for an apology from one of our political readers. I just wonder what the panel think of the policies that are forthcoming from the politicians that we see over the last month. So what do you think, do you mean it, or is there something not right about it? Yeah, thank you. I think public policies are really interesting things, and they often get it wrong, and if we really get to tackle off the ways they get it wrong. So the number one way is to offer an excuse at the exact same time they apologize, so I'm sorry, but wasn't really my fault, and that's a community apology. And the other way, I'm sorry, but it wasn't really wrong. They offered justification at the same time, and that's a really big apology. And then the other thing for them, because it's a really vague one where they weren't clearly admit to having done anything wrong at all, but they weren't actually saying anything about it and just backing it away. And I think this is actually a good illustration of how what we're doing goes beyond marriage guidance. So we're trying to get these concepts a bit clearer and say, you know, here's what logic is, and here's what it has to be, and now we can see fairly clearly why these public policies are nonsense, and here's the diagnosis of it. And so I think it will start by trying to get these concepts clearer and precise and talking about what seems like mundane or personal cases, but actually I think there are useful applications that will go into the public around beyond that, and we didn't really get there today, but I think that that we can do. Yeah, thank you very much. Right, well I think that's a good place to end. So thank you very much for our speakers. So Moana Simeon, who arranged this and coordinated this event, and all for coming. This is the last meeting of 2019. The next meeting is on Wednesday the 8th of January 2020. Professor Wendy Barclay from Imperial College London will talk about all the next influenza epidemic. So let's hope it doesn't come before then, and our very best wishes for the holiday in New Year, and there are refreshments as usual in the other rooms, and even more unusually we have mincefied because it's Christmas, and it's a special occasion because we had a panel of people from the conference that's just finished in Glasgow. Thank you very much.