Session 10: Should You Even Apologise?
Argue for silence or deferral as the responsible move in a scenario built to tempt a premature apology
Weight: 1%
Before the session, have the lecture’s five response types ready: apologise now, acknowledge harm without a full apology, investigate first, act first, delay. You’ll be assigning one to each case, not picking whichever feels most comfortable.
In the session, you’re given three deliberately ambiguous situations:
- A university department is told, anonymously, that its marking process may have disadvantaged some students, and has to respond to a public inquiry within a day — before anyone has checked whether the claim is accurate.
- Someone believes a friend forwarded a private message to a third party. The friend hasn’t been asked yet.
- A driver has clearly, visibly hit a parked car. No question of fault. The car’s owner isn’t there.
For each, choose one of the five responses and defend it: what does this choice get right that the other four get wrong, and what does it cost you that a different choice wouldn’t? “Investigate first” risks looking evasive and leaves a harmed party waiting; “apologise now” risks getting the facts wrong; “act first” risks presuming what the right action even is before anyone’s asked.
For the case you find most difficult, check your delay against the lecture’s test: is the time you’re proposing going to produce new information the response actually needs, or is the harmed party simply waiting while you decide what to say?
If your pair is genuinely split down the middle on which response to choose for a case, don’t resolve it by picking whoever argues more confidently. Write down both choices and both costs, and check whether the disagreement is really about the facts of the case — how much time is actually available, how bad the visible harm already looks — or about how much weight each of you puts on looking responsive versus getting it right; those are different disagreements and call for different next steps.
Afterwards, compare your driver case with another group’s. That one has the least ambiguity about fault — see whether that changes which of the five responses you land on, and why.
Check your understanding
The spec
What you bring to the session, and what you leave able to do. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- for each of three ambiguous cases, you choose one of apologise now, acknowledge harm without a full apology, investigate first, act first, or delay, and defend that choice against the other four
- you can name a concrete cost of your chosen option, not only its benefit — every option gives something up
- for at least one case, you can say whether the delay you're proposing would produce genuine new understanding or would just protect the responsible party while the harmed party waits