The Epistemic Harms of Botched Apologies for Past Wrongs

ABSTRACT Apologies often create expectations of meaningful change and repair. Yet when institutions or states deliver apologies for past wrongs that lack substantive reparative action, they risk deepening, rather than redressing, the harms they acknowledge. In this article, I examine what I call ‘botched apologies’ that can be performative, temporally disconnected from the ongoing effects of harm, and ultimately serve the interests of perpetrators. I argue that these botched apologies inflict distinct epistemic harms: they gaslight the victims, silence them, appropriate their hermeneutical resources, and exploit them. Using an epistemic reparations framework, I propose four non‐exhaustive conditions for epistemically responsible apology: truthfulness, testimonial uptake, hermeneutical openness, and reciprocal epistemic labour.