Everyday philosophy

As the Pope comes under intensified attack for his handling of paedophilic Catholic priests, Vatican officials are queuing up with excuses. So far we’ve heard that it was the work of the Devil, and that homosexuality not celibacy was the source of the problem. All of which raises interesting philosophical questions about the nature of excuses. Jean Paul Sartre claimed that excuses were always in “bad faith”: a denial of our fundamental freedom. The human condition, for Sartre, was that we are “alone without excuse”—we can’t blame God or the Devil because they don’t exist. We can’t blame our nature or our past either, as it is the human condition that we aren’t bound by such things. Every excuse is a kind of self-deception. Sartre’s position is too extreme. There have to be mitigating circumstances sometimes, such as cases where someone is no longer an active agent: if someone pushes you over a bridge and you land on a passerby, say, or if you are insane and no longer responsible for your actions. The “ordinary language” philosopher JL Austin, who thought words were tools that needed to be kept sharp, drew a useful distinction between justifications and excuses. Justifications, he argued, are when someone admits that they performed an act, but argues that this was a good thing. An excuse, meanwhile, is where you accept what happened, but show that there was some other factor in play. In Austin’s quaint example, you can justify dropping a tea tray as a distraction because an emotional storm was about to break; while if you say you dropped it because you were stung by a wasp, you’re offering a good excuse. Excuses reveal to us the limits of what is morally acceptable. You can make the excuse of inadvertence if you step on a snail, but that excuse won’t wash if you step on a baby. Where someone has done something that is beyond the pale but doesn’t want to accept full culpability, excuses are appropriate. But they are also ineffectual. The Vatican might want to heed Austin’s wise observation that, in a bad situation, the average excuse gets you out of the fire—but only as far as the frying pan.