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During the debate on whether Obama should apologise for the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as some people making trolley problem style comments about how many would have been killed had the atomic bombing not happened, others have argued that Japan has not shown sufficient acknowledgement of and/or contrition for its wrong-doings in World War II.

Within a broadly deontological (duty-based) framework, is offering an apology generally to be contingent upon a harmed party's acknowledgement of, or contrition for, its own wrongdoing?

(Disclaimers: This is assuming that an entire nation can be a harmed party or a wrong-doer, and it's also assuming that apologising won't cause Japan to commit harmful acts in the future.)

virmaior
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Andrew Grimm
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  • I'm genuinely interested in problems of forgiveness (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/forgiveness/ for a good start), but there really hard to work with and not very well handled by the literature in part because of the sort of issues your question highlights. – virmaior May 30 '16 at 10:14
  • @virmaior when tagging the question, I couldn't find many other questions on forgiveness. I was wondering why... – Andrew Grimm May 30 '16 at 10:28
  • @virmaior I'm not very knowledgeable about philosophy - I wouldn't be surprised if my question is closed because I don't ask in terms of a specific framework. Sorry (oh the irony!). – Andrew Grimm May 30 '16 at 10:31
  • @virmaior duty. – Andrew Grimm May 30 '16 at 12:25
  • Okay, I've made some emendations to the question to specify a duty-based framework. I'm not entirely sure why there aren't many questions on forgiveness, but it may be that forgiveness is largely a theological category. (it's hard to find closely equivalent notions outside the Abrahamic monotheisms) – virmaior May 30 '16 at 12:30
  • For obvious reasons, it's gotten pretty big in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. One thinker we might look to is Levinas -- who does have some duty-based considerations of whether jews can forgive for the deaths that happened in the holocaust. – virmaior May 30 '16 at 12:31

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