"In the one defence, briefly, we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad: in the other, we admit that it was bad but don't accept full, or even any, responsibility"
About this Quote
Austin is slicing up the moral theater of apology with a philosopher's scalpel: not to moralize, but to show how our excuses are engineered. The line lays out two common defensive manevers that look like accountability yet quietly dodge its cost. One says, Yes, I did it - and then rebrands the act so it no longer needs condemning. The other concedes, Yes, it was wrong - while treating the agent as a bystander to their own behavior.
The intent is diagnostic. Austin, a key figure in ordinary language philosophy, is interested in what we do with words in real situations: how "defence", "responsibility", and "bad" function less as neutral descriptors than as levers. Each strategy keeps one pillar intact: either your agency (I chose) is preserved by laundering the evaluation (but it wasn't bad), or the evaluation (it was bad) is preserved by laundering the agency (but not really my fault). The subtext is that ethics often happens at the level of grammar and emphasis: adverbs, hedges, passive voice, the careful trimming of "full."
Context matters: Austin was writing in a mid-century Britain still marked by wartime bureaucracy and postwar institutional life, where accounts, justifications, and "mistakes were made" rhetoric were part of the air. His broader project suggests that our moral life is negotiated in speech-acts, not abstract axioms. The brilliance here is the symmetry: he exposes how we split agency from judgment to salvage our standing, turning remorse into a kind of verbal engineering.
The intent is diagnostic. Austin, a key figure in ordinary language philosophy, is interested in what we do with words in real situations: how "defence", "responsibility", and "bad" function less as neutral descriptors than as levers. Each strategy keeps one pillar intact: either your agency (I chose) is preserved by laundering the evaluation (but it wasn't bad), or the evaluation (it was bad) is preserved by laundering the agency (but not really my fault). The subtext is that ethics often happens at the level of grammar and emphasis: adverbs, hedges, passive voice, the careful trimming of "full."
Context matters: Austin was writing in a mid-century Britain still marked by wartime bureaucracy and postwar institutional life, where accounts, justifications, and "mistakes were made" rhetoric were part of the air. His broader project suggests that our moral life is negotiated in speech-acts, not abstract axioms. The brilliance here is the symmetry: he exposes how we split agency from judgment to salvage our standing, turning remorse into a kind of verbal engineering.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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