Accepting responsibility for one's actions and their consequences, and acknowledging that those actions or their consequences are wrong or harmful, is the minimal condition for those who have harmed or offended against others to “set things right” with them. “Amends” are intentionally reparative actions by parties who acknowledge responsibility for wrong, and whose reparative actions are intended to redress that wrong. Nothing anyone does to relieve a harmed person's pain or suffering, stress, anger, resentment, indignation or outrage will count as “making amends” without an acceptance of responsibility as the reason for the effort. Nothing anyone says or does to provide injured parties with compensation for losses, to restore a status quo prior to injury, to make a victim “whole,” or to reaffirm or vindicate a victim's dignity can be a kind of “amends” without an acknowledgment of some kind of wrongdoing, wrongful complicity in harm, or wrongful profit from it. Without that acknowledgment, reparative actions are charitable, compassionate, or generous, even dutifully so, but they do not “make amends.” Making amends involves taking reparative action, but only action that issues from an acceptance of responsibility for wrong, and that embodies the will to set right something for which amends are owed, counts as making amends. Yet it sometimes seems that the magnitude of injury and the disposition to take responsibility are inversely related.

I want to use this frustrating and disturbing fact to delve deeper into the nature and requirements of gestures and practices of amends.