Need a Good Excuse? Make Sure It's Moral

We've all been there.  "I'd love to but I have a previous engagement."  "I'd like to go on a blind date with your brother but my next 10 weekends aren't free."  "I'd like to try your lasagna but I'm allergic to cheese." That's what they say about mine!

 We're talking about excuses, of course.

"We've all done it, offered an excuse for our poor behavior or rude reactions to others in the heat of the moment, after a long commute or a tough day with the kids," newswise.com reports. "Excuses are commonplace, an attempt to explain and justify behaviours we aren't proud of, to escape the consequences of our acts and make our undesirable behavior more socially acceptable.
What do most excuses have in common?
According to the web site, a researcher from Cambridge University has suggested that the answers lie in what they all tell us about our underlying motivation. "When excuses are permissible, it's because they show that while we acted wrongly, our underlying moral intentions were adequate," says newswise.
This research presents for the first time a unified account of excuses - the Good Intention Account - that argues our everyday excuses work in much the same way as those offered in a courtroom. "When lawyers appeal to duress or provocation in defense of their client, they are claiming that the client may have broken the law but had a morally adequate intention: she was just prevented from acting on it because fear or anger led her to lose self-control," newswise explains.
A morally adequate intention is crucial.
Recent work in psychology suggests that intentions have a distinctive motivational profile, with philosophers and psychologists both arguing that they are key to understanding how we make choices. Experts argue that intentions "are the key to making sense of our everyday morality," the web site declares.
Appealing to excuses has its limits, experts continue. "Successful excuses can mitigate our blame but they don't get us off the hook completely," notes Dr Paulina Sliwa in her study from the Faculty of Philosophy. "Saying we were tired or stressed doesn't absolve us from moral responsibility completely, though they do change others' perceptions of what we owe to make up for it and how the offended party should feel about our wrongdoing."
This means that when we make excuses we are trying to haggle, to negotiate whether we deserve anger and resentment, or punishment and how much we need to apologize or compensate. This is why it can be so annoying if someone makes spurious excuses - and also probably why we continue to make excuses in the first place, newswise points out.
Here's the bottom line with a successful one: what's the difference between explaining someone's bad behavior and excusing it.






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