You’ve been talking about the plight of us non-cunning-social-justice-rhetoric-manipulators people a lot recently. Any chance you’ll ever share these advanced social skills you learned during your Five Thousand Years?

Obviously, some of these techniques may be evil. But you have unparalleled access to the rationalist community, so I’m guessing the instrumental value could be high.

Oh, and I’m crazy curious, of course. Hmm, I think I’ll ask this on a few posts in the hope it’ll be seen.

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On the other hand, if you’re process-oriented like us, have devoted effort to divining the optimal processes in any given moral situation, and feel you can’t be found at fault for not somehow having done better, then you hit this situation where the only thing you can “apologize” for is that the world was being crappy.

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Some spouse’s feelings may be soothed by evidence of concern, rather than by claims of concern.

Why not give the spouse a chance to express zir own concerns, then answer those, whatever they are? A good opening might be, “I’m sorry about what happened” — and then leave it there for zim to tell you about whichever aspect zie is most focused on?

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In American culture — I can’t speak for Irish — it’s not too difficult to find men showing experiences like this off as status markers. I of course can’t peek in the minds of every man that does this and claim that they universally enjoy it, but I can speak to the cultural expectation, and that’s fairly unambiguous: if an age-appropriate woman makes physical advances without prompting, that’s interpreted as evidence of sexual prowess and not as a violation. You’ve been visited by the Ass-Grab Fairy? Way to go, man.

Now, it’s fairly obvious to me that this is thanks to differences in the sexual scripts attributed to men and women: men experience such advances less and culture therefore treats them as exceptional. Likewise, men are generally expected to do the initiating, so if you’re a guy and a woman crudely comes on to you, then that must mean you’re extra potent.

I wouldn’t care to speculate how this might change in a culture where the sexual expectations for men and women were symmetrical. But they’re not, and so a simple reversal test isn’t going to be very illuminating under the circumstances.

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I’m surprised if your moral judgements don’t at least drift over time, if only as more information becomes available. Even if you’re using the same metaethics, it’s possible to apologise for the times when you made different object-level decisions to those you would now, or the times when you made the best decision you could given what you knew at the time, but having learned more you see it was now the wrong one. Though that may be falling into heroic responsibility again.

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Did you just call Eliezer Yudkowsky an angel?

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In your (purely hypothetical) case, you clearly do feel bad for the patient’s wife, so whatever you say to her should emphasize that you empathize (say that 5 times fast!). A better version of “Gawd, it must have sucked for you to be told that your husband’s doctor did not care about him”. Then make it clear that you do car about your patients (even if they are not really your patients), that’s why you do what you do to begin with. Admit that this unfortunate accidental miscommunication was not a good thing and that you will be thinking about ways to reduce the odds of it happening again, and will discuss them with your superiors. Then ask her what she thinks you and the hospital in general could have done better (an outside view can be useful on occasion) and thank her for caring not just about her husband, but also about all other patients who may benefit in the future from her suggestions. or something similar that does not stretch the truth into a blatant lie.

At no point you actually have to apologize, only empathize and express gratitude.

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