In Defense Of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way"

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended"

People hate this phrase. They say it’s a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others’ concerns. Well, I’m sorry they feel that way.

People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions:

• Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (“Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction”), you say no, and they say they feel like you don’t love them.

• Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative’s sacrifice and calling them a bad person.

• Maybe you argue that a suspect is innocent of a crime, and some unrelated crime victim says it triggers them when people question victims or advocate for the accused. They say that now they are re-traumatized.

I see three classes of potential response:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that