I was wrong. I was foolish. I don't get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me. I brought this shame on myself. I hurt my wife, my kids, my mother, my wife's family, my friends, my foundation, and kids all around the world who admired me. … Parents used to point to me as a role model for their kids. I owe all of those families a special apology. I want to say to them that I am truly sorry. (Woods, 2010) Like most celebrity apologies, Woods offered his apology publicly. But he did not just apologize to those he directly wronged. He also apologized to his fans. Why do celebrities sometimes apologize to their fans? Why do celebrities typically publicly apologize? In this paper, I first consider three possible explanations for why celebrities typically apologize publicly and sometimes also include their fans among the targets of their apology. I then identify three moral dangers of celebrity apologies, the third of which arises specifically for fan-targeted apologies, and each of which teaches us important lessons about the practice of celebrity apologies. From these individual lessons, I draw more general lessons about apologies from those with elevated social positions. So, while my initial focus is on celebrities and on learning about an important and undertheorized social phenomenon, this investigation into celebrity apologies aims to illuminate a more general social phenomenon by using celebrity apologies as a case study. In Section 2, I outline an account of apology and redemption, drawing primarily on Radzik's (2009) work. In Sections 3–5, 3–5, I consider three possible explanations for why celebrities apologies are often both fan-targeted and publicly given. Because my focus is on such apologies, I set aside standard reasons for why people might apologize (e.g., a desire to make amends), though I discuss the relevance of celebrities also being motivated by these other reasons. The first explanation I consider is that celebrities are motivated to set the public record straight. The second I consider is that celebrities see themselves as having role model obligations. And the third is that celebrities aim to maintain their fame—that is, their positive celebrity status—and its associated powers. In Sections 6–8, 6–8, I then identify three moral dangers of celebrity apologies and then draw out lessons each danger teaches us about the practice of celebrity apologies. First, by apologizing publicly celebrities can set the public narrative about their misdeed in their favor. So, we have reason not to trust celebrity apologies. Second, even when they do not set the public narrative in their favor, a publicly given celebrity apology can still function to disempower the victim from having control over their own life narrative. So, celebrity apologies can present an additional harm to victims. Third, publicly given fan-targeted apologies block a celebrity from, what I will call, moral redemption. So, celebrities ought to be concerned about caring about their fame more than anything else. Additionally, the third moral danger also risks exacerbating the first two moral dangers. According to Linda Radzik (2009, p. 113), redemption is the “proper end state of responses to wrongdoing.” She holds that “When one is redeemed, one has justifiably regained one's moral standing” (Radzik, 2009, p. 113). On her view, moral standing is “the degree of esteem and trust to conduct oneself appropriately that we merit with the moral community” and we ought to be trusted to a particular degree by default (Radzik, 2009, p. 82). When we act wrongly, we demonstrate that we are not that trustworthy. When we are redeemed, we are seen to be trustworthy and thus have regained our standing within the moral community. Radzik draws on Karen Jones's account of trust according to which trust is “an attitude of optimism that the goodwill and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction with her, together with the expectation that the one trusted will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her” (Jones, 1996, p. 4; cited in Radzik, 2009, p. 114). To understand her account of redemption, we must first appreciate her account of wrongdoing. On Radzik's view, wrongdoing damages relationships through presenting insults and threats that persist over time (see also Murphy & Hampton, 1988). For example, a solitary thief may have no friends or family, but she might still damage possible relationships between herself and others, and herself and the moral community, through her past wrongs grounding the persistent threat that she will steal from others. Because her past actions send this message, others will not trust her and so her moral standing is at least diminished. To redeem herself, the thief must therefore remove this threat—that is, she must stop her past action sending such messages. Once the threat is removed, the thief merits reconciliation—that is, she is such that her victims and the moral community ought to reconcile with her. Importantly, removing threats requires more than just the wrongdoer morally transforming. Moral transformation is still crucial for meriting reconciliation. By morally transforming herself, the wrongdoer becomes trustworthy. However, merely being transformed is not enough. Wrongdoers are responsible for their own diminished moral standing, so they are responsible for letting others know they have changed. In other words, they must communicate that they are now (or again) trustworthy. So, they must also communicate their transformation. Finally, the wrongdoer must meet any claims they have incurred through acting wrongly. In doing so, the wrongdoer demonstrates their trustworthiness. Thus, to merit reconciliation and thereby be redeemed, a wrongdoer must do three things: (i) morally transform, (ii) communicate that transformation, and (iii) meet any claims incurred through acting wrongly (Radzik, 2009, p. 85). Moral transformation has backward- and forward-looking elements, which Radzik (2009, p. 86) takes to be tantamount to repentance. The transformed wrongdoer looks back at her wrongs and sees them in the proper light. This involves acknowledging her responsibility for what she has done, the wrongness of the relevant acts, the authority of the norms she violated, and that she should not have acted as she did. She must also care about the effect her actions have had. This involves feeling negative emotions, such as guilt, remorse, regret, and shame, with the right target and to an appropriate extent. The person who feels regret just because they have been caught acting wrongly does not feel regret with the right target. The person who feels slightly and briefly remorseful for a significant wrong does not feel bad enough. But the person who spirals into self-hatred for a minor wrong takes things too far. In short, wrongdoers ought to assess themselves and the impact their actions have had correctly. The transformed wrongdoer also looks forward to future behavior: she resolves not to repeat her past wrongs, to improve her character if more improvement is required, or to maintain her character improvements. Because wrongdoing involves expressive harms—in particular, threats to victims and the moral community—wrongdoers ought to communicate their moral transformation—for example, by apologizing, truth telling, and undertaking reparative work (e.g., care and charity work). Radzik does not hold that any are essential to meriting moral reconciliation. Rather, they are all possible ways to communicate one's moral transformation. Which forms of communication are appropriate will depend on the details of the wrong and the impact it has had. Apologies are a common and important way to meet this communication requirement. An apology can explicitly help to counter the harmful messages that one's earlier wrongs sent by demonstrating one's respect for the victims and community, as well as one's humility in response to one's earlier wrongs. Wrongdoers can make explicit that they are responsible for an earlier wrong, that they feel appropriately bad about the wrong, and so on. However, sometimes wrongdoers do not conceptualize or understand everything they ought to understand immediately. For this reason, Radzik endorses the view that apologies are often a negotiation between wrongdoer and victim/community (see also Battistella, 2014; Lazare, 2005; MacLachlan, 2014; Smith, 2008). Through this negotiation, a wrongdoer's feelings of guilt, regret, shame, and remorse, as well as her commitments for future behavior, can become more accurate and articulate. Public apologies … aid the reconciliation of both the victim and the wrongdoer to the community. They serve this end, first of all, by setting the record straight about who was in the wrong. They also allow the community to hear the wrongdoer's message of respect for the victim and provide it with evidence of the wrongdoer's moral reformation. They play an especially important role in cases where a wrong done to one person sends an additional message of disrespect to people who are like the victim in some respects. So, for instance, in making a public apology, an employer who has sexually discriminated against one female employee withdraws the insult and threat that his action implied for all of the women in that workplace. (Radzik, 2009, p. 95) In short, public apologies have a public record setting function and can send a message of respect to those subject to similar wrongs as the victim (see also MacLachlan, 2014, 2018; Smith, 2008). If an apology serves the communication requirement of merited reconciliation, it counts as a morally good apology. Such an apology can also help to meet some of the claims the wrongdoer incurred in acting wrongly—such as repairing any damage done to the victim's reputation. A wrongdoer must meet any claims she has incurred through acting wrongly just so that they rectify their wrong, but this also has the initial benefit of communicating their transformation and renewed trustworthiness. While Radzik (2009, p. 84) holds that certain wrongs are beyond the pale and the wrongdoer cannot ever subsequently merit full reconciliation, she believes that wrongdoers often can atone for their past wrongs. Importantly, all aspects of redemption can be feigned, misleading, or otherwise illicit. We can fall for a dodgy apology or believe someone has changed and trust them again, even though they have not changed and are not trustworthy. Even if we still distrust them, others can come to think that the wrongdoer has full moral standing again. In short, we can mistakenly believe someone has redeemed even though they do not in fact merit reconciliation. This, of course, is not genuine redemption, but rather a merely apparent redemption. To mark the distinction between these two types of redemption, call the former moral redemption and the latter public redemption. Let us now turn to consider the first of three possible explanations for why celebrity apologies are sometimes both fan-targeted and given publicly. This is that celebrities are motivated to set the public record straight. For example, in his apology for masturbating in front of junior colleagues, comedian Louis CK (2017) begins by saying “These stories are true” which reflects a clear effort to set the public record straight. I … took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn't want to hear it. I didn't think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it. (Louis CK, 2017) He identifies the fact he was widely admired as a reason why his accusers were not believed. When a wrongdoer is widely admired, this can lead to a form of testimonial injustice for the wrongdoer's victims (Archer & Matheson, 2019, 2021). Unlike standard cases of testimonial injustice that focus on a person being judged to be less epistemically credible than she is because of features of her identity (Fricker, 2007), this form involves a victim being seen as less epistemically credible than she is because she contradicts a wrongdoer who has excessive epistemic credibility—that is, the wrongdoer is believed more than they ought to be. As I discuss in Section 5, the fact a celebrity can disable others from being believed when they ought to be believed means the celebrity has not only excessive epistemic credibility, but also excessive epistemic power. CK seems aware he has such power. Because he had the power to stop his victims being believed, he might have felt he ought to wield that same power so that his victims would now be believed. Setting the public record is often a morally commendable motivation for apologizing—for example, when a person establishes an accurate and verifiable record of what wrongs they committed. However, it is not always. Consider an evil person who is motivated to set the public record straight so that the public know all the wicked things they have done. They could do this through an insincere apology, or simply by boldly stating what they have done. While this motivation is not always morally commendable, it remains that it often is. Being motivated to set the public record straight is also not necessary for a celebrity apology to be a morally good one. A celebrity apology that was just motivated by usual motives for apologizing (e.g., a desire to make amends) could be morally commendable. For example, Samantha Geimer (2013, p. 291), who was drugged and raped by Roman Polanski, says that Polanski offered her a written private apology. Polanski's apology might well be a morally good one even though he did not offer it publicly.1 Correcting the public record helps to explain why celebrity apologies are typically publicly given. By giving the apology publicly, a celebrity acknowledges what they have been accused of doing. However, this motivation does not obviously explain why celebrity apologies are also sometimes fan-targeted. We must look elsewhere for such an explanation. The second possible explanation for why celebrity apologies are sometimes both fan-targeted and publicly given is that celebrities see themselves as having role model obligation that they can only meet by providing an apology that is both fan-targeted and given publicly. Several authors have investigated whether celebrities—with a particular focus on athletes—have role model obligations (e.g., Feezell, 2005; Spurgin, 2012; Wellman, 2003; Yorke & Archer, 2020). The idea is that because celebrities occupy a privileged position, they have a special obligation to model good behavior. When they act wrongly, such role models incur greater blame than a person who performs a type-identical wrong. For example, a famous athlete who uses racial slurs is blameworthy for more wrongs than an ordinary person who also uses racial slurs. Both are blameworthy for using racial slurs, but the famous athlete is also blameworthy for not modeling good behavior. There is a lot of controversy about role model obligation. Some argue that celebrities are not prima facie good role models, and so cannot be thought to have role model obligations (e.g., Feezell, 2005). Others argue that because these obligations violate a person's right to privacy, such obligations can only be acquired by consent (e.g., Spurgin, 2012). Whether celebrities have role model obligations does not affect my present point. Rather, it is only important that celebrities believe they have role model obligations because this may explain why they sometimes apologize to their fans and in public for their wrongs. This is especially clear in the case of Tiger Woods. He explicitly identifies himself as a role model in his apology, and then apologies to his fans on that basis. It is clear, then, that Woods takes himself to have violated a role model obligation and that his violation calls for an apology to those to whom he was supposed to be modeling good behavior. Because he cannot feasibly apologize to each fan individually, it makes sense that he gave his apology publicly to reach all his fans. Indeed, it is through his public behavior that he is a role model, so it makes even more sense that Woods would apologize publicly. This motivation for apologizing to one's fans and in public is a morally commendable one: regardless of whether celebrities do in fact have role model obligations, it is a good thing that celebrities acknowledge they have the power to influence the behavior of others and that they then take extra steps to try to stop their wrongs from badly influencing others. I am not a role model. I'm not paid to be a role model. I'm paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids.2 (cited in Norris, 2020) Guys no idea what I did but I really am sorry. Zero bad intention. Deleting soon. (cited in Reslen, 2022) She issued this apology to her fans after they complained that a skincare routine video she uploaded to TikTok mocked a similar one that Hailey Bieber had recently uploaded. While she directs her apology to her fans, Gomez makes no claims about having role model obligations. So, not all fan-targeted and publicly given celebrity apologies are motivated by the celebrity's belief that they have violated a role model obligation. Let us now consider a third possible explanation for why celebrity apologies are sometimes fan-targeted and publicly given. This is that celebrities offer such apologies simply or primarily to maintain their fame—that is, their positive celebrity status—and its associated powers. In what follows, I will first explain how celebrities depend (to a significant extent) on their fans and potential fans for their social position and associated powers. I will then argue that this dependence helps to explain why celebrity apologies are sometimes both fan-targeted and publicly given. Finally, I argue that if this is a celebrity's sole motivation for apologizing, it is clearly a morally blameworthy motivation. Moreover, even if the celebrity has other motivations for apologizing, if they care about maintaining their fame more than anything else, their overall set of motivations for apologizing is morally blameworthy. Most celebrities have both fans and haters—that is, they are admired and loved by some and hated and despised by others. For example, businessman, and former president of the United States, Donald Trump is a clear case of a celebrity with both fans and haters. This observation is important to see how a feature of celebrity works. A person has epistemic power to the extent she is able to influence what people think, believe, and know, and to the extent she is able to enable and disable others from exerting epistemic influence. (Archer et al., 2020, p. 29) As noted earlier, epistemic power is related to epistemic credibility. However, epistemic power is a wider concept as it also includes both a person's tendency to be believed and their ability to make other people be believed or disbelieved. For example, many celebrities took part in the “pass the mic” campaign to spread accurate information about COVID-19.3 Through doing this, celebrities used their epistemic power to enable others to be believed. Epistemic power is not always used so benignly. As discussed earlier, Louis CK exercised epistemic power by disabling his victims from being able to exert epistemic influence with their accusations against him. A common feature of celebrity is excessive—that is, undeserved—epistemic power, especially in areas “unrelated to their career, talent, or expertise” (Archer et al., 2020, p. 28). CK had epistemic power over what people thought about accusations against him, even though his comedic traits and achievements do not imply anything about whether or not he would sexually harass others—and in fact the content of his work even lends credibility to these accusations as he joked about the kinds of acts he later confessed to committing (Bradley, 2017). It is important distinguish positive epistemic power from negative epistemic power. A person with negative epistemic power tends to be disbelieved more that they ought to be and disables those they try to enable epistemically. Celebrities usually have both kinds of power, depending on who their audience is. Consider Trump again. Some tend to believe his statements, while others tend not to believe them. For example, Trump fans were more likely to believe his bizarre statements about how to treat COVID-19, with several of them hospitalizing themselves (Smith-Schoenwalder, 2020). On the other hand, Trump haters were more likely to disbelieve his statements. For example, many did not believe his statements about COVID-19 originating in a laboratory in China. At the time, I dismissed these as racist and incendiary ramblings. Later it transpired these claims were more credible than his haters might have thought (though still not confirmed as of the time of writing).4 Trump thus has negative epistemic power over me, a hater of his. More generally, celebrities have positive epistemic power over their fans, and negative epistemic power over their haters. However, it is not just fans that celebrities have some power over. Fans give celebrities power over potential fans—that is, members of the public who are not yet fans but who might become fans (in part because they are not haters). Fans help to establish a celebrity's positive epistemic power in the social imagination—that is, the collectively constructed “kind of imagination that opens our eyes and hearts to certain things and not others, enabling and constraining” how we understand and conceptualize others and social life more generally (Medina, 2012, p. 22). Someone who appears to be a well-loved celebrity is someone we might come to like. Even if you are not currently a fan of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, you might have a positive view of him because many others see him positively. This might then make you open to seeing one of these films, which might help to make you a fan of his. So, having more fans helps potential fans become actual fans. Haters can also help to stop potential fans becoming actual fans. That someone is widely despised might make us not want to engage with their work (though, of course, some people are contrarians and the fact someone is hated might be an alluring feature). Because celebrities typically have both fans and haters, celebrity typically involves a continual power struggle. This is not just a power struggle between fans and haters, but also among all the various social, political, and economic forces that come into play to determine a person's image and social position. For example, celebrities sometimes try to avoid negative stories in newspapers and gossip websites to maintain their positive image in the social imagination. The fact they do suggests celebrities are aware of the importance of having a positive image. With such an image comes an elevated social position and various powers, including positive epistemic power. Celebrities, then, are aware there is a struggle to maintain their social position and associated powers. One important source of their power is their fans. While a celebrity has power over their fans, it is their fans that help to support their image in the social imagination as widely loved and admired. While celebrities might have other sources of positive epistemic power (such as a strong public relations team that promotes positive stories about them), celebrities still depend on their fans to a significant extent for their positive epistemic power—that is, celebrities depend on their fans to love and admire them so that they maintain their positive celebrity status. It is their fans, after all, who will support what the celebrity does both financially and socially. Regardless of how much they ought to be believed and regardless of how many positive stories there were in the press about them, if a celebrity were exclusively despised and hated, no one would actually believe anything they said, and no one would find anyone they recommend to be credible. That is, such a celebrity would only have negative epistemic power. Those celebrities who are aware of their dependence on their fans have a clear motivation to apologize to their fans for wrongs that do not directly involve their fans.5 Fans might feel betrayed or upset by a celebrity's wrongdoing.6 A notable feature of fandom is that fans often have an impression of their idol's character that is at odds with their actual character. Their idol's misbehavior can sometimes reveal what the idol's actual character is. To avoid losing their fans, a celebrity must act to avoid or allay feelings of betrayal and sadness that their wrongs might cause. An apology can help to do this. It can assure their fans that they really are, or aspire to be, how their fans see them. I would also like to apologize to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world. (Smith, 2022; my emphasis) Here Smith makes clear that he takes a subset of the public to be among the intended audience of the apology. I take it that by explicitly mentioning the public this way, Smith is targeting both fans and potential fans. What would you say to the people who looked up to you before the slap or people who expressed that you let them down? Two things. One: disappointing people is my central trauma. I hate when I let people down, so it hurts me psychologically and emotionally that I didn't live up to peoples' image and impression of me. The work I am trying to do is—I am deeply remorseful and I'm trying to be remorseful without being ashamed of myself. I'm human and I made a mistake and I'm trying not to think of myself as a piece of shit. So I would say to those people, I know it was confusing. I know it was shocking. But I promise you, I am deeply devoted and committed to putting light and love and joy into the world. If you hang on, I promise we will be able to be friends again. (cited in Whiting, 2022; my emphasis) This part of Smith's apology is notable for two reasons. First, he explicitly acknowledges that he did not live up people's impression of him. Second, he promises “we” will be able to be friends again. These reasons suggest Smith is directing this part of his apology to his fans. It is his fans whose impression he has not lived up to and it is his fans (perhaps among others) who he promises to be friends with again. We therefore have another potential explanation for why celebrities apologize to their fans and in public—namely, to maintain their fans, and potential fans, and thereby maintain their fame. Celebrities are often aware their fame depends on their fans, and so they think they must also apologize, or dedicate part of an apology, to their fans. Their fame depends on being “friends” with their fans. The apology must be publicly given because it is only this way that the apology can have its fan-appeasing function and its wider effect on the social imagination. A celebrity who was motivated to apologize only to maintain her fame would be apologizing for a bad reason. Only aiming to maintain one's fame is self-serving, so a celebrity who apologized for just this reason would act from a morally blameworthy motivation. Of course, people often act for multiple reasons. A celebrity might be motivated to apologize to her fans and in public also because she takes herself to have role model obligations and because she wants to set the public record straight. Such a celebrity might also be motivated to apologize because she feels remorse about what she has done and wants to make amends. When a celebrity publicly gives a fan-targeted apology, her overall set of motivations might not be morally blameworthy even though it includes the motivation to maintain her fame. Will Smith's apology might be an example of this. He plausibly had all these motivations, given his words and other facts we can infer from the context of his apology. For example, his talk of not living up to the image people had of him could also be understood as him implicitly acknowledging that he has role model obligations. But while all these motivations may be present, a celebrity may place more importance on one of them. For example, it might be that Smith cared more about maintaining his fame than he did about meeting his role model obligations, setting the public record straight, expressing his remorse, and making amends. If it is true that Smith cared more about maintaining his fame, this would make his overall set of motivations a morally blameworthy one, thereby making his apology a morally substandard one. In other words, caring more about maintaining one's fame results in the moral blameworthiness of that motivation polluting one's whole set of motivations for apologizing. This is because when a person cares more about something, they are willing to sacrifice other cares and interests for the sake of that thing. This is often good. For example, because I care more about my daughter than my career, I am willing to sacrifice advancing my career for the sake of my daughter (e.g., by opting to spend more time with her than writing papers). But sometimes it is bad. For example, a person who cares more about being famous is willing to sacrifice other cares and interests for the sake of becoming and remaining famous. This can mean neglecting earlier relationships to focus on developing ones that are more conducive to increasing one's fame, focusing on how one appears to the world rather than developing one's physical and psychological health, and so on. It also means that when a celebrity's positive status is thre