The Financial Ledger Theory of Apologies

Content note: this is written as part of a daily writing challenge for myself.I have a comrade in rationalist event organizing, who once explained his theory of apologies. He said if you hurt someone, it only makes sense to apologize if you should have known better. If, looking back, you see that you should have run different heuristics, or followed different policies, and you had enough information to know it at the time, then you were in the wrong, and should apologize.Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions. Perhaps it doesn't make financial sense to reliably support some niche diet at your conference (like keto, or kosher). Perhaps you have to kick everyone out of the venue early because the venue charges crazy rates past 10pm. You make the tradeoffs as best you can, and assuming you stand by them, it's still making a great event and you shouldn't feel bad about that. He recommends against apologizing if you are not going to change your behavior going forward.I replied that this analysis is sorely lacking. In thinking about ethics, a frame I've gotten a lot of mileage from, is by analogy to a financial ledger. If you go into a shop and break something, you have to pay for it. They had something, you imposed costs on them that can be estimated as the cost of the value of whatever you broke, you can make them whole by paying for it.Criminal courts can be thought of as analogous to this. With many costs imposed on people, you cannot be made whole, but we have come up with prices for them that you can pay, that at least incentivizes the right behavior. For misdemeanors this is often literally a fine, for more serious crimes, you can't undo the hurt, but your debt to society is paid in prison time.Most costs people can impose on each other are not prosecuted by any court of law. Being annoying, for one. The analogy here is to having a ledger that tracks these costs. Sometimes we have pre-agreed rules about what is admissible as a cost, and who pays for it. Tha