This seems too simple. The email was going to be made public, which would (and did) cause harm to many people, so an apology could try to mitigate the harm of his words being shared in 2022. His apology largely failed on this point (in my opinion).
This is a universal argument that can be used to stop literally any action you don’t like, or at least cause people to apologize for any such action, because any nontrivial action taken in the world is going to cause harm to at least some people, and probably many people. For this reason it should be rejected out of hand unless it is supported by context-specific details that make it more compelling in this case than it would be in the abstract.
No such details have been forthcoming from the proponents of this argument, most likely because they don’t actually exist and therefore can’t be supplied on demand.
I am not clear to the extent to which his email actually harmed people.
I agree that he did not optimise for mitigating the harm caused, but I don’t grant much weight to that because it’s very ambiguous to me to what extent harm was caused.
A desire to mitigate the harm that one’s comments have caused.
Bostrom’s email did not actually cause any harm (as far as we know) as at the time it was written.
This seems too simple. The email was going to be made public, which would (and did) cause harm to many people, so an apology could try to mitigate the harm of his words being shared in 2022. His apology largely failed on this point (in my opinion).
This is a universal argument that can be used to stop literally any action you don’t like, or at least cause people to apologize for any such action, because any nontrivial action taken in the world is going to cause harm to at least some people, and probably many people. For this reason it should be rejected out of hand unless it is supported by context-specific details that make it more compelling in this case than it would be in the abstract.
No such details have been forthcoming from the proponents of this argument, most likely because they don’t actually exist and therefore can’t be supplied on demand.
I am not clear to the extent to which his email actually harmed people.
I agree that he did not optimise for mitigating the harm caused, but I don’t grant much weight to that because it’s very ambiguous to me to what extent harm was caused.
Can you point to any specific physical harm that was caused by Bostrom’s comments that goes beyond “some people were upset”?