Some of the issues central to the meanings of collective apologies invoke significant debates within contemporary philosophy, and the preceding discussions raise far more questions than they answer. Despite the many nuances of my account of individual apologies, collective apologies add layers of complexity to nearly every facet of apologetic meaning. They also tend to traffic in large-scale and high-stakes injuries, adding multiple loathsome offenders, scores of seriously injured victims, and a range of ultimate values to an already intricate analysis. To complicate matters further, we find many of these exchanges within ever-confounding corporate and political contexts. All of this may leave some readers feeling more confused than when they began. When a UN report on the Rwandan genocide stated that the “United Nations as an organization, but also its Member States, should have apologized more clearly, more frankly, and much earlier,” we might have initially viewed this as a laudable and unproblematic assertion. Yet as we noticed in the introduction with respect to demands that the Pope apologize for his Regensburg address, we need some standard against which to measure such gestures. When we demand that a collective apologize, what do we mean?

Of all the issues raised regarding collective apologies, here I would like to highlight those that I consider most important. If apologies present loose constellations of interrelated meanings, these are the questions I ask first when scanning the horizons of collective apologies.