In June the Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling for an official apology for more than two centuries of slavery and “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws” laws that followed.

However, a signing ceremony scheduled for today in the Capitol Rotunda has been postponed after several members of the Congressional Black Caucus objected to a disclaimer in the resolution that bars legal claims against the United States by those seeking reparations or cash compensation for the enslavement of Africans in America.

Paul Taylor, associate professor of philosophy at Temple’s College of Liberal Arts, says the most natural response to the Senate’s recent apology for slavery may be ambivalence.

“The apology does in some way indicate a kind of ethical progress, but the progress is rather minimal and may come at an unacceptable political cost,” said Taylor.

“The progress is minimal for two reasons. First, the wrongness of slavery is not a matter of serious controversy, and it should have been possible for the people’s representatives to go on record about this issue years ago. And second: apologies are nice, and are in fact a vital part of the give and take of human relationships, but as public policy, in a society deeply in need of serious policy solutions to real problems, they are very nearly a waste of time.

“The political cost of making apologies like this (as with the House version from last year) may be unacceptable because the resultant controversy and consternation may complicate the passage of serious legislation concerning issues — like urban policy, policing, and immigration — that have already been complicated by misplaced racial anxieties and myths.”

Taylor studies aesthetics, philosophy of culture, Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, social and political philosophy and pragmatism in the United States.