Hey GPT, should we take advice from people who have made mistakes about the mistake they made? Or are they trying to pass blame for their behaviour by explaining their way out of it. Discuss the ethics or each position
We are often in situations where we meet people who are explaining away their behaviours or claiming expertise because they have been to the university of hard knocks.
Like any advice understanding what is useful and not is part of critical thinking. However these situations where the behaviour is particularly bad, are often the most dismissed or heavily lauded. Why?
I think GPT handled this in an interesting way in examining the way things are explained, neatly side stepping its way out of the moral relativism where perpetrators are raised above victims and become moral authorities.
GPT says,
This question sits at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and epistemology (how we know things). There are two competing moral interpretations when someone who has made a mistake gives advice about that mistake:
- The Redemption / Learning Model – mistakes create insight worth sharing.
- The Rationalisation / Blame-Shifting Model – explanations are a way to escape accountability.
Both positions have ethical legitimacy depending on intent, responsibility, and evidence of change.
1. The Ethical Case For Listening to People Who Made the Mistake
Moral Principle: Experiential Knowledge
People who have failed often possess knowledge unavailable to those who have not faced the situation.
Philosophically this aligns with practical wisdom (phronesis) in virtue ethics:
experience—including mistakes—develops judgment.
Examples across domains:
- Former addicts advising about addiction recovery
- Bankers explaining causes of financial crises
- Climbers explaining fatal mountaineering errors
- Engineers explaining system failures
In many safety disciplines, learning from error is institutionalized:
- aviation accident investigation
- medicine morbidity & mortality reviews
- nuclear safety reporting systems
These systems assume:
Mistakes contain information that success often hides.
Ethical Argument
If a person acknowledges fault and extracts lessons, refusing to listen wastes knowledge that could prevent harm.
The ethical logic becomes utilitarian:
- Knowledge from failure can reduce future suffering.
Additional Moral Value: Moral Growth
Listening to people who have made mistakes recognizes the ethical possibility of redemption and learning.
From a moral philosophy perspective:
- Aristotle: virtue develops through practice and reflection
- Christian ethics: repentance and testimony
- Buddhist ethics: awareness through suffering
In these frameworks, mistakes are part of moral development.
2. The Ethical Case Against Listening
The counterargument is powerful: explanations may simply be self-serving narratives.
Humans are highly skilled at post-hoc rationalisation.
Psychological research shows:
- People reinterpret past actions to protect their identity
- Memory is reconstructed, not replayed
- Success is attributed internally, failure externally
So the person who made the mistake might say:
- “The system made me do it”
- “No one could have known”
- “Everyone else was doing it”
This becomes a form of narrative laundering.
Ethical Concern: Moral Hazard
If society constantly centers the voices of those who caused harm, it can:
- Normalize poor judgment
- Shift responsibility away from wrongdoing
- Turn failure into a platform
Examples where this concern arises:
- corporate scandals
- political misconduct
- financial fraud
Sometimes “lessons learned” presentations function as reputation repair, not truth.
Ethical Argument
From a justice perspective, the priority is accountability, not explanation.
The moral risk is:
Explanation becomes a mechanism for blame dilution.
3. A Deeper Problem: Narrative vs Causality
Even sincere people often misunderstand why they failed.
Humans are poor at identifying complex causal chains.
We tend to produce clean stories about messy events.
This creates three layers:
| Layer | Description |
|---|---|
| Actual cause | Complex system interactions |
| Experienced cause | What the person perceived |
| Narrative cause | What they later explain |
Advice often comes from the third layer, not the first.
This is why:
- accident investigations rely on data and systems analysis
- not only participant testimony.
4. Ethical Filters for When Advice from Failure Is Valuable
The ethical tension resolves when we apply filters.
Advice from someone who failed is valuable when:
1. They accept responsibility
They say:
“I did this wrong.”
Not:
“The world made me do it.”
2. They reveal uncomfortable details
Truthful reflection usually includes self-criticism, not self-protection.
3. They distinguish explanation from justification
Explanation answers:
“How did this happen?”
Justification answers:
“Why I was right to do it.”
Ethically serious reflection focuses on the first, not the second.
4. Their behavior changed afterward
Learning is visible through subsequent conduct, not words.
5. Independent evidence supports the lesson
If external analysis aligns with their explanation, credibility increases.
5. A Useful Ethical Rule
A helpful heuristic:
Take lessons from mistakes, but not moral authority from them.
Someone can still provide valuable insight into a failure mechanism without being a role model.
For example:
- A failed CEO may still explain strategic misjudgments.
- A climber who triggered an avalanche may explain terrain traps.
Their authority is technical, not moral.
6. A Balanced Ethical Position
The most responsible stance is neither cynicism nor naivety.
- Rejecting all testimony from failure loses critical knowledge.
- Uncritically accepting it risks absorbing rationalisations.
The ethical middle ground:
Listen carefully, but verify ruthlessly.
Treat the explanation as a hypothesis about failure, not a definitive account.
7. A Final Insight
In many domains the people who failed are often the only ones who truly understand the edge of failure.
But that knowledge becomes ethically valuable only after the person stops defending themselves and starts examining themselves.
Until that moment, explanations are usually reputation management, not wisdom.
If you’d like, I can also show a four-quadrant framework that distinguishes honest reflection vs narrative repair and useful lessons vs moral evasion—it’s a very powerful way to evaluate whether someone’s explanation is trustworthy.
Chat GPT and Me 
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