The number of corporate apologies has increased dramatically during the past decade. This paper differs from the public relations and management literature concerning CEO apologies because it delves into the ethics of CEO apologies. Rather than just listing traits or features than an apology should have, I ground these features in the nature or essence of an apology as an act of potential trust. Then I explore the largely ignored role played by the speaker’s ethos and by audience pathos in genuine or ethical apologies and suggest that attention needs to be paid to the problems such as “role contamination.” The paper concludes by arguing that it likely is not possible to specify all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for an apology to be ethically good. The most one can hope to do is to outline some key aspects of an ideally good apology.