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Embarrassment and Innocence
Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that are true—which end up causing reasonable people to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be judged for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't being misleading just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is embarrassment rather than defensiveness.
The function of embarrassment as a social emotion is as a signal of appeasement and social repair: embarrassment says, "I'm aware that I've become visible in a socially undesirable way; please don't take it as representative of me."
The socially undesirable appearance can come apart from any intended or actual wrongdoing. Jewish law has a concept of marit ayin, "appearance to the eye": the law prohibits actions that would themselves be permissible if they didn't create the appearance of a prohibited act. Hanging up wet clothes to dry on the sabbath is prohibited, because it looks like you were doing laundry on the sabbath (even if the clothes actually got wet for some other reason). One function of the marit ayin doctrine is to deny plausible deniability to norm-violators (as someone might try to do laundry on the sabbath if they felt secure that no one would punish them for merely hanging up the wet clothes). Those who want to be known for keeping the sabbath need to pay a price that's more expensive for sabbath-violators to pay; if you care about m