On the relationship between responsibility and guilt: antecedent appraisal or elaborated appraisal?

Three studies are reported in which we examined the relation between responsibility and guilt. Results from Study 1 suggested that responsibility increased as a function of guilt, but that the reverse relation did not emerge. In the second and third studies we primed either responsibility or guilt and examined how these primes influenced subsequent appraisals for novel events. We also used different manipulations of responsibility and guilt. In Study 2 guilt was operationalized as negative interpersonal consequences as evidenced by the reactions of others. Responsibility was varied by manipulating the controllability of negative outcomes. In Study 3 responsibility was manipulated in terms of the severity of negative consequences for oneself. Results of both studies showed that guilt primes gave rise to perceptions of responsibility but that responsibility primes did not affect perceptions of guilt. We conclude that responsibility is best regarded as an elaborated appraisal generated by guilt, rather than an antecedent of guilt. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Guilt and Child Soldiers

The use of child soldiers in armed conflict is an increasing global concern. Although philosophers have examined whether child soldiers can be considered combatants in war, much less attention has been paid to their moral responsibility. While it is tempting to think of them as having diminished or limited responsibility, child soldiers often report feeling guilt for the wrongs they commit. Here I argue that their feelings of guilt are both intelligible and morally appropriate. The feelings of guilt that child soldiers experience are not self-censure; rather their guilt arises from their attempts to come to terms with what they see as their own morally ambiguous motives. Their guilt is appropriate because it reaffirms their commitment to morality and facilitates their self-forgiveness.     

A Discussion of “‘When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible’: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race”

Jane Caflisch’s discussion (this issue) of white liberal guilt is recognized as a bold and ground-breaking exploration of how the Kleinian concepts of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions may shed light on the question of reparation for racial injustice. I suggest that, in addition to persecutory and depressive guilt, melancholic guilt also operates in racist mind-sets, and constitutes the more serious obstacle to reparation. Guilt of this sort prompts defensive repetition, thereby perpetuating racist mind-sets and acts and taking one further and further from the possibility of reparation. On the other hand, the more normal interplay between persecutory and depressive guilt, which is illustrated through a clinical vignette, is seen as opening up a path to reparation. Brief vignettes are offered illustrating points about melancholic guilt and how a culture of facing rather than evading persecutory guilt enabled an opportunity for reparation to be recognized and used.     

Unspecific postevent information,attribution of responsibility,and eyewitness performance

A large number of experiments have demonstrated that misleading postevent information may result in distortions of eyewitness performance. However, most studies have employed a quite specific piece of misinformation (the colour of a car, a type of a road sign) rather than more general postevent information. In the present experiment subjects viewed a film depicting a traffic accident and were subsequently informed that the car driver had or had not committed hit-and-run behaviour and that the motorcyclist had or had not been drinking. An additional control group received no information. In a subsequent interrogation subjects were asked to rate the amount of cause, responsibility and guilt attributable to the car driver and motorcyclist. Results showed that responsibility and guilt and the statements on the accident-related behaviour were influenced by the postevent information. In general, subjects who had received negative information about one of the persons involved attributed higher amounts of responsibility and guilt to them and provided more negative statements concerning their behaviour. However, details that were not closely related to the accident were not significantly influenced by postevent information. The results are discussed in terms of schematic memory reports.     

Talking About Talking About Patients

Several years ago, I talked about a case in a clinical seminar. I presented the work in a style that is different from usual because I was experimenting with how to best evoke the experience of being with this patient for my listeners. This paper is a continuation of that presentation, now through written rather than spoken word. In writing it, I struggled with the same dilemma of how to evoke the ambience, the feel of being with this patient. I begin with a discussion of some of the dilemmas involved in writing up clinical work when the aim is to stay close to the experience rather than to illustrate theoretical or technical points. I present a few sample vignettes of my work with this patient and then an analysis of how my writing style, including use of sounds, grammar, and word placement, contributes to evoking experience. I continue with a brief discussion of my experiences in presenting the case in the seminar and use these experiences to highlight aspects of the case. I ask the reader to become personally involved in the experiment by paying attention to what is evoked when reading the material.     

Guilt,Remorse and Victims

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams describes the experience of guilt in terms of fear at the anger of an internalised other, who is a “victim or enforcer.” Williams says it is a merit of his account that it shows how our guilt turns us towards the victims of our wrongdoing. I argue that his account in fact misses the most important form of guilt's “concern with victims”– the experience of remorse. I consider, and reject, one way of trying to supplement this lack in Williams's account of guilt. Finally, I sketch some features of remorse that suggest that remorse belongs to a very different moral picture from the one painted by Williams.     

Differentiation of existential guilt and compassion in relation to responsibility induction: a film experiment

Feelings of existential guilt are assumed to depend on the perception of a causal relationship between one's own behavior or (privileged) situation and the disadvantages of others. By contrast, pity should not depend on such perceptions. This hypothesis, which has been supported so far only by correlational studies, was tested experimentally. Eighty students were shown a film about a developing country. The film was provided with four different comments, each representing one experimental condition (between-subjects design). Experimental factors were "amount of misery of the people shown" and "subject's responsibility for these peoples' conditions of life". As expected, subjects in the condition "misery and responsibility" reported higher feelings of guilt, though no more pity than subjects in the remaining three treatment conditions (experiment 1, n = 40). This mean difference, however, was statistically significant for men only. Contrary to our theoretical expectations--and to finding from other experiments on vicarious reparation--the induction of guilt had no effect on willingness to help a third party (experiment 2, n = 40). Possible reasons for this unexpected finding are suggested.     

Two Strawsonian strategies for accounting for morally responsible agency

It is common for theorists, drawing on P. F. Strawson, to account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the emotions and feelings that characterize our responsibility practices, in terms of the nature of the so-called “reactive attitudes.” Here, I argue against this attitude-based Strawsonian strategy, and I argue in favor of an alternative, which I call the “concern-based Strawsonian strategy.” On this alternative, rather than account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the reactive attitudes, one accounts for such agency in terms of the concern that leaves us susceptible to those attitudes in the first place. This, I believe, is a more promising way to develop the Strawsonian approach than the attitude-based strategy. The concern-based strategy allows us to better countenance the number and variety of the reactive attitudes that characterize our responsibility practices; it shares the attitude-based strategy’s virtues; and it seems to position us to better understand the distinctive social and moral significance associated with being and being regarded as a morally responsible agent.

     

The Relation between Sovereignty and Guilt in Nietzsche's Genealogy

This paper interprets the relation between sovereignty and guilt in Nietzsche's Genealogy. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, Nietzsche was not opposed to the moral concept of guilt. I analyse Nietzsche's account of the emergence of the guilty conscience out of a pre‐moral bad conscience. Drawing attention to Nietzsche's references to many different forms of conscience and analogizing to his account of punishment, I propose that we distinguish between the enduring and the fluid elements of a ‘conscience’, defining the enduring element as the practice of forming self‐conceptions. I show that for Nietzsche, the moralization of the bad conscience results from mixing it with the material concepts of guilt and duty, a process effected by prehistoric religious institutions by way of the concept of god. This moralization furnishes a new conception of oneself as a responsible agent and holds the promise of sovereignty by giving us a freedom unknown to other creatures, but at the price of our becoming subject to moral guilt. According to Nietzsche, however, the very forces that made it possible have spoiled this promise and, under the pressures of the ascetic ideal, a harmful notion of responsibility understood in terms of sin now dominates our lives. Thus, to fully realize our sovereignty, we must liberate ourselves from this sinful conscience.     

Moral Responsibility as Guiltworthiness

It is often alleged that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves a negative interpersonal response for that transgression, blaming responses such as resentment and indignation being paradigms. Aside from a few exceptions, guilt is cited in recent discussions of moral responsibility, if at all, as merely an effect of being blamed, or as a reliable indicator of moral responsibility, but not itself an explanation of moral responsibility. In this paper, I argue that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves to feel moral guilt for that transgression. I argue that this alternative view offers all that the predominant blame-focused view offers, while also solving some puzzling features of moral responsibility. Specifically, it offers a compelling way to reconcile conflicting intuitions about the suberogatory, and allows those who do not understand what Darwall calls ‘second-personal’ reasons to be morally responsible for their immoral acts.     

The toiling lily: narrative life,responsibility, and the ontological ground of self-deception

In this essay, I argue that genuine responsibility and ethical self-understanding are possible without narrative—or, at least, that narrative is not always sufficient. In §2, I introduce and clarify a distinction between our ontological subjectivity and everyday practical identity—one made famous by Heidegger and Sartre. On the basis of this distinction, in §3 I argue that narrative is unable to ground ethical choice and decision. For, although acting in light of practical identities is something we do, it cannot wholly capture what it is to be who we are. Irrespective of whatever worldly projects and identities we press into, something about our subjectivity always remains unchanged. Narrative identity, which trades merely on practical identity, thus obscures this ontological dimension of life wherein human action, decision, choice, and responsibility truly originate. By way of conclusion, in §4, I briefly examine depictions of the narrative life found within the authorships of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Voltaire, illustrating how self-narrative at times invites self-deception and annuls responsibility. A life of genuine responsibility demands more than what the most candid and best intentioned of self-narratives can supply us. Living the good life, I shall intimate, is thus not something that involves mere narrative. It depends, rather, on inwardness.     

Causal and moral responsibility: Antecedents and consequences of group‐based guilt

In six studies (N = 1045) conducted in three European countries, we demonstrate distinctions between causal responsibility, group‐based guilt, and moral responsibility. We propose that causal responsibility is an antecedent of group‐based guilt linking the ingroup to previous transgressions against the victim group. In contrast, moral responsibility is a consequence of group‐based guilt and is conceptualized as a sociomoral norm to respond to the consequences of the ingroup's transgressions and the current needs of the victim group. As such, moral responsibility can be stimulated by group‐based guilt and directly predicts individual action intentions. Studies 1 and 2 focus on the conceptual distinctions among the three constructs. Study 3 tests the indirect effect of causal responsibility on moral responsibility via group‐based guilt. The remaining studies explore the mediating role of moral responsibility in associations between group‐based guilt and compensatory action tendencies, that is, financial compensation (study 4), approach and avoidance tendencies (study 5) and public apology (study 6). Together these studies show that causal and moral responsibility are psychologically distinct concepts from group‐based guilt and that moral responsibility plays an important role in shaping the effects of group‐based guilt on behavioral intentions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collective guilt,moral outrage,and support for helping the poor: A matter of system versus in‐group responsibility framing

We examined how the framing of responsibility for reducing socio‐economic inequality affects individuals' emotional reactions towards the poor and the willingness to engage in prosocial actions. Attribution of responsibility to either the system (government and institutions), the less deprived in‐group, or the disadvantaged out‐group (poor) was measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Study 2). Consistent with our hypotheses, moral outrage was higher than collective guilt when system responsibility for inequalities was put forth, but collective guilt arose to reach the level of moral outrage when in‐group responsibility was emphasized. Moreover, distinguishing between collective guilt for action and for inaction, we found guilt for inaction more difficult and thus less likely to arise, unless responsibility was put on the in‐group. Collective emotions were also found to be negatively linked to system justification motivation illustrating the palliative function of legitimization processes. Finally, moral outrage predicted the willingness to act upon socio‐economic inequalities both when the system's and in‐group's responsibility was emphasized, whereas collective guilt for action (but not for inaction) predicted support for prosocial actions only when the in‐group's responsibility was engaged. These findings suggest that the specific group‐based emotions in response to poverty depend on whether the system or the in‐group is held responsible and differentially predict individuals' commitment to act.     

“When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible”: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race

This paper examines the problem of white liberal guilt from a Kleinian perspective, considering both the reparative potential of guilt in the depressive position, as well as the ways in which racial guilt can become diverted to an internal experience focused more on the self than on the harmed other, inspiring ways of thinking and acting that have little to do with repair. Drawing especially from the Kleinian concept of persecutory guilt, which describes the form guilt can take “when reparation is felt to be impossible”, I examine the consequences of white liberal guilt as expressed in the United States today. In particular, I argue that white liberal self-idealization and self-reproach – positions summarized as “this is not who we are” and “this is all that we are” – can function as two sides of a coin, grounded in splitting and in divergent yet related forms of exceptionalism. As an alternative, I propose thinking about reparation within the realm of the ordinary, and consider what this might entail.     

A study of the comparative structure of guilt and shame in a Chinese society.

On the basis of previous theoretical and empirical analyses of the comparative structures of guilt and shame, the authors hypothesized that antecedent condition (personal inadequacy vs. moral norm violation), audience presence, and personal responsibility attribution would distinguish shame from guilt. Although the subject population was Hong Kong Chinese, evidence from previous studies suggests that the comparative structures of guilt and shame are quite similar across cultures. The subjects were asked to recall either a guilt or a shame incident, and their responses were then coded into the predictor variables. The results of the study indicated that guilt was most likely to emerge when individuals had violated a moral norm and held themselves responsible for their conduct. In contrast, shame emerged more frequently when subjects felt personally inadequate than when they had violated moral norms. Moreover, when a guilt incident was reported, and audience was rarely mentioned, whereas subjects who reported a shame incident would generally feel personally responsible and often mentioned being looked at or evaluated. However, neither personal responsibility nor the presence of an audience seemed to be essential for a person to experience shame.     

Complicity and Criminal Liability in Rwanda: A Situationist Critique

In Complicity and the Rwandan Genocide (2010b), Larry May argues that complicity can be the basis for criminal liability if two conditions are met: First, the person’s actions or inactions must contribute to the harm in question, and secondly, the person must know that his actions or inactions risk contributing to this harm. May also states that the threshold for guilt for criminal liability is higher than for moral responsibility. I agree with this latter claim, but I think that it casts doubt on May’s account of criminal liability, particular in so-called performance cases in which low-level participants merely fail to help. This is because it is far from clear that passive non-helpers are morally responsible for their participation in widespread harms. Situationism purports to show that passive bystanders typically are not morally responsible for their role in such harms, because they were behaving reasonably subject to the constraints they faced. In this paper, I assess this claim, and defend it on the basis of O. W. Holmes’ standard of the reasonable person as a guide to judging criminal complicity. Finally, I provide a situationist account of the Rwandan genocide, which focuses on the systemic causes and primary perpetrators of the genocide, rather than low-level participants.     

The Relationship Between Levels of Guilt in Thematic Stories and Unsocialized Behavior

Many previous studies on the relationship between inhibition of expression of hostility in thematic stories have focused on the severity of the punishment rather than the quality of the guilt expressed. Using a more subtle approach, it was found that an increase in the level and quality of guilt expressed in TAT stories was significantly associated with a reduction in unsocialized behavior. The results suggest that an analysis of guilt along dimensions of internalization, the concern for others, and the desire to change offers a way of dealing with thematic productions that is more consistent with our clinical observations and understanding.     

TRANSCENDENTAL GUILT: On an Emotional Condition of Moral Experience

This article considers a central ethically relevant interpersonal emotion, guilt. It is argued that guilt, as an irreducible moral category, has a constitutive role to play in our ways of conceptualizing our relations to other people. Without experiencing guilt, or being able to do so, we would not be capable of employing the moral concepts and judgments we do employ. Elaborating on this argument, the paper deals with what may be described as the “metaphysics of guilt.” More generally, it is suggested, through a case study on the concept of guilt, that a moral theory avoiding naïve emotivism yet emphasizing the role of emotions in morality can and should pay attention to the transcendental status of emotions such as guilt—emotions constitutive of our concept of moral seriousness. Instead of psychologizing moral emotions, the paper employs Raimond Gaita's Wittgenstein‐inspired way of examining the place of the concepts of guilt and remorse in our ethical language‐use. Finally, some methodological remarks on the possibility of transcendental reflection in moral philosophy are presented. While it is not necessary to commit oneself to any specific religious tradition in order to emphasize the constitutive role of guilt in the way suggested in the paper, it turns out that the moral depth of this concept requires that one is at least open to religiously relevant ways of using moral language. In the fundamental metaphysical sense examined in the paper, guilt is a concept whose home language‐game is religious rather than secular ethics.     

Guilt following transgression: an attribution of responsibility approach

People typically experience guilt when they violate sociomoral norms. Using Heider's (1958) attribution of responsibility model in the two experiments reported here, I examined the attributional mediators of posttransgression guilt. The basic design of both studies was a Level of Responsibility X Subject Role factorial. The first study used a role-playing methodology; in the second, subjects generated protocols describing their own past experiences. The second experiment also distinguished between attributions of responsibility, causality, and blame. In both studies, harmdoer guilt was higher following accidental as opposed to intentional transgressions. The discussion focuses on the dynamics of guilt development and reduction and on the importance of maintaining conceptual distinctions among the various attribution measures in future guilt research.     

The influence of responsibility and guilt on naive hypothesis-testing

Three experiments were used to investigate individuals' hypothesis-testing process as a function of moral perceived utilities, which in turn depend on perceived responsibility and fear of guilt. Moral perceived utilities are related to individuals' moral standards and specifically to people's attempt to face up to their own responsibilities, and to avoid feeling guilty of irresponsibility. The results showed that responsibility and fear of guilt in testing hypotheses involved a process defined as prudential mode, which entails focusing on and confirming the worst hypothesis, and then reiterating the testing process. In particular, the results showed that responsible and guilt-fearing individuals: (1) tended to search prudentially for examples confirming the worst hypothesis and to search for counter-examples falsifying the positive hypothesis; (2) focused on the worst alternative, and tended to confirm it; (3) prudentially kept up the testing process, even if faced with initial positive evidence. Our discussion of the results emphasises how people are largely pragmatic in their hypothesis testing, using efficient cognitive strategies that focus on error minimisation rather than on truth detection. In a context of responsibility and guilt, the errors are linked to people's failure to face up to their own responsibilities, and are thus moral errors.