Blame and Guilt Feelings

Kutz’s objection to collective responsibility rests on the assumption that evoking feelings of shame, guilt, and regret is an essential function of moral blame in general. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to defend this assumption, but like David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Richard Brandt, Alan Gibbard, and others, I will assume that it is basically correct.

Hume emphasizes that moral feelings, i.e. “pleasure and pain of that peculiar kind, which makes us praise or condemn” are social in character, and differ radically from feelings we have towards inanimate objects. They include love and hatred, pride, and humility (1739, book III, section 1:2). These are feelings of the sort that are bound up with “the very great importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings, and the great extent to which our personal feelings and reactions depend upon, or involve, our beliefs about these attitudes and intentions” (Strawson 1962: section 3). Like Strawson, Hume understands moral praise and blame in terms of interpersonal feelings that typically involve a mutual affective concern — a desire or expectation that the other cares about my attitudes towards her, and that she has a similar desire for me to care about her attitudes towards me.

When John Stuart Mill characterizes morality as a system of social sanctions, the type of sanctions he treats as most important are self-reproach and feelings of guilt.

For the truth is, that the idea of penal sanctions, which is the essence of law, enters not only into the conception of injustice, but in that of any kind of wrong. We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience.

(Mill 1863: 33)

According to Richard Brandt, the essential element in the moral responsibility of a person X is that

it is fitting or justified in itself for X to have some blaming attitudes, including... remorse towards himself, and for many other persons Y to have some blaming attitudes including retributive indignation towards X, and to express them in their behavior.

(Brandt 1958: 16-17)

Alan Gibbard claims that “[t]o hold a person to blame for an action will then be to accept norms that tell him to feel guilty for having done it, and tell others to be angry with him for having done it” (Gibbard 1990: 150).3

In line with this, I will assume that to hold you responsible for some bad event is to have an attitude with a conative element towards you: The wish that you feel guilt for your involve­ment in the event. When you feel guilt for what you did, you feel bad about your actions and wish them undone, due to your demand for regard from others. (As Mill notes, this demand may be completely internalized and it does not necessarily require actual social interaction in each case.) Blame typically appeals to your demand for goodwill from others and your sense of having been part of the explanation of why something bad happened.

On the face of it, we blame the deceased, we blame psychopaths who allegedly lack the capacity to feel guilt,⁴ and we even appear to blame inanimate objects like malfunctioning computers. On the view assumed here, it appears that we must dismiss such behaviors as non­sensical, since the blamer in such cases aims at a reaction she knows cannot be realized. A less dismissive strategy is to regard them as distinct forms of blaming-like practices, whose meaning in various ways are parasitic upon the basic sense of blame, sharing some but not all of its essen­tial characteristics. The latter strategy is compatible with holding on to the idea that blame in that basic sense still occupies the most central “region in our moral thought” (Gibbard 1990: 52), and hence that the question of whether a certain type of being is capable of feeling guilt is of great moral relevance.

As Mill notes, guilt feelings may be regarded as negative moral sanctions, closely related to other forms of punishment. Although guilt feelings may have valuable functions, such as helping ameliorate damaged relations, prompting personal improvement etc., like other forms of pun­ishment they are in themselves generally unwanted and unpleasant. This becomes obvious when we consider cases where guilt feelings occur but lack the usual positive effects, such as when people cannot help but feel strongly guilty about some innocent choice that by coincidence turned out to have disastrous consequences.⁵ Such feelings are generally considered as bad for the person, and clearly constitute a form of suffering. The unpleasant quality of guilt feelings appears essential to their function as negative moral sanctions.

For the sake of argument, I will not commit myself to any conceptual claims about the phe­nomenological nature of unpleasantness but like Brandt in A Theory of the Good and the Right I will at least assume that one thing which unpleasant states have in common is a continuous motivational component. Other things equal, as long as you are in an unpleasant state you want to be relieved of it, and you want this because of the intrinsic nature of the state you are in (Brandt 1979:35-42).⁶

16.3