Blaming Collectives as a Way of Evoking Collectively Tainted Guilt in Individuals

As Gilbert points out, we may distinguish between the feeling of guilt that a person may have over her personal contribution to a collectively produced effect, and guilt feelings that are directed at the collective behavior of one’s group.

Gilbert tentatively suggests that an individual may not only have membership feelings (or, as she says, “feeling-sensations”) of this unproblematic kind — individual feelings directed at some aspect of one’s group — but also that distinctively collective feelings may occur in the individual’s mind.

When Gilbert discusses how the pangs of guilt feelings that a person may have due to some act that her group has performed should best be described — as pangs of personal guilt, mem­bership guilt, or collective guilt — she says that although these phenomena are distinct, “from a phenomenological point of view, there may be no way of deciding this issue: a pang is a pang is a pang” (2002: 141). That caveat may be unnecessarily cautious. Among authors defending the possibility of genuine collective intentionality (without postulating group minds or plural subjects), it is not uncommon to associate certain intentional states with a collectively tainted phenomenal feature, a “sense of we-ness” (Pacherie 2012: 343) or “feeling of togetherness” (Zahavi 2015: 91).

Consider again the case of Karl Jaspers. One way of understanding his predicament would be to say that although he was neither causally involved in the atrocities, nor felt any kind of sym­pathy for these deeds or the ideology they were driven by, he felt guilt for them from the per­spective of the German people — a collective with which he identifies. The idea that individuals may identify with groups has been commonly expressed in social psychology at least since the 1970s (for an overview, see e.g. Tajfel and Turner 1986, who discuss group identification in rela­tion to social identity theory) and I believe that it is quite common in various popular debates on collective phenomena — people are said to identify to various degrees with their sports team, ethnic group, political party, etc. In the present context, we need to give a more exact meaning to such expressions. My suggestion is that there is a sense in which you can experience the situ­ation from the group’s perspective.

To make that claim plausible it is not enough to appeal to phenomenological intuitions or introspective evidence. We should be able to give a functional characterization of this perspectival feature of our attitudes. Elsewhere I have suggested a way of developing such an account of the collective perspective, and I will not go into all details here but just give some hints about how I think one should proceed.⁹ My approach relies on the common assumption that we can characterize intentional states functionally in terms of what would make them successful. Some types of attitudes, like perceptions and action intentions, are only veridical or successful if their object stands in a certain relation to the subject of inten­tion — my intention to raise my arm is not successful unless I raise my arm by way of carrying out this very intention, to use a standard example from John Searle. Like Francois Recanati, I think that Searle is wrong in thinking that this implies that the subject of the intention (I) must figure in the content of the intentional state in question.

As Recanati has argued, some types of intentional states admit of perspectival variation when it comes to time and place. This means that the context in which the content of the intentional state should be evaluated (according to its success conditions) need not be the context in which the ontological subject is situated when possessing the state. An episodic memory is not ver­idical if its object occurs in the present context, but is if it occurred in the context of an earlier perceptual experience, for instance. So, the point in time and space from which the content of an intentional state is conceived need not be “here” and “now.” In a similar manner, I suggest that it is possible that some types of intentional states admit of perspectival variation when it comes to the subject of intention, i.e. that the subject of intention may be either “I” or “we.”

So, my claim is that there is a coherent and analyzable sense in which “the subject is imma­nent in the attitude” (to borrow a phrase from Hans Bernhard Schmid¹⁰) without necessarily being part of its content, and that this allows for genuinely collective attitudes without requiring the existence of group minds or independent plural subjects.

This section proceeded from Gilbert’s claim that individuals can experience collective feelings, and a phenomenological intuition about the plausibility of the claim that a sense of we-ness may accompany certain attitudes. The suggested functional characterization of how attitudes can be held from a group perspective does not rely on such phenomenological intuitions, but fits well with them. Perspectival features of a mental state may be part of the phenomenology of that state. As Recanati says, “there is absolutely no reason to consider that phenomenology supervenes on content in the narrow sense” (2009: 51).

According to Deborah Tollefsen, “one could understand collective emotions as those emotions that are expressed through the group members qua group members” (2003: 232). A collective guilt feeling is “the guilt one feels in response to the actions of one’s own group” (Tollefsen 2006: 237). I agree that these kinds of feelings occur and that they are distinct from the guilt an individual may feel over her individual contributions to the collective act. Such feelings are what Gilbert (and I) call “membership guilt feelings,” i.e. individual feelings directed at the collective action of the group in which the individual is a member. What makes my mem­bership guilt feeling “collective” is its object.¹¹ But like Gilbert, I believe that individuals can have collective guilt feelings in a sense distinct from mere membership guilt feelings. I cannot only feel guilt for my group or what it has done. I can feel guilt from my group’s perspective. What makes this kind of feeling collective is not its object, but its intentional subject.

This approach will not provide any grounds for taking literally the claim that groups as such can feel guilt, but it may capture some of the intuitions behind such claims. It gives an expli­cation of how feelings and preferences in the individual mind can be based on the individual’s identification with the group, and thereby have a genuinely collective character.

Let me return to Kutz’s challenge against the idea of collective guilt. Kutz thinks that it would be pointless to hold collectives accountable, since they are unable to respond affectively. Blame must therefore be directed towards the individual accomplices (Kutz 2001: 196). I am sympathetic to Kutz’s restrictive attitude to collective blame and sanctions, partly because of considerations in the previous sections of this chapter. If those considerations are correct then there may be no meaningful way of punishing the collective as such — collective blame, if effective, will merely make individual members feel guilty.

That said, I think that Kutz overlooks the possibility that by holding a collective respon­sible, we address its members in a way that is substantially different from what we do when we assign individual guilt. And although the collective as such is unable to respond affectively, its members may do so from the collective perspective. As Tollefsen says, the norms governing the relevant affective reactions might differ, and so might the motivational role of the distinct types of feelings evoked by assignments of individual and collective responsibility (2003: 232).

I would add that there is a motivational difference not only between the guilt I may feel over what I have done and the membership guilt I may feel over what we have done. There is also a difference in terms of motivation between feeling guilty as a member over what we have done and feeling guilty from our perspective. The latter but not the former kind of feeling fits in with the kind of “agency transformation” that makes a distinct motivational difference in certain prob­lematic social choice situations, as Bacharachs work on “team reasoning” indicates (Bacharach 2006). In other words, the functions and consequences of affective responses that are collective in this sense may be substantially different from what we are after when we blame each member individually. This way of addressing them may be appropriate when the collective character of the action for which they are blamed needs to be stressed.

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