Conclusion
Reasonable conceptual analyses of “collective guilt feelings” face the choice between assigning such feelings to groups as such while playing down the phenomenal element in the notion of “feelings,” or assigning them to individual group members while weakening the collectivistic element in the notion of “collective.” By discussing two examples, I have tried to show that the first strategy is less viable than the second, due to functional dis-analogies between the group case and the individual case.
My concluding claim is that an essential function of holding a collective morally responsible is to make its members feel guilt, albeit from the group’s perspective. Guilt feelings are reactive attitudes of an essentially social character, intimately connected with our view of others, and with our thoughts and wishes about their view of us. Such feelings are appropriate responses to moral blame. Guilt feelings are essential elements in a social sanction system that may not constitute the whole sphere of morality but at least, as Hume, Mill, Gibbard, and others noted, occupies the most central “region in our moral thought” (Gibbard 1990: 52). Like other negative sanctions, guilt feelings are in themselves unwanted and unpleasant even when they are justified and fulfil their function. Fairness therefore requires that blame for collective actions is directed towards properly delimited collectives, consisting of people whose membership features make them complicit in the act the group is blamed for. We need criteria of complicity that explain why Jaspers is unfair to himself when he feels guilty just in virtue of sharing nationality with the perpetrators of atrocities.
Very generally speaking, the two basic pillars of moral as well as legal accountability are causal involvement and intent. However, in accounts of co-responsibility for collective or corporate action, both of these conditions have been questioned.
Due to causal or epistemic complications such as over-determination or undetectable causal links, philosophers like Christopher Kutz (2001) and Brian Lawson (2013) have argued that people sometimes should be held to account as accomplices to collective wrong-doing merely in virtue of participatory intentions, regardless of causal involvement. Because of possible discrepancies between a group’s collective decisions and the beliefs and desires of its members, other philosophers, like Torbjorn Tannsjo (2007), have abandoned or at least played down the requirement of intent.I am more optimistic about upholding these two basic requirements for co-responsibility. I also think that giving them up would either have unwanted implications for moral and legal security, or make assignments of co-responsibility toothless. But I have discussed both kinds of worries in some detail elsewhere (2008, 2013) and they do not affect the main points of the present chapter.
Notes
1 Versions of this chapter were presented at the “Responsibility in Complex Systems” conference in Umea and at the Higher seminar in Practical Philosophy in Lund. I am grateful to participants in these events for valuable input. Special thanks to Olle Blomberg, Gunnar Bjornsson, Mattias Gunnemyr, Ingvar Johansson, Gloria Mahringer, Andras Szigeti, and to the editors of this volume Deborah Tollefsen and Saba Bazargan-Forward. This work was funded by project grant 421—2014—1025 from the Swedish Research Council.
2 For an overview, see Ferguson and Branscombe 2014.
3 Mill’s, Brandt's, and Gibbard’s characterizations of moral blaming are all stated in terms of acceptance of norms directed at the blamed: the blamer thinks that the blamed “ought” to be reproached by his own conscience (Mill) or that it is “fitting and justified” for the blamed to have blaming attitudes towards himself (Brandt). The blamer “accepts norms” that tell the blamed to feel guilty (Gibbard). Insofar as the blamer believes that ought implies can, this means that the blamer implicitly assigns an ability to feel guilt to the blamed.
4 Moral blame towards psychopaths may seem difficult to explain away as non-genuine or insincere forms of blame. At the same time, “lack of remorse or guilt” is an important item on the standard psychopathy checklist (Hare 1980: 115). But to begin with, “psychopathy” is a contested concept, used as an umbrella term for various types and degrees of anti-social personality traits (Mullen 2007). Insofar as we hold real-life “psychopaths” responsible, this may be because we apply the term to people that have some anti-social dispositions but still display a sufficient sense of guilt and concern, or simply because we lack the medical and psychological insights necessary to understand their degree of moral impairment. It is not very controversial to assume that it would be improper to react with moral blame towards an individual fulfilling all the standard criteria for full-blown psychopathy. The debate about whether real-life “psychopaths” should be held morally responsible tends to focus precisely on the empirical question of whether they really lack the capacity to react morally in a proper way (Levy 2014; Malatesti and MacMillan 2014, 13-14).
5 I am thinking here of unjustified moral self-blame. As Richard Hare points out, in situations like these it may not be easy to sort out genuine moral remorse from mere regret, which can be equally strong and unpleasant but justified in spite of moral innocence (Hare 1981: 28). Bernard Williams famously argues that a certain kind of morally tainted regret which involves a need to compensate or restitute, “agent-regret,” can be morally warranted when agents faultlessly cause harm to others (Williams 1981: 27-9). My point here, which is not affected by these claims, is just that guilt feelings in themselves are unpleasant, and that this feature can be brought out by considering cases of unjustified self-blame.
6 I assume here that the motivational component is a necessary element in unpleasantness, leaving it open whether e.g.
a certain experiential quality or some other less operationalizable feature is necessary as well. Brandt assumes that the motivational analysis gives necessary and sufficient conditions though: “In short, an experience is pleasant if and only if it makes its continuation more wanted. The transposition for being unpleasant will be obvious” (1979: 40-1). As Brandt points out, the necessary motivational element does of course not rule out the possibility that your overall disposition is nevertheless to endure the unpleasant experience. There may be various factors extrinsic to the state of being unpleasant, counteracting your disposition to be relieved from it due to its intrinsic quality. You may believe that you deserve to suffer, or that the unpleasant experience is necessarily intertwined with something instrumentally valuable, for instance.7 Among the 28 contributions, Hans Bernhard Schmid’s stands out as the only one that appears to assign phenomenal experience to groups: “The claim is that there is a sense in which it is literally true that when a group of people has an emotion, there is one feeling episode, one phenomenal experience in which many agents participate” (Schmid 2014: 9). However, as Tom Cochran points out in a review, Schmid’s analysis of the phenomenon, in terms of individuals having plural pre-reflective selfawareness, makes the position less radical than it may seem at a first glance (Cochran 2016: 471). And as Schmid himself makes clear further on, his “shared feelings” are actually “feelings had by individuals, not feelings had by a group” (2014: 13).
8 www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/ 18/business/gms-ignition-problem-who-knew-what- when.html?_r=0
9 Also described in Petersson 2015, 2017.
10 Hans Bernhard Schmid “The Duty to Know What We are Doing Together,” talk at ENSO IV September 2015.
11 Tollefsen draws an illuminating analogy between feeling collective guilt and feeling genuine embarrassment for someone else’s behavior, which I believe brings out a difference between our suggestions about collective guilt feelings (2003: footnote 26).
On the perspectival account that I suggest here, collective guilt feelings are still essentially first person — they are about the collective and they are held from the same collective’s perspective — a first person plural perspective. But if, instead, we think of collective guilt feelings as mere feelings for a collective, as I take Tollefsen to do, it seems possible, in principle, that I could have such feelings for a collective that I do not belong to, in analogy with my feeling embarrassment for another individual.References
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