Guilt Feelings and Phenomenology

The view that groups can have their own beliefs, desires, and intentions has been defended in different ways by Philip Pettit, Margaret Gilbert, and others (Gilbert 2000; Pettit 2003).

Like Burleigh Wilkins, most would probably find the idea of guilt feelings with a “total absence of any phenomenological accompaniments... extremely puzzling” (Wilkins 2002: 152). While a more technical term like “emotion” has been given non-phenomenological interpret­ations, at least in the philosophical literature — as referring to an essentially conative state or a type of evaluative judgment, for instance — the word “feeling” typically refers to something felt by a subject, i.e. an occurrent subjective experience of a particular kind, or at least a dispos­ition for such experiences. Non-phenomenological accounts of emotions are usually explicitly contrasted with feeling accounts, thereby implying that feelings, unlike emotions, by definition come with phenomenology. So, on the common use of the word “feeling,” “feelings without phenomenology” is a contradiction in terms.

Nevertheless, in line with the widely accepted repudiation of groups as bearers of phenom­enal experience, one natural move among philosophers defending collective guilt feelings is to question the essentiality of phenomenology in this context. Gilbert explicitly doubts that some phenomenological condition must be met for someone to have guilt feelings (Gilbert 2002: 141). Thomas Szanto argues that corporations can have negative reactive emotions, such as feelings of humiliation, which “are not individuated by their phenomenology” and Deborah Tollefsen makes a similar point (Szanto 2016: 271—2; Tollefsen 2003: 232). In their function­alist defense of corporate reactive attitudes, among them guilt feelings, Gunnar Bjornsson and Kendy M.

The natural alternative to stripping the notion of “feeling” (in “collective guilt feelings”) of phenomenological connotations will be to reinterpret the notion of collectivity in a way that makes it possible to assign the feeling in question to individual group members rather than to the group as such. This appears to be in line with how the term is mostly used in empir­ical investigations or case studies of collective guilt feelings (see e.g. Pettigrove and Parsons 2012). Versions of this strategy have been defended, for example, by Stephanie Collins, who interprets normative ordinary language claims about organizational emotions in terms of the organization’s duties to promote said emotions in their members (Collins 2018) and by Anita Konzelmann Ziv, who accounts for “collective guilt feelings in terms of individual members’ we-feeling of guilt” (Konzelmann Ziv 2007).

In other words, given that no reasonable approach assigns phenomenal consciousness to collectives as such, we need to stretch the meaning of “collective guilt feelings” beyond the most natural reading, either by allowing for “feelings” without experiential components, or by assigning a “collective” attitude to individuals. If we allow for the first strategy, it seems rea­sonable to require at least that the functional analogy between individual and collective guilt is very strong, phenomenal differences aside. If we allow for the second, the challenge is to give an account of what it means for an individual attitude to be collective in a substantive and interesting sense.

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