Implications for Group Members (2): The Intelligibility of Feeling Guilt Over What One's Group Has Done

Suppose that I am blameless in connection with an extremely bad action of ours. Could it still make sense for me to feel guilt over our action? Karl Jaspers raised this question in the wake of the Second World War.

Gilbert has argued that given her account of collective action and related concepts, it does make sense—given some important distinctions and assumptions (Gilbert 1996a; 1997a).

First, we allow that someone can only bear personal guilt for an action of his own. More fully, it is only someone’s personal wrongdoing that allows for an ascription of moral guilt to that person—to Jill, on the one hand, or to Jane, on the other. We allow, further, that it makes sense for someone who bears personal guilt to feel it, that is, to feel guilt over what he has done. This feeling will be expressible by such words as “I am guilty.” Call it a feeling of personal guilt.

Finally, we allow that if an action is ours, collectively, in the sense articulated by Gilbert, and that action is morally blameworthy, it makes sense for any one of us to feel guilt in our capacity as one of us. In other words, what I can intelligibly feel guilt over is what we—collectively—did. This is so by virtue of my participation in the joint commitment or commitments that lie at the foundation of the action in question.

To be clear, what I feel guilt over in this case is what we collectively did. It is not guilt over my participation in the joint commitment. That might well not have been culpable, after all.

Gilbert has labeled the feeling just described a feeling of membership guilt. It will be expressible in such words as “We are guilty” where the collective “we” is at issue. Importantly, no personal guilt is implied.

According to Gilbert, then, what she calls a feeling of membership guilt is intelligible, even when I am personally blameless with respect to our action, or minimally blameworthy.

As Gilbert understands it, then, I may intelligibly feel membership guilt even when it is not appropriate for me to feel personal guilt. For “We—collectively—are guilty” does not imply “I—personally—am guilty.”

In a particular case it may of course be reasonable for me to feel guilt both over our col­lective action and over my part in it, or something that I did or did not do in connection with it, such as making no effort to stop it. Whether or not this is so, my feeling of membership guilt is directed at the plural subject we form, not at me personally or in some particular guise. It is, rather, a feeling that is apt for members of a guilty plural subject to have.

To say that qua members: people, share in a collective’s guilt, as Gilbert sometimes does, misleads as to her intent if it suggests otherwise. Indeed, when writing of members “sharing in” their group’s guilt (Gilbert 1997a) she makes it clear that that she does not mean that each party has his own piece of it, contrary to what some commentators have suggested.³³

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