Introduction1

In Complicity (2001), Christopher Kutz admits that there are important differences between assigning responsibility to a group in a holistic manner and summing up judgments about indi­vidual responsibility.

a collective cannot respond affectively to these expressions, only its constituent members can. The lack of affective counter-response is troubling, because the efficacy of responses of accountability partially depends upon affect. The responses of shame, guilt, and regret help to register the significance of the harm.

(Kutz 2001: 196)

The view that evoking feelings of shame, guilt, and related social affective attitudes is essential to our practices of blaming and holding groups morally responsible is common, at least within a broadly Humean or Strawsonian tradition (Hume 1740; Strawson 1962). And the claim that groups can feel guilt, or indeed feel anything at all, appears to “stretch phenomenological cred­ibility” (Smith 2008: 241). So, Kutz’s worry seems legitimate.

There is a relatively rich literature on the social psychology of collective guilt and on how different kinds and degrees of experiences of collective guilt affect and are affected by the degree of group identification, and by other ingroup/outgroup attitudes and behavior.² Social psychologists regard the feeling of collective guilt as an existing phenomenon; one which is available for empirical studies. This may seem to undermine Kutz’s objection. However, even in the context of empirical research it is still not clear exactly what assumptions research subjects commit themselves to when they express feelings of collective guilt. The studied phenomenon is social and hence collective in the broadest sense of the word — it is a feeling that requires an us/them categorization and it explains attitudes that are directed towards one’s own group or other groups.

Section 16.2 is a brief elaboration of Kutz’s assumption that a subject’s capacity for guilt feelings is a reasonable condition for holding it morally responsible in a meaningful way. Section 16.3 maps current defenses of the possibility of collective guilt into two cat­egories: positions that assign guilt feelings to groups as such but play down the phenom­enological or experiential component in guilt feelings, and positions that do justice to our intuitions about the phenomenology of guilt feelings but understand collective guilt feelings in terms of individual experiences. Section 16.4 focuses on two examples of the first type of approach, by examining the analogy between collective and individual guilt from two different collectivistic viewpoints — Gilbert’s plural subject theory of group guilt, and the suggestion from Gunnar Bjornsson and Kendy M. Hess that standard functionalist arguments for basic corporate agency extend to reactive attitudes like guilt feelings. The fourth section presents an approach of the second kind: an individualistic but “perspec- tival” understanding of collective guilt, related to the “we-mode” approach to collective intentionality.

My tentative conclusion is that Kutz is right in assuming that groups as such cannot feel guilty in the relevant sense, but that guilt as felt by individuals can have a distinctively collective character, such that the feeling still may be an appropriate response to assignments of collective responsibility.

16.2