Joint Commitment to Feel Guilt
According to Margaret Gilbert, there may be a radical disjunction between the intentions and beliefs of a group, and those of their members. This is the core of her account: “A population P has a collective intention to do A if and only if the members of P are jointly committed to intending as a body to do A” (2002: 125, also Gilbert 2000, 2006 and 2009).
A population fulfilling this condition constitutes a plural subject of the intention to do A. A joint commitment is not a set of individual commitments, it is not created by individual decisions, and it “does not have parts” although it has implications for the parties.On the plural subject account, groups can have intentions of their own, and Gilbert argues that they can have moral beliefs. Therefore, groups as such can be guilty of performing wrongful acts. Gilbert questions Kutz’s claim that collectives cannot respond affectively to moral blame in the appropriate way. “In particular, I argue that there is an important sense in which a collective can feel guilt” (2002: 117).
On the plural subject account of collective action, it is clear that groups as such can be guilty of wrongdoing, and that the group’s guilt may have no implications for the guilt of its members (Gilbert 2000, section 8.10). Gilbert argues plausibly that the individual member’s feeling of guilt in such a case may be different from ordinary feelings of guilt over the member’s own individual actions: the object of the member’s guilt feeling is the collective action of the group in which she is a member, and such feelings may not be proportionate to the member’s assessment of her personal contribution to the collective wrongdoing. As Gilbert notes, a “problem with rejecting such feelings is that people seem to have them” (2002: 134). We might ask whether they can be rationally justified — Gilbert quotes Karl Jaspers’ description of the predicament of being unable to rid himself of guilt feelings for what other Germans did during the Second World War, while as a philosopher he found such emotions to be rationally refutable — but for the present purposes it is sufficient to accept that we can have such feelings, feelings that we have in virtue of our membership in a collective.
Gilbert calls them “membership guilt feelings” and we might imagine other sorts of membership feelings, like membership sadness over a collective loss, or membership pride over a collective achievement (Gilbert 2002; Jaspers 1947).Still, the occurrence of membership feelings of guilt does not imply any feelings of the group as such, or vice versa. For genuinely collective guilt feelings to occur, it is
neither necessary nor sufficient for members of the group to feel membership guilt over an act of the collective... neither necessary nor sufficient for members to feel personal guilt over their participation or other act relating to the collective act. [W]hat is needed, to put it abstractly, is expressions of readiness on everyone’s part to be jointly committed to feel guilt as a body.
(Gilbert 2002: 140)
Gilbert’s general plural subject account is formulated in terms of a joint commitment to intend as a body to do something. From such a commitment follows individual entitlements to actions from other members, and personal obligations to act so as to constitute with others an entity that acts “as a body.” The language of commitments seems more appropriate for capturing collective agency than collective emotions, for the simple reason that while we commit ourselves to act in various ways, we do not normally seem to make commitments to feel anything. In later work, Gilbert articulates the core idea by saying that “roughly, the parties are jointly committed as far as possible to emulate, by virtue of the actions of each, a single body that intends to do the thing in question” (2009: 180). The reference to commitments to act so as to constitute a body that does something is still essential in this formulation.
We do not make decisions about what to feel, and more generally, we do not seem to have the capacity for voluntary shifts of attitudinal modes. I do not deliberately switch from fearing that p to hoping that p, grieving that p, or feeling guilty that p.
Admittedly, there are precommitment devices, more or less efficient self-help methods, and other ways of attempting to affect one’s emotions and motivation but those sorts of activities are not what the parties to the joint commitment to feel guilt as a body are committed to in Gilbert’s examples of such cases. In her illustrations of collective guilt feelings, the act of expressing guilt feelings as a body is really what the parties to the joint commitment are committed to.When Joe and Lisa have failed to look after Phyllis’ daughter Mary properly and as promised during the weekend, thereby making Mary depressed, a joint commitment between Joe and Lisa is prompted by Lisa’s expressing their guilt feelings to Phyllis, in the presence ofJohn. This results in a commitment “to feel guilt as a body” but the function of that commitment is e.g. to make Joe “feel constrained to do and say things that echo or conform to Lisa’s claim that she and Joe feel guilty about the way they treated Mary” (2002: 140). Certainly, this type of situation occurs, but note that these conditions may be completely fulfilled — Joe and Lisa may both be constrained by a joint commitment to do and say things that are consistent with feeling guilty as a body — without any of them actually feeling guilty about anything.
Gilbert explicitly stresses the latter possibility: “No one of these feelings [i.e. collective, membership, and personal guilt feelings] seems to carry another with it as a matter of logic” (2002: 142). On Gilbert’s notion of collective guilt feelings, their collective behavior would suffice for assigning such feelings to this group, even if we know for certain that neither Joe nor Lisa cares about Mary or Phyllis, and that their initial expressions of readiness to enter the joint commitment to do the things that are significant of collective guilt is fully explained by, say, their desire to conform with socially accepted behavior.
Gilbert explicitly questions the idea that some phenomenological condition must be met for someone to have guilt feelings.
Let us grant that the apparent absence of an independent phenomenology of the plural subject may, as Gilbert claims, be “no issue” for an account of collective guilt feelings (2002: 141).My remaining worry is that nothing in the account gives us any reason to believe that the plural subject as such would care about being in this state. Joe and Lisa may each wish that they were not bound by a joint commitment to express guilt feelings as a body, but the account assigns no such wishes to the plural subject, which is distinct from Joe and Lisa. To assign such wishes to the plural subject would seem to require that yet another joint commitment comes into play — a commitment to express resentment over the first commitment, perhaps. This seems farfetched, and would clearly be an ad hoc move. So, I am inclined to think that the plural subject’s Gilbertian guilt feelings lack the element of being unpleasant and unwanted that is essential to guilt feelings and their functions in relation to blame.
My contention is that while Gilbert sketches an interesting account of how members in a group may feel obliged to express certain emotions on behalf of the group, and of how in such situations collectively tainted emotions may occur in the minds of individual members, the properties that she assigns to the plural subject — the group as such — do not constitute guilt feelings in the sense that is tied to moral blame.
Nevertheless, I think that elements in her reflections on the phenomenology of collective guilt feelings point to an interesting sense in which individuals may have distinctively collective feelings of guilt. I will return to that issue in the last section.
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