Moral Responsibility-Based Collective Emotions
Allowing that I can intelligibly feel guilt over our action, provided this feeling is understood as just discussed, can we collectively feel guilt or, for that matter, pride over our action? This raises the more general question of collective emotions, a topic on which Gilbert has written at length.34
She approaches this topic from the same angle that she approaches the topics of collective goals, beliefs, and so on, with an interest in understanding the ascriptions of emotions to “us” that people make every day, as in “We feel remorse over what we did” and “The team is jubilant after its win.”
Here is Gilbert’s positive proposal regarding the case of collective remorse.
According to Gilbert, we collectively feel remorse over our doing A if and only if we are jointly committed to feel remorse as a body over our doing A. The technical terms here—“jointly committed” and “feel remorse as a body”—are to be understood in the usual way, and the implications for the participants in a case of collective remorse are as usual. Importantly, everyone is obligated to everyone else to act in ways expressive of remorse over our doing A in relevant contexts.Some have claimed that emotions, whether of a group or of an individual human being, must involve what Gilbert has called “feeling-sensations,” distinctive conscious states such as pangs of regret. This claim may stem from an implicit assumption that collective emotions must be understood along the same lines as the emotions of individual humans, coupled with the assumption that emotions necessarily involve feeling-sensations. The second assumption is denied by some of the emotion theorists who focus on the individual case. The first seems to beg the question with respect to everyday collective emotion ascriptions.35
Whether or not one thinks that Gilbert has successfully characterized the referents of everyday collective emotion ascriptions, or a class of emotions according to a given account of emotions, the presence of collective remorse and other emotions understood along the lines she has sketched is liable to have significant consequences in the aftermath of collective wrongdoing.36 For instance, if we have harmed you, and we are known to be remorseful, on Gilbert’s account, you are more likely to forgive us, and peace to be restored between us.
Note that our collective belief that we did wrong is less likely to have precisely that effect. It seems that we could believe this while appearing not to care about it.37
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