The concept of guilt in relation to conscience and anxiety is not referred to as a feeling or an emotion in existential philosophy. Rather, the phenomenon of guilt is analyzed through the structure of existence. In Being and Time, Heidegger interprets guilt in the context of Dasein’s understanding of its own Being. The nature of Dasein as a finite entity permeates the analysis of guilt, which is based on the analysis of negation and the time (...) structure of Dasein. An existential interpretation of guilt, conscience, and anxiety offers a new dimension of the study of emotions with regard to the understanding of human Being. (shrink)

In this dissertation I develop a philosophical theory of scapegoating that explains the role of blame-shifting and guilt avoidance in the endurance of oppression. I argue that scapegoating masks and justifies oppression by shifting unwarranted blame onto marginalized groups and away from systems of oppression and those who benefit from them, such that people in dominant positions are less inclined to notice or challenge its workings. I first identify a gap in our understanding of oppression, namely how oppression endures (...) despite widespread formal commitments to principles of equality and justice. I argue that prominent theories of oppression do not place enough weight on the question of how oppression is justified and concealed from us through blame-shifting, in ways that enable its persistence without our explicit approval of its systems. Scapegoating, a concept as old as the Bible, offers potential insight into the means through which we shift blame and avoid responsibility. However, my survey of the genealogy of scapegoating shows that existing conceptualizations of scapegoating are limited in their scope and cannot be applied to explain the endurance of oppression. I propose an ameliorative theory of scapegoating that accounts for deficiencies in prevailing theories of both oppression and scapegoating. Distinct from interpersonal theories and psychologistic analyses of scapegoating, my theory characterizes scapegoating according to its social function in oppression, thereby explaining structural dimensions that are not already captured by other accounts.With the motivation and ingredients in place, I develop my theory of scapegoating as made up of three sub-mechanisms: essentialization of marginalized groups as blameworthy, collective interest in protection against a threat, and social exclusion of the blamed. These sub-mechanisms work together to construct certain groups as scapegoats and encourage us to treat them accordingly through various structural and interpersonal means. I argue that scapegoating has important implications for the formation of social identities; namely, scapegoating constructs social identities in an oppressive arrangement that is largely hidden from us but informs our social and affective relations. By constructing some identities as essentially blameworthy and threatening, dominantly situated identity groups are encouraged to internalize a protected status, act together in defense of their status, and maintain systems of oppressive exclusion. Finally, I elaborate the epistemic dimensions of my theory of scapegoating to argue that scapegoating functions within our social imaginaries and structural epistemic practices. In particular, I focus on the ways that ignorance functions to maintain the scapegoat mechanism, and how scapegoating helps insulate structural forms of ignorance. I end by considering the potential for resistance to scapegoating. (shrink)

The connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Three other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central (...) moral concepts: the Responsibility Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame's link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt have obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives. (shrink)

It is generally maintained that emotions consist of intentional states and /or bodily feelings. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of guilt in severe depression, in order to illustrate how such conceptions fail to adequately accommodate a way in which some emotional experiences are said to be deeper than others. Many emotions are intentional states. However, I propose that the deepest emotions are not intentional but pre-intentional, meaning that they determine which kinds of intentional state are possible. I go (...) on to suggest that pre-intentional emotions are at the same time feelings. In so doing, I reject the distinction that is often made between bodily feelings and the world-oriented aspects of emotion. (shrink)

This article considers a central ethically relevant interpersonal emotion, guilt. It is argued that guilt, as an irreducible moral category, has a constitutive role to play in our ways of conceptualizing our relations to other people. Without experiencing guilt, or being able to do so, we would not be capable of employing the moral concepts and judgments we do employ. Elaborating on this argument, the paper deals with what may be described as the "metaphysics of guilt." (...) More generally, it is suggested, through a case study on the concept of guilt, that a moral theory avoiding naïve emotivism yet emphasizing the role of emotions in morality can and should pay attention to the transcendental status of emotions such as guilt--emotions constitutive of our concept of moral seriousness. Instead of psychologizing moral emotions, the paper employs Raimond Gaita's Wittgenstein-inspired way of examining the place of the concepts of guilt and remorse in our ethical language-use. Finally, some methodological remarks on the possibility of transcendental reflection in moral philosophy are presented. While it is not necessary to commit oneself to any specific religious tradition in order to emphasize the constitutive role of guilt in the way suggested in the paper, it turns out that the moral depth of this concept requires that one is least open to religiously relevant ways of using moral language. In the fundamental metaphysical sense examined in the paper, guilt is a concept whose home language-game is religious rather than secular ethics. (shrink)

The idea behind right and wrong is premised on ethics. There have been controversies about the philosophy of right and wrong in Western and African thoughts. There is a perception that the essential difference between right and wrong is honor-orientation versus justice-orientation, which is believed to be based on shame and guilt. With the aforementioned, the researcher sought to explore the comparative analysis on guilt and shame in Western and African ethics using a qualitative research design to (...) make the investigation. It was discovered that Western ideas and beliefs are quite different from those of African society. Western ethical standards have been used wrongly to scan African ethics and ethical conducts and these African ethical conducts have not been given elaborate investigation and clarification. It concluded that using Western ethical standards to judge African moral ideas is biased and demeaning to philosophical scholarship. Some recommendations on extensive analysis and interpretation of moral values on the scale of guilt and shame as well as a rethink on morality as it relates to ethics and corporate existence were made. (shrink)

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel (...) account of guilt that explains guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

Whereas Christians often give guilt a prominent role, Buddhists are encouraged not to dwell on feelings of guilt. Leading members of the Triratna organisation – Sangharakshita, Subhuti and Subhadramati – characterise guilt as a negative emotion that hinders spiritual growth. However, if we carefully examine the concept of guilt in the manner of Wittgenstein we find that the accounts of guilt given by leading members of Triratna mischaracterise it and so ignore its positive aspects. They (...) should acknowledge the valuable role that guilt can play in our lives. (shrink)

In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a ...

"... a profoundly stimulating and satisfying piece of philosophy.... It is a book from which one really can learn something worthwhile." —Idealistic Studies "... exceptionally well-written philosophy of religion... " —Mentalities "... a most impressive phenomenology of religion... a splendid achievement... " —The Reformed Theological Review "... challenging to scholars... interesting to general audiences." —International Journal for Philosophy of Religion "... equal in clarity of thought and comprehensiveness of scope.... profoundly original." —The Reformed Journal "Challenging and thought-provoking, (...) this makes a fine... textbook in the philosophy of religion." —Religious Studies Review "... its virtues as a textbook in phenomenology or philosophy of religion are extraordinary." —Faith and Philosophy Examples from the writings of Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Tolstoi illuminate Westphal’s thesis that guilt and death are the central problems of human existence. (shrink)

:In this essay, I consider a particular version of the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to suffer, namely, that they deserve to feel guilty to the proper degree. Two further theses have been thought to explicate and support the thesis, one that appeals to the non-instrumental goodness of the blameworthy receiving what they deserve, and the other that appeals to the idea that being blameworthy provides reason to promote the blameworthy receiving what they deserve. I call the first "Good-Guilt" (...) and the second "Reason-Guilt.” I begin by exploring what I take to be the strongest argument for Good-Guilt which gains force from a comparison of guilt and grief, and the strongest argument against. I conclude that Good-Guilt might be true, but that even if it is, the strongest argument in favor of it fails to support it in a way that provides reason for the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilty. I then consider the hypothesis that Reason-Guilt might be true and might be the more fundamental principle, supporting both Good-Guilt and Desert-Guilt. I argue that it does not succeed, however, and instead propose a different principle, according to which being blameworthy does not by itself provide reason for promoting that the blameworthy get what they deserve, but that being blameworthy systematically does so in conjunction with particular kinds of background circumstances. Finally, I conclude that Desert-Guilt might yet be true, but that it does not clearly gain support from either Good-Guilt or Reason-Guilt. (shrink)

P.S. Greenspan uses the treatment of moral dilemmas as the basis for an alternative view of the structure of ethics and its relation to human psychology. In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a socially based version of moral realism.

This chapter begins by tracing the development of the notion of conscience in the Western philosophical tradition and then addresses questions regarding the supposed authority or normativity of conscience. The relation between the idea of conscience and the notions of guilt and shame is examined, which in turn leads on to the question of whether the concepts of guilt and shame inhabit essentially different ethical landscapes. The chapter concludes by looking at the contribution of psychoanalytic thinking to our (...) modern understanding of the phenomena of conscience, guilt and shame, and by asking why the resulting insights have been so imperfectly assimilated into contemporary anglophone moral philosophy. (shrink)

The guilt left by immoral actions is why moral duties are more pressing and serious than other reasons like prudential considerations. Religions talk of sin and karma; the secular still speak of spots or stains. I argue that a moral staining view of guilt is in fact the best model. It accounts for guilt's reflexive character and for anxious, scrupulous worries about whether one has transgressed. To understand moral staining, I borrow Christine Korsgaard's view that we construct (...) our identities as agents through our actions. The contribution of immoral actions to self-constitution explains why moral obligations have priority and importance. (shrink)

Transcendental Guilt challenges traditional ways of understanding moral philosophy by proposing, instead of mainstream ethical theorizing, a serious moral reflection on our ethical finitude, focusing on the concept of guilt. It argues that guilt plays a "transcendental" role in our ethical lives by being constitutive of the seriousness characteristic of the moral point of view.

The control principle implies that people should not feel guilt for outcomes beyond their control. Yet, the so-called ‘agent and observer puzzles’ in philosophy demonstrate that people waver in their commitment to the control principle when reflecting on accidental outcomes. In the context of car accidents involving conventional or autonomous vehicles, Study 1 established that judgments of responsibility are most strongly associated with expressions of guilt–over and above other negative emotions, such as sadness, remorse or anger. Studies (...) 2 and 3 then confirmed that, while people generally endorse the control principle, and deny that occupants in an AV should feel guilt when involved in an accident, they nevertheless ascribe guilt to those same occupants. Study 3 also uncovered novel implications of the observer puzzle in the legal context: Passengers in an AV were seen as more legally liable than either passengers in a conventional vehicle, or even their drivers–especially when participants were prompted to reflect on the passengers’ affective experience of guilt. Our findings document an important conflict–in the context of AV accidents–between people’s prescriptive reasoning about responsibility and guilt on one hand, and their counter-normative experience of guilt on the other, with apparent implications for liability decisions. (shrink)

The article focuses on prosecutor's fallacy and interrogator's fallacy, the two kinds of reasoning in inferring a suspect's guilt. The prosecutor's fallacy is a combination of two conditional probabilities that lead to unfortunate commission of error in the process due to the inclination of the prosecutor in the establishment of strong evidence that will indict the defendant. It provides a comprehensive discussion of Gerd Gigerenzer's discourse on a criminal case in Germany explaining the perils of prosecutor's fallacy in his (...) application of probability to practical problems. It also discusses the interrogator's fallacy which was introduced by Robert A. J. Matthews as the error on the assumption that confessional evidence can never reduce the probability of guilt. (shrink)

We often feel survivor guilt when the very circumstances that harm others leave us unscathed. Although survivor guilt is both commonplace and intelligible, it raises a puzzle for the standard philosophical account of guilt, according to which people feel guilt only when they take themselves to be morally blameworthy. The standard account implies that survivor guilt is uniformly unfitting, as people are not blameworthy simply for having fared better than others. In this paper, we offer (...) a rival account of guilt, the relational account of guilt, which makes sense of survivor guilt and other forms of guilt without self-blame while preserving the intelligibility of guilt about culpable wrongdoing. According to this account, guilt involves the feeling of being unable to justify ourselves to others, and we lack self-justification when we (however blamelessly) stand on the positive side of an undesirable asymmetry with them. When someone survives something that those around her do not, the disparity in outcome constitutes an asymmetry that is often undesirable, because it arises from luck or violates a requirement of solidarity. Thus, survivor guilt is often fitting. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'guilt by association' (GBA). GBA is the erroneous logic that just because someone/something A is associated with someone/something B, that someone/something A has or accepts all of the qualities of someone/something B. This fallacy permeates society, from social groups, to political campaigns, to business relationships, and to the court system. When politics, social issues, and business collide, GBA enters new realms. It is also used when it (...) is found that perpetrators of horrific events belonged to a certain group. GBA is often a knee‐jerk reaction that has deep roots in people's implicit biases and has even been supported consistently by legal precedent. To disrupt the desire to make these immediate and fallacious assumptions, individuals must recognize the consequences of doing so and instead build their arguments on facts and realities. GBA can have dire consequences. (shrink)

It is tempting to hold that guilt‐tripping is morally wrong, either because it is objectionably manipulative, or because it involves gratuitously aiming to make another person suffer, or both. In this article, I develop a picture of guilt according to which guilt is a type of pain that incorporates a commitment to its own justification on the basis of the subject's wrongdoing. This picture supports the hypothesis that feeling guilty is an especially efficient means for a wrongdoer (...) to come to more deeply understand why her behavior was wrong; it is precisely because guilt is painful and involves a self‐reflexive justificatory element that it is able to play this role. Such a picture, moreover, preserves the possibility that deliberately making others feel guilty needn't involve aiming gratuitously to harm them and needn't be objectionably manipulative. It follows that we should be surprisingly sanguine about the practice of inducing guilt in wrongdoers as a means of facilitating their moral edification. (shrink)

The paper argues that in our usage of moral language we relate three concepts: guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This assumes that we can distinguish between external actions and internal executions, because guilt as well as forgiveness and reconciliation are realities that first affect our inner humanity. When a relationship has been damaged by culpable actions (sometimes even by both sides), forgiveness is the precondition of reconciliation. As long as people accuse each other, there can be no talk of (...) true reconciliation. Although these are attitudes, that is, inner engagements, reconciliation also becomes outwardly recognizable as peace. However, these relationships can only be explained well in the connections of individual persons to each other. When political communities confront each other, our moral sense becomes fuzzy, because it is not so easy to say how such collectives (e.g., peoples) are to be determined in their inside and outside. Who can and may forgive, if other persons have become victims of culpable actions, but cannot forgive themselves? Here, then, the difficulty of individuality and collectivity is added. The essay pleads for maintaining the conceptual conjunction between individual and collective forgiveness. However, this should not be done at the price of a complete socio-ontological dissolution of collectives. Therefore, one must also be cautious about rash universalistic appropriation of the Other or the other group, because this is usually accompanied by a failure to recognize and endure the selfhood of the Other. Before it comes to a “false” reconciliation in this way, it is better to at least recognize each other – also in diversity. This should also be reflected in the rules of conflict, which must above all be oriented toward ensuring that conflicts are not carried out in such a way that the manner in which the conflict is carried out makes reconciliation impossible. But in both collective and individual reconciliation, the person does not have the outcome of the process entirely in his or her own hands. Reconciliation is not a technique, but a relational event that is carried out in an “open space.”. (shrink)

At the outset, I would like to thank the Royal Institute of Philosophy for inviting me to add my contribution to the general theme of the present session. Mr Vesey suggested that I speak on the notion of guilt from the twofold perspective of Ethics and of the Philosophy of Religion. I was very happy to accept his proposal, for it gave me the opportunity to gather together my own reflections on this difficult topic, which up to (...) now have been somewhat scattered. My principal task will be to determine the distinction between ethical discourse and religious discourse on the question of guilt. These will be the two main divisions of my analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guilt History:Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion"Werner Hamacher (bio)Translated by Kirk Wetters (bio)History as Exchange EconomySince history cannot be conceived as a chain of events produced by mechanical causation, it must be thought of as a connection between occurrences that meets at least two conditions: first that it admit indeterminacy and thus freedom, and second that it nonetheless be demonstrable in determinate occurrences and in the distinct form of (...) their coherence. Relations can thus be called historical and can be recognized as historical only if they are determined by neither necessity nor chance, and if their causality is of a different order than the mechanical. The temporal structure of history can therefore be characterized on the one hand by the distinct connection of its elements—and on the other hand by the dissolution of all connections that do not assist these elements in achieving their independence.A temporal nexus that clearly does not satisfy these conflicting requirements has been characterized in one of the oldest texts of occidental philosophy as the time of guilt. According to the sentence of Anaximander (from about 500 BC), handed down by Simplicius in his commentary (530 AD) on Aristotle's Physics, the origin and end of all things is subordinated to the law of necessity (katà tó kreòn). "They must pay penance and be judged for their injustice, according to the order of time (katà tèn tou chrónou táxin)"—so the fragment reads in the translation offered by Nietzsche in his treatise "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks." According to Anaximander, the sequence of time orders the rise and fall of all things and orders them in accordance with the law of guilt and punishment so that becoming (génesis) is a guilt (adikía) that must be expiated in perishing. Time and more precisely its táxis, the positing of time, is thought in Anaximander's sentence as an order of guilt and retribution, debt and payback. It is a time of economy in the sense that it is the time of law—and precisely a law that is valid for all beings, a táxis, a decree, an ordinance and an ordering—in which the unavoidable incurring of guilt is atoned in an equivalent penance that is just as unavoidable. The strict coherence of guilt and penance is ascertained by the principle of their equivalence. Time is therefore conceived here as a double process of coming into being and perishing, [End Page 81] a process that occurs in such a way that the genesis is erased in its passing away—so that time is thus erased by time itself.In Anaximander's sentence, however, time is not only the double-process of coming into being and passing away, it is—as a táxis—the common and constantly enduring medium of the exchange of the contrary but equivalent motions of coming into being and perishing. It is the time of the quid pro quo of everything that is generated and passes away within time. Its measure is a justice that represents itself as a táxis and thereby as the positing and the law of all becoming and vanishing, the law of physis and its demise as an onto-economic law. This taxiological order of time places every realm of the natural and human world under a law of substitution without exception; this also allows ethical, juridical, and economic concepts to substitute for one another within this order. The ethical dimension of justice, thus circumscribed by the order of time, is reduced to the juridical dimension of the decree, and both now define themselves according to the calculus of "an exchange economy in an eternally unchanging household of nature."1 It can only, however, be a matter of an ethics of time to the extent that this ethics, already juridified and economized, is subordinated to the schema of exchange, trade, and the equivalence of guilt and retribution. The time of history, ethical time, is thus interpreted in Anaximander's sentence as a normative time of inculpation and expiation. Whatever enters this táxis of time is thereby already guilty and can... (shrink)

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they (...) are not. If they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

At the outset, I would like to thank the Royal Institute of Philosophy for inviting me to add my contribution to the general theme of the present session. Mr Vesey suggested that I speak on the notion of guilt from the twofold perspective of Ethics and of the Philosophy of Religion. I was very happy to accept his proposal, for it gave me the opportunity to gather together my own reflections on this difficult topic, which up to (...) now have been somewhat scattered. My principal task will be to determine the distinction between ethical discourse and religious discourse on the question of guilt. These will be the two main divisions of my analysis. (shrink)

This paper examines the moral significance of guilt in the context of how students confront the suffering of another. Within social-justice education, such confrontations are often staged in pedagogical efforts to encourage students to assume social responsibility. Frequently, however, the guilt that students claim to endure as a result of these pedagogical encounters is not perceived to be of much ethical import. By exploring the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this (...) essay argues that guilt arises out of our susceptibility to another’s pain and that it plays a crucial role both in ‘making reparation’ (Klein) and in the very formation of responsibility itself (Levinas). (shrink)

I examine a particular case in which moral guilt seems to be incurred even though the agent cannot be said to be blameworthy in any way. I argue that the agent-regret induced by one’s causal involvement in bringing about the bad state of affairs is not always sufficient to account for the extent of guilt, and I suggest that the sense of failure in terms of fulfilling tasks that arise from role-responsibilities that have been taken on must be (...) considered as well. Then I explain that this kind of moral guilt is a significant aspect of our practical life because the agent who has taken on a substantial role-responsibility such as parenthood is subject to conflicting demands as a result and because the agent cannot be expected to fulfill all the tasks associated with this role-responsibility on one’s own. (shrink)

This discussion of pride, shame, and guilt centers on the beliefs involved in the experience of any of these emotions. Through a detailed study, the author demonstrates how these beliefs are alike--in that they are all directed towards the self--and how they differ. The experience of these three emotions are illustrated by examples taken from English literature. These concrete cases supply a context for study and indicate the complexity of the situations in which these emotions usually occur.

The emotions of shame and guilt have recently appeared in debates concerning legal punishment, in particular in the context of so called shaming and guilting penalties. The bulk of the discussion, however, has focussed on the justification of such penalties. The focus of this article is broader than that. My aim is to offer an analysis of the concept of legal punishment that sheds light on the possible connections between punishing practices such as shaming and guilting penalties, on the (...) one hand, and emotions such as guilt, shame, and perhaps humiliation, on the other. I␣contend that this analysis enhances our understanding of the various theories of punishment that populate this part of criminal law theory and thereby sharpens the critical tools needed to assess them. My general conclusion is that, in different ways, all of the theories we encounter in this area can benefit from paying renewed attention to the nature of the connection between the state’s act of punishing and its expected or perceived emotional effect on the individual. (shrink)

Theories about man's moral sensibilities, particularly his sense of justice, tend to reflect either optimism or pessimism about human nature. Among modern theorists Hobbes, Hume, and Freud are perhaps the most outstanding representatives of pessimism. Recently, optimistic theories, which view the sense of justice as linked essentially to the sentiments of love and friendship, have found favor with philosophers. Of these theories John Rawls's is the most notable. Section I considers the conceptual scheme optimists advance to establish this view of (...) the sense of justice and argues that it has serious problems. Section II examines Rawls's account of moral development, which is an especially well worked out account on the optimistic side, and argues that, because it relies on the conceptual scheme discussed in Section I, it too is seriously problematic. Finally, Section III suggests that behind these problems lie reasons favoring a pessimistic view like Hume's or Freud's. (shrink)

This book brings together and develops Patricia Greenspan’s thoughts on moral dilemmas and the role of emotions in moral judgment. Her main focus is on metaethics and moral psychology, and she discusses moral dilemmas primarily as a concrete way of introducing these issues.

The most eminent exponents of the ontological argument for the existence of God have been characterized as well by a common emotional ingredient — a concern with individual guilt. Anselm, Josiah Royce, Karl Barth, and Norman Malcolm in their respective ways have made the experience of guilt a central one in their metaphysical standpoints. The hypothesis is therefore advanced that the validity which such thinkers have found in the ontological argument is the expression of a frame of mind (...) which we can call 'logical masochism'; under the influence of such emotions, the ontologian bows his logical powers submissively before an entity the existence of which he cannot question because of the guilt that such questioning would arouse. Under such social circumstances, on the other hand, as during the eighteenth century, when the psychology of individual guilt subsided, the appeal of the ontological argument likewise declines. (shrink)

Public apologies have become increasingly common scenes and representative moments in what appears to be a global process of forgiveness. The apology-forgiveness dynamic is familiar to all of us, but what do these rituals of atonement mean when they are applied to political and historical events? In his timely, topical, and incisive book A Guilted Age, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the proliferation of apologies by politicians, nations, and churches for past events—such as American slavery or the Holocaust—can be understood as (...) a historical phenomenon. In our post–World War II world, Rushdy claims that we live in a “guilted age.” A Guilted Age identifies the two major forms of apologies—political and historical—and Rushdy defines the dynamics and strategies of each, showing how the evolution of one led to the other. In doing so, he reveals what apology and forgiveness do to the past events they respectively apologize for and forgive—and what happens when they fail. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘innocent guilt’ regards cases where people feel guilty without being responsible for the wrongdoing or suffering at which the guilt is directed. The aim of this article is to develop a consistent account of innocent guilt and show how it may arise in the aftermath of conflicts. In order to do this, innocent guilt is contrasted with guilt and collective guilt, and the account is substantiated by drawing on the writings of (...) Ludwig Wittgenstein and Emmanuel Levinas, who both consider the phenomenon of innocent guilt a necessary element in the fundamental structure of the ethical subject. These thinkers, furthermore, show a connection between guilt and possible victims of wrongdoing, rather than between guilt and personal acts of wrongdoing. Innocent guilt may thus appear in the aftermath of conflicts as an ethical and emotional response to the fact of finding oneself in a post-conflict situation still marked by suffering. It thus reveals a fundamental need to contribute to the relieving of such suffering. (shrink)