Isaacs, Tracy (2011). Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Collective Guilt
If collectives are the sorts of things that can be morally responsible, then there is a sense in which they can be guilty, too.
“Guilt” is an ambiguous term, so let me begin by stating that I understand guilt as blameworthy moral responsibility. An agent is guilty when she or he is morally responsible in the blameworthy sense...it is important to distinguish an agent’s being guilty—an objective evaluation of moral responsibility—from an agent’s believing herself to be guilty and from an agent’s feeling guilty. In ordinary language, when we speak of “guilt” we frequently have in mind a moral emotion of sorts. We think of guilt as something that we feel or experience when we believe ourselves to be in the wrong. But this sense of guilt is quite different from the normative concept that is the focus of this chapter, and, as I argue, thinking of guilt solely in terms of the experience of guilt creates confusion in discussions of collective guilt. I begin with a discussion of the difference between being guilty, believing oneself to be guilty, and feeling guilty.
3.1 Guilt: Being, Believing, and Feeling
Few would dispute that I may be guilty, that is, be blameworthy for a wrong action that I have taken, without feeling guilty
(1) For one, I may not recognize my wrongdoing; agents sometimes act wrongly while believing themselves to be in the right. In such cases, agents will not feel guilty. Guilt feelings require, at a minimum, a self-assessment of moral wrongdoing; they require that I believe myself to be guilty.
(2) It is also conceivable that I might believe myself to be guilty without experiencing any particular or distinctive feelings of guilt (however we may choose to characterize such feelings).
(3) Alternatively, I may experience feelings of guilt while not being guilty in the objective sense. This situation arises when my self-assessment of moral wrongdoing is mistaken, that is, if I believe myself to be guilty when I am not guilty.
With respect to individuals, then, there are three distinct conditions of guilt.
| being guilty | believing oneself to be guilty | experiencing feelings of guilt |
| an objective moral condition—someone is guilty when she is morally responsible in the blameworthy sense for doing something wrong | a self-assessment that may or may not be consistent with the objective moral condition | an affective response to one’s belief that one is guilty |
Two points worth noting about feelings of guilt are, first, that they are not a necessary response to the belief that one is guilty, and second, that they are unfounded when the belief on which they are based is false.
we can now turn to the collective case to see which of the three, if any, have collective counterparts.
To the extent that at least some collectives are responsible agents capable of intentional collective action, at least some collectives may be guilty in the objective sense. Collective guilt in this sense is the same thing as blameworthy collective moral responsibility.
Instead, as far as that sense of guilt is concerned, I shall argue that in the collective case, it is the most important of the three conditions of guilt outlined above. If collective belief is possible, then it is possible for collectives to have beliefs about their guilt.
The government of Canada, for example, can believe that it is guilty for both its historical and present treatment of First Nations people, particularly where federal government policy has been and is concerned. With respect to collective guilt feelings, it is not clear that collectives are capable of affective responses at the collective level or that collective feelings play any necessary normative or practical role in collective guilt.
since feelings of guilt are distinct from the objective moral condition of guilt and from the belief in one’s guilt, an adequate account of collective guilt does not require that we account for collective guilt feelings.
3.2 Types of Guilt
1. Personal guilt: blameworthy moral responsibility at the individual level for one’s own actions. There is a strong intuition that agents can be personally guilty only for what they, personally, have done.
2. Collective guilt: blameworthy responsibility at the level of collectives. If a corporation exploits its workers, then the corporation is morally responsible, as a corporation, for exploiting its workers. It is blameworthy for that action, understood as a collective action. Its blameworthiness is a moral condition of the collective, not a moral condition of the individual members of the collective. It is in no way a species of personal guilt.
Therefore, collective guilt and personal guilt are different because they operate at different levels. Given that personal guilt and collective guilt address guilt at different levels of agency and moral responsibility— the individual and the collective, respectively—an ascription of guilt to a collective does not have direct implications for the personal guilt of the members of the collective. Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that the lack of direct implications for personal guilt does not automatically rule out individual involvement and individual moral responsibility in the relevant collective action. Individuals may and do participate in and contribute to collective wrongdoing. However, these contributions do not render individuals responsible, as individuals, for collective action.
Since individuals do not perform collective actions, individuals cannot be personally guilty for the actions of collectives to which they belong.
3. Membership guilt: people often have membership guilt in mind when they speak of collective guilt. To think of membership guilt as collective guilt is a mistake, because membership guilt is not a feature of the collective; it operates at an altogether different level. Thus, it is not collective guilt.
Instead, membership guilt is a feature of individuals who are members of blameworthy collectives, regardless of whether they participate in the collective action for which their group is blameworthy. Those who are guilty in the membership sense are not guilty for the acts of the collective, but for their own acts or omissions in response to the collective action. Though the collective context is relevant for membership guilt, the guilt itself is not collective. In what follows, I argue that membership guilt is a species of personal guilt. I begin with an explanation of the difference between membership guilt and membership guilt feelings.
membership guilt feeling: feelings of guilt experienced by an individual because of her or his association with others who have acted wrongly.
There is also the phenomenon of membership guilt that is sometimes regarded as a kind of moral taint. The idea is that my association with people who act badly, including comembers of a group to which I belong, taints me in a manner that makes me share in their guilt.
Here again we have an objective conception of guilt—I may be tainted without believing myself to be and, conversely, I may mistakenly believe myself to be tainted. Sometimes membership guilt is characterized as metaphysical, as opposed to moral, guilt. Karl Jaspers characterizes the difference between moral guilt and metaphysical guilt by noting that the former, but not the latter, has its source in the blameworthy actions of the party who is in the relevant sense guilty. Those who are guilty in the metaphysical sense are so because of who they are, or more precisely, who they choose to be.
Larry May notes that being members of a blameworthy collective is not in itself the violation of a moral duty. Nevertheless, he points out, how we position ourselves with respect to that group and its actions, the extent to which we enjoy a feeling of solidarity with the o ending group, is a morally charged issue with consequences for one’s moral character. There are actions we can take that “break the chain of responsibility” even if we cannot leave the relevant group. May notes, rightly, that not taking these actions amounts to choosing to identify with the group. Omissions of this kind constitute choices about who we consider ourselves to be.
When the status quo [현재의 상황, 현상] involves participation in wrongful social practice, the choice to live as a member of the group who participates, or even benefits from, this identity —for example, the German identity in Nazi Germany—the existential choice is metaphysical. One does not necessarily have to be a direct participant in wrongdoing to be guilty in this sense. Thus, metaphysical guilt allows us to cast a wider net of guilt over a population than moral guilt might (and certainly than criminal guilt for specifically proscribed crimes). Jaspers’s distinction between these two kinds of guilt, as well as between criminal guilt and what he calls political guilt, advances our understanding of the many ways in which someone’s actions, choices, and, in broader terms, their alliances, might serve as bases for difierent kinds of responsibility attributions.
It might be worth wondering whether all comembers are rightly understood as bystanders to wrongdoing. It is not a necessary condition of being a member of a group that one be fully apprised of all that the group does. If I am a member of a group that engages in wrongful behavior, and I fail to distance myself from the group’s actions because I do not know or have reasonable grounds for knowing what the group is doing, then it would be a mistake to think of my continued membership as a choice about who I am. If this reasoning is correct, then informed comembers— bystanders of a sort—are the only ones whose continued membership or failures to speak against the group’s activities make an existential statement for which they might be guilty. To the extent that it involves a choice, I claim that membership guilt is best understood as personal moral guilt, that is, guilt for one’s own actions in response to the acts of a collective to which one belongs.
Membership guilt, while it may involve the more metaphysical notion of who we choose to be, is moral in nature as well. In the terms I have outlined in this chapter, membership guilt should be understood as a species of personal, moral guilt; it is a matter of moral responsibility at the individual level.
one is responsible, morally, to respond appropriately to the wrongdoing by distancing oneself from the group so far as that is possible. Failing to do so is failing to meet a moral obligation.
In discussing a similar sort of guilt that arises from white-skin privilege, Sandra Bartky says that “it is important to remember that there are some inequalities from which we cannot entirely divorce ourselves, no matter how hard we try.” Hannah Arendt discusses the “elemental shame” of being human...White people cannot, for example, do anything about their whiteness, and, more broadly, where the relevant community is all of humanity, we can never position ourselves completely outside it.
when membership is not voluntary and there are no exits available, moral guilt is absent because the choice aspect that many of us believe to be central to moral responsibility is absent. However, appropriate and inappropriate moral stances exist for individuals in blameworthy communities to take, even if leaving the community altogether is impossible. Marilyn Frye suggests, for example, that blameworthy white-skin privilege is best understood in terms of a set of behaviors and attitudes—which fall into the category of “whitely”—than as a necessary feature of being white. People may not be able to shed their whiteness, but they can be morally expected to do what they can to shed their “whiteliness.” This kind of approach to membership guilt makes it possible to escape; thus, agents who choose not to are for that reason culpable.
membership guilt is moral guilt but is not collective. It is personal guilt whose source is the failure to discharge moral obligations that arise as a result of one’s association with a blameworthy collective Though membership guilt arises in collective contexts, it is distinct from collective guilt and ought not be confused with it.
| membership guilt | membership guilt feelings |
| an objective state in which agents are morally blameworthy as a consequence of their failure to take appropriate action to distance themselves from a blameworthy collective of which they are members | the guilt feelings people sometimes experience when they feel morally tainted by the actions of comembers of a group to which they belong. |
3.3 Collective Guilt Is Not Distributive
The notion of collective guilt risks condemning some for the actions of others, thereby suggesting “injustice, vindictiveness, and the blurring of distinctions.”
The root of such worries is the failure to distinguish between collective guilt and personal guilt.
Collective guilt is a feature of a collective moral agent who has acted wrongly in a blameworthy fashion. More precisely, collective guilt is collective moral responsibility in the blameworthy, as opposed to the praiseworthy, sense. My view emphasizes the importance of recognizing the distinction between the collective and individual levels of moral responsibility.
A significant feature of that distinction is that ascriptions of guilt, that is, of blameworthy moral responsibility, to a collective agent do not entail that all members of the collective share in the guilt as individuals; collective guilt is not distributive. An understanding of collective moral responsibility that fails to keep these levels distinct is confused and results in premature dismissals of a signi cant normative concept.
This understanding of collective guilt as blameworthy collective moral responsibility that operates at a level distinct from individual moral responsibility ows from the claims, defended in earlier chapters, that collectives can act intentionally and that they can be morally responsible, that is, praiseworthy or blameworthy, for their actions. Collectives with the capacity for intentional action are guilty whenever they are blameworthy for their actions.
3.4 Collective Guilt Feelings
There are a number of reasons for taking collective guilt feelings into consideration.
1. collective guilt is sometimes run together with collective guilt feelings. the identification of collective guilt with collective guilt feelings is prevalent in psychological literature concerning collective guilt.
2. guilt feelings might appear to play an important practical role in motivating guilty parties to act in ways appropriate to their guilt, perhaps even motivating them to repair, make amends for, or accept appropriate punishment for their wrongdoing. If guilt feelings serve this motivational function, then collective guilt feelings could be important for motivating collectives to address their guilt where apologies, reparations, and other forms of compensation are concerned.
3. Third, it is not entirely clear what collective guilt feelings might be, since by hypothesis, collective guilt is a feature of collectives and some might be hesitant to attribute to collectives the capacity to have feelings...Psychological accounts are not consistent with the view of collective guilt developed so far in this chapter; instead they characterize them as feelings of membership guilt (whether warranted or not).
4. An additional reason for taking collective guilt feelings into account is that some might think that guilt feelings are morally appropriate responses to a self-assessment of guilt, and that agents who fail to experience feelings of guilt while believing themselves to be guilty fall short in moral terms. If collectives cannot feel guilty, then perhaps they lack an important moral capacity.
Let me begin the discussion of collective guilt feelings by asking whether we should be skeptical of collective guilt feelings. The answer is yes. In order to remain consistent with the view defended in this book, collective guilt feelings need to be feelings of a collective, not of individual members of the collective. Just as collective guilt is a feature of the collective and so differs from personal guilt, collective guilt feelings are different from personal guilt feelings because the former are feelings of the collective. Unless we distinguish feelings from their sensations—a move that Gilbert makes and that I argue ought to be avoided —collectives just do not appear to be the sorts of things that can have feelings. Even as highly structured a collective as a corporation “has no soul to damn, no body to kick,” and, we might add, no body with which to experience sensations.
The conflation of collective guilt with collective guilt feelings is most apparent in the psychological literature on collective guilt, which, arguably, is wholly concerned with collective guilt as an emotional response. However, in the terms of our discussion, this understanding of collective guilt is not in any substantive sense collective.
Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje:
“Collective guilt stems from the distress that group members experience when they accept that their in-group is responsible for immoral actions that harmed another group. It is a self-conscious emotion that can occur when the individual’s collective identity or association with a group whose actions are perceived as immoral is salient…. Because collective guilt is a psychological experience, it need not involve actually being guilty in any sense of the word.”
These authors are quite clearly talking about guilt feelings. It is less clear, however, whether these feelings are collective. Instead, they appear to be feelings that individuals experience based on their association with a blameworthy collective. These feelings are not, in the terms I have outlined here, feelings of collective guilt, because it is individuals who experience them in response to their own personal guilt. Thus, we may set aside the psychologists’ discussion of collective guilt as collective guilt feelings since, strictly speaking, they are not collective guilt feelings and they do not constitute collective guilt as we are understanding it, that is, as blameworthy moral responsibility at the collective level.
Let us now consider whether collective guilt feelings serve a significant normative purpose. They might play a motivational role in getting members of collectives to respond appropriately to collective guilt. If we think that guilt feelings are important in this respect, then we need an account of them at the collective level that addresses our initial skepticism concerning collectives’ capacity to experience feelings. Gilbert believes that collective guilt feelings serve a particular and useful function, insofar as they commit individuals who constitute the collective to act in certain ways. For example, they would characterize the group’s relevant act as wrong and they would ascribe guilt feelings to the group. Moreover, collective guilt feelings would “help to ameliorate relations between wrongfully acting collectives, their victims, and others. They would also be apt to improve the relevant collectives themselves.” Collective guilt feelings indicate an acknowledgment, on the collective’s part, of its wrongdoing.
Gilbert uses her plural subject theory as a framework for her account of collective guilt. Understanding her view of collective guilt feelings requires a basic understanding of her notions of joint commitment and plural subject. I briefly outline them here. Though there is a lot to say about the plural subject theory, I here limit critical evaluation to Gilbert’s discussion of collective guilt feelings. Fundamental to Gilbert’s plural subject theory is the notion of a joint commitment. According to her account, joint commitments have normative force. They are not aggregates of personal commitments. Gilbert says, “Those initiating such a commitment do not each create a part of it by making a personal decision. Rather, they participate in creating the whole of it along with the other parties. A joint commitment does not have parts, though it certainly has implications for individual parties. That is, they are committed through the joint commitment.”
Once in place, the joint commitment binds each individual who is party to it. They are committed to following through. A group of people constitutes a plural subject when they are jointly committed to doing something “as a body.” Using this framework, Gilbert characterizes collective guilt feelings in the following way: “For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to constitute the plural subject of a feeling of guilt over our action A.” This amounts to the parties committing to act so as to constitute a single, unified subject of guilt feelings. Once the commitment is in play, individuals are required to act in ways appropriate to it. Among other things, this means that “they will refrain from proposing that it is morally acceptable for the group to engage in an obviously similar action” and “should one of their number propose such a thing, they will feel free to remonstrate [항의하다] with the person in question.” These commitments are analogous to what we might expect of an individual who feels guilty. If someone did not act in a way that was appropriate to feeling guilt, we would not believe that she had feelings of guilt. Using parallel reasoning, Gilbert supposes that collective guilt feelings require certain behaviors if they are to be credible.
On this account, collective guilt feelings have functional descriptions and do not have a collective a ective component. That is, they are feelings, but they are not experienced as sensations by the collective that has them. In this way, Gilbert addresses the skeptical concern that collectives are not the sorts of things that can experience feelings. Her account allows that they can have them when parties enact a joint commitment to feel guilt as a body, but does not require that the plural subject feel the collective guilt feeling.
It is worth repeating that the relevant behaviors that ow from the joint commitment are required by, not just evidence of, a collective guilt feeling. In essence, collective guilt feelings play the role of providing individuals with reasons for action that have normative force because of their source in commitments. We may, indeed, understand collective guilt as generating obligations for individual members of the collective. Because agents, including collective agents, may be guilty without being aware of it or acknowledging it, collective guilt in the absence of collective guilt feelings cannot ful ll the same function. Moreover, given their normative impact on individuals within collectives, Gilbert maintains that collective guilt feelings “would help to ameliorate relations between wrongfully acting collectives, their victims, and others” and “[t]hey would also be apt to improve the relevant collectives themselves.” Thus, according to Gilbert, collective guilt feelings are normatively significant. Is she correct?
First, I reject her characterization of the collective acknowledgment of guilt as a “collective guilt feeling.” Second, I question the analogy between collective guilt feelings and personal guilt feelings that Gilbert uses throughout her account. I take these points up in order.
Consider the personal case. We can see that at the personal level, an acknowledgment of guilt is not the same thing as a guilt feeling. Individuals may acknowledge their guilt in different ways, and feeling guilty may be one way of acknowledging guilt. But it is not the only way. I may acknowledge my guilt by attempting to compensate the wronged party or parties, by apologizing for my behavior, or by promising to do things differently in the future. All of these are acknowledgments of a sort, and none requires that I feel guilty.
Similarly, in the collective case, it is possible for collectives and members of collectives to act in ways that acknowledge their guilt without feeling guilty. Gilbert’s central idea, that there could be a joint commitment collectively to acknowledge wrongdoing and to act in ways appropriate to that acknowledgment, has practical merits because it places normative constraints on what collectives and their members are to do when they “feel guilty.” It is a mistake, however, to call the acknowledgment of collective guilt a “collective guilt feeling,” particularly while removing the affective aspect from it. It is a mistake because an insistence on the language of collective guilt feelings could lead many to reject the otherwise plausible collective phenomenon of acknowledging collective guilt. Collective concepts face enough opposition without invoking language that misleads in ways that then need to be explained away. Instead, we would do better to set aside the language and idea of collective guilt feelings, and focus on collective guilt itself as a species of collective moral responsibility.
Given the distinctions outlined earlier between being guilty, believing oneself to be guilty, and feeling guilty, it is perfectly plausible that collectives might (1) be guilty and (2) believe themselves to be guilty but (3) not feel guilty. Such a state would not in the least impede a collective’s ability to acknowledge and respond to its moral blameworthiness.
Gilbert takes collective guilt feelings to be analogous in important ways to personal guilt feelings, so it is worth considering the extent to which they are similar and whether there are significant ways they differ from one another. The range of behaviors that Gilbert associates with collective guilt feelings is meant to mirror the range of behaviors we would expect of someone experiencing personal guilt feelings.
A significant disanalogy between personal guilt feelings and collective guilt feelings is that individuals do not respond to personal guilt feelings because they are required to; personal guilt feelings do not obligate us or commit us to taking a particular course of action.
Rather, if these feelings have a practical function it is their motivational role, insofar as the associated unease promises to lift if the party experiencing personal guilt acts in ways that acknowledge that guilt.
Uncomfortable feelings prod us in the direction of right action, that is, they motivate us to do the right thing. But being motivated is not the same thing as having an obligation. An agent may have an obligation and be aware of that obligation, yet nonetheless lack the motivation to act on it. If the main role of collective guilt feelings in the plural subject account is to commit or obligate individuals who are party to the agreement to feel guilt as a body, then the same role could easily be fulfilled by less elaborate means, that is, by an agreement to acknowledge guilt as a body.
However, if the main role of collective guilt feelings in the plural subject account is to motivate individuals to act in ways appropriate to that guilt and a simple acknowledgment will not sufice, then it looks as if, on the analogue with personal guilt, the feelings are best not dissociated from the sensation of them, since that is what gets the agent moving.
Given Gilbert’s emphasis on the joint commitment that collective guilt feelings effect, it is fair to say that their main function is to obligate, not so much to motivate, the parties to the joint commitment. However, this view introduces a complication of its own. The dificulty stems from a consideration of why the phenomenon of feelings is at all significant in matters of guilt, collective or otherwise.
In the personal case, as noted, if guilt feelings are normatively important, it is not as mere epiphenomena, but instead because of their motivational role. If they did not play that role, then they would not be normatively interesting, though they might be psychologically interesting. Thus, if we jettison [버리다] the notion that guilt feelings function in a motivational role, then the very intuition that warrants our initial interest in them falls away. Furthermore, as we have seen, if collective guilt feelings gain significance because they create commitments, then they are quite different in nature from the personal guilt feelings to which they are being compared and from which comparison they gain plausibility. Either they motivate, in which case they need to be felt, or they obligate, in which case they are not sufficiently analogous to personal guilt feelings to gain credibility through a comparison with them.
A nal consideration that is in favor of collective guilt feelings, but that Gilbert does not entertain, is that guilt feelings may be considered morally appropriate responses to self-assessments of guilt. One might argue that if an agent does not respond with guilt feelings, then the agent falls morally short. If collectives cannot have guilt feelings, then on this view they consistently fall short as moral agents whenever they are guilty. The more significant threat would be that their failure on this front might altogether call into question the possibility of collective agency if the capacity for appropriate affective responses to moral guilt is a prerequisite for moral agency.
In earlier chapters, I have argued that the capacity for intentional action is the main requirement for moral agency. Thus, collectives’ agency is not in question simply because they are incapable of experiencing affect. Some might press the point, however, claiming that collectives are lesser agents because of this incapacity.
Two responses make sense here. First, even if moral feelings show something virtuous about moral agents, they are not the only indicators of moral virtue. As we have seen, morally appropriate feelings do not exhaust the range of morally appropriate responses to self-assessments of guilt. Collectives are capable of acknowledging their guilt in a variety of ways, and it is not clear that their inability to feel guilt makes them lesser in an agency sense. Second, beyond intentional agency, it is not obvious that all moral agents must have exactly the same capacities. We might say that collective agents are different from, not lesser than, individual agents. Such a claim would hardly be controversial; of course they are different. But they still satisfy the conditions for moral agency. It is also worth noting that the claim of lesser agency gains currency only if we insist that moral feelings constitute an important part of moral agency. And while Kant is good company for those who might deny the significance of moral feelings in moral agency, we do not need to endorse the Kantian view that feelings undermine the moral quality of our actions to allow that moral action is possible in the absence of feelings. These considerations mitigate against the view that collective agency is compromised if collectives are incapable of collective guilt feelings.
In summary, collective guilt feelings are not required for an adequate collective acknowledgment of collective guilt, and the language of feelings is a poor choice. Furthermore, the significant disanalogy between collective and personal guilt feelings, given the assumption that collectives do not feel these feelings and so are not motivated to act on them in the same way that individuals are motivated to act on personal guilt feelings, calls the normative significance of collective guilt feelings into question. Finally, it is not the case that collectives’ incapacity to experience collective guilt feelings calls their agency into question. I suggest, therefore, that collective guilt feelings are not required in order to fill in any gap between collective guilt and its acknowledgment, and that an adequate account of collective guilt does not require an account of collective guilt feelings.
3.5 Conclusion
My goal has been to explicate the notion of collective guilt as blameworthy collective moral responsibility. Understood in this way, collective guilt is different from personal guilt and from membership guilt (which is a species of personal guilt). Collective guilt is also distinct from collectives’ beliefs about their guilt and from collective guilt feelings, which I have shown to be an unnecessary addition to the normative understanding of collective guilt. In establishing this last claim, I considered Gilbert’s functional account of collective guilt feelings and maintained that we could capture the essential idea of collective acknowledgment of guilt without complicating the matter with the notion of collective guilt feelings. Though some people have tended to confuse collective guilt with feelings of collective guilt, it is not the case that collective guilt is a feeling, and it is not the case that the feelings that are frequently associated with collective guilt are feelings attributable to collectives. Hence, according to my view, these feelings are not properly characterized as collective guilt feelings. Much confusion concerning collective guilt and the feelings that members of collectives experience when they are associated with a blameworthy collective has resulted from the failure to distinguish adequately between collective and individual levels of moral responsibility. When we keep this distinction and what follows from it firmly in mind, and remember that collective guilt is fundamentally blameworthy moral responsibility at the collective level, we can see that the notion of collective guilt is not nearly as complicated or troubling as some have made it out to be.