Margaret Gilbert, Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings, The Journal of Ethics , 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 115-143
1. Introduction
i. The Commonplace Nature of Holistic Talk about Groups
Thus, though in the previous quotation Kutz acknowledges the ubiquity of ascriptions of accountability to groups, in the following he appears to express opposition to “treating [the group itself] as the culpable party”:
The law of complicity and conspiracy in effect applies an organicist conception of collective action, treating the acting group as conceptually prior to its individual members. This is, in effect, to naturalize the group itself, treating it as the culpable party ...This reifies the joint intention that underlies all concerted action, treating it as a thing in itself rather than an overlap among individual participatory intentions ...3
For Kutz, as for others before him, a collective or joint intention exists when there is a certain kind of overlap in the content of a number of individual intentions, that is, in the intentions of individual members of the relevant group.
Kutz allows that ascriptions of culpability to groups may have a point in some circumstances– presumably in his view such ascriptions would be literally false. In this connection, he argues that:
There is an important difference between expressing recrimination at an organization and expressing it at an individual ...a collective cannot respond affectively to these expres sions, only its constituent members can. The lack of an 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 is surely not the only philosopher who would endorse the claim that “a collective cannot respond affectively, only its members can.” In this essay I attempt to counter that claim. In particular, I argue that there is an important sense in which a collective can feel guilt.
ii. The Practical Importance of Guilt Feelings
There is clearly a case to be made for a relatively sustained examination of the possibility of collective guilt feelings. In effect, Kutz himself makes a case for exploring this question.
Appropriate affective responses he says “help to register the signi f icance of the harm.” I am not entirely sure precisely what he has in mind here, but the following may be an illustration of his point, and it seems to be true. Were an agent to respond with a feeling of guilt to the blame it encounters for what it has done, this response would act as an acknowledgement of its guilt by the agent itself.
Anagent does not need to respond to others in order to acknowledge its guilt. A spontaneous feeling of guilt would surely suffice.
A feeling of guilt for harms done is apt to have important practical effects. It is particularly galling for victims to meet with self-righteousness and self-justification from those who have wronged them. Such a stance is likely to harden the victims’ feelings towards these wrongdoers. In contrast, a feeling of guilt– and even better, its close cousin remorse is liable to promote the restoration of good relations
Were collective emotions such as guilt feelings possible, then, they would be of great practical importance. They would help to ameliorate relations between wrongfully acting collectives, their victims, and others. They would also be apt to improve the relevant collectives themselves. This does not mean, of course, that there are such emotions. It just means that whether there are or not is a matter of consequence.
iii. In Favor of the Possibility of Collective Guilt Feelings
People talk as if they are ascribing emotions to groups. These emotions include guilt feelings along with other emotions responsive to what a group has done...Thus the member of a political party might say, “The party feels great guilt. It had no idea this would happen.” A family member might say, “This family has treated you very badly. We feel terribly guilty.” Similarly, a responsive emotion may be called for, or its lack decried. Thus critics of a nation, N, might say, “N should feel guilt for what it has done.” Or “N has never felt any guilt for its wrongful actions.”
What can one learn from such statements? That people are prepared to speak in this way, and frequently do, at least suggests that they think that there is something, something real, to which they refer: the feelings of a group. Rather than casually writing off this assumption as due to ignor ance, or writing off these ways of speaking as fanciful, we can approach both more carefully. We can attempt to explore the circumstances in which ascriptions of guilt feelings to groups are judged to be in place.
iv. Skepticism about the Possibility of Collective Emotions in General and Collective Guilt Feelings in Particular
Why might one write off the assumption that there are collective guilt feelings as Kutz, for instance, seems to do? Kutz puts it this way: only the constituent members of a collective can respond affectively, feeling guilt, shame, regret, and so on. Presumably he means that only individual human beings can so respond.
Why might one think this? One possible reason is this. Emotions gener ally may be thought of as essentially involving something with a distinctive “feel” to it. Thus people talk of “surges” of anger, of joy “welling up,” of the “sting” of jealousy, of “pangs” and, for less vivid cases, “twinges” of guilt.
Pangs and twinges, in particular, seem to be something like a sensation, such as the sensation of pain. It may be thought that to feel guilt is to experience a “pang of guilt” conceived of as a particular kind of “feeling-sensation”– nothing more and nothing less than that. In that case, if feeling-sensations are something only individual humans can have, the case against collective guilt feelings seems to be closed. If groups cannot have pangs of guilt, they cannot have guilt feelings. It may seem obvious that while individual human beings can have feeling-sensations, groups cannot.
v. Some Counters to Skepticism about Collective Emotions in General and Collective Guilt Feelings in Particular
a. Particular emotions may not require a specific phenomenology
In order to feel guilt an individual human being must, surely, have certain thoughts about his or her situation and perhaps be disposed to act in certain ways. Thus one who feels guilt over what she has done must take what she has done to be wrong to some degree. Perhaps, then, such cognitions lie at the heart of the emotion. Perhaps specific “feeling-sensations” are not essential, but only frequent concomitants.
In the course of so arguing she disputes the idea that particular emotion types necessarily have specific phenomenological concomitants.
These reasons allow us to regard it as at least open whether guilt feelings necessarily involve either a qualitatively special “pang of guilt,” a generic type of “pang,” or any phenomenological condition at all. How do things seem to stand with guilt feelings at the level of the individual? Without attempting a fine-grained discussion, I can imagine saying that I felt guilty about something without meaning to imply that any particular phenomenological condition was satisfied. The central if not the sole thing at issue would be my judgment that I was wrong to do whatever it is I say I feel guilty about. The very nature of any associated pangs or twinges as pangs or twinges of guilt could only be assumed if this judgment were present.
b. A matter of method
One might then want to say that groups did not feel guilt in quite the same way that individuals did. It would not be necessary to say that they did not feel guilt at all.
c. The scope of psychology
The idea that many if not all emotions involve a kind of belief or judgment evidently has some plausibility.12 As noted earlier, one who feels guilt over what she has done, for instance, must surely believe at some level that she has done something wrong.
Thus it might be argued that whether or not guilt feelings necessarily involve feeling-sensations of one kind or another, they involve a kind of belief. It may then be contended that collectives cannot have their own beliefs, and, therefore, cannot feel guilt.
vi. Collective Guilt Feelings Assume Collective Guilt
Collective guilt feelings over the relevant group’s wrongdoing would evidently be misplaced were there no collective guilt to serve as its appropriate object. I shall take it that we are talking about collective moral guilt here, as opposed to legal guilt or any other kind.
Collective moral guilt appears to require collective moral responsi bility. Can a collective be morally responsible? Many have found this idea troubling, though there is little doubt that people frequently ascribe such responsibility to collectives, whether rightly or wrongly in a given case. Thus Franklin Roosevelt, in the wake of the Second World War:
Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place– that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.14
Unlike Kutz, Bratman, and others, I do not see a collective intention as a certain kind of overlap among the intentions of individuals. If doing anything other than this is to “treat it as a thing in itself,” as Kutz puts it, then I do that.
vii. A Distinction among Groups
I refer to populations as “collectives” when I conceive of them as genuinely collective subjects of intention, action, and so on. I take it that a population is a genuinely collective subject of intention if and only if, roughly, it can plausibly be regarded as having an intention of its own, an intention, if you like, of the population as a whole.
As long as so-called collective action is conceived of as having as its intentional base some sort of amalgam of the intentions of the individuals involved, it does not seem plausibly to be thought of involving a collective subject. This will be so even if the intentions involved have what is in some sense a collective object or end– such as an end requiring the actions of many persons, as in the so-called collective ends invoked by Kutz, Seumas Miller, and others
The populations I argue to be potential subjects of moral guilt constitute collectives in the sense indicated above. Often, when people discuss the topic of so-called collective moral responsibility or guilt, they are thinking of individuals who constitute no more than an aggregate, as opposed to a collective. In particular, they are thinking of sets of individuals with certain features in common, such as people with skin of a certain color, of the same sex, economic class, social status, beliefs, propensities, and so on. Often such populations are referred to as groups.
I shall myself, however, tend to use the terms “collective” and “group” to refer to collective subjects, using “population” for sets of people who do not necessarily, as referred to, form such subjects.
2. COLLECTIVE MORAL GUILT
I shall take it, therefore, that in order for a collective to bear moral guilt it must be able to act, act freely, and believe its act to be wrong. In what follows I briefly argue that collectives can fulfill these conditions.
i. What Are Collective Intentions and Actions?
plural subject accounts: 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.
I say that a population P constitutes a plural subject, by definition, if and only if its members are jointly committed to do something as a body, where “doing something” is construed very broadly so as to include intending and being in various cognitive states. Populations fulfilling the above conditions constitute the plural subject of an intention to do A.
ii. Joint Commitment
It is helpful to begin an explanation by considering something other than a joint commitment, namely, the personal decision of a human individual. Suppose that Alison has decided to flee the country. Her decision can be seen as involving a personal commitment. Failing a change of mind, she is now committed to fleeing the country. She is, of course, in a position to change her mind. But as long as she does not do so her commitment stands. That is important because, as a commitment, it has some force from a normative point of view. Should she stray from the course she is personally committed to, without a prior change of mind, she has in some sense done what she was not supposed to do.
A joint commitment is not created by a set of personal decisions. It is not a set of personal commitments, but a truly joint commitment, a commitment of two or more persons. 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 the individual parties. That is, each is committed through the joint commitment.
Importantly, without special side understandings no individual party to a joint commitment can rescind it unilaterally. All must participate in its rescission. Since it does not have parts, no one is in a position to rescind just part of it. [???]
Two or more people enter a joint commitment in much the same way as an individual creates a personal commitment through a personal decision. To put it generally, and somewhat roughly, each must openly express his or her readiness to be jointly committed with the relevant others, in conditions of common knowledge. The common knowledge condition requires, roughly again, that the expressions must be out in the open for all concerned.21
Thus Joshua may say to Martin, “Shall we meet at six?” In standard circumstances, should Martin reply “Sure!” they will have created a joint commitment. Here one can describe the joint commitment as a commit ment to uphold together the decision that the parties will meet at six. It also counts as an explicit agreement. That is not true of all cases of joint commitment. Some may be arrived at in a less explicit manner, and over a period of time.
iii. Collective Action
A population P collectively performed action A if and only if the members of P were jointly committed to intending as a body to do A, and, acting in the light of this joint commitment, relevant members of P acted so as to satisfy this intention.
Note that the members of P may be jointly committed to intending as a body to do A, without everyone in P knowing or even conceiving of the content of their commitment. This can happen if there is a joint commit ment to authorize as a body some person or body to make decisions, form plans, and so on, on behalf of the jointly committed persons. For the sake of a label, one might call this an authority-producing joint commitment. Thus a leader and his henchmen may formulate and carry out a plan in the group’s name, and, given the appropriate background, the group’s members can say of the group as a whole “We did it.”
iv. In Favor of the Plural Subject Account of Collective Action
In everyday life when people understand that “We collectively intend such and-such,” or that “We are doing such-and-such together,” they understand themselves to have a special standing in relation to one another. In partic ular, they understand that they have rights against and obligations towards each other. They also understand that they are not in a position unilater ally to change the collective’s mind, though they may do so by mutual consent.
v. Collective Belief
Members of a population P collectively believe that p if and only if they are jointly committed to believe as a body that p.
vi. Freedom of Collective Action
Is there a basis for distinguishing between the free and the coerced actions of groups? Surely there is.
In particular, a group may be subject to strong external pressure from another group. In the opinion of many thinkers, this could provide the first group with a justification for carrying out actions that would otherwise be reprehensible. In other words, the external pressure could ground a rebuttal of the charge of moral guilt.
This line of thought is presumably a large part of what lies behind traditional just war theory. If a nation is attacked or under immediate threat of attack, it may– according to the theory– justly defend itself, where necessary engaging in actions that in other circumstances could be described as heinous.24
Where there is no external pressure on a group, there can surely be circumstances in which it would be appropriate to say that it acted freely. This would presumably be when, at a minimum, a collective intention was arrived at without any external interference, and implemented by members of the group acting in light of it.
vii. The Impact of Collective Guilt on Individual Members
For a number of reasons the guilt of a group must be sharply distinguished from the guilt of any of its individual members.
Consider a version of the possibility just mentioned. Joe is put under strong pressure by his parents to join the army and participate in the collective waging of a war that their country is engaged in. They threaten to disown him if he does not join the army. Now suppose that the waging of this war by this country is morally wicked, and both the country, and Joe, believe this. Suppose, finally, that the country in question freely entered the war. The collective itself appears unequivocally to meet the suggested standards for collective guilt. Joe’s situation, however, is more nuanced. He does believe his country is in the wrong, but he stands to lose his inheritance if he fails to participate. If the loss of an inheritance does not seem sufficient to excuse him, one can imagine stronger pressure. Perhaps a government official has credibly threatened to kill Joe’s wife and child if he refuses to join the army. Then perhaps we will not fault him for participating in the war. He may be morally blameless, or, if not that, he is not properly the object of harsh blame, as is his country.
3. COLLECTIVE GUILT FEELINGS
What is it for us, collectively, to feel guilt about what we have collectively done?28 In this section I articulate three possible answers to this question. These differ in interesting ways from one another. All describe possible phenomena, and important phenomena at that. In discussion of each one I focus on the question of how well it seems to represent “a collective feeling of guilt.”
i. The First Aggregative Account: Feelings of Personal Guilt
One who is considering for the first time what the phenomenon of so-called collective guilt amounts to is likely to suggest an account in terms of the feelings of individual human beings, feelings of a particular kind that I shall refer to as feelings of personal guilt.
What is a “feeling of personal guilt?” By definition:
For A to feel personal guilt is for A to feel guilt over an action that A personally has performed [should have performed? what about omission?]
In other words, the object of the guilt feeling, what it is about, is an action of the one who feels the guilt. The one who feels the guilt is the subject of the guilt feeling, the one whose feeling of guilt it is.
What about Survivor Guilt?
It may seem obvious that collective guilt feelings will be a matter of the feelings of personal guilt of individual members of the relevant collective. Two common assumptions suggest this. First, one may assume that the only possible subjects of guilt feelings are individuals as opposed to collectives. This is Kutz’s assumption.
Second, one may assume that a feeling of guilt is– as a matter of logic– guilt over one’s own actions. Thus Gabriele Taylor writes: “Feelings of guilt ...cannot arise from the deeds or omissions of others.” [???] Others make concordant remarks. R. Jay Wallace, for instance, asserts: “Guilt is appropriate to one’s own violations."
Later discussion in this essay will question both assumptions. For now I mean only to suggest that together they seem to recommend an account of collective guilt feelings in terms of the feelings of members of the collective, in particular, their feelings of personal guilt.
For us collectively to feel guilt over our collective action A is for each of us to feel guilt over something he or she did that directly contributed to our doing A.
There are two main problems with this account. First, the object of guilt in the analysandum is our collective act, something we have done together. It is hard to see how an account in terms of personal guilt can accommodate this consideration.
Suppose that Linda and Phil together kidnapped Sally. Perhaps Linda masterminded the affair, and feels guilt over doing so. This is not the same as feeling guilt over the collective act of kidnapping Sally. What if the plan to kidnap Sally was both jointly executed and jointly authored? With regard to what can either Linda or Phil appropriately feel personal guilt? Each one could appropriately feel guilt over having personally participated in the planning and execution of the kidnapping. That, of course, is not the same as feeling guilt over Sally’s kidnapping.
Suppose that both Linda and Phil feel guilt for participating in the plan ning and execution of Sally’s kidnapping. Is that enough to warrant the claim that they collectively feel guilt over their collective act? It does not seem so, since even now no one is feeling guilt over what they did together.
Apart from the fact that this first aggregative account does not seem to capture the object of the guilt in the analysandum, there is another problem with it. The account requires that all members of the relevant population feel guilt in relation to some contributory action of their own. There surely are cases of collective action where we cannot expect all of the members to feel this way, or in which they simply do not feel this way, cases in which– at the same time– it is not obvious that a collective feeling of guilt is ruled out.
It will be tempting here to amend the present account in the following direction. Do not require that all members feel personal guilt in rela tion to the collective action. Require, instead, that those who contributed directly to it feel personal guilt for having done so. This may seem like the obvious way to proceed, but there is still a problem. The unamended account logically ruled out group guilt feelings on what seemed like insufficient grounds. The amended account seems logically to rule them in on insufficient grounds.
Is it enough for a group to feel guilt over its action if less than half of the group members directly contributed to the action and these members feel guilt over having done so? I would say not.
I have considered two versions of an account of collective guilt feelings in terms of the personal guilt feelings of the directly contributing members of the relevant collective. Neither seems wholly plausible. Given that this is so, it looks very much as if one cannot give a satisfactory account of a collective’s feeling guilt over its act in terms of the personal guilt feelings of the directly contributing members.
However the first account is modified, the core idea that is likely to drive all versions of the account is that collective guilt feelings must ultimately be a matter of feelings of personal guilt on behalf of some or all members of the relevant collective. If this is all there ever is to a collective feeling of guilt, it would appear that no one ever actually feels guilt over a wrongful collective action. This may seem regrettable. Is it not possible for some person or body to feel guilt in regard to it?
ii. The Second Aggregative Account: Feelings of Membership Guilt
a. Feeling guilt over what one’s group has done: Feeling membership guilt
Recall the doubts philosophers have expressed about the possibility of guilt feelings that are not directed towards the personal guilt of the subject of guilt. A problem with rejection of such feelings is that people seem to have them. In particular, they sometimes seem to feel guilt and other supposedly “self-directed” emotions in relation to the actions of a group to which they belong. And this may be so even when they would not warrantably feel guilt over anything they themselves had done in relation to the group’s action. Perhaps as soon as they realized it was afoot they tried to prevent it from happening. Perhaps they simply never made any direct contribution to it. Perhaps they did not even know that it was going on. Thus Herbert Morris, in relation to shame:
A man may take pride in the accomplishments of his countrymen when all he appears to share with them is his nationality ...And do we not feel shame and think it appropriate, at least sometimes, over actions of our country with which we may not have been involved. (The emphasis is mine.)
And thus Karl Jaspers, philosopher and psychiatrist, writing soon after the end of the Second World War in his nuanced and sensitive essay The Question of German Guilt:
We feel ourselves not only as individuals, but as Germans. Everyone, in his real being, is the German people. Who does not remember moments in his life when he said to himself, in opposition and in despair of his nation, “I am Germany” or in jubilant harmony with it, “I, too, am Germany!” and ...I feel co-responsible for what Germans do and have done. I feel closer to those Germans who feel likewise ...and further from the ones whose soul seems to deny this link.33
I shall take it that people sometimes feel guilt over what a group of which they are members has done. I shall call this feeling a feeling of membership guilt. [134]
b. Membership guilt versus personal guilt
What is it like to feel membership guilt? How does it compare with feeling personal guilt?
I assume that a feeling of membership guilt may not be distinguishable from a feeling of personal guilt in terms of whatever pangs and twinges may be involved. More generally, these feelings will not have distinguishable phenomenological conditions. They will, however, be distinguishable, by reference to the requisite judgment or thought. A feeling of membership guilt will at some level involve the judgment that a collective of which the subject of the guilt is a member has done something wrong, whereas a feeling of personal guilt involves the judgment that the person whose feeling it is has done something wrong.
c. Karl Jaspers’ dilemma
Are feelings of membership guilt intelligible? Jaspers thought not. I omitted the words that express his judgment from the second passage quoted above. The penultimate sentence reads, more fully, as follows: ... in a way which is rationally not conceivable, which is even rationally refutable, I feel co-responsible for what Germans do and have done.
In effect, Jaspers is confronted with a dilemma. There is a way that he “cannot help feeling” which is “rationally refutable.” Being a philosopher, he finds this extremely problematic:
As a philosopher I now seem to have strayed completely into the realm of feeling and to have abandoned conception ...
As a philosopher he would prefer not to have emotions that are “ration ally refutable.” He would prefer not to “abandon conception,” presum ably leaving concerns with logical coherence and consistency, and stray completely into the realm of feeling.
d. The intelligibility of membership guilt
Jaspers can be rescued from his dilemma. Or at least, a related dilemma can be resolved. That is, given that a group has acted in a blameworthy fashion, one can argue that it is indeed intelligible for group members to feel guilt over the action in question. My argument for the intelligibility of these feelings utilizes the account of collective action introduced earlier in this essay. To repeat it here:
Apopulation P collectively performed action A if and only if, roughly, the members of P were jointly committed to intending as a body to do A, and, acting in the light of this joint commitment, relevant members of P acted so as to satisfy this intention.
Given this analysis of collective action, there is an argument for the intel ligibility of collective guilt for any member of the collective. Even group members who do not directly contribute to the group’s action are linked to it through their participation in the foundational joint commitment. This joint commitment is crucial to the argument. It grounds each member’s ability to say, “We did it” with some justification. He, as a party to the foundational joint commitment, is indeed one of us.
A member can say this, on this basis, whether or not he or she made a direct contribution to the performance of the action. A member can say this, indeed, whether or not he or she knew at the time that the action in question was being performed. For one can be part of a population whose members are jointly committed to intend as a body to do A whether or not one is aware of the content of the intention in question. One’s being jointly committed in this way can be a function of an authority-creating joint commitment. Thus the relevant intention may have been brought into effect by virtue of the acts of a person or body authorized to make decisions for the group. It is not necessary that everyone in the group knows that the intention has been brought into effect or implemented. Nonetheless the authorization may be one in which everyone has participated.
Similarly, one can say “We did it” appropriately, even if one has done whatever one could to subvert the course of the collective action. One’s participation in the relevant joint commitment still ties one inextricably to the group. If what “we” did was morally wicked, one can appropriately in these circumstances admit that too, and appropriately feel guilt over what we did. This is not, of course, to feel guilt over what one did oneself. One may have been entirely guiltless, personally, in the matter.
e. Joint commitment and identification
What of Jaspers’ thought, “I am Germany?” Can the above account of collective action help to explain it? One might say that Jaspers here identifies with Germany. There is a clear sense in which a joint commitment provides a basis for identification with the group as agent. A party to the joint commitment is not literally identical with the agent, of course, but to some extent it is as if a party is the agent. If my group bears guilt, then my participation in the relevant joint commitment means that I cannot disassociate myself from that guilt: from my point of view it is our guilt, not their guilt. To be jointly committed is to be, in a substantial sense, an “associate” of the other parties.37 In terms from J.-J. Rousseau’s Social Contract, one is “an indivisible part of the whole.”
f. Intelligibility versus accuracy
I have argued, contrary to Jaspers’ doubts, that feelings of membership guilt are intelligible, and can find a clear rationale in the joint commit ment that underlies a collective action. One might be comfortable with this conclusion, but raise the following question. Were “the German people,” comprising millions of people, parties to a joint commitment to authorize the Nazis to do what they did? If not, then Jaspers’ own feeling of membership guilt has not been rationalized at all.
The details of Jaspers’ situation are an empirical, historical matter. As I have indicated earlier, there are mechanisms for the creation of large-scale joint commitments. Hence it is in principle possible, for any given large population, that there is a joint commitment in that case. Jaspers suggests that many– though not all– Germans feel as he does. They feel “co responsible” for what Germans do and have done. Insofar as he and others have this feeling, my guess would be that what underlies it is a sense of joint commitment. This sense would be misplaced only insofar as there is no such commitment in fact. Given that many do share it, however, it there may be something approximating a relevant joint commitment.
I suspect Jaspers thought the problem was worse: that for a person to feel guilt over acts in which he was not directly involved, and so on, is simply irrational. It is against this concern that I have argued here
g. Feelings of membership guilt and collective guilt feelings
Can one give an account of collective feelings of guilt in terms of an aggregate of feelings of membership guilt? Is it plausible to think of a group as feeling guilt over one of its actions if all of its members feel membership guilt over the action in question?
I suggest not. It is true that, here, a group’s action is the object of a feeling of guilt. But the feeling does not have a collective subject. One might put it this way. Certainly individual members of the group feel guilt over the group’s action. But one can still ask: what of the group itself? The group itself does not seem to be the subject of a feeling of guilt.
To point up the problem, consider that no one may know that everyone feels guilt over the group’s action. Perhaps each member believes that she or he alone feels membership guilt over the group’s act. Perhaps he or she believes that everyone else would laugh or be scornful on hearing that anyone felt the group’s act was culpable. It would surely be quite odd to say that the group felt guilt under such circumstances, even though the conditions posited by the account of collective guilt feelings under scrutiny are met.
We could amend the account in terms of a generalized feeling of membership guilt by adding a condition to the effect that the existence of the feelings in question should be common knowledge.
This would rule out the scenarios just mentioned, though it would still not introduce a collective subject of guilt.
In addition, a common knowledge condition could be fulfilled without anyone having publicly expressed a feeling of membership guilt. It does not rule out the following state of affairs. The group in question believes that it can do no wrong. That is, the members are jointly committed to believe as a body that they can do no wrong. Such self-righteousness may be as common with groups as it is with individuals. Unless this joint commitment is rescinded with the concurrence of all, it stands as a barrier to anyone’s expressing guilt feelings over what the group has done. For such feelings involve a judgment of group wrongdoing.
In this situation group members, discussing the group’s act with one another, are likely to refer to its fineness, justice, appropriateness, and so on. All will realize that they stand to be rebuked in the name of the joint commitment should they baldly assert a contrary judgment.
Few may be willing even to say something carefully qualified like “I personally think that we acted badly when ... .”38 Though this does not amount to a violation of the joint commitment, it could be seen as subversive. Hence one risks being faulted for disloyalty even then. Such a situation, given common knowledge that people personally feel guilt over the group’s action, may be inherently unstable. Nonetheless, as far as it goes, it seems some distance from a situation in which one would want to speak of the group feeling guilt.
iii. A Plural Subject Account of Collective Guilt Feelings
People constitute a plural subject in my sense when they are jointly committed to doing something as a body, where “doing something” is construed broadly enough to include intending, believing, and the like. An alternative to any of the aggregative accounts of collective guilt feelings that have been considered is, evidently, a plural subject account. I now consider such an account
a. The account
A plural subject account of collective guilt feelings would run as follows:
For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feeling guilt as a body over our action A.
Alternatively, with my definition of “plural subject” understood:
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
What exactly are the parties committed to here? One might spell this out as follows. They are to act as would be appropriate were they to constitute a single subject of guilt feelings. Or, perhaps better, they are to act so as to constitute, as far as is possible, a single subject of guilt feelings. This does not mean that they are to act so as to constitute, as far as possible, a single individual human subject of guilt feelings. Thus this conception of collective guilt feelings does not entail that the guilt feelings of individual human beings are logically prior to those of collectives.
How will the individual members act if they act in the way required by their joint commitment? For one thing, when talking among them selves they will characterize the action in question as morally wrong. They will say and do only what accords with this judgment. For example, they will refrain from proposing that it is morally acceptable for the group to engage in an obviously similar action. Should one of their number propose such a thing, they will feel free to remonstrate with the person in question. In addition, they feel free to ascribe guilt feelings to the group, and to remonstrate with a group member who denies that the group feels guilty.
b. The importance of the phenomenon
Collective guilt feelings according to this account would be important phenomena under any name. Suppose that Ted and the other members of his gang understand that they are jointly committed to feel guilt as a body over their unprovoked attack on a rival gang. This is liable to make a significant difference to what happens next. Perhaps their credo is: “Attack other gangs when you get the chance.” Accepting the wickedness of its last attack, Ted’s gang will be under pressure from the point of view of self-consistency to question its credo. Perhaps it will modify its credo, or even decide to disband. Someone might propose that Ted’s gang tender an apology to the other gang. A wrong done might be righted as far as is possible. A cycle of violence may be closed.
Evidently collective guilt feelings– on the plural subject account provide an analogue of personal guilt, at the collective level. This is not surprising, since a joint commitment precisely to feel guilt as a body is at issue.
c. The genesis of collective guilt feelings
How might collective guilt feelings, according to the plural subject account, arise? It will be neither necessary nor sufficient for members of the group to feel membership guilt over an act of the collective. It will be neither necessary nor sufficient for members to feel personal guilt over their participation or other act relating to the collective act. In cases in which there is no relevantly authoritative person or body involved, what is needed, to put it abstractly, is expressions of readiness on everyone’s part to be jointly committed to feel guilt as a body. Common knowledge of these expressions completes the picture.
Take a small-scale case. Lisa and Joe have been looking after Phyllis’s daughter Mary for the weekend. Preoccupied with their own problems, they neglect Mary, leaving her to her own devices. She becomes depressed, as is obvious when Phyllis comes to collect her. Later, speaking on the phone to Phyllis, Lisa says, “We feel really guilty about letting Mary get so depressed ...” Joe, who is listening, says to Lisa, sotto voce, “No we don’t ...” Lisa flashes back, “Yes, we do ...” and Joe concurs.
This may be enough to establish a joint commitment between Joe and Lisa, a joint commitment to feel guilt as a body over their treatment of Mary. In Lisa’s presence, at least, Joe will now 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.
A different kind of case appears to be possible. This involves consti tutionally elected governments. Addressing a third party through its emis saries, an official of such a government may say something like this: “The whole nation feels guilt over the way it treated you.”
It may be understood by all that the government, acting through its officials, is entitled thus to determine the emotional state of the citizen body, in effect, jointly committing the citizens to feel guilt as a body. A special feature of this case is that many particular citizens may be unaware of the official’s pronouncement, and be found expressing contrary feel ings without understanding that they violate a joint commitment they are subject to. Clearly this is a complicated type of case, dependent on an understanding of the simpler case without authorities. It seems there may be cases of analogous complexity involving a single human being.
d. The phenomenology of collective guilt feelings
On the plural subject account, are collective guilt feelings such that they have no associated phenomenology? The question here need not be interpreted in terms of a necessary phenomenological condition of feeling guilt. As I have argued, there is reason to doubt whether any such conditions are necessary in the case of an individual human being. If they are not, then they are not necessary for guilt feelings in general. There is then no issue for an account of collective guilt feelings that does not require that some phenomenological condition be met.
Meanwhile, it is worth considering the following fact about collective guilt feelings according to the plural subject account. To put it generally, it seems most likely that there are phenomenological accompaniments of collective guilt feelings. These will include feeling-sensations experienced by individual human beings and occurring, in that sense, in the minds of these individuals.40 Nonetheless, they may best be thought of as pangs, and so on, of collective guilt.
Let me explain. Suppose Joe is conforming to the joint commitment he has with Lisa to feel guilt as a body over their treatment of Mary. His conformity involves such things as saying, in light of the joint commit ment, “We acted wrongly,” and “We feel guilty about what we did.” In the course of saying such things and acting accordingly, Joe may experience a sudden pang.
Howis one best to describe such feeling-sensations? Are they pangs of personal guilt, or pangs of membership guilt?
Clearly, from a phenomenological point of view there may be no way of deciding this issue: a pang is a pang is a pang. One needs to look at the context in which the pangs occur.
As far as Joe’s story goes, Joe’s pang is responsive to his and Lisa’s collective feeling of guilt, rather than to any feeling of membership or personal guilt of his own. Had he and Lisa not come to collectively feel guilt, he might never have had this pang. And his pang may not corres pond to any judgments he has made in his heart as to the wrongfulness of what he and Lisa did or any associated act of his own. In the above story, insofar as he made any personal judgments on what they did these were not censorious.
It may be, then, that Joe’s pang is best described as a “pang of collective guilt.” To argue that there can be pangs of collective guilt, in this sense, is not to fly in the face of reason or science. Pangs of collective guilt, in this sense, exist in and through the conscious experiences of individual group members. Nonetheless, this way of labeling them makes sense.
iv. How to Feel Guilt: Three Different Ways
I have considered three accounts of what it is for people collectively to feel guilt in the context of collective wrongdoing, one in terms of feelings of personal guilt, one in terms of feelings of membership guilt, and the plural subject account.
The plural subject account alone posits an irreducibly collective subject of guilt feelings– a plural subject created by a joint commitment. With other accounts, the so-called collective guilt feelings come down to an aggregate of guilt feelings attributable to individual group members. I am therefore inclined to think that it captures the gist of everyday attributions of collective guilt feelings, attributions that appear to imply the existence of a collective subject.
Each account appeals to a different way of feeling guilt in the context of collective action. An individual member of a collective can feel personal guilt over what he or she has done in relation to the collective action. The individual member of a collective can feel membership guilt over what the collective has done.
And people can constitute themselves the members of plural subject of guilt feelings, the object of these feelings being the collective act. This last seems most plausibly to be considered a collective way of feeling guilt. In what follows, when I refer to collective guilt feelings I understand this in terms of the plural subject account.
There are important connections between collective guilt feelings and feelings of personal and membership guilt. No one of these feelings seems to carry another with it as a matter of logic. The existence of guilt feelings of any of the three kinds, however, will tend to be associated with guilt feelings of the other kinds. People who feel membership guilt, for instance, are likely to express this feeling to one another in such a way that they constitute themselves a plural subject of guilt feelings. Hence, whether or not one continues to believe that the true subjects of guilt feelings are individuals, one can allow that collective guilt feelings in the plural subject sense are likely to occur and to play an important role in the life of groups, their victims, and their critics.