Ingram, Andrew Tice (2020). Guilt feelings and the intelligibility of moral duties. Ratio 33 (1):56-67.
According to the dominant view in moral psychology, guilt is a deontic experience. The thought that separates guilt from other negative feelings occasioned by bad deeds, like remorse or shame, is that one has done something wrong, that one has infringed one's obligation. This view is shared by philosophers like Gabriele Taylor, Herbert Morris, John Rawls, and Richard Wollheim
In the title of her book, Taylor refers to pride, shame, and guilt as ‘emotions of self-assessment.’ What justifies placing each of these emotions under the same heading is that each has a common object and is characterized by an evaluative belief about that object. Taylor says, ‘The self is the “object” of these emotions, and what is believed amounts to an assessment of that self’ (Taylor, 1985, p. 1).
Taylor's emphasis on ‘what is believed’ about the self when a subject experiences guilt is typical of accounts of this emotion. According to Wollheim, guilt and shame both are distinctive in that they must be understood in terms of changes in a person's ‘sense of self’ (Wollheim, 1999, p. 150). For instance, in the case of guilt, the shift is occasioned by the transgression of a prohibition that leaves the agent hearing the persistent, accusing voice of an internal ‘authority’ (pp. 188, 189, 193). Rawls takes this cognitive approach the furthest, walking it so far as to deny that there is a difference in the affective quality of two emotions like remorse and guilt. He writes:
What distinguishes the moral feelings from one another are the principles and faults which their expla nations typically invoke. For the most part, the characteristic sensations and behavioral manifestations are the same, being psychological disturbances and having the common features of these. (Rawls, 1971, p. 482)
On the other hand, Taylor more modestly allows that a ‘complete account would normally include consideration of other features, such as wants and wishes, sensations and physiological changes’ (Taylor, 1985, p. 2).
To describe the role that beliefs play in identifying emotions, Taylor sometimes says that these emotions ‘requir[e]’ certain beliefs and other times that the beliefs are ‘constitutive’ of the emotions (pp. 2, 3). Her choice of words expresses two distinct points. The first is that certain beliefs are necessary for specific emotions to ob tain. For example, she characterizes the person feeling a burst of pride as necessarily ‘believ[ing] her worth to be increased’ (p. 41). If the person has no such belief, then she is not experiencing a burst of pride. The second point is that the beliefs are not just necessarily antecedent, coincident, or consequent to the emotion. Rather, Taylor's choice of the word ‘constituent’ communicates that they are among its component parts. Returning to the exam ple of a woman's burst of pride, the belief that her worth has increased is not simply something that precedes, comes along with, or follows on what the woman feels but is integral to her emotion itself.
One reason to accept these philosophers' views is that they account for guilt's mutability–the fact that seem ingly any action can be the subject of guilt. All that is necessary is that the agent believe that his action is one that is contrary to his duty. A person may feel guilty about skipping church on Sundays, playing video games rather than attending a party, or flipping a light switch on the Sabbath. It is for this reason that Taylor suggests it is helpful to describe the person feeling guilt as believing that he has violated a ‘taboo’ (Taylor, 1985, p. 86). To the Europeans who introduced the term to English in the nineteenth century, ‘taboos’ were sets of disjointed prohibitions, unconnected and unexplained by utility, harm, equity, or theology. In like manner, people sometimes feel guilty over actions without regarding those actions as harmful, unfair to anyone, offensive to God, or disad vantageous for themselves or their community. An example would be an ethical vegetarian who believes that it is a moral duty not to eat meat. While cleaning his omnivorous family's dishes by himself, he finishes eating some casserole with small flecks of bacon in it rather than sweep the food into the garbage. The vegetarian then feels guilty, even though he did nothing to encourage animal slaughter. In such scenarios, the common link that remains is that what the person did (or failed to do) ‘presents itself as wrong’ (p. 86). The subject need not even know why the action is impermissible. To be sure, the person feeling guilt does not merely acknowledge that what he did was wrong within the fiction of a system of positive laws or rules. He regards it as truly wrong, not simply contrary to what is putatively wrong according to a certain rule.
The person feeling guilty represents herself as having transgressed; this is true even though in a cool hour the person may decide the represented prohibition is invalid and without justification. This phenomenon evidences the transgression theory by showing that the thought in guilt does not concern the grounding or justification for the obligation–be it God, other people, or the common good–but solely the deontic fact itself. It is psychologically plausible that an agent believes (as part of experiencing guilt) that an action is contrary to duty while at the same time holding that there is no good reason for the duty at issue. It is less plausible that the agent somehow believes (as part of the experience of guilt) that an action is hurtful to his community while at the same time holding that it is benign for the community.
Finally, the views of the foregoing philosophers, mused sitting in the armchair, are corroborated by what em pirical psychological have observed standing in their laboratories. In a 2008 article, philosophers Fabrice Teroni and Julien Deonna sought to reconcile the philosophical and empirical literature on the difference between guilt and shame (Teroni & Deonna, 2008). They found that guilt and shame were differentiated in the empirical litera ture by both their ‘particular object’ (one's behavior and one's self, respectively) and their ‘formal object’ (norms and values, respectively) (pp. 736, 737). A typical empirical study that they relied upon looked for patterns in questionnaires issued to test subjects asking them to recall or imagine situations in which they experienced either guilt or shame (e.g., Ferguson, Stegge, & Damhuis, 1991; Lindsay-Hartz, de Rivera, & Mascolo, 1995). For example, psychologists Paula Niedenthal, June Tangney, and Igor Gavanski asked subjects to imagine either an experience of guilt or shame and then describe a counterfactual situation that would remove the shame or guilt (Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski, 1994, p. 587). The researchers then coded the responses to see whether the self, the be havior, or some other feature of the situation changed in the counterfactual scenario (p. 587). They reported that those asked to envision an occasion of shame were much more likely to ‘mentally undo aspects of self’ whereas those prompted to think of an instance of guilt feelings fantasized performing different actions (p. 593).
Although Teroni and Deonna surveyed the psychology literature at the end of the last decade, a 2017 re view, performed by psychologists Stefanie Tignor and C. Randall Colvin came to the same result. Tignor and Colvin affirm that work cited by Teronia and Deonna remains authoritative and frequently corroborated (Teroni & Deonna, 2008, p. 727; Tignor & Colvin, 2017, p. 2). According to Tignor and Colvin, ‘researchers have provided consistent empirical support (e.g., Ferguson & Stegge, 1995; Lindsay-Hartz, 1984; Tangney & Dearing, 2002)’ for the proposition that those feeling guilt represent themselves as having transgressed while those feeling shame represent themselves as bad or defective (Tignor & Colvin, 2017, p. 2).