Abstract
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.
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Notes
By “survivor guilt”, we mean the negative self-directed emotion that people often have not only in surviving something that others did not, but in faring better than them more generally. It has been observed in Holocaust survivors (Niederland 1961), survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Lifton 1967), HIV-negative gay men during the epidemic of the 1990s (Wayment et al., 1995), veterans (Sherman 2013), lung cancer survivors (Perloff et al., 2019), those who kept their jobs during layoffs (Brockner et al., 1986), and first-generation college-goers (Piorkowski 1983).
In saying that an emotion is fitting, we mean roughly that its object merits or warrants the emotion as a response: amusement is fitting toward humor, fear is fitting toward danger, anger is fitting toward malice, and so on. Of course, this is suggestive rather than exact, but it is notoriously difficult to characterize fittingness in an uncontroversial way. Those who adopt a cognitivist theory of the emotions, according to which emotions represent their targets as having certain evaluative properties, typically understand fittingness in terms of veridicality (Tappolet 2016): so an emotion is fitting just in case its target really has the evaluative property that the emotion represents it as having. On the other hand, many want to deny that emotions have representational content, and want to understand evaluative properties in terms of the fittingness of emotions, rather than vice versa: so perhaps what it is for a joke to be funny is for amusement to be fitting toward it (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000). These “sentimentalists” or “fitting-attitude theorists” must find a way to characterize fittingness that does not conflate it with other ways in which an emotion might be deemed “rational” (e.g., its being morally appropriate or prudentially rational to feel).
Beyond the question of how to characterize fittingness, there are also difficult questions about the normative status of fittingness. Our inclination is to think that considerations of fittingness carry some deontic weight: the fact that guilt is fitting in a given situation means that the agent has some reason to feel the emotion, even though that reason might be outweighed by other considerations, like the fact that the pain of the emotion is undeserved.
Of course, “wrong” and “blameworthy” are not entirely equivalent: injuring an innocent person is wrong in an objective sense, although if you do so while driving safely and attentively, you are not thereby blameworthy. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which the two are related: consider the subjective sense of “wrong,” on which wrongdoing consists in having violated a moral requirement that makes reference to one’s epistemic state—roughly, what one can (or can reasonably) foresee happening as the result of what one does (Gibbard 1990; Parfit 1984). Because you could not reasonably have foreseen that your driving safely would cause injury to someone, you have not violated any such moral requirement, so have not done anything wrong in the subjective sense of “wrong.” As Gibbard (1990) describes it, the connection between blameworthiness and wrongness in the subjective sense is that an act is blameworthy if and only if it is wrong (in that sense) and performed by a psychologically normal agent, one who does not have cognitive or moral deficiencies that exempt him from the reactive attitudes.
For other endorsements of the standard account, see Wallace (1994), Rawls (1999), Darwall (2009). By “construal,” we mean something like a quasi-perceptual seeming rather than an outright belief (Roberts 1988). According to the standard account, then, an agent does not need to believe that he has done anything wrong to feel guilt; rather, all he needs is to construe himself as having done wrong.
Alice Gregory, “The Sorrow and the Shame of an Accidental Killer,” New Yorker (11 September 2017).
Some scholars do indeed describe this emotion as ‘survivor shame’, in large part from an implicit commitment to the idea that guilt requires moral wrongdoing (e.g. Leys 2009). Nevertheless, ‘survivor guilt’ remains the strongly preferred term both academically and colloquially. A google search for ‘survivor shame’ returns 13,000 results; in contrast, ‘survivor guilt’ returns approximately one million results.
Note that we don’t think that excuses—or facts about the agent that renders him not to blame for an action that he would otherwise be blameworthy for—always render an apparently bad asymmetry innocuous. A blameless truck driver might be excused from blame for killing a child who ran onto the road by the fact that he was driving carefully, but that fact does not thereby mean that there is no morally bad asymmetry between him and the child. After all, he still has killed the child. Nonetheless, the presence of an excuse can mean that certain apparently morally bad asymmetries are actually innocuous. If Alice is 20 minutes late to a meeting with Bill because of an unforeseeable subway delay, then that fact means any lack of respect or concern for Bill’s time that Alice’s lateness seems to indicate is merely illusory.
Although we want to remain officially neutral on the nature of these other emotions, we are sympathetic to a view of resentment according to which resentment and guilt are counterparts, so that someone can fittingly resent another without construing him as blameworthy: we can fittingly resent you for all of things that you can fittingly feel guilt toward us about, even if you are not blameworthy for those things. It seems plausible, for example, that the parents of a child who died in a plane crash can fittingly resent those who walked away with minor injuries, even if they know that the survivors were in no way blameworthy for the child’s death, just as the survivors might fittingly feel guilt about having survived when the child died.
On the relational account, guilt and self-blame are not equivalent, and they may indeed come apart in cases like those involving survivor guilt. Nevertheless, it is not an accident on our account that guilt is correlated with self-blame: one of the most common ways to stand in a bad relation to someone, after all, is by doing something that makes one a proper object of blame, and thus a fitting object of self-blame. Note that this renders our account of guilt compatible with a range of views on blame—like Hieronymi’s (2004) quality-of-will account, or Scanlon’s (2008) relationship-impairment account—while leaving it incompatible with Strawsonian accounts that understand blame in terms of a set of reactive attitudes that include guilt (Carlsson 2017; Wallace 1994).
Why doesn't this response generalize to cases of guilt that accompany moral wrongdoing? Why don’t we try to talk wrongdoers out of their guilt? We think that there are at least two reasons why wrongdoing might in general make a greater degree of guilt fitting, thus outweighing the reasons that the individuals have not to feel guilt. First, third parties might view the pain of guilt as an appropriate punishment for moral wrongdoing. And second, the badness of the asymmetry constituted by wrongdoing may in general be greater than the badness constituted by surviving. That is because the wrongdoer not only stands in an initial undesirable asymmetry of having harmed the victim, but also a second undesirable asymmetry constituted by his exhibiting bad quality-of-will toward the victim. Third parties might therefore think that wrongdoers have especially strong reasons to feel guilt, and that these reasons outweigh concerns about their wellbeing.
“‘Everybody Around Me Died’: Jerry Schemmel’s United 232 Survivors’ Guilt.” https://www.otbsports.com/sport/jerry-schemmel-survivors-guilt-1048629
“Small Choices, Lives Saved: Near Misses of 9/11.” http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/09/03/near.death.decisions/index.html
See, e.g., Mill (Utilitarianism, ch. 5), Leibniz (“The Ultimate Origin of Things”), Feinberg (1970), Cohen (1989), Dworkin (2000). Some, like Rawls (1999), prefer to limit the term ‘unjust’ to inequalities that result from individual or institutional wrongdoing, so that there cannot be injustice without wrongdoing. This is purely a difference in terminology: even Rawls admits that there is something morally bad about inequalities resulting from luck, even if he does not describe them as ‘unjust’.
To be sure, appealing to the size of the asymmetry and the locality of justificatory demands will not fully settle questions about the scope of luck guilt (or survivor guilt more generally). For starters, there will be vagueness concerning what counts as ‘local’. It would be bizarre for the grieving parents to wonder why a random person on the street survived while their child did not. But would it also be bizarre for them to ponder that question about someone who missed boarding United Airlines Flight 232 due to a delayed connecting flight, or who briefly considered, but ultimately opted not to book a ticket on that flight? At what point is the relation between these people and the death of their child ‘distant’ enough that they may no longer demand justification from these people?
Questions about the precise scope of survivor guilt will need to be taken up in further work. For now, however, we want to flag that these questions are not uniquely vexing to the relational account. Rather, the standard account will also struggle to set a precise threshold for the degree of moral responsibility necessary to make guilt fitting. Think about a massacre of civilians during wartime. Certainly the soldiers who took part should feel guilty. But what about the commanders who ordered the troops to destroy the village that the massacre would take place in? Or the politicians who backed the war initially? Or the electorate who voted those politicians into office?
Indeed, the term ‘sudden wealth syndrome’ was coined in the 1990’s to describe the feelings of guilt and anxiety common to those who had made it rich during the dot-com era (Jaffe and Grubman 2007; Goldbart, Jaffe and DiFuria 2004).
“Lottery millionaires with winners’ guilt’ help out struggling families in crisis.” https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/lottery-millionaires-winners-guilt-help-26539160
Sally Racket, “Survivor’s Guilt,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 15, 2011). https://www.chronicle.com/article/survivors-guilt/.
See Zhao (2019) for a fuller discussion of this idea.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful for feedback from Laura Callahan, Michael Cholbi, Daniel Hoek, Alexander Greenberg, Kerah Gordon-Solmon, Rahul Kumar, Daniel Muñoz, and two anonymous referees at this journal, as well as from audiences at the CNY Moral Psychology Workshop, the Virginia Tech Moral Luck graduate seminar, the Queen’s University Political Philosophy Reading Group, the Carolina Seminar on Philosophy, Ethics and Mental Health, and the Oxford Workshop on Guilt, Shame and Regret. The authors would also like to thank Sam Curtis and Grant Bailey for their research assistance.
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MacKenzie, J., Zhao, M. Survivor guilt. Philos Stud 180, 2707–2726 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02002-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02002-9