Reply: Morality, Humanity and Historicality: Remorse and Religion Revisited

Abstract

I am grateful to Rai Gaita and to the organisers of this conference for the opportunity to return to the very topic that was the focus of my attention in my very first substantial piece of work in philosophy: my undergraduate honours thesis at Harvard, written more than thirty years ago, under the supervision of David Sachs, with John Rawls as second reader. Entitled ‘The Feeling of Guilt’, it dealt with precisely what Gaita in his paper calls ‘remorse’ — which he without further ado simply defines as ‘the pained recognition of one’s guilt’. In it I too explored some of the relevant language, did some moral phenomenology, dismissed Freud’s account as failing to do justice to the guilt-feeling, and took a look at various thinkers in the Continental tradition who offered other, more ‘ontological’ rather than naturalistically psychological accounts; but like Gaita, I devoted most of my essay to reflection on what I took to be the larger and profoundly important human reality reflected in the experience of genuine guilt.