Abstract
This paper defends a minimal desert thesis, according to which someone who is blameworthy for something deserves to feel guilty, to the right extent, at the right time, because of her culpability. The sentiment or emotion of guilt includes a thought that one is blameworthy for something as well as an unpleasant affect. Feeling guilty is not a matter of inflicting suffering on oneself, and it need not involve any thought that one deserves to suffer. The desert of a feeling of guilt is a kind of moral propriety of that response, and it is a matter of justice. If the minimal desert thesis is correct, then it is in some respect good that one who is blameworthy feel guilty—there is some justice in that state of affairs. But if retributivism concerns the justification of punishment, the minimal desert thesis is not retributivist. Its plausibility nevertheless raises doubt about whether, as some have argued, there are senses of moral responsibility that are not desert-entailing.
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Notes
That is, someone who bears this kind of blameworthiness for something is morally responsible for it. Some writers [eg., Driver (2015); Sher (2006: ch. 4)] hold that one can be blameworthy for something without being morally responsible for it. If there is blameworthiness of that kind, it is not my concern here.
“When feeling guilty…we feel badly. Feeling guilty is partly defined by its being a painful condition” (Morris 1976: 101).
I am also not able to say exactly how the right time, as referred to in the minimal desert thesis, is to be understood, though I offer a few remarks on this point in Clarke (2013: 155). Again, a lack of specificity on this point will not affect the discussion here.
The state has an intentional object: it is about something. Not every intentional object is propositional. But I will take it that this one is. Some of what I say would have to be retracted if this assumption were mistaken, but I think many of the main points would stand.
Rosen (2015: 71–72) takes a similar view of the thoughts that are, as he puts it, essential to blaming attitudes such as resentment, indignation, and feeling guilty.
Similarly, Scanlon (2008: 128) maintains that to blame someone is in part to judge her blameworthy. A feeling of guilt, he states, is among the attitudinal responses that are “elements of blame” (Scanlon 2008: 143).
As it seems to me, one can have the thought I mention without having any clear idea for what one is blameworthy. Sometimes one’s feeling of guilt is nonspecific. But the usual form of the thought is that one is blameworthy for some more or less specific thing—for lying to Betty, for Sam’s having to wait in the rain, etc.
David Shoemaker made this suggestion on the blog “Flickers of Freedom.”
Pamela Hieronymi takes reactive attitudes such as resentment and indignation “to involve (to be sensitive to, or to entail, or to be the affective face of, or simply a label for” (Hieronymi 2004: 133) a complex set of judgments, the unifying member of which is a judgment that the targeted individual has displayed ill will.
On this point, Herbert Morris agrees: “The pain associated with feeling guilty, while a response to the belief that one has done wrong, is not a pain that one inflicts upon oneself with the significance carried by punishment inflicted by others. It is not, in general, deliberately inflicted pain as requital for wrongdoing” (Morris 1976: 104). It is thus mistaken to state, as Patricia Greenspan does, that guilt is an “internal sanction” (Greenspan 1995: 109), a kind of “emotional self-punishment” (Greenspan 1995: 130), or a way of “inflicting punishment on oneself” (Greenspan 1995: 130). These claims imply a purposiveness to the process of coming to feel guilty that, as I explain in the text to follow, need be no part of that process.
Pereboom raises the objection in response to my proposal of the thesis in Clarke (2013).
Perhaps in claiming that the pain of feeling guilty “need not involve desert,” Pereboom is simply denying that the guilty deserve to feel guilty. In that case, there is no argument here against the minimal desert thesis, merely a denial of it.
Indeed, Feinberg explains (1970: 79), considerations of desert can conflict with other considerations of desert.
Ben Bagley (on the blog “Flickers of Freedom”) and Justin Capes (in personal correspondence) brought the problem to my attention.
Jacobson (2013) argues that the sentiment that Williams’s truck driver can be expected to feel is in fact guilt, which is unfitting but nevertheless admirable. And indeed, as Jacobson notes, Williams later remarked that agent-regret “can be psychologically and structurally a manifestation of guilt” (Williams 1993: 93). If Jacobson is right on these points, the objection considered in the text here is averted.
Similarly, it is not a matter of justice that I feel disappointment or shame at my failure to live up to the high standards I have set for myself for playing chess or piano.
Compare Scanlon’s remark that his claim that certain reactive attitudes “can be made appropriate simply by what a person’s normative attitudes in general are like” is “a first-order moral thesis about when we do and when we do not owe it to others not to modify our attitudes toward them in these ways” (Scanlon 2015: 99).
Dana Nelkin (2013: 124) considers the idea that the appropriateness of negative reactive attitudes is their desert by the blameworthy individuals. One problem for such a view, she holds, is that what is deserved by the guilty must be something that is bad for them, and being resented by someone need not be bad for one (it might just show how petty or hateful the person who resents one is). This problem, at least, does not arise with respect to the feeling of guilt: it is bad for the one who feels guilty.
Further, I do not find it entirely clear that the disposition that Strawson characterizes is specifically retributive. It is a disposition to accept punishment as just. But seeing it as just need not be seeing it as justified only by desert.
Rosen qualifies this claim, saying that the statement gives the “focal sense” of ‘blame.’ Someone who is disposed to resent X for A, or who judges X to merit resentment for A but who cannot work up much resentment, can still be said to blame X for A, “not in the focal sense, but in a related sense” (Rosen 2015: 67, note 5).
Of course, for one to be blameworthy for something, it need not be the case that anyone actually has any blaming attitude toward one.
Resentment of X for A includes as well, Rosen suggests, the thoughts that X did A, that it was wrong for X to do A, and that in doing A, X showed an objectionable pattern of concern (Rosen 2015: 77).
As I discuss in Sect. 6, Pereboom holds a similar view of resentment and indignation.
Alan Gibbard agrees: “Not that guilt is self-directed anger; feeling guilty is different from feeling you could kick yourself” (Gibbard 1990: 139). (The connection between guilt and anger, he suggests, is that the emotion of guilt evolved to placate the anger of others.) Greenspan holds that in “the typical sort of adult moral case,” guilt involves “self-anger,” though she writes, “I interpret this broadly to involve discomfort at the thought of oneself as responsible for a wrong” (Greenspan 1995: 130).
It might be said that the retributive thought in the feeling of guilt is that one deserves the punishment that others might desire one to suffer. But can one not feel guilty without having such a thought?
As Feinberg observes (Feinberg 1970: 60), desert of a certain response is a pro tanto consideration favoring that response, one that can be outweighed by other considerations; despite being deserved, the response in question might be all-things-considered wrong. I do not think that Scanlon means to disagree when he states that a desert-based justification of some response claims that it is made appropriate “simply by certain facts about that person or what he or she has done.” I take him to characterize here just the appropriateness that is a matter of desert, and not all-things-considered justification.
The expression “desert-entailing” is perhaps due to Strawson (1986: 109). It has come to be widely used to refer to a kind of moral responsibility, or a conception of it, involving a tight connection to desert.
It is thus unclear what to make of Parfit’s claim that “we can be morally responsible in several other ways, or senses, but no one could ever be responsible, I believe, in any way that could make them deserve to suffer” (Parfit 2011: 264).
Many thanks to Derk Pereboom and Michael Zimmerman for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Clarke, R. Moral Responsibility, Guilt, and Retributivism. J Ethics 20, 121–137 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9228-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9228-7