Daniel Elstein d.elstein@ucl.ac.uk
FIGS Friday Forum on Guilt – 30th November 2012
GUILT AND WRONGDOING
The intuitive view of guilt
 We tend to assume that the feeling of guilt is closely
associated with beliefs about wrongdoing:
 We feel guilty to the extent that we believe we have acted
wrongly.
 The facts about wrongdoing are more fundamental
than the facts about when guilt is merited.
 It would be odd to say that the fact that an action merited
guilt made it the case that the action was wrong.
 In contrast, it is generally correct to say that the fact that an
action is wrong explains why it merits guilt.
Wrongdoing and control
 Many philosophers believe that the extent of
an agent’s wrongdoing cannot depend on
factors beyond her control.
 Whether we transgress against a moral rule
depends on the actions we decide to perform and
the (subjective) chances of the potential results.
 Differences in the results of our actions that are
simply down to luck don’t affect wrongdoing.
 For example, assuming no differences in chances of
success, murder isn’t more wrong than attempted
murder.
The two assassins
 Boris and Doris are equally well-trained and well-equipped




snipers.
Each decides to assassinate a (different) political figure.
Boris succeeds in shooting his target to death.
Doris fails to kill her target, because he ducked at the
crucial moment.
Years later, both Boris and Doris realise that their actions
were misguided.
 Doris feels less guilty than Boris, even though, hearing
about each others’ actions, they agree that their actions
were equally wrong.
 Are Boris and Doris mistaken that their actions merit different
amounts of guilt despite being equally wrong?
Moral Luck
 The assassins example is central to philosophical
discussion concerning Moral Luck.
 The issue is whether correct moral assessments can be
affected by luck (factors beyond the agent’s control).
 Some philosophers, focusing on our intuitions about
guilt, say “Yes”.
 Other philosophers, focusing on wrongdoing and
control, say “No”.
 But a third option distinguishes between assessments
of wrongdoing and assessments of merited guilt:
 The former kind of assessment is unaffected by luck,
whereas the latter kind of assessment is so affected.
Can they be separated?
 In order to defend the verdicts of Boris and Doris, we have
to explain how wrongdoing and guilt can be separated.
 Consider what Boris might say to explain why he should
feel more guilty than Doris:
 “Although what I did was no worse than what she did, I am
responsible for someone’s death, and she is not; my additional
guilt is on account of that death. I have that death on my
conscience; it is a kind of debt that I owe, and that I must
somehow make up for.”
 The idea is that guilt is a response not just to the wrongness
of past actions but to their negative consequences.
 Boris, in contrast to Doris, is responsible for a death, and this
affects the overall contribution that he makes to the world.
 We take guilt to be appropriate as a reminder of debts like this.
The place of blame
 Philosophers sometimes wonder whether
blameworthiness is affected by luck.
 We might also ask whether blame is tied more
closely to wrongdoing or guilt.
 It seems unfair to blame Boris any more than Doris,
because she behaved just as badly.
 But we might think of feeling guilty as blaming
oneself, so that if Boris’s actions do merit more guilt,
that has to mean that they merit more blame too.
 These intuitions about blame might make it harder to
maintain the separation of guilt and wrongdoing.
The complexity of blame
 We talk both of the blameworthiness of actions and
agents themselves, and of the consequences for
which they are to blame.
 Boris is to blame for a death; Doris is not.
 But this does not make Boris’s actions more blameworthy –
it is the death rather than his actions that acts as a focus of
our blame towards Boris.
 We can recognise that equally wrong (and so equally
blameworthy) actions can have different consequences
because of luck, so affecting what agents are to blame for,
and so how much we resent them.
 Our focus is on the harm done: we don’t need to explain
greater resentment or guilt by greater wrongdoing.