Note to reader:
This is a first draft. I plan to re-write this in light of some of the questions and comments I received
in discussion. Please feel free to email questions, suggestions or corrections.
Does guilt track moral transgressions?
akosua.bonsu.09@ucl.ac.uk
The focus throughout will be on guilt experienced as a result of a putative moral wrongdoing. The
claim to be assessed is that guilt, so understood, is morally relevant because it tracks those of our
behaviours which count as moral transgressions. In doing so it enables subjects to avoid immoral
actions or motivates subjects to engage in reparative behaviours as a result of acting immorally.
This view of the moral significance of guilt is shared by thinkers in philosophy, moral psychology
and cognitive psychology therefore an assessment of its plausibility is of great interest to these
disciplines. The essay is split into two parts. In part 1, I clarify the claim that guilt is morally
significant in the sense that it tracks behaviours which count as moral transgressions. A behaviour
counts as a moral transgression if it violates a moral rule. Although there is some controversy about
the precise way to characterise moral rules, empirical evidence shows that, on the whole, ordinary
people accept the claim that moral rules are objective and universal. This means that moral rules do
not fluctuate between different cultures and that they proscribe behaviours whose justification does
not depend on the authority of any individual or institution. The fact that a large number of people
conceptualise moral rules in this way gives us a reason to take that characterisation seriously. I will
therefore propose that guilt is morally significant if it tracks moral transgressions understood as
those behaviours that violate a rule that is objective and universal. In part 2, I argue that guilt is not
morally significant in the specified sense. By looking at a series of examples, I aim to show that
what guilt actually tracks are behaviours that are believed to be moral transgressions. In only some
cases will it be true that these behaviours count as moral transgressions because in only some cases
will it be true that the rule which determines the impermissibility of the behaviour is objective and
universal. I sketch out some of the consequences for this result in the conclusion.
1. In what sense is guilt a moral emotion?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, guilt is “the state (meriting condemnation and
reproach of conscience) of having wilfully committed a crime or heinous moral offence.” This
definition connects guilt to an action (captured by the idea of wilfully committing), to a painful
feeling (captured by the idea of a merited condemnation and reproach from conscience) and to a
wrongdoing (captured by the idea of a crime or heinous moral offence). Guilt in the typical case is
closely related to all three notions. It is related to action because I experience guilt as a result of
something I have done, it is related to wrongdoing because it involves the judgment that I have done
something wrong and it is related to feeling because it involves a negative, unpleasant or painful
feeling. The judgment that I have done something wrong is connected to the feeling that is
characteristic of guilt. We can see this most clearly by thinking about the difference between guilt as
an emotion and guilt as a legal concept. I may plead guilty to an offence or be judged to be guilty of
an offence without feeling guilty if I do not take myself to have done anything wrong. What this
suggests is that the judgment of wrongdoing, understood as requiring a recognition or
acknowledgement of having done something wrong, grounds the negative feeling characteristic of
guilt. It is principally because we condemn ourselves for bad behaviour that guilt is characterised by
a distinctively unpleasant, negative or painful feeling (c.f. Stocker 2007 p. 138). Of course, guilt
cannot always be understood as a painful feeling experienced as a result of a recognition or
acknowledgement of wrongdoing. I can feel guilty about my unexpressed thoughts, I can feel guilty
because I am the only remaining survivor of genocide, I can feel guilt vicariously about your
actions etc. In the dominant case, however, guilt is experienced as a result of having acted wrongly.
On a first viewing then, guilt is an emotional experience the essence of which is feeling bad because
of something that I have done and which I recognise or acknowledge to be wrong.
From the definition with which we started, it is clear that guilt can be experienced in response to my
recognition of either a moral or a criminal wrongdoing. In what follows here, I focus only on moral
wrongdoings, i.e., on immoral acts. An act which is immoral may count as a criminal wrongdoing,
as in the case of unprovoked murder, or it may not, as in the case of reading your diary. Some
theorists take the view that guilt is essentially tied to moral wrongdoings. Simon Blackburn (1998 p.
3) for example, signals an essential relationship between guilt and self-ascriptive judgments of
moral wrongdoing when he writes “moral judgment is indeed used to coerce, and cajole, and to
judge: when it is internalised, its victims may walk around under the burden of guilt and anguish.”
Similarly, Kevin Mulligan (2009 p. 262) suggest that guilt is essentially tied to immoral acts when
he writes “[t]he object of a feeling of guilt is some action of the agent which he takes to involve an
infringement of some moral ought or obligation, an action which may simply be an omission, a
failure to do the right thing.” Other notable thinkers holding the view that guilt is essentially
connected to moral wrongdoings are Sigmund Freud (1930/1961) and Robert Lazarus (1991). Guilt,
so understood, is typically thought to be morally significant. Why? Different thinkers seize upon
different ideas. Some say that guilt, when restricted to moral wrongdoing, is morally significant
because the negative feeling it involves acts as a powerful deterrent against acting immorally (c.f.,
Blackburn 1998). Others say that the painful awareness of the moral wrongdoing that guilt involves
motivates us to engage in behaviours that attempt to repair the wrongs resulting from our actions
(c.f., H. B. Lewis, 1971). Still others claim that being a moral agent by its nature requires
experiencing guilt or related emotions because a moral agent needs to be deterred from doing
immoral things and motivated to engage in reparative behaviours when she does immoral things
(c.f., Williams 1985 p. 77). There may well be other accounts of the moral significance of guilt
when guilt is understood as being restricted to moral wrongdoings. I certainly do not think that the
suggestions canvassed here are the only available options. My point is rather that each of the
suggestions canvassed here can be right only if the initial characterisation of guilt as involving the
recognition of a moral wrongdoing is accepted. If guilt did not involve the recognition of a moral
wrongdoing (i) guilt could not deter me from immoral behaviours because the painful feeling with
which it is associated would not determine which actions to steer clear of, (ii) guilt could not
motivate reparative behaviours because the subject would not even be aware that her actions had
transgressed a moral rule and (iii) guilt would not be essential to being a moral agent because it
could not deter us from immoral behaviours or motivate us to engage in reparative behaviours.
Already we can see that a number of thinkers are committed to the claim that guilt, understood as an
emotion experienced in response to a moral wrongdoing, is morally significant because it involves
an act recognised by a subject to be a moral transgression. A moral transgression is an act that
violates a moral rule, but what is a moral rule? In the 1970’s Elliott Turiel designed a method for
investigating differences in the way that people conceptualise moral and conventional rules. The
method was simple. Participants were presented with prototypical cases of moral and conventional
rule transgressions and asked a series of questions designed to establish, amongst other things, the
extent to which the wrongness of the transgression was dependent on the dictates of an authority
and the extent to which the rule in question applied to everyone, everywhere. The findings showed
that moral rules were thought of as objective and universal whereas conventional rules were thought
of as subjective and relative to a community. More specifically, moral rules were thought to
proscribe behaviours that are to be adopted irrespective of the dictates of an authoritative individual
or institution and that are applicable to all people independently of the time in which they live or the
culture to which they belong. In contrast, conventional rules were thought to proscribe behaviours
that can be suspended or changed by an appropriate authority and that shift from one community to
the next or from one time to another.1 A significant number of psychologists following Turiel’s
methodology have confirmed his findings with people of varying ages, nationalities, cultures and
religions, people with cognitive impairments such as autism and even children as young as three
and six months (c.f., Nucci 2001 for a review of this literature). Certainly this empirical evidence
does not show that moral rules are in fact the way we conceptualise them as being but it does give
us a good reason to take the commonsense characterisation of moral rules as our starting point. I
will take it therefore that guilt is morally significant if it involves the recognition, on the part of a
subject, of a violation of a moral rule understood in the way commonsense would have it. Is guilt a
moral emotion in this sense?
2. Is guilt a moral emotion in the required sense?
Here is an interesting case. In 1934 Ruth Benedict reported on the practices of the Kwakiutl tribe.
The Kwakiutl people are a group of Native Indians based in the North Pacific coast of Canada.
They lived in communities resembling our own but their attitude to bereavement motivated
behaviours that would be seen by us to be abnormal. For the Kwakiutl, irrespective of whether a
person died in bed of disease or was killed at the hands of an enemy, the loss was considered by the
bereaved to be a personal insult. The very fact that one had been caused to morn, they thought, was
proof that one had been unfairly put upon. The way to wipe out the insult of bereavement was to kill
a randomly selected member of another tribe. The victim need not in any way be connected to the
death which resulted in the bereavement. The victim did not even need to be thought of as an
unworthy person. It was the act of murder rather than the victim of murder that was important. The
murder showed that the bereaved would not be assaulted by grief. Instead, he would strike back by
placing the burden of grief onto someone else. The murder also showed strength in the face of grief.
This perhaps explains why joy was the normal response to a murder committed by the bereaved. In
one case, a chief whose sister and daughter did not return home after travelling to a neighbouring
village gathered a war party. The warriors went to a neighbouring village were they found by
chance seven men and two children sleeping. They killed the sleeping party. They felt good on
returning home. The murder and the joy which resulted from the murder were believed to be a
perfectly normal response to a noble act. It is not as if the Kwakiutl did not have or utilise the
concept of a moral transgression. Members of the community thought that failure to pay a debt was
a moral transgression for which guilt, shame or even humiliation would be an appropriate response.
The point is that while the Kwakiutl had a moral code, they did not think that unprovoked murder
was immoral, abnormal or inappropriate. This example, and innumerable others in the
anthropological literature shows that there can be considerable variation between cultures on which
actions count as moral transgressions (c.f. Benedict 1934 for more examples). We now have all we
need to unravel the claim that guilt is morally relevant in the sense above described.
Let’s begin with a summary of the direction of the argument so far. To begin with I identified the
claim to be assessed as the claim that guilt is morally relevant in the sense that it involves an action
which is recognised by a subject to be a moral transgression. I will now put this point by saying that
guilt is morally significant in the sense that it tracks moral transgressions. In order to better
understand the notion of a moral transgression, I discussed how it is that moral rules are ordinarily
conceptualised. I pointed out that a substantial body of empirical evidence shows that moral rules
are ordinarily conceptualised as being objective and universal. The factors which determine whether
1
Other features of moral and conventional rules were determined but they will not be of significance here (c.f.
Kelly, Stick, Harley, Eng & Fessler 2007). Interestingly, it has been found that psychopaths and children displaying
psychopathic tendencies do not distinguish moral and conventional rules in this way (c.f. Blair 1995). These are clearly
special cases and so do not undermine the substantial evidence in favour of the characterisation suggested by Turiel
(1977)
or not a given rule counts as objective and universal were not discussed and I will not enter into that
discussion here. Finally, I discussed the attitude of the Kwakiutl tribe to unprovoked murder. The
point of that discussion was to show that while moral rules prescribe behaviours that, ex hypothesi,
apply to all people independently of the time in which they live or the culture to which they belong,
what a subject believes to be a moral rule can fluctuate depending on the norms and attitudes of her
culture. What this means is that the behaviours that are taken by a subject to be moral transgression
sometimes depend exclusively on cultural norms and attitudes. Now consider the sort of person who
thinks that unprovoked murder even as a result of bereavement is morally wrong. This person
would experience guilt if she killed a stranger simply because she had recently been bereaved. Her
guilt would involve the recognition that what she had done was wrong and that recognition would
generate the sorts of negative feelings characteristic of guilt. Is her guilt morally relevant in the
sense that it tracks moral transgressions? Well, that depends on whether the rule prohibiting
unprovoked murder is universal and objective. I make no commitments on this score because I wish
to leave as an open question what criteria a rule must pass in order for it to count as objective and
universal. The central point is that there is a gap to be exploited between the rules that count as
objective and universal and the rules that are believed to be objective and universal. How does this
relate to guilt?
The behaviour which a subject “recognises” as a moral transgression in guilt may or may not
actually be a moral transgression. The term “recognise” is therefore misleading. If I recognise that
something is the case then I see correctly that something is the case. If the behaviours that a subject
takes to be morally impermissible in guilt are behaviours that she recognises to be morally
impermissible, then we must suppose that she is invariably correct in thinking that those behaviours
are morally impermissible. This is false. Mistakes are made. It is therefore more accurate to say that
guilt tracks those behaviours which a subject believes to count as moral transgressions. In some
cases, these behaviours will actually be moral transgressions because the rules which determine the
impermissibility of such behaviours will be objective and universal. In other cases, this will not be
true. The discussion of the permissibility or impermissibility of unprovoked killing was meant to
illustrate this, but perhaps another case is useful. Through a series of interviews and questionnaires
Nisan (1987) found that transgressions such as mixed sex bathing were conceived of as moral
transgressions by a group of children living in traditional Arab villages in Israel. Being put in a
situation in which one had to bath with a member of the opposite sex was a source of guilt and
shame. The guilt experienced by these children on such occasions involved the “recognition” that a
particular form of behaviour was morally wrong. All this actually amounts to, however, is that the
children accepted (i.e., believed) that a rule prohibiting bathing with members of the opposite sex
was objective and universal. If the guilt experienced by these children is to be morally significant in
the sense that it tracks a moral transgression, it must be the case that the rule prohibiting bathing
with a member of the opposite sex actually is objective and universal. This is a further question. We
cannot say that guilt tracks actual moral transgressions (i.e., those behaviours that are impermissible
according to a rule that is objective and universal) simply because, in guilt, a subject believes that
some behaviour counts as a moral transgression. What we can say, as I have already suggested, is
that guilt tracks the behaviours that people believe to be moral transgressions. Why then is it that
guilt is not morally significant in the relevant sense? Because in tracking beliefs about the moral
impermissibility of actions, guilt indiscriminately tracks those behaviours which actually are moral
transgressions and those behaviours which only appear to a subject to be moral transgressions.
3. Conclusion
In response to the argument just canvassed we may simply reject the claim that moral rules are
universal and objective. This move would not by itself establish that guilt tracks moral
transgressions. We would further need a new conception of a moral rule. This new conception
would, of course, determine which behaviours count as a moral transgression but, to avoid the
conclusion of the argument, application of the rule could not distinguish between the beliefs,
tracked by a subject in guilt, about the behaviours that count as moral transgressions and the
behaviours that actually count as moral transgressions. It seems to me that this is an extreme cost
for a minimal payoff. The payoff is minimal, I want to suggest for two reasons. First, something is
gained by the reorientation of focus that comes from accepting the conclusion of the argument.
Second, nothing much is lost by replacing the claim that guilt tracks moral transgressions with the
conclusion of the argument. Although I cannot give a detailed defence of these points here, I can
give a sketch of a line of thought that will need to be elaborated on elsewhere.
The conclusion of the argument is that guilt tracks those behaviours that a subject believes to count
as moral transgressions. As such, guilt indiscriminately tracks those behaviours which are moral
transgressions and those behaviours which merely appear to be moral transgressions. This means
that the rules which determine the impermissibility of the acts that guilt tracts are sometimes
objective and universal and sometimes not. That said, the rules determining the impermissibility of
the acts that guilt tracts are almost always rules widely held by members of the subjects’
community. This is partly Benedict’s point. Whether or not the rule allowing unprovoked murder is
moral or not, it is widely held to be correct by the Kwakiutl tribe. Members of the community who
do not subscribe to the rule are abnormal, strange, immoral etc. Similarly, whether or not the rule
prohibiting bathing with a member of the opposite sex is moral or not, it is widely held to be correct
by members of a particular Arab community based in Israel. Again, members of the community
who did not subscribe to the rule are alien, immoral, other etc. On the basis of such cases, I would
suggest that the beliefs about the moral impermissibility of an action which guilt tracks will be
widely accepted by the members of the subjects’ community irrespective of whether those rules are
moral or not. With this in view, I would argue that nothing much is lost by accepting the conclusion
of the argument. Guilt still has the function of motivating us to avoid certain behaviours, but the
central point is not that these behaviours are immoral but rather that they are socially impermissible
and as such they will be met by anger, hostility or even rejection by community members. Guilt still
has the function of motivating reparative behaviours, but the central point of those behaviours is not
to correct a moral indiscretion, but to correct an indiscretion that could be met with anger, hostility
or rejection by community members. Finally, it will still be true to say that an agent must be capable
of experiencing guilt if she is to be regarded by others as a right-thinking member of the community
but again, this is not because guilt involves recognition of moral transgressions but rather because
guilt displays a sensitivity to and respect for those rules which are widely accepted by community
members. As well as capturing key aspects of the claim that guilt is morally significant, the
reorientation of focus that comes with accepting the conclusion of the argument means that we
come to better understand why guilt is a significant emotion. We learn from this reorientation that
the significance of guilt does not primarily lie in its ability to accurately track moral transgressions
but in its ability to track those behaviours that are not permitted by members of a particular
community. Of course, this is just a sketch, and more would have to be said in a full defence of
these views. My point has only been to show that the consequence of rejecting the claim that guilt
tracks moral transgressions motivates a new and rewarding line of inquiry that does not require us
to give up the genuine insights of the claim that guilt is a morally significant emotion.
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