One of the papers I have recently been writing is on the topic of guilt, and how it demonstrates human freedom. Just to give you guys an advance read-through of some of it, and because all my writing has been going to the paper rather than to the blog, I’ll attach some here.

Guilt, as it will be considered in this paper, is the unpleasant emotion elicited by the recognition of one’s actions bad effects. ‘Bad,’ in this context, implies primarily that which is harmful to others or to oneself, but is not restricted to this. A man can feel guilty for some act which only indirectly harms himself, and does not harm another, simply because he thinks or knows it to be wrong: blasphemy is arguably such an act. God cannot be hurt by the act of His creatures – unless He freely chooses to suffer – and the man is only indirectly affected by his act; nevertheless, his idea that it is wrong can still lead to feelings of guilt.

The experience of guilt is an emotion: it is an interior movement of the person, repelling them from an act which they either committed, are committing, or consider committing. Emotions comprise the affective sphere of the person, attracting and repelling them, and are distinct from one’s intellect and will. Realizing that the affective is distinct from the intellectual and voluntary aspects of the person helps to explain some of our experience of guilt. For instance, repentance and forgiveness, which are acts of the will, do not always remove all one’s guilty feelings, even though they are generally experienced as liberating. On the other hand, one’s guilty feelings can eventually be overcome even if one willfully continues the same patterns of action perceived as evil. The experience of guilt, then, is not necessarily linked to the will’s rejection or acceptance of the acts; as an emotion, it is distinct.

Even more essential to this paper is the fact that the experience of guilt, as an emotion, is independent from the intellectual sphere. Essentially, it doesn’t matter what one knows – one can continue to feel guilty. The emotion of guilt is intrinsically attached to one’s own actions: one cannot feel guilty on behalf of another, except analogically. One can, however, feel guilty for one’s actions which were not freely chosen or intended. It is a peculiar aspect of guilt that we know that guilt ought to be proportional to our possession of the act, but we continue to experience guilt even when we know we were not in control of the effects of our act. Intellectually, we can see that our guilt is unjustified, because we did not intend – or could not have avoided – the act or its effects. Emotionally, however, we can still feel guilty.

This distinction between justified and unjustified guilt, on which the argument of this paper will be built, can perhaps be best explained through examples. For instance, a man backing out of his driveway may notice his wife’s cat, be annoyed, and speed up to purposely run over it. During or after the act, he may feel guilty for causing pain to his wife and to the cat, and it would be generally accepted that he is justified in feeling this guilt. If, on the other hand, he accidentally ran over his wife’s cat because he didn’t see it, he may still feel deeply guilty for his action even though there was no precaution he could have taken to avoid the effect of his act, it was not premeditated or even intended. In this case, however, it would be generally accepted that his guilt is unjustified since he was not in possession of that aspect of the action. The experience of guilt ought to reflect the objective quality of guilt – that which Scheler described as a ‘quality of evil’ – which attaches to a person only if they possess and own the act by choosing or willing it. However, we often experience it as attached to any acts we perform, whether or not they are fully possessed. We can see this more clearly when we see that we cannot feel guilt for an act which we do not perform. If a stranger driving down the street ran over the cat, for example, the husband could not feel guilty except insofar as he was involved in the accident – if, say, he let the cat outside or failed to leash it. The experience of guilt, then, attaches to any act of the person’s own, but is only seen as justified if the act is one that the person embraced through an act of the will.

That we clearly distinguish between justified and unjustified guilt is obvious whenever we try to ‘talk someone out of’ feeling guilty. “It wasn’t your fault,” we claim. “You couldn’t help it.” We don’t deny that their act caused the effects, but we deny that they are ultimately responsible for the effects. Our distinction between justified and unjustified guilt, then, is based on whether or not a person is ultimately responsible for the effects of their act. Bernard Williams claims that “[to] the extent that the institution of blame works coherently, it does so because it attempts less than morality would like it to do… [it] takes the agent together with his character, and does not raise questions about his freedom to have chosen another character.” The experience of guilt, however, raises exactly these questions about the agent’s freedom. A person weighted down by guilt knows that their guilt is explained by his actions, and leads him to question at what point he could have chosen, if not another character, other acts which would have had a different outcome. If he can identify an incident in which he was ultimately responsible for choosing these effects of his act, he must admit that the guilt is justified. If there was no such moment of ultimate responsibility, then the guilt was unjustified.