Is Guilt a Moral Emotion?

An assumption often made about guilt is that it is moral emotion. This assumption seems to underlie a lot of philosophical and empirical research about guilt. I’ve recently come to question this view, and in this post I’m going to give an overview of my reasons for doing so.

The Standard Account of Guilt

Let’s start by considering, what I will call, the standard account of guilt — that is, of feeling guilty. The first thing to note is that this is distinct from being guilty. If you commit a crime, you are guilty of committing that crime regardless of what you think or feel about your behaviour.

When you are guilty, you might also come to feel guilty. This feeing most minimally functions to reflect the apparent fact that you are guilty. This allows that might feel guilty without being guilty. For example, you might mistakenly think that you’ve committed a crime and come to feel guilty about doing so. Your guilt still functions to reflect the apparent fact you are guilty, but it turns out that, in fact, you are not guilty.

Feeling guilty therefore says something about the world — specifically, it says something about something that you have done. To put it slightly more technically, feeling guilty appraises one’s behaviour in some way. The standard view of guilt takes this appraisal to amount to taking our behaviour to be morally substandard in some way. For example, a person might feel guilty for forgetting to feed his dog, and so his guilty feelings appraise his forgetting to feed his dog as morally substandard. In other words, the person takes morality to tell him that he should not have forgotten to feed his dog.

This allows that a person might be mistaken about what morality demands of them, but still feel guilty for behaving a particular way nevertheless. For example, a person might feel guilty for buying too many socks. According to the standard view of guilt, the person is mistakenly appraising their action as morally substandard, and so mistakenly taking morality to demand that they do not buy so many socks (at that particular time, at least).

Appraisals can therefore be correct or incorrect — or what is sometimes called fitting or unfitting. That an emotion is correct to feel gives us a reason to feel that emotion. However, it does not give us all-things-considered reason to feel that emotion. There might still be overriding reasons against feeling guilty even for something that you are guilty for doing. Some examples of this involve outlandish scenarios. For instances, we might imagine that some super-powerful aliens will destroy The Earth unless you do not feel guilty about acting in a morally substandard way. In this case, you have overriding reason not to feel guilty, regardless of whether you can actually bring this about. Some examples of this are more down to earth, though. Perhaps feeling guilty about something you’ve done wrong will lead you to become terribly depressed and suicidal. Insofar as what you feel guilty about doesn’t merit such a reaction, you have an overriding reason to not feel guilty about what you’ve done wrong. That this is true, though, doesn’t affect the fact that you have some reason to feel guilty.

Guilty feelings have two other key features. First, an affect or phenomenology. In short, feeling guilty feels bad. It may do so in a distinctive way. It may feel bad with a distinct focus on something you have done. You may ruminate about what you’ve done, all whilst feeling bad about it. You may feel small or pathetic. I won’t dwell on this feature here.

Second, guilty feelings have an action tendency — that is, a type of action that they motivate us to perform. The standard view of guilt takes reparation to the type of action in question. When we feel guilty, we are motivated to apologise, to compensate, and to otherwise try to make amends. For example, we might apologise to a friend we’ve wronged. Or we might offer to replace a stranger’s bicycle that we’ve negligently driven over and destroyed.

It is then another question whether we actually act on this motivation. There might be overriding factors that stop us from, say, apologising to someone even though we are motivated to do so. For example, the person might have died. Or else we may fear the consequences of apologising to them.

In summary, according to the standard account of guilt, when we feel guilty about behaving a particular way, we appraise our behaviour as morally substandard, we feel bad about having acted this way, and are motivated to try to repair our action (and its effects) if at all possible. It may even be the affect/phenomenology and action tendency of guilt are caused by its appraisal.

This presentation of, what I call, the standard account of guilt, highlights two ways in which guilt may qualify as a moral emotion. First, it exclusively takes moral failures as the object of its appraisal. That is, guilty feelings are only about ways we have failed with respect to what we take to be moral standards. Second, it motivates moral repair. That is, guilty feelings do not just motivate us to deceptively apologise to people or compensate them for damages just to get them to like us again. Rather, guilty feelings motivate us to repair wrongs we have committed in a morally commendable way. In short, we aim to make things right with people in a way that is not itself criticisable and will, if everything goes smoothly, lead to better and more flourishing relationships with others.

I’ve come to question both ways that guilt might be a moral emotion, and so I’ve come to question whether guilt is a moral emotion at all.

Guilt’s Appraisal

I’m not alone in holding that doesn’t just seem to take moral failures as the object of its appraisal. We sometimes feel guilty about failing to meet goals that we have set for ourselves even though failing to meet these goals doesn’t involve any kind of moral failure. Suppose you’ve aimed save money to go towards paying for aa holiday for yourself, but you instead spend all your money on sweets and chocolate. You might feel guilty for failing to meet your goal, even though you also agree that there is nothing about morality that required you to save for your holiday over spending your money on sweets and chocolate.

One response here might be that while we feel guilty in these cases, our guilty feelings are incorrect or unfitting. We are mistakenly taking ourselves to have done something morally substandard in this kind of case. Such a response, though, assumes that guilt must involve appraising our actions as morally substandard, and that doesn’t seem to be what we are doing in the above kind of case. Perhaps the idea is that the concept of guilt is such that it involves moral failures, and not just mere personal failures. Such an idea needs support, though. In particular, we need an explanation for why the concept of guilt only involves moral failures. Typically, it seems that we determine the boundaries of guilty feelings by considering cases, and cases seem to dictate that guilty feelings do not just involve moral failures.

It is also difficult to explain the phenomenon of guilt tripping while holding that guilt must involves an appraisal of an action as a moral failure. Consider the follow scenario:

Consider the following case:

Guilt-Trip: I forgot to tell a friend about a call they received while they were out of the room. It wasn’t the most important call. It was a co-worker of theirs telling them that they would see them at work tomorrow; no big deal, I thought. It completely slipped my mind to say anything, and if it had seemed important, I would have made sure to try harder to remember to say something. Now my friend is really annoyed at me about not telling them about the call. They went into work and felt foolish because the co-worker mentioned the call and my friend had no idea about it. My friend now doesn’t want to see me at the weekend because apparently they need time to process this. I think they are overreacting; clearly, they think I did something wrong — at least that I have failed them in some way — by not telling them about the call. And now I’m starting to feel bad. But I still don’t think I did anything wrong… It’s no big deal! Still, maybe I should just apologise and move on. I do feel bad, so I wouldn’t just be giving them a hollow apology. I can even offer to make up to them in some way, and promise to always make sure I tell them about any calls they receive. Perhaps I’ll even offer to get the drinks the next time we go out. I hope that will smooth things over.

This is a common enough type of interaction in our lives. We fail someone at least from their perspective and then they get upset and angry with us because of this failure. We typically don’t first consult morality to see whether our feelings are justified; we just feel them. We also typically don’t consult morality to see how we should react to people; we just react them. In this scenario, the friend feels some upset and angry about the person’s failure and, more specifically, towards the person and then the person starts to feel negative emotions about what they have done. But what is this negative emotion?

Perhaps calling the case “Guilt-Trip” tips the scales in favour of agreeing with me that it is guilt that the person is feeling in this scenario. But I think this is justified because this is just the kind of thing we call guilt tripping: someone is, consciously or unconsciously, trying to make another person feel guilty, sometimes regardless of whether what they have done is morally substandard in any way. So if Guilt-Trip involves someone feeling guilty, it undermines the standard account’s claim that guilt involves an appraisal of an action as being morally substandard. I’m inclined to think that this case does indeed involve the person feeling guilty as a result of their friend guilt tripping them. How can we make sense of this?

My proposal is that feeling guilty, most basically, involves taking a bit of one’s behaviour to be substandard in some way. In Guilt-Trip, the person sees their failure to tell the friend about the phone call as substandard from the friend’s perspective. So, even though the person may not quite see what the harm is with failing to tell their friend about the call, they can see that their friend takes it to be a harmful. The person both feels bad and is motivated to try to repair the harm he has caused. The can’t undo the past, but they can try to make things better for the friend.

Guilt’s Action Tendency

I’m much more alone in questioning what guilty feelings motivate. Among those who take action tendencies to be a core part of an emotion, reparation is often highlighted as central to guilty feelings. Now, I don’t deny that feeling guilty can motivate us to apologise, to compensate, and otherwise make amends, as it does in Guilt-Trip. But I do deny that these are all that guilty feelings can motivate.

Consider the following scenario:

Guilt-Trip-2: I forgot to tell a friend about a call they received while they were out of the room. It wasn’t the most important call. It was a co-worker of theirs telling them that they would see them at work tomorrow; no big deal, I thought. It completely slipped my mind to say anything, and if it had seemed important, I would have made sure to try harder to remember to say something. Now my friend is really annoyed at me about not telling them about the call. They went into work and felt foolish because the co-worker mentioned the call and my friend had no idea about it. My friend now doesn’t want to see me at the weekend because apparently they need time to process this. I think they are overreacting; clearly, they think I did something wrong — at least that I have failed them in some way — by not telling them about the call. And now I’m starting to feel bad. But I still don’t think I did anything wrong… It’s no big deal! How dare they. They should really be more understanding. They do things like this all the time. They are far from perfect. Why do they think they can just push me around and make me feel bad for a tiny little thing like this. I’m really getting sick of them and people like them. They just hang onto any little failure and run with it. When I see them, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. How dare they!

In this scenario, the person doesn’t get motivated to apologise, compensate, or otherwise make amends. Rather, they get defensive. They try to minimise the harm, they question the motivations of the friend, and they otherwise try to find ways to undermine the grounds on which they have been made to feel bad by their friend.

Now, you might think that given that there is no moral failure in this case, that the person’s reaction here is the appropriate one (and perhaps it is — more on this shortly). But notice that people sometimes react like this even when there’s been no guilt tripping involved and the failure clearly is a moral failure.

Defensive: My friend asked me to look after their apartment while they were on holiday. At first I went and checked everything, but I figured it would be fine to just not bother. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out there was a major leak and it caused all kinds of damage to their downstairs neighbour’s apartment too. Now, my friend is really upset and especially upset with me for not checking the apartment regularly like I said I would. They are making me feel bad for this, but I don’t see how it’s really my fault. I can’t control the pipes or what damage water does! It’s just bad luck. And even if I visited regularly, I might still have gone at the wrong time. Again, these things are just outside of my control. I shouldn’t be blamed for their bad pipes. They are really overreacting and trying to pin the blame on me. How dare they. They should really be more understanding. They do things like this all the time. They are far from perfect. Why do they think they can just push me around and make me feel bad just because they have crappy pipes and crappy luck. I’m really getting sick of them and people like them. They just hang onto any failure and run with it. When I see them, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. How dare they.

The person here gets defensive as a result of feeling bad — I would say, as a result of feeling guilty — about they failed to do. And what their failure seems to be a moral one. The person promised to do something and completely disregarded that promises. While we might sometimes have morally good reasons for disregarding a promise that we have made, this isn’t such a situation. The person just couldn’t be bothered to follow through on what they said they would do and it has disastrous consequences for their friend. So, guilty feelings seem to also motivate being defensive. How might we explain this?

My proposal is that guilt motivates getting rid of guilt. This explains the reactions we have seen so far. Sometimes guilt motivates us to try to repair what we have done, but sometimes it motivates us to get defensive and so try to undermine the grounds for us appraising our behaviour as (morally) substandard in the first place.

We can further support this view about guilt’s action tendency by observing that guilty feelings do not always motivate morally good ways of repairing our wrongs. Notice that we sometimes might feel bad about wronging a friend, but not really care about making things right with them in morally well-founded way. Rather, we may just want to placate them and try to make them stop holding our failure against us. Once they stop doing so, this then undermines our reason to feel guilty — if we are only feeling guilty because the person holds our failure against us. We can feel that we are forgiven or otherwise pardoned by the person, and we can get back to business as usual. So, even if guilt only motivates reparation (and not also defensiveness), we have no good reason to think it only motivates morally good reparation.

In summary, insofar as guilt is a moral emotion for the two reasons given above, we ought to conclude that guilt is not a moral emotion. This allows that guilt can have morally good consequences through motivating morally well founded repair, but it also makes sense ways in which guilty feelings move us towards morally substandard courses of action, even if sometimes, as in the case of giving phony apologies, others do not notice that our guilty feelings have not lead to a morally commendable response on our part.

We might then wonder: what makes the difference between guilt motivating a morally good course of action and guilt motivating a morally bad course of action? I propose that, inspired by Michael Cholbi’s view of grief, that the difference depends on how a person attends to her guilty feelings. So, it is the person who feels guilty who ultimately makes the difference. Guilty feelings highlight substandard behaviour, and then the person reacts to those feelings and what they highlight. Sometimes a person’s reaction is morally good such that they immediately try to make up for what they have done, and sometimes a person’s reaction is morally bad such they either get defensive or give a morally substandard apology and poor attempts at making up for what they have done.

More likely, and I believe this accords with our experiences of feeling guilty well, we can move between these two extremes. We may start off being defensive, we may then try to offer a bad apology, and then we may eventually try to improve our attempts at making amends. We may also waver from an initially morally good attempt at making amends to getting defensive once we see that the person isn’t receptive to our attempts at making amends. There is often no straight path from failing someone to having guilty feelings to making amends in a morally well-founded way.

This is not to say that we should always attend to our guilty feelings in a non-defensive way. We can be made to feel guilty about something we have done for no good reason. In Guilt-Trip, for example, the friend might be making us feel bad illegitimately. Maybe they are being too sensitive and too vindictive; maybe they shouldn’t think this failure matters, or even that it is a failure at all. Sometimes, then, we should attend to our guilty feelings in a defensive way.

Finally, I think that attending to guilty feelings in a morally appropriate way will sometimes lead to feelings of regret (wishing to undo the wrong), remorse (taking up the victim’s perspective), blame (holding the wrong against ourselves), and shame (finding fault in ourself, i.e. our attitudes, character traits, etc.). We might, then, be able to distinguish between the emotion of guilt (which I’ve focused on until this paragraph) and the morally appropriate experience of guilt (which I’ve suggested the contours of in this paragraph).