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Guilt, Practical Identity, and Moral Staining*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2017
Abstract
The guilt left by immoral actions is why moral duties are more pressing and serious than other reasons like prudential considerations. Religions talk of sin and karma; the secular still speak of spots or stains. I argue that a moral staining view of guilt is in fact the best model. It accounts for guilt's reflexive character and for anxious, scrupulous worries about whether one has transgressed. To understand moral staining, I borrow Christine Korsgaard's view that we construct our identities as agents through our actions. The contribution of immoral actions to self-constitution explains why moral obligations have priority and importance.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017
Footnotes
*
The author would like to thank Daniel Bonevac, Jonathan Dancy, John Deigh, and Paul Woodruff for their mentoring and helpful criticisms of this article.
References
1 Ewing, A.C., The Definition of Good, 133 (New York: MacMillan, 1947)Google Scholar.
2 Scanlon, T.M., What We Owe to Each Other 160 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., 158–60.
4 Ibid., 163.
5 Taylor, Gabriele, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon: 1985)Google Scholar, 92.
6 Ibid.
7 It's important to recognize that Emily is truly in doubt as to whether her action was right or wrong. Thus, when I use the word ‘possible’, I mean to say that it is uncertain, at least to Emily, whether her actions were right or wrong. Moreover, I myself take it that it is not obvious whether what Emily did was right or wrong.
8 Indeed, Korsgaard uses the phrases ‘practical identity’ and ‘personal identity’ interchangeably. Korsgaard, Christine, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 7.
9 Ibid., 19.
10 Ibid., 127–29.
11 Ibid., 29.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 128.
14 Ibid., 110.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 116.
17 Ibid., 110.
18 Ibid., 116.
19 Ibid., 19–20.
20 Ibid., 130.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 19–20.
23 Ibid., 129‒30 (‘Because he is alive in a further sense, then, a person has an identity in a further sense. He has an identity that is constituted by his choices… Every person must make himself into a particular person.’).
24 See ibid., 23 (‘[Y]ou can walk out even on a factually grounded identity like being a certain person's child or a certain nation's citizen…’).
25 The self for Korsgaard is a work-in-progress to which each new action contributes; it is not created anew with every fresh choice. See ibid., 35–36.
26 In using words like ‘kind’, ‘loyal’, ‘callous’, or ‘wrathful’, I do not mean to renege on my earlier commitment to treating moral stains as non-psychological properties of individuals. To use these words consistently with that commitment, however, I must ask the reader to understand them not as expressing actual psychological traits (e.g., the warm feeling typical of the kind person) but as states of persons whose actions have corresponded to these traits. Thus, in this manner of speaking, the kind person is not necessarily kind in the sense that he is disposed to warm feelings and finds it easy to lend a helping hand; rather, he is a person who has done kind things and thereby, on the Korsgaardian theory, constituted himself a kind person.
27 As I interpret Korsgaard, practical identity has ‘inertia’ but is nonetheless malleable. That said, cleaning up one's practical identity is not a topic that Korsgaard specifically addresses. In a later section, I will suggest that our bad actions are not a permanent part of our identity but that a theory of repentance is necessary to explain how they may be excised. For now, it is sufficient to say that, even if the stain can be erased, it has sufficient special stickiness to make a person feel as if he has perpetrated an irrevocable harm.
28 Kierkegaard, Søren, The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, 19.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Op. cit. note 8, 129 (emphasis added).
32 Morris, Herbert, ‘Guilt and Suffering’, in On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 89, 96–97 Google Scholar.
33 Ibid., 96.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. (‘When one is guilty of wrongdoing, one separates oneself from another or others with whom one was joined.’).
36 Ibid., 96–97.
37 Ibid., 96.
38 Ibid., 97.
39 Ibid., 97.
40 See ibid., 89, 98–99.
41 Buber, Martin, ‘Guilt and Guilt Feelings’, in Guilt and Shame, edited by Morris, Herbert (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1971)Google Scholar, 58, 60.
42 Op. cit. note 5, at 98.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 99.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 104.
48 Op. cit. note 32, 98 (emphasis added).
49 Ibid., 97.
50 Ibid., 97.
51 Op. cit. note 5, 85. In truth, Morris does say that wrongdoing entails the ‘conception of some limit on conduct’. Op. cit. note 32, 94. He believes though that the idea of a limitation on conduct is derivative of concerns about harm to those things that are valued. Ibid., 93–94. Hence, harm is still the primary concept defining wrongdoing for Morris.
52 Op. Cit. note 5, 86.
53 Ibid., 87.
54 In a similar vein, Ruth Barcan Marcus has argued that agents ought to arrange their affairs to avoid moral dilemmas. Marcus, Ruth Barcan, ‘Moral Dilemmas and Consistency’, Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), 121Google Scholar.