Collective Guilt in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Abstract

AbstractLincoln’s second inaugural address sees both North and South as responsible for the violence of the American Civil War and as complicit in slavery. Lincoln develops two theories of collective moral responsibility in the speech. The first concerns the behavior of the political class as the war approached. Because the political class acted through deliberative bodies that made commitments to which they could expect to be held, Lincoln sees their responsibility in terms of traditional concepts of agency, assigning them what I call “agential guilt.” But Lincoln also assigns moral responsibility for slavery as a whole to the nation, not just to the state, and nations, unlike states, do not have agency in the traditional sense of that word. For the nation Lincoln describes a kind of responsibility that turns not on what is chosen but on what is given, a kind of responsibility different in kind from agential guilt that I call “ontological guilt.”