Account Of Guilt Research Articles

Politicizing Ontological Guilt: Arendt’s Transformative Appropriation of Heidegger’s Existential Analytic

Abstract To the limited extent that Arendt’s stance on Heidegger has been studied in relation to her thinking on guilt, the focus has been on her outright repudiation of Heidegger’s controversial ontologization of guilt. However, that Arendt does not simply repudiate Heidegger’s account of guilt becomes clear if we recognize that she deals with guilt, albeit less explicitly, in her theory of political action, particularly in her notion of “trespassing” as a specifically political form of harm. In this context, Arendt appropriates key features of Heidegger’s account. I argue that, in doing so, she transfers Heideggerian features into a political framework, insisting that they proceed not from individual existential indebtedness but from political intersubjectivity, or what she polemically – with a redefined Heideggerian term – calls the “with-world” (Mitwelt). This politicization testifies to Arendt’s overall approach to Heidegger’s existential analytic: a critical-transformative appropriation through her signature concepts of action and plurality.

Guilt, Desert, Fittingness, and the Good

Desert-realists maintain that those who do wrong without an excuse deserve blame. Desert-skeptics deny this, holding that though we may be responsible for our actions in some sense, we lack the kind of responsibility needed to deserve blame. In two recent papers, Randolph Clarke (Philosophical Explorations 16:153–164, 2013 and Journal of Ethics 20:121–137, 2016) advances an innovative defense of desert-realism. He argues for deserved-guilt, the thesis that the guilty deserve to feel guilt. In his 2013 paper, Clarke suggests two strategies for defending deserved-guilt: the fitting-guilt strategy and the good-guilt strategy. In his 2016 paper, Clarke issues a challenge to the desert-skeptic: he calls on them to provide a non-desert based account of guilt’s fittingness. In the first two thirds of the paper, I respond to Clarke’s challenge to the desert-skeptic, showing that guilt felt by the guilty is alethic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. None of these notions of fittingness, I argue, are desert based. In the last third of the paper, I show how the work done in previous sections affords us the tools to finely diagnose the failures of both the fitting-guilt and the good-guilt strategies. Here, I draw on one of Clarke’s own insights—namely, that desert is intimately connected to the value of justice. I propose that showing that guilt is fitting, or again non-instrumentally good, fails to show that it is deserved because to show that it is deserved one must show that guilt is fitting or good in a sense that implicates justice.

Coping with Guilt and Shame After Gambling Loss

In this study we examined the relations between guilt and shame and coping strategies in response to gambling loss. Based on H.B. Lewis's (Shame & guilt in neurosis. New York: International Universities Press, 1971) account of guilt and shame, we proposed that unlike guilt, the experience of shame involves the attribution of gambling loss to stable and global internal factors (i.e., self-devaluation). We hypothesized that problem gambling severity would be more strongly associated with the intensity of shame than with the intensity of guilt following gambling loss. Further, we hypothesized that the intensity of shame would be positively associated with the use of avoidant coping strategies following gambling loss. Finally, we hypothesized that the intensity of shame would mediate the association between problem gambling severity and the use of avoidant coping. These hypotheses were supported by a retrospective survey of recent gambling losses. Our finding suggests that the experience of shame and the use of avoidant coping strategies to deal with this emotion are central to problem gambling severity.

No one is perfect: The limits of transparency and an ethic for ‘intelligent’ accountability

This paper draws on the work of Butler [Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press] to develop a critique of the operation and adequacy of transparency as a form of accountability. The paper begins with an exploration of accountability as subjection explored through Lacan’s account of the social dynamics of recognition, and Freud’s account of guilt. This analysis then informs an exploration of what is argued to be our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency as a form of accountability. The final section of the paper investigates the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ form of accountability, grounded in an ethic of humility and generosity, made possible by a conscious acknowledgement of the ways in which I can never quite know what it is that I am doing.

Guilt, Remorse and Victims

AbstractIn Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams describes the experience of guilt in terms of fear at the anger of an internalised other, who is a “victim or enforcer.” Williams says it is a merit of his account that it shows how our guilt turns us towards the victims of our wrongdoing. I argue that his account in fact misses the most important form of guilt's “concern with victims”– the experience of remorse. I consider, and reject, one way of trying to supplement this lack in Williams's account of guilt. Finally, I sketch some features of remorse that suggest that remorse belongs to a very different moral picture from the one painted by Williams.