Moral Guilt Research Articles

La aporía de Auschwitz en Der Vorleser, de Bernhard Schlink: justicia, culpa y superación del pasado en la literatura

This paper focuses on the analysis of the novel Der Vorleser (The Reader), from the point of view of its juridical content and relevance in the novel and the whole conception of the work, through the original text as main source of the analysis. In order to achieve our aims, we will study three focal points which are related: jurisprudence, justice and its (in)validity; guilty as a legal concept, moral guilt and collective guilt; and trial, criminal responsibility and criminal punishment. We will try to confirm if it is possible to speak of overcoming of the past (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung), that is, those terrible crimes committed against Jews in extermination camps during the Second World War or if we can just speak of a legal and historical aporia shown by Schlink.

The individualization of conscience: what Daybreak (9, 10, 544) and The Gay Science (117) tell us about the sovereign individual

ABSTRACTThe figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings but is present in sections from Daybreak and The Gay Science that have not been pursued in this context in the Anglophone literature; sections that shed new light on the sovereign individual. Second, that examination of these texts reveals that the sovereign individual is for Nietzsche embodied by Socrates and the Socratic individual. Third, and most importantly, that with the sovereign individual there emerges individualized conscience – the capacity for self-laceration that concerns one’s misdeeds alone and involves the belief that one’s misdeeds are entirely one’s own individual fault, rather than the fault of the community or the gods. A fourth, rather negative consequence, is that at the end of the day Nietzsche, in the Genealogy, does not manage to provide us with a genealogy of moral guilt.

Moral pride only under the positive gaze of others? Effects of praise and criticism on moral pride and guilt / ¿Orgullo moral solo bajo la mirada positiva de los otros? Los efectos del elogio y la crítica sobre el orgullo moral y la culpa

This study analysed the influence of praise and criticism on moral pride (the pride we feel when we believe we have done something morally good) and guilt. Ninety-two adolescents (age: M = 15.17, SD = 0.43; 44.6% girls, 55.4% boys) completed a questionnaire which outlined 10 scenarios based on combinations of three variables: the moral nature of the action (positive/negative); praise, criticism or the absence of either; and the source (parents/peers). Participants were asked to indicate the intensity with which they would feel pride and guilt (seven-point scale). Praise of positive actions increased pride. Interestingly, criticism of positive actions reduced pride and increased guilt, while praise of negative actions reduced guilt and increased pride. No differences were found between the pride felt after a criticized positive action and that felt after a praised negative action. A parallel effect was not, however, observed for guilt. These results reveal the strong, sometimes pernicious, influence of praise and criticism on guilt and pride and, even more, the need for praise by others in the experience of moral pride.

“There Are Many Kinds of Justice”: Confessing Growing Up an Indian Legal Subject in Louise Erdrich’s 'The Round House'

This paper looks at Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning The Round House as a novel that mixes and reworks genres from a Native American perspective to narrativize the “(post)colonial” (Cheyfitz) status of contemporary American Indian nations. An autobiographical story that can be read as a “postcolonial Bildungsroman” (Nayar), The Round House uses crime fiction as a pretext for writing Indian sovereignty. The legal is fully involved in the construction of the Indian colonized subject. Erdrich’s novel can be read as a confession to “a wrong thing that serves an ideal justice” (RH 306). The main character’s statement that “[t]he sentence was to endure” (RH 317) can be understood both in terms of his admitted moral guilt, and as a proclamation of “survivance” (G. Vizenor). The paper approaches the novel in light of the inseparability of U.S. federal Indian law and American Indian literature (Cheyfitz). My reading relies on Lyotard’s “différend” and on Agamben’s “state of exception” to discuss the plot and its dénouement as Erdrich’s way to wage a contemporary “Indian war” (E. Cook-Lynn).

Citizens’ Political Responsibility and Collective Identity: A Spinozistic Answer to Jaspers’s Question on Guilt

The question on guilt that Jaspers poses to the Germans was not only valid after the Holocaust, it can be raised to other peoples who must answer for the crimes committed by the state which act on behalf of the people that gave support to them. In this paper, I elaborate a notion of citizens’ political responsibility in order to argue to what extent—and under what circumstances—the citizens of a political community must respond for the deeds of the political institutions that govern them. For that purpose, I try to explain Spinoza’s notion of political authority in relation to Jaspers’ notion of political guilt. This Spinozistic approach has the advantage of freeing us from moral guilt—a misleading notion in political arena as I will argue—but it demands from us a genuine self-reflective and therapeutic procedure that if applied to politics would reveal a different path from Jaspers’ guilt. The aim of this therapeutic is to bring about a profound change in the personal and political identity of both citizen and political community.

Consequences of Tit‐for‐Tat Enforcement: Toward a Hippocratic Principle of Regulatory Implementation

The article discusses when tit‐for‐tat enforcement, an important strategy in responsive regulation theory, may generate intended reactions in communities of regulatees. Combining insights from compliance motivation theory, responsive regulation theory, and ethnographic studies of compliance, I hypothesize that tit‐for‐tat enforcement's probability of success depends on regulators’ institutionalized capacity to promote law–morality correspondence. Building such institutionalized capacity—so‐called “embeddedness”—simultaneously increases requirements for inspectorates’ competence. This article addresses three forms of law–morality correspondence: moral support for the law's content, the legislator's authority, and harmony between legal and moral guilt criteria.

Remedies for Robots

What happens when artificially intelligent robots misbehave? The question is not just hypothetical. As robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly integrate into our society, they will do bad things. They have already killed people. These new technologies present a number of interesting substantive law questions, from predictability, to transparency, to liability for high stakes decision making in complex computational systems. Our focus here is different. We seek to explore what remedies the law can and should provide once a robot has caused harm. Where substantive law defines who wins legal disputes, remedies law asks, “What do I get when I win?” Remedies are sometimes designed to make plaintiffs whole by restoring them to the condition they would have been in “but for” the wrong. But they can also contain elements of moral judgment, punishment, and deterrence. For instance, the law will often act to deprive a defendant of its gains even if the result is a windfall to the plaintiff, because we think it is unfair to let defendants keep those gains. In other instances, the law may order defendants to do (or stop doing) something unlawful or harmful. Each of these goals of remedies law, however, runs into difficulties when the bad actor in question is neither a person nor a corporation but a robot. We might order a robot—or, more realistically, the designer or owner of the robot—to pay for the damages it causes. (Though, as we will see, even that presents some surprisingly thorny problems.) But it turns out to be much harder for a judge to “order” a robot, rather than a human, to engage in or refrain from certain conduct . Robots can’t directly obey court orders not written in computer code. And bridging the translation gap between natural language and code is often harder than we might expect. This is particularly true of modern AI techniques that empower machines to learn and modify their decision making over time. If we don’t know how the robot “thinks,” we won’t know how to tell it to behave in a way likely to cause it to do what we actually want it to do. Moreover, if the ultimate goal of a legal remedy is to encourage good behavior or discourage bad behavior, punishing owners or designers for the behavior of their robots may not always make sense—if only for the simple reason that their owners didn’t act wrongfully in any meaningful way. The same problem affects injunctive relief. Courts are used to ordering people and companies to do (or stop doing) certain things, with a penalty of contempt of court for noncompliance. But ordering a robot to abstain from certain behavior won’t be trivial in many cases. And ordering it to take affirmative acts may prove even more problematic. In this paper, we begin to think about how we might design a system of remedies for robots. It may, for example, make sense to focus less of our doctrinal attention on moral guilt and more of it on no-fault liability systems (or at least ones that define fault differently) to compensate plaintiffs. But addressing payments for injury solves only part of the problem. Often we want to compel defendants to do (or not do) something in order to prevent injury. Injunctions, punitive damages, and even remedies like disgorgement are all aimed, directly or indirectly, at modifying or deterring behavior. But deterring robot misbehavior too is going to look very different than deterring humans. Our existing doctrines often take advantage of “irrational” human behavior like cognitive biases and risk aversion. Courts, for instance, can rely on the fact that most of us don’t want to go to jail, so we tend to avoid conduct that might lead to that result. But robots will be deterred only to the extent that their algorithms are modified to include sanctions as part of the risk-reward calculus. These limitations may even require us to institute a “robot death penalty” as a sort of specific deterrence against certain bad behaviors. Today, speculation of this sort may sound far-fetched. But the field already includes examples of misbehaving robots being taken offline permanently—a trend which only appears likely to increase in the years ahead. Finally, remedies law also has an expressive component that will be complicated by robots. We sometimes grant punitive damages—or disgorge ill-gotten gains—to show our displeasure with you. If our goal is just to feel better about ourselves, perhaps we might also punish robots simply for the sake of punishing them. But if our goal is to send a slightly more nuanced signal than that through the threat of punishment, robots will require us to rethink many of our current doctrines. It also offers important insights into the law of remedies we already apply to people and corporations.

Destin și subdestin în romanele lui Marin Preda

The characters in Marin Preda's novels are anchored in the objective history of the time they live in and become victims of circumstances that brutally transform their existence, canceling their natural right to happiness, after they had been left with the illusion that they were favoured by destiny itself. Călin Surupăceanu, the protagonist of the novel "The Intruder" and Victor Petrini, the main character of the novel "The most beloved man on Earth ", go through ecstasy down to agony, being forced by circumstances, at a time when nothing predicts the existential collapse. The way these characters which cross different records of existence are built projects them into a tragic dimension. Preda proves to be the partisan of the thinking one can encounter during the Greek antiquity, according to which man is twice guilty: once against the gods (a mistake they call “hamartia”) and secondly against his fellows through "hybris"(the unmeasured pride that darkens his reason). As a consequence of these errors, man must be subjected to a life and death experience in order to purify by suffering his high consciousness and in order for him to acquire,after the recognition of moral guilt, total wisdom and perfect contemplation, having access to the tragic metaphysical.

『周易』의 죄와 벌(Ⅰ) : 개인적 죄와 벌에 대한 윤리적 접근

『周易』의 죄와 벌(Ⅰ) : 개인적 죄와 벌에 대한 윤리적 접근

Moral Responsibility as Guiltworthiness

It is often alleged that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves a negative interpersonal response for that transgression, blaming responses such as resentment and indignation being paradigms. Aside from a few exceptions, guilt is cited in recent discussions of moral responsibility, if at all, as merely an effect of being blamed, or as a reliable indicator of moral responsibility, but not itself an explanation of moral responsibility. In this paper, I argue that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves to feel moral guilt for that transgression. I argue that this alternative view offers all that the predominant blame-focused view offers, while also solving some puzzling features of moral responsibility. Specifically, it offers a compelling way to reconcile conflicting intuitions about the suberogatory, and allows those who do not understand what Darwall calls ‘second-personal’ reasons to be morally responsible for their immoral acts.

Модуси ідеї відповідальності в соціокультурних обставинах середини ХХ – початку ХХІ століть. Частина 1

The paper deals with socio-cultural factors, terminological collisions and modi of the idea of responsibility in the West European socio-cultural space. Main attention is paid to shaping of the idea of responsibility in socio-cultural circumstances of the mid of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries. The first part of the paper outlines the preliminary history of the modern concept of responsibility, peculiarities of the problem in Aristotle’s "The Nicomachean Ethics" are observed as well as the idea of accountability (imputatio) in ethics of P. Abelard in modi of moral guilt and offense. It is mentioned that in Pre-modern culture idea of responsibility is developed in the context of the freedom of human action, one’s capability to keep an answer for one’s actions and to admit guilt. It is specified that in philosophy of Modernity the notion imputatio is represented in I. Kant’s philosophy. Although Kant did not put the problem of accountability as the cornstone of his philosophy, he had defined conditions for possibility of agent’s accountability in such a way that his ideas are at the background of the main conceptions of responsibility of the 20th century. Further in the paper development of the problem around the term Verantwortung (responsibility) is observed. In particular, M. Weber’s ethics of responsibility (in comparison to ethics of conviction) is analyzed. The paper pays attention to the of H. Arendt’s conception of lost generations, and grounds of the problem of responsibility actualization in the sense of life search of these generations are analyzed. The first part of the paper is finished by the analysis of the conception of guilt and responsibility by K. Jaspers who applied to the problem in the context of comprehension of the axiological space of postwar Germany.

Compromise: What Makes it Bad?

This article considers what makes a compromise bad. First, it defines a compromise as a decision involving a loss of good (i.e., an evil), which should therefore be accompanied by ‘agent-regret’. Regret, however, is not moral guilt. Pace proponents of ‘dirty hands’, a morally right compromise cannot retain elements of moral wrongness (as distinct from non-moral evil). Second, the article proceeds to elaborate the features of bad compromise further in terms of common moral sense: the preference of less rather than more of a single good; the preference of an inferior to a superior good; and the violation of an absolute moral rule. Third, it extends its elaboration in terms of three historical cases: the abandonment of strategic promotion of a good; tactical suspension for insufficient reasons; complicity in indubitable and certain injustice to avoid tolerable costs; and the violation of a basic principle of justice as distinct from normal judicial process. Finally, it adds a methodological epilogue, in which it reflects on whether its treatment of the topic has been sufficiently theological.

What is the structure of Genealogy of Morality II?

In this paper, I sketch out a new interpretation of the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality by showing that its seemingly meandering character conceals a highly cogent structure. In contrast to the prevalent scholarly trend, I argue that the ideal of sovereignty Nietzsche introduces in the essay’s opening sections plays an integral and crucial role in his account of the emergence of the feeling of moral guilt. In contrast to another common trend in the scholarship, I also argue that Nietzsche’s account is very different from the account Freud proposes in Civilization and Its Discontents, with which it is often compared. Specifically, I show that guilt is not, for Nietzsche, a form of fear, nor simply the product of raw aggression turned inward when it can no longer be vented outward.

The relevance of cause-related marketing to post-purchase guilt alleviation

Guilt is a self-conscious emotion that strongly influences human behavior, namely consumption. Aware of this, many brands promote anticipatory non-purchase guilt to lead people to buy their products. However, fewer are giving attention to the question of purchase guilt, despite the fact that it may be an aspect that hinders people to repurchase a product and recommend it to others. According to Burnett and Lunsford (1994), feelings of consumer guilt may arise from different types of transgressions, leading to four different types of consumption-related guilt: social responsibility guilt, moral guilt, health guilt and financial guilt. This study has two main purposes. First it strives to identify which kind of purchase behaviors better explain purchase guilt, an emotion that brands would like to prevent. Second, it examines the potential importance of using social causes as a remedy for preventing purchase guilt, namely by brands that, for their nature, will tend to incite more guilt. The results of a survey-based study suggest that only financial guilt feelings are good antecedents of general post-purchase guilt. These results have important implications to marketing practitioners for products whose marketing should receive special attention when it comes to prevent the occurrence of purchase guilt as a deterrent of buying. The results of an experimental study with a sample of 840 individuals opened new vistas in the use of cause-related marketing strategies to cope with the purchase guilt, by proving that the inclusion of a social cause in a marketing campaign may decrease the feelings of guilt and regret and increase the probability of buying and recommending a product. These results have important implications to marketing practitioners for products whose marketing should receive special attention when it comes to prevent the occurrence of purchase guilt, as a deterrent to buying. We conclude by opening new vistas in the use of cause-related marketing strategies to cope with the post-purchase guilt that some products may display.

Atoning in purgatory

AbstractThis article develops a new argument – The Argument from Atonement – that commonplace Christian assumptions about heaven imply the existence of purgatory. According to this argument, many Christians will die with residual moral guilt due to possessing unfulfilled moral debts towards fellow non-divine humans. Some of these debts cannot be fulfilled immediately after death and are not completely fulfilled or cancelled by Jesus's atoning work. Christians with such debts are fit neither for heaven nor for hell and thus must occupy purgatory until their moral debts are fulfilled.

Do moral emotions buffer the anger-aggression link in children and adolescents?

Given the prevalence of anger-related aggression in school and out-of-school contexts, research on counteracting the anger-aggression link in children and adolescents is likely to have implications for educators and practitioners. Here, we tested moral guilt and sympathy as potential moderators of the anger-aggression link in a sample of 4-, 8-, and 12-year-olds (N=242). Caregivers reported their children’s aggression and anger levels with a questionnaire. Children reported their moral guilt (in response to vignettes depicting intentional harm) and sympathy levels in an interview. Moral guilt and sympathy interacted with anger in relation to aggression. Controlling for age, sex, socio-economic status, and inhibitory control, high anger was significantly related to high aggression, but not when children and adolescents had high guilt or sympathy. We discuss the potential roles of moral guilt and sympathy in mitigating the anger-aggression link.

Morally Corrupt Aesthetic Pleasure?

Abstract Why do we not object on moral grounds against the enjoyment of tragedies? And why do we not feel moral guilt when looking forward to watching a tragedy involving a heroine’s suffering? The present paper suggests that concentrating on these questions within the periphery of the paradox of tragedy is as interesting as an inquiry into the question of how the apparently "negative" can arouse feelings of pleasure, which rests on a number of problematic presuppositions concerning hedonic qualities of emotions. Following Walton’s way of looking at the paradox helps us get a clearer idea of what it is that we actually appreciate when in a state of "tragic pleasure." My paper not only rejects an oversimplified two-object approach but also Susan Feagin’s reflexivist answer, that is, the assumption that tragic pleasure is fed by our moral involvement with the play. I hope to show that tragic pleasure is not independent from conventions; conventions seem to sanction "tragic pleasure" as long as the recipient fulfils two conditions: (i) the specification of the object of his pleasure may not essentially make reference to moral harm, and (ii) he has to believe that his enjoyment has not been at the expense of moral harm.

Punishment of Serious Human Rights Violations by Changing Internal Moral Codes

The modern era has awoken a period of extreme terror used both by states and against them to attack peoples or their way of life. Modernity also gave rise to human rights, humanitarian ideals and with the rule of law; a growing belief in the power of law to deliver safety and justice. Unfortunately, neither internal state nor international law has yet delivered a just system of dealing with these problems. Even when called to account punishment falls short of what many expect. Law and punishment have been unable to deal with the fractured locus of power and legal requirements and the torn moral allegiance that often accompany human rights atrocities. International law fails to deliver either retribution or deterrence. Law (international and state) and punishment need to search for a different focus, one designed to sustain and promote human rights, one which might restore communities and individuals back into the rights family. Duff's expressive theory of punishment offers a solution. It expects clear and wide condemnation of atrocities to be expressed whilst guiding perpetrators to face their moral guilt, to publicly repent and improve their moral standing so permitting reintegration into the international community.

“For Better and for Worse, or Until …”: On Divorce and Guilt

Feelings of guilt that are related to divorce are little studied. In this study, moral guilt related to divorce was analyzed along with divorcees' feelings of guilt and the ways of making the other feel guilty. The focus is especially on the guilt related to the spouse and children. Divorcees' feelings of guilt were studied through a questionnaire mailed to participants in spring 2008: The data included 535 questionnaires (224 from men and 311 from women). For this study, the respondents' answers to the question about guilt and shame were analyzed with data-driven content analysis, which was complemented with the quantitative data received from relevant structured questions. The research helps in understanding the wide range of feelings of guilt in divorcing couples and especially in the ones who apply for the divorce.

Reframing the Responsibilities of Bystanders through Film

Political responsibilities for systemic mass violence have been subordinated to the moral guilt and legal liability of perpetrators and collaborators, while the role of the bystander has been narrowly construed in terms of charitable rescue or negligence. This dominant victim–perpetrator framework ignores the complex political dimensions of bystander responsibilities for systemic mass violence, especially those responsibilities that stem from the benefits that bystanders receive. The films of Claude Lanzmann, Rithy Panh, and Yael Hersonski contain elements of an alternative framework of bystander responsibility and also can serve as catalysts for the political education of bystander beneficiaries and those from whom they have benefited.