Personal Guilt Research Articles

Responsible Shares and Shared Responsibility: In Defense of Responsible Corporate Officer Liability

When corporation commits crime, whom may we hold criminally liable? One obvious set of defendants consists of the individuals who perpetrated the crime on the corporation's behalf. But according to the responsible corporate officer (RCO) doctrine, the government may also prosecute and punish those corporate executives who, although perhaps lacking consciousness of wrongdoing, nonetheless have a responsible share in the furtherance of the transaction which the statute outlaws. In other words, under the RCO doctrine, corporate executive can come to bear criminal responsibility for an offense of her corporation that she neither participated in nor culpably failed to prevent. Just so long as the executive in question had the authority to prevent the corporate crime and failed to do so, she may be targeted in criminal suit.The RCO doctrine plainly poses challenge to our traditional understanding of criminal culpability, according to which guilt is individual -- one may be held responsible only for wrong one has personally committed, and only if one has done so with guilty mind. Thus, RCO liability, while representing the most common instance of strict criminal liability, has been deemed odds with fundamental notions of our criminal justice system, and likened to the primitive doctrine of Frankpledge, under which innocent members of group could be punished for the wrongful deed of one of their fellows. On the other hand, corporate crimes have an irreducibly collective aspect. If we take this aspect seriously, as this paper does, then departures from the paradigm of individual culpability may well be warranted. In particular, we may be justified in assigning responsibility not just to the corporate crime's immediate perpetrators but also to those who held prominent positions within the corporation at the time of the crime's occurrence, and this responsibility may license just the kind of criminal liability that the RCO doctrine contemplates. This paper seeks to determine the circumstances under which this extension of responsibility is permissible, and the grounds of its permissibility.More specifically, the paper seeks to critique existing justifications for the doctrine by arguing that these mistakenly construe it as kind of negligence liability, and in so doing deprive the doctrine of its transformative power. The paper next offers defense of the doctrine according to which personal guilt is not necessary. The paper then contends with objections to the doctrine, arguing that we need not dispense with the doctrine altogether in order to avoid the concerns of its critics. What is needed instead is set of guidelines that ensure against the doctrine's misuse or abuse. The paper ends with specification of these guidelines.

Trust, Individual Guilt, Collective Guilt and Dispositions Toward Reconciliation Among Rwandan Survivors and Prisoners Before and After Their Participation in Postgenocide Gacaca Courts in Rwanda

A field experiment compared the level of personal and collective guilt in survivors (N = 200) and accused perpetrators (N = 184) of the Rwandan genocide before and after participation in Gacaca community courts and in control groups of survivors (N = 195) and prisoners (N = 179) who did not participate in Gacaca. Participation in Gacaca led to a marked reduction in survivors’ personal and collective guilt and to an increase in prisoners' personal guilt. Prisoners’ collective guilt was unaffected by participation but collective guilt was higher for prisoners participating in Gacaca suggesting an effect of the mere anticipation of participation. Survivors who participated in Gacaca had greater doubts about Gacaca, trusted the prisoners' apologies less, were less inclined to forgive, were more revengeful, and opted more for intragroup contact and less for intergroup contact. In sum, participation in Gacaca failed to have direct effects upon dispositions to reconciliation but it produced important indirect effects in this direction by drastically reducing survivors' guilt feelings, which may have enhanced their empowerment.

Experience of Guilt and Strategies for Coping with Guilt in Patients with Severe Copd: A Qualitative Interview Study

Guilt is associated with an increased level of mood disturbance and a poorer quality of life. The aim of this study was to explore how patients with severe COPD view and experience guilt and the ways in which they cope with this guilt. A total of 31 COPD patients were interviewed about their perceptions and experiences of guilt. Qualitative content analysis was used to examine the interviews. In the descriptive (manifest) analysis, the categories "not feeling personal guilt" and "experiencing guilt" emerged; in the interpretative (latent) analysis, various strategies for dealing with guilt were identified--for example, acceptance or blaming others. Relatively few patients reported that they felt guilt on a conscious level, but those who did expressed anguish, and remorse before God; some felt blamed by others. It is important that healthcare providers acknowledge the guilt that their patients express, since guilt may have adverse effects on the patients' overall health.

Grieving with the Moon: Pantheon and Politics in The Lunar Eclipse

In response to the absence of consensus on events narrated in the Lunar Eclipse Myth, this article proposes an interpretation that takes into account the mythological representation of astrological phenomena, the Myth’s meaning in the context of the Utukkū Lemnūtu (“evil demons”) incantation series, as well as its implications concerning royal authority and guilt during the politically unstable conditions of a lunar eclipse. Although human observation alone could not discern the reasons for a lunar eclipse, the Myth suggests that at least some eclipses resulted from malevolent acts of self-will by a group of seven deities or demons (the “Sibitti”) and did not represent the pantheon’s condemnation of royal guilt. By contrast, celestial omens, letters from astrologers, the substitute king ritual, and šuilla prayers all envisioned the lunar eclipse as a sign of the gods’ displeasure. Omen verdicts depicting successful acts of treason as divine judgment would have contributed to suspicions and tensions between the king and his courtiers during stressful times of eclipses. In portraying the king as an embodiment of the moon-god and as a fellow victim (together with the pantheon) of the Sibitti, the Lunar Eclipse Myth functioned as royal apology by removing implications of the king’s personal guilt and failure and, hence, the pretext for treason and regime change. Such a radical reinterpretation that contradicted long-held ideas about the lunar eclipse as divine judgment, however, may not have fitted easily with existing traditions. Inter-textual references to the Eclipse Myth are relatively scarce and do not accurately convey meanings original to the Myth itself, suggesting that subtler ways of downplaying royal guilt and safeguarding the king’s status may have been preferred.

Guilt aversion revisited: An experimental test of a new model

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the guilt aversion hypothesis by using a trust game with pre-play communication. For this purpose, we first develop a new version of guilt aversion called personal guilt aversion. It is shown that the new version is consistent with extant experimental results in the literature and thus cannot be rejected by any of them. Given this observation, we then design an experiment that can test the new as well as original versions of the guilt aversion hypothesis. In contrast to the prediction of both versions of the hypothesis, we find that the correlation between elicited beliefs and (trustful or trustworthy) behavior is almost zero even in an environment with pre-play communication. Thus, our experimental result provides a case against the guilt aversion hypothesis.

Governing ‘eco-certified children’ through pastoral power: critical perspectives on education for sustainable development

This article analyses how ‘eco-certified children’ are constructed as desirable subjects in teaching materials addressing education for sustainable development. We are interested in how discourses structure this cherished practice and how this practice has become ‘natural’ and obvious for us. A discourse analysis is carried out by looking at the material through the lens of Foucault’s notion of pastoral power. The analysis departs from teaching material addressing issues on sustainable development: (1) textbooks for primary and secondary school; (2) games targeted at preschool and school children; and (3) children’s books about sustainable development. The results show that the discourse of education for sustainable development is characterized by scientific and mathematical objectivity and faith in technological development. It emphasizes the right of the individual and the obligation to make free, however ‘correct’, choices. In the teaching materials, the eco-certified child therefore emerges as knowing, conscious, rational, sacrificing and active. This child is constructed through knitting together personal guilt with global threats, detailed individual activities with rescuing the flock and the planet. In a concluding discussion, we discuss how ESD is framed in a neoliberal ideology. With the help of ESD, an economic discourse becomes dressed in an almost poetic language.

Who Reads an Early American Sermon?

Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: Bible and the American Revolution JAMES P. BYRD New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 243 PP Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel DAWN COLEMAN Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013 293 pp. Jeremiah's Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England MEREDITH MARIE NEUMAN Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 265 pp. American Zion: Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution the Civil War ERAN SHALEV New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013 239 pp. The sermon's neglect, Dawn Coleman frankly confesses, might be traced the perception that the genre is dull (5). Having fallen asleep more than once in my march through Thomas Hooker's thousand-plus pages on Application of Redemption, I am willing acknowledge that can, occasionally, act as a soporific. But the pulpit riffs described by Meredith Neuman, in whose general movement from theme variation resembles and its almost limitless potential for elaboration and exploration ... crescendos and shifting rhythms, are a reminder that the textual evidence of preaching often preserves theology better than it does the emotions prompted by aural experience (112). Scanning the score for Juan Tizol's jazz standard Caravan (1937) is hardly the same experience as listening Duke Ellington's orchestra from the front row of a crowded concert hall, and for English colonists in North America, listening Sunday was a profoundly affective experience. As James Byrd argues, preaching not only persuaded colonists to be willing die but also to be willing kill in their struggle for independence (74). And sermons on issues from independence war, constitutionalism federations, Eran Shalev suggests, inspired citizens of the new republic think of the United States as a chosen land, an American Zion (4-5). In the hands of these four scholars, the early American sermon is more stimulant than soporific, a genre rife with interpretive possibilities and surprising sociopolitical implications. That these four books, each taking the colonial or antebellum sermon and related forms of religious discourse as its focus, should be published in a single year suggests that Sandra Gustafson no longer need lament the relative neglect ... of religion and in early American studies (1). scholarship of Byrd, Coleman, Neuman, and Shalev attests a vigorous and interdisciplinary resurgence of interest in the textual record of religious experience; the sermon, in their capable hands, is an instrument of provocation, inciting intercontinental war and personal guilt, congregational unity and the jealousy of novelists (Neuman 11). Collectively, these writers demonstrate the essentially democratic character of sermon literature, debate the utility of close reading as a methodology, and illustrate the direct influence of an American sermonic tradition on genres--such as the novel--that few have ever found dull. To read Neuman or Coleman or Byrd in isolation is peer into the future and see how advances in book history, the digital humanities, and other relatively new fields will transform our understanding of the sermon. To read all three at once is both trace the evolution of a broadly influential genre across three centuries and acknowledge the unstated assumptions that have cultivated an unfortunately narrow scholarly approach the genre. Together, these books make a compelling case that far more scholars and students should be reading early American sermons. Every anthology of American literature includes pastoral exhortations from at least two preachers: John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charitie and Jonathan Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God are omnipresent. …

Bad Memories: Haneke with Locke on Personal Identity and Post-Colonial Guilt

Michael Haneke's film Hidden ( Cache, 2005) raises questions about responsibility and guilt in the context of post-colonial inequities that are profoundly discomfiting for the viewer, framing a meditation on identity, consciousness and responsibility that is at once visceral and intellectual. On the reading presented here, this film makes visible and palpable some of the effects of the ' strange suppositions' about personal responsibility and memory that were first articulated by a philosopher who also felt called upon to justify colonialism: John Locke. The perspective provided by the film casts light both on the unpleasant emotional resonances of Locke's theory of personal identity and points to the likely source of its structure in his celebrated theory of private property.

The Prerequisite of Personal Guilt and the Duty to Know the Law in the Light of Article 32 ICC Statute

In international criminal law, personal guilt is a basic prerequisite for criminal liability. A guilty verdict requires at least a psychological relation between the actor and the act, i.e., the actor must fulfil the actus reus of the offence with intent and knowledge. It is, however, a contested issue if this also means that the defendant must have been aware of the criminality of his action. At first glance, the ICC Statute seems to answer this question in the negative: it adopts a narrow understanding of the mens rea requirement which does not include, as a rule, consciousness of the legal wrong, and admits mistakes of law as a valid defence only if they – by way of an exception – negate the required mens rea. This restrictive approach does not, however, have a solid basis in comparative law. Moreover, given the complexity of at least some war crime provisions it seems highly questionable to punish persons who honestly but wrongfully believe that their conduct is lawful without taking into account whether they can be blamed for their ignorance of the law. Rather, the principle of personal guilt understood in a broad and comprehensive sense calls for a more flexible approach towards mistakes of law having due regard to the reasonableness or avoidability of the misconception.

Dead-baby dreams, transfiguration and recovery from infant death trauma in northeast Brazil

Maternal reactions to infant death in Northeast Brazil have been at the epicenter of anthropological debate since the 1980s. This ethnographic study of 45 death narratives by bereaved mothers collected from 1979-1989 in Pacatuba, Ceará, Brazil, refutes existing claims of mothers' "selective neglect" and "indifference" towards sick babies and emotionally empty grief response. I argue that through dead-baby dreams--and their imaginary transfiguration-grieving mothers alleviate infant death trauma. Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, definitive loss, and personal guilt-the social seeds of depression--are reframed to deny death's finality and exonerate mothers from crippling self-blame. By transfiguring lingering mental images of the tiny cold corpse, mothers remold the irreversibility and definitiveness of death, gaining a sense of control over its unpredictable "jolt." In the politically oppressive Northeast Brazil--where social justice remains "an illusion"--mothers dream to preserve their own mental sanity and to recover from death's cruel aftermath. Any interpretation of mourning behavior must be contextualized within the local moral world and its "assumed structure of reality" to avoid demoralizing grieving Brazilian mothers and compounding their suffering. "You see, the only thing a poor woman truly owns that no one can borrow, cheat, steal or rob from her … is her imagination!" (Dona Chiquinha grieving death of her 10 children, Pacatuba, Ceará, Brazil).

Violence among peers in the real and virtual world

In this paper we analyze the similarities and differences between traditional (physical, verbal, relational, sexual) and electronic forms of violent behavior among peers. Violent behavior, which is a characteristic of the real world (insults, disinformation, slander) has been extended to the virtual world, but modern technology has also allowed: a) new forms (flaming, electronic harassment and intimidation, false imprisonment, assault videotaping and sexting) and b) more intense and brutal youth participation in violent activities, most likely because of the anonymity, indirect contact with the victim and deflection of responsibility. Violence perpetrators in the real and virtual worlds both have similar characteristics (lack of empathy and shame, neglect of moral norms, a tendency to minimize personal guilt and responsibility, ignoring the consequences and victim suffering, and similar family problems), and the victims experience almost identical consequences: psychosomatic, emotional (especially anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts), educational, as well as difficulties in establishing and maintaining social contacts. Because of the large exposure and serious risks to psychological health, safety and welfare of children, there is a need to educate children, parents, teachers and doctors about the possible threats in the real and virtual worlds, and scientific research should provide tools for effective prevention and targeted interventions to reduce peer violence. Conclusion - With regard to peer-to-peer violence in the real world, modern technology has made new modalities and the more intensive participation possible of children in violent activities, but the perpetrators of these forms of violence have similar characteristics, and the victims identical consequences.

Self-Confrontation via a Carbon Footprint Calculator Increases Guilt and Support for a Proenvironmental Group

Guilt occurs when people realize they have violated personal or social standards for behavior. For example, past research found that confronting Whites for racist behavior created guilt, which motivated behavior change. Carbon footprint calculators provide a venue for self-confrontation about the impact of one’s behavior on the environment. In Study 1, participants were randomly assigned to learn their carbon footprint was larger or smaller than the average United States’ citizen. Participants confronted with a larger-than-average carbon footprint reported more personal guilt, but not shame or anger, than participants who learned they had a smaller-thanaverage carbon footprint. In Study 2, participants confronted with evidence that Americans had a larger carbon footprint than other industrialized nations reported more collective guilt, but no less collective pride, than participants who learned Americans had a smaller carbon footprint. Collective guilt then partially mediated the association between carbon footprint feedback and support for a proenvironmental group.

Interpreting our lives: memory, truth and fiction

Interpreters is a novel that explores the secrets and lies within families, the parent–child relationship, the interpretation of the past and the collective and personal guilt of a generation who grew up in Nazi Germany. Mindful of the moral and ethical issues inherent in memoir and autobiography, I explore the challenges and dilemmas encountered in creating a work of autobiographical fiction that draws on the experiences of those who may never have expected, or wanted, their stories to be told. I attempt to ensure ethical and artistic integrity by recording emotional rather than actual truths, by changing the stories’ and the characters’ natures, and liberating myself from the constraints of conventional life writing with its requirement for historical accuracy, logical timeframe and expectation of truthfulness.

Gazzaniga, Michael S., Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain

A review, with reflections, of Michael S. Gazzaniga's (2011) book, Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Gazzaniga, a distinguished neuroscientist, wishes to connect contemporary understandings of the functioning of the human brain to the proper functioning of the American courtroom. What effect, if any, should these current understandings (and current technologies) have on legal conceptions of personal responsibility, guilt, and punishment? If, as many neuroscientists hold, the functioning of the brain wholly determines the functioning of the mind, can people rightly be held responsible for their actions? Gazzaniga argues that they can.

Negotiating Wifely Virtues

This article attempts to examine how three seventeenth-century literati husbands mourned and wrote about their late wives. It argues that when the biographer of a deceased woman and her grieving husband coincided in the same person, the biographical narrative could be complicated considerably with Confucian biographical conventions of the “exemplary” becoming more likely to be challenged in moments of intensely private grief and, especially,deep personal guilt. The overlap between the biographical (private memories of a man’s deceased spouse) and the autobiographical (his own self-redemption agenda) adds to a husband’s need to re/negotiate and redefine wifely virtues in order to accommodate the personal feeling of his roles as husband/biographer, who, in the moment of mourning, may be more interested in the unique than the typical as memory tends to be retained better if a deceased person is remembered as an individual distinctly different from others.

Breakthrough at Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling West German War Tale

AbstractThe article delves into the concealed origins of Heinrich Gerlach's 1957 Stalingrad novel. A German veteran and former Soviet POW, Gerlach claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime experience through hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The author discovered this manuscript, believed lost, in Russian archives. It reveals how Soviet political re-education efforts prompted Gerlach to compose a memoir revolving around questions of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach removed these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet origins of his memoir, from the published novel, which he presented as a self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.

“Everything You Ever Dreamed”: Post-9/11 Trauma and Fantasy in Ali Smith’s The Accidental

Noting a recent critical trend to read contemporary fiction in terms of trauma theory, this article explores Ali Smith’s The Accidental both as a negotiation and critique of this fashion. Recognizing trauma’s centrality in the novel in terms of personal guilt and public catastrophe in relation to an implicit Iraq War background, I argue that the novel reaffirms trauma theory’s importance, even as it criticizes post-9/11 appropriations of traumatic sentiment. By undermining romantic and patriarchal readings of trauma as the function of a state-of-alert, the novel satirizes salient post-9/11 discourses and reaffirms its final unease with trauma culture.

"Confessional" Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: "Confessional" Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination Max Saunders "Confessional" Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination. Miranda Sherwin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 224. $80.00 (cloth). The gist of Miranda Sherwin's tightly-argued study is that the term "confessional," introduced by M. L. Rosenthal and thenceforth regularly applied to the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, has been misleading in two respects. It skews understanding of the nature of that poetry, suggesting poets are offering autobiographical testimony in order to work through guilt, rather than using confession as a trope that they can manipulate to create poems. But the label also obscures the way these 1950s and 1960s poets drew on earlier "confessional" forms—as well as how the controversies over their work are echoed in recent scandals over autobiographical hoaxes. A first chapter, on Sexton, lays out what Sherwin calls "the Autobiographical Fallacy." One of her striking observations is how all of the major poets given the label "confessional" actually explicitly rejected the idea that their work should be read autobiographically. Yet the coexistence of the use of the first-person with the raw accounts of substance abuse, marital and mental breakdowns, and madness, inexorably drew critics to read—and often condemn—the poetry as if it were mere confession. Sexton is a crucial figure to the discussion not only because of the apparent intimacy of her writing, including its discussion of psychoanalysis—there is a fine reading of her poem "Said the Poet to the Analyst"—but also because of the controversy stirred up by Diane Wood Middlebook's 1991 biography, which made use of confidential medical records and tape recordings of Sexton's therapy sessions that were made by one of her psychiatrists. This engagement with psychoanalysis is developed in the chapter on Berryman. The "confessional" poets did have something in common, Sherwin argues, but it wasn't confession. What it was was the attempt to imagine what she calls a "Psychoanalytic Poetics." Freudian ideas had permeated culture, and an earlier modernist hostility to them was now replaced by a more exploratory approach, by writers who underwent psychoanalytically-inflected forms of treatment. At this point the story jumps back in time. Despite its title—"The Madwoman in the Asylum: The Confessional Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination"—the third chapter juxtaposes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's well-known nineteenth-century story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," with a much less familiar 1930 novel, The Shutter of Snow, by Emily Holmes Coleman. In the wake of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilman's story has acquired the status of a canonical feminist work, owning its madness as a resistance to an infantilising patriarchy. Sherwin reads Coleman's novel in similar ways. Its story of an asylum patient who believes she's a female Jesus is seen as an allegory of the canny preservation of an identity that social institutions are attempting to quash. And that, for Sherwin, is what's fallacious about readings that try to tie the texts to personal confession. They imply the problem is individual: a form of personal guilt that public confession might salve. In doing so, they deny the political dimension. Whereas the force of "confessional" poetry lies in the way its candor about personal crisis reflects insight about social crisis, and also represents political resistance—whether to sexism, conservatism, or racism. Rather than seeing poems "confessing" to marginal experiences so as to recuperate the subject back into hetero-conformativity, Sherwin wants to reclaim the poetry's counter-cultural energies. Allen Ginsberg and the Beats are invoked, as writers drawing on equally autobiographical material, but whose more explicit political stance ensured a reception less fixated on the idea of autobiography. This is all admirable, and one of the book's strengths is in Sherwin's excellent close-readings, which assemble a persuasive case that the poets in question are not just confessing, but putting confession itself on the couch. Yet strains in the argument begin to appear. When Ginsberg [End Page 627] begins Howl with the line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," the...

Taking care of patients, relatives and staff after critical incidents and accidents

Taking care of patients, relatives and staff after critical incidents and accidents

Why are religious individuals more obsessional? The role of mental control beliefs and guilt in Muslims and Christians

Background and objectivesThe cognitive-behavioural perspective on obsessions recognizes that certain cultural experiences such as adherence to religious beliefs about the importance of maintaining strict mental control might increase the propensity for obsessional symptoms via the adoption of faulty appraisals and beliefs about the unacceptability and control of unwanted intrusive thoughts. Few studies have directly investigated this proposition, especially in a non-Western Muslim sample. MethodIn the present study high religious, low religious and religious school Canadian Christian and Turkish Muslim students were compared on measures of OCD symptoms, obsessive beliefs, guilt, religiosity, and negative affect. ResultsAnalysis revealed that religiosity had a specific relationship with obsessional but not anxious or depressive symptoms in both samples, although the highly religious Muslim students reported more compulsive symptoms than highly religious Christians. In both samples the relationship between religiosity and obsessionality was mediated by importance/control of thoughts and responsibility/threat beliefs as well as generalized guilt. LimitationsThe sample composition was limited to non-clinical undergraduates and only two major religions were considered without recognition of denominational differences. ConclusionsThese findings indicate that the tendency for highly religious Christians and Muslims to experience greater obsessionality is related to their heightened sense of personal guilt and beliefs that they are responsible for controlling unwanted, threatening intrusive thoughts.