Topics Ethics

Question Is it, in general, better to take actions that could be described (variably, according to your moral temper) as sinful, or wrong, or regrettable, "in your stride", rather than feel guilt if it is the case that guilt will not diminish the probability of its happening again? Is guilt something irrational in the sense that we would really be better to (i) rid ourselves of it (ii) discourage aspects of the upbringing of children which conditions this response in them, so long as there are other ways to disincentivize harmful behaviour?

Accepted:
December 8, 2005

Comments

With respect to your own bad acts, isn't guilt often useful precisely because it can diminish the probability of you acting in that way in the future? So, I think the general answer is that you should take seriously the power of appropriate guilt.

With respect to responding to bad actions performed by others, the best general answer is probably something uninteresting like "strive to respond to wrong in ways that are as rational and constructive as possible," and figuring out how to do that has everything to do with the specifics of the situations you confront. Douglas Walton's work on critical thinking is useful here, I think -- he adopts an interesting dialogical approach that focuses on understand the exact "contexts of dialgoue" of the most challenging and important situations we face and then provides concepts and tools that help make it easier to understand exactly what you need to do to respond to challenges in a a rational, constructive manner. (I especially like Walton's survey text, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (Cambridge, 1989), which I use when I teach critical thinking.)

If you regard guilty feelings as a form of self-punishment, then it is reasonable to ask whetherthere isa less painful way to achieve the same positive effects. But I agreewith Hilary Bok that feelings of guilt are not self-inflictedpunishment. She writes: “If we care about living by our standards andabout the state of our wills, then we will find the thought that wehave failed to act as we think we should painful. In so doing we arenot giving free rein to self-hatred or turning internalized aggressionon ourselves, but responding in the only appropriate way to a factabout our conduct. For just as our claim to love another person iscalled into question if the demise of our relationship to that personleaves us unmoved, not minding the fact that we have willingly violatedour standards calls into question our claim that they are, in fact,standards we think we should live by. . . . We can avoid the pain ofguilt in only two ways: first, by living blameless lives, and second,by ceasing to care about the world we live in and the lives we lead” (Freedom and Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 170-2).