feel guilt at the very fact of surviving their comrades),48 is on balance a
strongly positive force.
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Moreover, guilt plays a pivotal role in moral development. Early
on, young children are full of aggressive wishes, and sometimes actions,
toward anything and anyone that blocks their pursuit of their own ends.
Wrapped up in infantile narcissism, they are unable to accord to the
needs of others any independent moral weight. However, because they
have developed a kind of love for their caregivers, they come to a point
in their development where they are able to see their own aggression as a
problem. Suddenly, they realize that the very beings toward whom they
wish destruction are the ones who care for them and comfort them. This
realization is the occasion of a deep crisis in the personality, which might
lead to a total shut- down— except that, at this point, morality comes
to the rescue. What Fairbairn calls the “moral defense” is the idea that
through adopting rules protecting the rights of others, children can atone
for their aggression. By obeying these rules, they become able to forgive
themselves. Melanie Klein adds to this the further idea that persisting
anxiety about guilt makes people try throughout their lives to benefit
humanity: guilt leads to cultural creativity.49 So that is my earlier view.
Herbert Morris develops a related picture in a powerful and nuanced
way.50 Guilt involves inflicting pain on oneself, with the idea that this
pain is owed. Pain, indeed, is one constituent of the emotion. This pain
expresses “hostility to oneself.” But that suffering is intrinsic to the idea of a world in which we all need to learn moral rules in order to live
together in community. The wrongdoer isolates himself from the com-
munity by violating its rules. Fortunately, wrongdoing takes place in a
world in which there is a well- understood path to reestablishing the torn
fabric of community: “asking for and receiving forgiveness, making sac-
rifices, reparation, and punishment … have the significance of a rite of
passage back to union.”51
Here’s what my teacher Bernard Williams thought. (I must recon-
struct this somewhat conjecturally, because his animus against what he
called “the morality system” is expressed in many contexts, but never
developed as fully as one might wish.) The Kantian idea of morality as a
system of prohibitions, held in place by guilt, is confining and repressive.
It stifles creative aspiration and the pursuit of personal ideals. It is incompatible with the generosity and spontaneity of love. Williams admitted
that moral rules have a legitimate role to play in the political domain, but
he questioned the claim of ubiquity and supremacy made on their behalf
in the ethical life.52
Sometimes one becomes able to acknowledge the full measure of
truth in one’s teacher’s insights only after that teacher has died— in this
case, lamentably and prematurely.53 I now think that I was too influenced
by the strongly Kantian views of certain psychoanalysts, and that what
I said about guilt is highly problematic. We don’t need self- inflicted pain
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to correct ourselves and help others. And we do not need the fear of
the torments our own conscience will inflict, as a motive to pursue our
ideals. A positive love of others, combined with compassion at their
predicaments, seems a sufficient motive for moral conduct, and a much
less problematic one. Indeed, if one can only pursue morality by lacerat-
ing oneself, one’s devotion to morality is surely very incomplete. It’s like
Aristotle’s distinction between self- control and virtue: if you find your-
self fighting an inner struggle to prevent yourself from committing acts
such as theft and murder, something has gone badly wrong somewhere.
Admittedly we all commit errors against others: but love of them, and a
desire to do better by them, seems more productive than guilt, which is
all about oneself and not about them.
Like anger, guilt may often be well- grounded. But, like anger, if it
is attended by the thought, “Things will be made right if I inflict suf-
fering (on myself),” that thought is highly irrational and unproductive.
As with other- directed anger: pain won’t solve the real problem, if the
focus remains on the real problem. It’s only if the focus shifts to a status
concern, in this case a wish for one’s own self- abasement to counteract
a putative self- aggrandizement, that the suffering of the self seems to do
any good at all. But that’s the wrong focus to have, since it is narcissistic and has nothing to do with others. If one retains the correct focus on the
other, one may feel guilt and have a wish for one’s own suffering, but one
will quickly recognize the futility of that project and move toward the
Transition. In this case, the Transition takes the highly reasonable form of
redoubling one’s attention to the rights and needs of others and figuring
out what actions of one’s own will make their lives better.
Does guilt promote creativity? This is one of those untestable empiri-
cal claims that seems true only because it is untestable and because it
resonates with so much that Judeo- Christian culture has taught us. It’s
interesting to observe that the Greeks, who did not recognize guilt as
an emotion worth talking about, thought that creativity was promoted
by a wide range of motives, including love of virtue for its own sake
and including, too, the desire to achieve a surrogate immortality. These
positive motives seem sufficient to generate other- regarding and creative
efforts. And they are more appropriate than guilt, which has an unpleas-
antly stifling and narcissistic aspect. If we think of love, whether between
parents and children or between spouses, it seems that Williams is likely
to be on the right track: guilt is the wrong motive and positive love and
compassion the right motives. Guilt may well block or inhibit these other
motives.
With young children, the case for a positive role for guilt seems stron-
ger. Consider Nietzsche’s judgment that guilt was productive in order
“to breed an animal with the right to make promises”54 (discussed in
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chapter 3). The picture is that children are like heedless animals, and only
the infliction of pain can get them to notice morality and take it seriously.
Whether pain is the best way to train horses and dogs can certainly be
questioned, and it should! It has long been established that even in the
case of a “wild” animal such as the elephant, positive reinforcement is
much more effective than pain.55 Scientists studying marine animals,
too, have discovered that positive reinforcement is sufficient for teach-
ing: they had to use this strategy, since whales and dolphins can just
swim away if they don’t like what is in the offing. By now this appre-
ciation of the positive has extended to other species. So, our antiquated
views of animal training are evolving rapidly.56 Whe
re humans are con-
cerned, we now know a lot more than Nietzsche did about the psychol-
ogy of infancy, and we know that infants are capable of both empathy
and inchoate altruism, which oppose narcissism, albeit in a primitive
form. We probably don’t need the Fairbairn picture of an abrupt crisis in
the self, in order to explain how selfish infants become capable of moral-
ity. But that also means that we don’t need to rely on instilling guilt as
a force in moral development. A positive focus on the rights and needs
of others, and on developing compassion for their plight, seems both
possible and better, because more about others and less about one’s own
inner drama. At the most, one should grant a partial role for Morris’s
picture: a pain at one’s isolation from others (as when children are sent to
think over their actions in their room) may prompt useful self- criticism
and a wish to act in a way worthy of human relations that one prizes.
Williams thought (again, I’m to some extent putting words in his
mouth) that the Christian idea of original sin was at the root of the
way we look at guilt and punishment, and that this focus smelled of
the Murdstone school of child- rearing: it was inherently repressive
and self- hating, encouraging sadism in parents and masochism in their
children— who no doubt, once grown, would turn into sadists in their
turn. Although I still want to distinguish the Klein- Fairbairn psychoana-
lytic story from Williams’s (rather extreme and incomplete) version of
deontology, I now see a kinship between the two that I did not see earlier,
and I would rather rely on love— as does my favorite among psychoana-
lysts, Donald Winnicott.
What about self- forgiveness? Well, if one is dominated by guilt, and
thus by angry feelings toward oneself, then a practice of self- forgiveness
is surely better than that. But the vigilance of this process, and its obses-
sive inward focus, appear stifling in their own way, and surely impede
outward- looking concerns and activities. Rather than figuring out how to
rid oneself of crushing feelings of guilt, whether conditionally or uncon-
ditionally, it might be better to look at the world in a different way all
along, so that one would not be crushed by those feelings. Even if one is
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in that undesirable state already, it might be better to get out of it through mental focus on others, and by becoming active in other- directed projects.
At this point, it will be natural to object that our main problem, in
today’s world, is not too much self- anger, but too little. Public life is filled with people who have little reflective or self- critical capacity, and who
don’t hold themselves to a high standard. I agree with the statement of
the problem, but not with the diagnosis. The problem is not too little
guilt, it is too little compassion and too little love of justice. For all we know, some of the furtive behavior in which public officials ubiquitously
engage may be an outgrowth of guilt. At any rate, getting more angry at
themselves would not be the solution to the problem. At best, it would
be a signal that a problem exists and possibly also a motivation to solve
the problem. But it could also impede the outward future- oriented focus-
ing that the problems of public life require. Guilt is a slippery motive,
because only insecurely and contingently linked to the real goal, which is
the welfare of others.
But what about the deterrent value of guilt? Surely at least some
people avoid wrongdoing only because they know it will mess up their
relationship to themselves, keeping them awake at night and marring
daily enjoyment. Well, if this is how one is and can’t be otherwise, then
there’s no more to say, and such a person had better avoid her own wrath.
But it seems sad that any person should avoid wrongdoing for such
purely negative and self- focused reasons. It’s one thing to avoid coffee
in the afternoon because one knows that one won’t sleep well that night,
but if what is avoided is an act with serious moral content, one would
hope that the motive to avoid would be connected to morality’s positive
goals. As with trust in intimate relations with others, so with self- trust: a relationship of trust that depends on fear of anger is not a healthy relationship. If it is possible to cultivate more positive motives for behaving
well, one should certainly do so, moving to the Transition as quickly as
possible.
Some of these motives may include a kind of pain, the pain of not
having been the sort of person one was aspiring to be, or having done
something that was not really up to one’s own standard. I think that sort
of pain can feel like a kind of grief, a part of oneself that has gotten lost or gone missing. Like grief, it focuses outward toward replacement: I redouble my efforts to do the good thing, to be the sort of person I really aspire to be. That kind of pain (which we might call moral disappointment or
moral loss, and which often accompanies Transition- Anger) may well
motivate good conduct (and awareness of it may deter). But that’s differ-
ent from the self- inflicted punishment of guilt.
More generally: although self- torment is less morally objectionable
than tormenting others, it is not terribly desirable either, and a more
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generous and constructive attitude toward one’s imperfections seems
preferable. Above all, one should care about the welfare of others because
it is them, not because it is all about me and my own guilty conscience.
There is one further complexity to be addressed; like the rest of this
section, it will require me to reformulate some of my previous views.
Sometimes a person does something seriously wrong because of the
pressure of circumstances. The case on which I want to focus is the well-
known case of moral dilemma: circumstances are such that, whatever
one does, one will do something seriously wrong. There are dilemmas
of many types, and I have written about them over a long time period.57
Like Bernard Williams, I have argued that it is not right to assimilate these conflicts to conflicts of belief, holding that if two obligations collide, at most one of them can be correct.58 I have also argued, in a Williamsesque
fashion,59 that these situations are not correctly described by typical
Utilitarian cost- benefit analysis, which poses only the question, “Which
choice shall I make?” and fails to pose another very important question:
“Is any of the available alternatives free of serious wrongdoing?” I argued
that in the situations where the answer to the second question is “no,”
then, even if the agent landed in that terrible situation through no fault of his own, and made the best possible choice under the circumstances, he
should still feel emotions of something like “remorse,” connected to the
fact that, even if under constraint for which he is not to blame, he himself
did a morally repugnant act.60
Why does the insistence on negative emotion make a difference? In
earlier work I offered three reasons. First, the pain of negative emotion
reinforces moral commitments that are otherwise valuable,
and rein-
forces, too, the unity and continuity of a person’s character, showing
that she is not a chameleon who changes with each situation. (Aristotle
already used that animal as an image of ethical inconstancy!) Second,
negative emotion may prompt reparative actions (the Kleinian strand
mentioned above), such as reparations for some of the bad acts commit-
ted in a war.61 Third, and of increasing importance to me over time, is a
point well made by Hegel: taking note of the special “clash of right with
right” that a tragic situation presents may help us to think well about
the future, trying to create a future where such clashes do not face well-
intentioned people.
I still believe that marking the difference between tragic choices
and other situations of choice is extremely important, and that Hegel’s
forward- looking account of that importance, at any rate, is powerful.
I think that one may also endorse the other two reasons for marking
the distinction. But we must now ask what the right emotion is. Clearly
grief and regret are not enough: for they do not differentiate between
mere bad luck and this case of horrible, albeit co- opted, agency. On the
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other hand, I see no reason why guilt should be called for, if we under-
stand guilt as I have so far in this section, as a kind of self- punishing
anger. “Remorse” is a very unclear term, so we cannot use that with-
out defining it further. What may work best is Williams’s term “agent-
regret,” regret of a special sort focused on one’s own wrongful act.
We could combine this with a special sort of moral horror that a good
person feels, when confronted with the necessity to violate a cherished
moral norm, and perhaps with a profound sense of moral loss, the
loss of one’s consistency and full integrity as a morally good person.
None of this requires self- castigation or self- anger. Or so it now seems
to me.62
Later, in the political context, I shall insist that we need two things:
truth, and reconciliation, i.e., acknowledgment of what was done, and
then a move beyond it to a better future. That is what we need here too: a
truthful acknowledgment that this was not just a hurricane or a wildfire,
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