Online research in philosophy

How should moral sanctions and moral rewards - the moral sentiments involving feelings of guilt and of virtue - be employed to govern individuals' behavior if the objective is to maximize social welfare? In the model that we examine, guilt is a disincentive to act and virtue is an incentive because we assume that they are negative and positive sources of utility. We also suppose that guilt and virtue are costly to inculcate and are subject to certain constraints on their use. We show that the moral sentiments should be used chiefly to control externalities and further that guilt is best to employ when most harmful acts can successfully be deterred whereas virtue is best when only a few individuals can be induced to behave well. We also contrast the optimal use of guilt and virtue to optimal Pigouvian taxation and discuss extensions of our analysis.

In the first part of the paper an argument is developed to the effect that (1) there is no moral ground for individual persons to feel responsible for or guilty about crimes of their group to which they have in no way contributed; and (2) since there is no irreducibly collective responsibility nor guilt at any time, there is no question of them persisting over time. In the second part it is argued that there is nevertheless sufficient reason for innocent individual members of a group (that persists over time) to take on responsibility and guilt for the evil other (earlier) members have committed. The reason depends on the acceptability of a particular psychological theory of personal identity.

Intentional collective action -- Collective moral responsibility -- Collective guilt -- Individual responsibility for (and in) collective wrongs -- Collective obligation, individual obligation, and individual moral responsibility -- Individual moral responsibility in wrongful social practice.

We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic, and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of contemporary moral theory. Christopher Kutz shows that the two prevailing theories of moral philosophy, Kantianism and consequentialism, both have difficulties resolving problems of complicity. He then argues for a richer theory of accountability in which any real understanding of collective action not only allows but demands individual responsibility.

Abstract: Many individuals experience feelings of collective guilt or shame for the blameworthy historical acts of the nations or ethnic groups to which they belong. I reject the idea that collective moral sentiment rests on inherited moral responsibility. I suggest that the possibilities for individual action inherent in membership in ethnic identity groups can be a source of special moral duties. I argue that collective guilt and shame are moral emotions that individuals experience in response to complex assessments of their groups' histories and of their own practical responses to those histories. The approach I take to analyzing the concept of an ethnic identity group makes use of tools developed by Max Weber. Weber's conceptual work on social groups and related phenomena has been strongly criticized in a widely discussed book by Margaret Gilbert. I show that Gilbert's arguments fail to discredit Weberian analyses of social groups and their properties.

A wealth of research in social psychology over the past twenty years has examined the role that guilt plays in our mental lives. In this paper, I examine just one aspect of this vast literature, namely the relationship between guilt and prosocial behavior. Researchers have typically found a robust positive correlation between feelings of guilt and helping, and have advanced psychological models to explain why guilt seems to have this effect. Here I present some of their results as well as draw out certain important implications that seem to follow for moral psychology and ethical theory.

This is a review essay of Christopher Kutz's Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, and Jonathan Bass's Stay The Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. Topics addressed include the nature of collective intentions and actions, the possibility of collective guilt, the moral responsibility of individuals in the context of collective actions.

This paper defends the claim that collective responsibility can be based on group membership. It argues that collective responsibility is best understood in terms of duties to respond to the victims of collective crimes. Reasonable fear on the part of the victimized groups creates duties to respond for members of the perpetrating group. This account does a better job of capturing our intuitions about actual cases and the phenomenology of collective responsibility than other accounts currently on offer. It also offers us a justification of collective responsibility judgments that is compatible with the separateness of persons.

Can it ever be appropriate to feel guilt just because one's group has acted badly? Some say no, citing supposed features of guilt feelings as such. If one understands group action according to my plural subject account of groups, however, one can argue for the appropriateness of feeling guilt just because one's group has acted badly - a feeling that often occurs. In so arguing I sketch a plural subject account of groups, group intentions and group actions: for a group to intend (in the relevant sense) is for its members to be jointly committed to intend that such-and-such as a body. Individual group members need not be directly involved in the formation of the intention in order to participate in such a joint commitment. The core concept of joint commitment is in an important way holistic, not being reducible to a set of personal commitments over which each party holds sway.

One relatively central idea is that guilt feelings are warranted if an agent knows that he or she has acted morally wrongly. It might be said that in such a case the agent has a strong reason to feel guilt, that the agent ought to have guilt feelings, that the agent is justified in having guilt feelings and unjustified in not having guilt feelings. It might be said that it would be immoral of an agent not to have feelings of guilt after realizing that he or she has acted morally wrongly or that only an agent with bad character would not have such feelings.