Abstract
Desert-realists maintain that those who do wrong without an excuse deserve blame. Desert-skeptics deny this, holding that though we may be responsible for our actions in some sense, we lack the kind of responsibility needed to deserve blame. In two recent papers, Randolph Clarke (Philosophical Explorations 16:153–164, 2013 and Journal of Ethics 20:121–137, 2016) advances an innovative defense of desert-realism. He argues for deserved-guilt, the thesis that the guilty deserve to feel guilt. In his 2013 paper, Clarke suggests two strategies for defending deserved-guilt: the fitting-guilt strategy and the good-guilt strategy. In his 2016 paper, Clarke issues a challenge to the desert-skeptic: he calls on them to provide a non-desert based account of guilt’s fittingness. In the first two thirds of the paper, I respond to Clarke’s challenge to the desert-skeptic, showing that guilt felt by the guilty is alethic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. None of these notions of fittingness, I argue, are desert based. In the last third of the paper, I show how the work done in previous sections affords us the tools to finely diagnose the failures of both the fitting-guilt and the good-guilt strategies. Here, I draw on one of Clarke’s own insights—namely, that desert is intimately connected to the value of justice. I propose that showing that guilt is fitting, or again non-instrumentally good, fails to show that it is deserved because to show that it is deserved one must show that guilt is fitting or good in a sense that implicates justice.
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Notes
More specifically, Clarke’s thesis is that the guilty deserve to feel guilt at the right time and to the right degree. I think these additions are appropriate, but since nothing turns on these details in what follows, I leave them aside for ease of prose. Similarly, guilt can be felt both by those who are in fact guilty and those who are not. Whenever I speak of guilt in this paper, I am referring to guilt felt by one who is in fact guilty unless I specify otherwise.
Not all value is non-instrumental. Whenever I speak of goodness or value, I am referring to non-instrumental value or goodness.
More precisely, one is representing oneself as not exempted from responsibility practices and as having done wrong without an excuse (Clarke 2016: 123).
I agree with Clarke on this point, and the work done in this paper assumes Clarke is correct. The representational content of guilt is, though, a matter of controversy. For a contrasting view, see Portmore (2019). For a response to Portmore, see Carlsson (manuscript).
Nelkin is following McKenna (2019: 276) in pointing out that grief felt in response to the loss of a loved one is non-instrumentally good.
See Wonderly (2016) for a richer account of our susceptibility to grief.
See footnote #18 for a discussion of the caring argument.
See Carlsson (2017: 110–113) for a more in depth discussion of why grief is not deserved.
An anonymous reviewer has suggested that it might make sense to say grief is deserved. In their words, “While I agree that it's odd to say that one deserves to feel the pain of grief, it's not clear that desert is entirely inapplicable to the fittingness of grief. For example, it seems right to say that a kind parent deserves to be mourned, where this reference to desert describes the fittingness of the bereaved child's grief.” The reviewer’s press deserves careful attention which I unfortunately do not have space for here. What I can do is highlight how grief being deserved affects the points made in this paper.
Let’s assume then that a kind parent deserves (in the sense articulated in this paper) to be mourned by her children. What this means is that, contra some theorists, grief is not a good counterexample to the good-guilt strategy. This would be a problem for my paper if discrediting this counterexample served to restore the good-guilt strategy to good standing. But I don’t think discrediting the grief counterexample succeeds in doing this. One could simply deploy a different counterexample. We might put agent-regret to double duty, i.e., use it as a counterexample not only to the fitting-guilt, but also to the good-guilt strategy (see footnote #24). Agent-regret is a virtuous and thus non-instrumentally good response to faultlessly harming another, but it is not deserved (either by the one feeling it or by the one harmed). What’s more, even if agent-regret does not work as counterexample, Sect. 5 offers a theoretical explanation for why the good-guilt strategy fails.
Nelkin also points out that grief may be fitting but not deserved. As we move through the paper, the tight connection between fittingness and non-instrumental goodness will be emphasized. It will become clear why showing that grief is non-instrumentally good underwrites the claim that grief is fitting. See footnote #24.
Admiration is Clarke’s example. I have added contempt.
McKenna (2019) also emphasizes that desert grounds goodness.
More precisely, to say that an attitude is a reason-fitting response to X is to say that there is a right kind of reason to respond to X with said attitude. For more on this detail, see, for example, Jacobson (2011).
See Howard (2018) for more on value-based accounts of fittingness.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive account of the possible modes of fittingness. See, Howard (2018) for other modes of fittingness. See also McKenna (2019) for the idea that an attitude is fitting insofar as it is a conversationally intelligible response to its object. Also, Scanlon’s (2013) account of fittingness arguably differs from those articulated above.
In his 2013 article, Clarke suggests that guilt felt by the guilty is fitting insofar as it is representationally accurate. He writes, “The psychological state of feeling guilty includes a thought—that one is blameworthy for some wrong—as well as some unpleasant affect. It might be said that such a state can be apt or fitting when one is guilty. The thought can fit in that it can be correct” (p. 158).
An anonymous reviewer pointed out that some manifestations of caring about the right things seem non-instrumentally bad. The examples they give are (1) “a family of an ancient warrior might manifest their caring for a deceased patriarch by killing and burying the man's slaves in his grave” and (2) “one might commit suicide as a manifestation of caring for a partner who has died.” This is a compelling press that deserves more attention that I can give here. That said, I want to very tentatively suggest two ways that the caring argument can potentially be improved so as to avoid the implication that all manifestations of caring about the right things are non-instrumentally good. First, what is non-instrumentally good is not caring about the right things, but rather caring about the right things in the right way. If this is correct, then it will only be manifestations of caring about the right things in the right way that will be non-instrumentally good. One could argue that cases of murdering the killer of a loved one or again committing suicide are manifestations of caring about the right things in the wrong way. Thus, the revised caring argument would not imply that these acts are non-instrumentally good. Another possible tweak to the caring argument is as follows. Only some manifestations of a particular instance of caring about the right things in the right way are such that their absence evidences some kind of defect in the caring. One might urge that it is only these manifestation of caring that are non-instrumentally good. Thank you to Agnieszka Jaworska for helpful discussions on these issues.
It might be worth noting that if the caring argument fails, the desert-skeptic is not without the resources needed to defend the value-fittingness of guilt. She still has what I call the virtue argument at her disposal.
Philosophers who theorize about the nature of belief might object to the characterization of beliefs as mental states that ‘merely describe.’ They will argue that this is far too thin a notion of belief, that beliefs are much richer and more complex mental states. Those who object to such a view of belief should read the claims I make in this portion of the paper as explicating two modes of recognition: one in which recognition consists in ascribing a property to an object and another in which recognition is constituted by a change in comportment. What I am urging is that guilt constitutes the latter form of recognition and is thus a virtuous response.
A number of the paragraphs describing the two modes of recognition are from Hurely and Macnamara “Beyond Belief: Toward a Theory of the Reactive Attitudes.” See this piece for a more in depth discussion of these points.
If one is not indifferent to her culpable wrongdoing, then one’s belief that one is blameworthy will in all likelihood lead to changes in comportment of the sort I describe above. This does not though undermined my claim that believing that one is blameworthy on the one hand and feeling guilt on the other are two distinct modes of recognition. My point here is that the change in comportment is constitutive of guilt, whereas it is not constitutive of, or internal to, the belief that one is blameworthy. It is one thing to have an attitude that just is a change of comportment; it is another to have an attitude that might, or even will likely, lead to subsequent changes in comportment.
Compare with Clarke’s point about the non-instrumental goodness of recognizing one’s blameworthiness (2013: 155–6). Recall that on Clarke’s account, guilt has both cognitive and affective aspects: guilt has a constitutive thought and is at least in part an unpleasant affect. For Clarke it is the cognitive component of guilt that constitutes one’s recognition of one’s blameworthiness. What’s more, for Clarke, said recognition is non-instrumentally good insofar as “it is a familiar step in a process of moral reintegration” (2013: 155).
In urging that guilt felt by the guilty is reason-fitting and value-fitting, I do not mean to imply that guilt is all-things-considered permissible, required—or again, the best response—to responsible wrongdoing. The point about the reason-fittingness of guilt is simply that culpable wrongdoing is a reason to feel guilt, i.e., a pro tanto consideration that speaks in favor of feeling guilt. Similarly, the point about the value-fittingness of guilt is that guilt is, ceteris paribus, a valuable response to wrongdoing. These claims leave open the possibility that there are other reason-fitting and value-fitting responses to wrongdoing, and thus leave unanswered questions about the all-things-considered normative status of guilt.
Notice that agent-regret felt in response to having faultlessly caused another harm and grief felt in response to the loss of a loved one are also arguably alethic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. They accurately represent their respective objects. Faultlessly causing another harm and the loss of a loved one are sufficient reasons to feel agent-regret and grief respectively. And both agent-regret and grief are arguably non-instrumentally good. Grief is a manifestation of caring about the right thing. Agent-regret is arguably both a manifestation of caring about the right thing and a morally virtuous response. On the morally virtuous response point, Clarke concurs (2016: 128).
If I am right about the non-instrumental goodness of agent-regret, then agent-regret serves not only as a counterexample to the fitting-guilt strategy but also to the good-guilt strategy. Relatedly, if it is correct to say that grief is good qua manifestation of caring about the right thing, then grief serves as a counterexample not only to the good-guilt strategy but also to the fitting-guilt strategy. Nelkin implicitly acknowledges this when she suggests that the caring argument shows grief to be fitting (2019: 183).
To be clear, attitudes can be fitting in many ways—indeed, I argued that guilt felt by the guilty is athletic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. For all that has been said so far guilt may be desert-fitting as well. My response to Clarke’s challenge merely shifts the dialectical burden back onto Clarke.
See footnote #9.
Clarke writes, “If the minimal desert thesis does have the implication that I have suggested, it nevertheless does not imply that what is good about the fact that a guilty person feels guilty is that that person, in so feeling, is worse off. The implication would be that what is good about this state of affairs is that there is some justice in it” (2016: 130). If I am correctly characterizing the concept of retributive justice, then the fact that there is justice in a state of affairs in which a guilty person feels guilty entails that there is value in a guilty person being made worse off. It is precisely, the person’s guilt together with her being made worse off by feeling the pain intrinsic to guilt that constitutes the just state of affairs. Insofar as the person being made worse off in part constitutes the just state of affairs, it is non-instrumentally good.
I suspect Nelkin would find this explanation appealing. Though she does not explicitly mention justice she highlights that the caring/good-guilt strategy seeks to demonstrate guilt’s desert, but strangely implies that the “value [of guilt] does not lie in the blameworthy getting something negative in response to wrongdoing” (2019: 183). This characterization calls to mind the idea of justice and thus suggests that a key problem for the caring/good-guilt strategy is that it does not show guilt to be valuable in virtue of helping to constitute a just state of affairs.
Though I have used different terms, I read McKenna (2019: 277–8) as making the same core point as I do above—namely, that pain can be good qua manifestation of caring. McKenna writes, “Yes it is, for instance, a harm for the one blamed that she suffer the setback of others distancing themselves from her, but as this harm for her is also an expression of her concern for others, it likewise counts as a good that she is harmed in this way” (p. 278).
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Acknolwedgements
Thank you to Maggie Little for invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thank you to members of my 2019 Value Theory Pro-seminar and to participants of the 2019 Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility Conference for helpful discussions and insights. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Monique Wonderly for countless conversations and for reading and commenting on numerous drafts.
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Macnamara, C. Guilt, Desert, Fittingness, and the Good. J Ethics 24, 449–468 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09337-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09337-z