Abstract

This dissertation's major thesis, though very weak, seems to be surprisingly controversial: I claim only that it is fruitful to approach some "moral emotions" by examining them in relation to the metaphor of "moral taint". The scope of this project is therefore rather small. I do not take it upon myself to prove that there is any sense in which the metaphor of moral taint might be the foundation of all our practices of moral blaming, nor do I claim that there is any necessity to the connection between taint and negative moral emotions. Rather, I argue just that three of our most often discussed moral categories--guilt, shame, and regret--may profitably be understood through the metaphor of moral taint. ;In chapter one, I offer a preliminary examination of the role of taint in moral thinking and present two literary examples as "case studies". I discuss guilt in chapter two, tracing the moral taint of guilt from its genesis in transgression, through the pain of remorse, to its expiation in punishment. In chapter three, I show that the taint of shame is founded on a notion of moral shortfall or failure, an individual's sense of not having lived up to some important moral ideal, that the pain of shame is a peculiar sort of self-distress, and that the appropriate response to such a taint of shame is moral growth, a renewed effort to become the kind of agent the moral ideal calls for. I discuss regret in chapter four, arguing that the source of the taint peculiar to regret lies in harms suffered due to bad "moral luck", its pain in the sorrow we feel at the recognition that the world might have been a better place, and its cleansing in the integration of our past sorrows into our plans for the future. And in chapter five, I sketch an independently justifiable meta-ethical position which provides an explanation for the conceptual metaphor of moral taint in more standard philosophical terms