Emotion motivates prosocial behavior, and interest in this topic usually focuses on empathy. This chapter explores other emotions that can also motivate prosocial action and the research directions and practical implications that follow. It opens with consideration of two perspectives on the association of emotions and prosocial behavior offered by Malti and Thompson, and then proceeds to discuss research concerning the following prosocial emotions: happiness derived from assisting another, moral pride derived from prosociality, indignation over observed harm, empathy and sympathy, and gratitude. Guilt as a moral and possibly prosocial emotion is also discussed. The shared element of these prosocial emotions is that they derive from a personal connection between an observer and another’s emotional experience. An overview of the research on emotional development and emotion regulation follows to explore how this connection emerges developmentally. The conclusion summarizes much-needed areas for further research along with the implications of these ideas.

This chapter describes the development of prosocial motives and the social contexts within which these motives emerge and differentiate. Initially, prosocial behavior is based on a blend of motives, namely, participating in social interaction and early forms of feeling for others. During early childhood, concern-based guilt emerges and mere participation transforms into contributing to collaborative activities. During childhood, the normative turn complements these motives by a sense of obligation (living up to), and, during adolescence, aspiring to one’s ideal self can become an important prosocial motive. In this sense, doing good often is an expression of central human motives, namely, belonging to others, feeling for others, contributing to joint endeavors, affirming a sense of responsibility and normative obligation, and striving for our ideal selves.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

In Chapter 4, the second vantage point of the book is introduced, that of the German citizen. It describes a record of how average men and women, from different backgrounds and living in different occupied territories, experienced the campaign to eradicate Nazism; how it impacted their daily lives and what they felt about it. Journal entries, private letters, newspapers, memoirs, and interviews chronicle much of the everyday denazification experience. An examination of on-the-ground activities reveals that the ideological cleanse was tethered to employment, and hence, political screening. If a shared denazification experience existed, it was the completion of Fragebögen. This chapter also shows that the consequences of denazification were more severe than what is often suggested. The form had the potential of permanently altering one’s material security, as well as professional and community status. Going through political screening was emotionally exhausting. This chapter includes a detailed case study of denazification experiences in Hersfeld (Hesse), a seemingly typical German district in the US occupation zone.

There is a tension in military culture between the growing acceptance of moral injury and an idealized view of Stoicism that leaves little room for the guilt and shame, mercy and forgiveness characteristic of moral injury and repair. Does that emotion-lean view do justice to ancient Stoic doctrine? I argue that it does not. The emotions of the Stoic moral aspirant, such as shame and moral distress, bear striking similarities to the negative self-reactive attitudes that P.F. Strawson famously discusses. Notions of mercy and forgiveness speak to the positive reactive attitudes. I develop my argument by turning to Seneca’s essay, On Mercy and his play, the Trojan Woman. Mercy, Seneca insists, makes good on the gentler side of Stoicism. Learning from the mercy others show us, and that we would show them, is one way that soldiers can begin to show mercy towards themselves.

Robert Wicks examines the question of whether the thing-in-itself can be accurately described as “will.” Schopenhauer admits that, although our inner experience of our body as will leads us to generalize the will as the in-itself of other phenomena, this is not yet an accurate depiction of the thing-in-itself, as it is still subject to the form of time. Yet he persistently describes the in-itself of reality as “will,” and it is hard to see how anything other than an endlessly striving will could underwrite his pessimism. Wicks argues that Schopenhauer’s use of Christianity appears in his vocabulary of universal guilt, which is key to understanding how suffering is universal. However, a Christian interpretation of the mystical experience would push Schopenhauer in the direction of saying there is more to the thing-in-itself than will, since the mystical experience is experience of something, and if will is negated something must remain to be experienced. Wicks, however, argues that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is incompatible with any interpretation of the thing-in-itself that denies it to be will; this puts him in touch with a more Buddhist form of mysticism, and explains the enthusiasm with which he accepted Buddhism when he finally encountered it.

Enns reflects on the meaning of guilt and responsibility in the context of Indigenous struggles in Canada. While rarely uncomplicated, the question of who is to blame poses a unique challenge in the case of historical atrocities with enduring legacies. When those guilty of the original violations are long dead, yet leave behind institutions that perpetuate the conditions for oppression and privilege, it is tempting to assign collective guilt. With the help of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who argued in the aftermath of World War II for a robust understanding of collective responsibility, distinct from individual guilt, Enns navigates the effects of oversimplifying these concepts. Central to her discussion is the dramatic shift in contemporary scholarly and public discourses on victimhood and identity – on victimhood as identity – since Arendt famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, no one is.” With reference to the parallel ways in which victimhood is assumed as a permanent state and granted moral authority in North American Indigenous and anti-Black racism struggles, Enns notes the limits of an identity-based politics, and argues for a richer understanding of collective responsibility – one that will create a future world with a better inheritance.

Chapter 4 presents the first of the three case studies. Entitled ‘Guilty and Innocent: The Individual Human Being in International Criminal Law’, it analyses the discourse on prosecution with a focus on the ICC. This case study illustrates the applicability and value added of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Furthermore, I draw heuristics from this first case study to guide my analysis of the two other case studies, which I embed in a larger analytical framework developed in Chapter 5. Apart from these theoretical and methodological purposes, the chapter has a substantial purpose, demonstrating how the individual human being appears in the discourse on prosecution and how this appearance matters for global politics. The case study shows how the individual human being appears as a perpetrator or victim. This appearance is based on assertions of innocence and guilt, which makes prosecution and the deliverance of justice to individual human beings possible in the first place.

What is self-blame, and what is its role in an adequate theory of moral responsibility? Moreover, what of guilt? In this chapter, I will examine the role of both self-blame and guilt within the context of a conversational theory of moral responsibility. Some philosophers have recently placed guilt and self-blame at the heart of moral responsibility’s nature. They also have in turn made the deservingness of both the most fundamental normative consideration in justifying the harms of blaming. Doing so appears to threaten conversational and other communicative theories of moral responsibility. In response, I will argue that guilt and self-blame cannot play the fundamental grounding role in a theory of moral responsibility. As a result, conversational and other communicative theories are not in jeopardy. Rather, what is required is a proper appreciation of the aim and norms of our blaming practices wherein guilt and also self-blame are meant to fit as responses to the blame of others as well as oneself. Along the way, I will also argue that self-blame and guilt are distinct things. While it is natural to think that to experience guilt just is to blame oneself, this is not so. Although the two are tightly connected, the relationship is nevertheless contingent; one can blame oneself without experiencing guilt, and one can experience guilt without blaming oneself.

There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this chapter, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore how this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself.

The literature on moral responsibility is ripe with accounts of what it takes for an agent to become blameworthy. By contrast, very little has been written about what it takes for an agent’s blameworthiness to cease or diminish. It seems that there are certain things a wrongdoer can feel or do that might make her less blameworthy than she would otherwise have been. She might experience guilt, atone, apologize, and make reparations. In this chapter, I will argue that prominent accounts of blameworthiness are unable to explain how such actions and emotions can influence one’s blameworthiness. I will then present an alternative account. If we understand blameworthiness in terms of deserved guilt rather than fitting resentment, we can give a plausible account of how blameworthiness can change over time. The fact that a wrongdoer has already experienced guilt, atoned, or apologized will make her less deserving of guilt, and therefore less blameworthy.

This chapter sets out a non-retributive conception of blame and of self-blame, that is, one that does not invoke the notion of basically deserved pain or harm. To blame is instead to take on a non-retributive stance of moral protest. The reasons for moral protest are forward-looking: moral formation or reconciliation in a relationship that has been impaired due to wrongdoing, protection from wrongdoing, and restoration of the integrity of its victims. Regret, a painful response to one’s own wrongdoing, which by contrast with guilt (by stipulation) does not involve the supposition that the pain it involves is basically deserved, may appropriately accompany self-blame. The pain of guilt, an attitude distinct from regret, conceptually involves basic desert since it involves the supposition that it would be prima facie permissible for those who are appropriately situated to impose it on a wrongdoer for a non-instrumental reason. The pain of regret, by contrast, does not involve this supposition.

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide a comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms.

Let F be a fact in virtue of which an agent, s, is blameworthy for performing an act of A-ing. We argue for the following three theses (with slight qualification of the first):

• (Reason) F is (at some time) a reason for s to feel guilty (to some extent) for A-ing;

• (Desert) s’s having this reason suffices for s’s deserving to feel guilty for A-ing; and

• (Ground) what grounds s’s deserving to feel guilty for A-ing is simply what grounds that feeling’s being a fitting response by s to her A-ing.

In light of these theses, we address several claims that have been made regarding responsibility and desert. We take issue with the divorce of desert from responsibility. We find acceptable a claim regarding blameworthiness and reason to induce guilt, and we defend the idea that it is non-instrumentally good that one who is blameworthy be subject to a fitting feeling of guilt. Finally, we argue against a view on which desert of blame has a teleological dimension.