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.

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.

The seventh chapter follows the pattern of extending and specifying theoretical points through the close interpretation of a literary work, in this case Tony Kushner’s widely admired, award-winning treatment of the AIDS crisis, Angels in America. This chapter also develops a concept of “critical empathy,” designed to respond to some potential problems raised by critics of empathy. Critical empathy involves effortful compensation for empathic biases (e.g., the saliency of the target or his or her in-group status). It also involves attention to ameliorating the condition of the targets of empathy, rather than brooding on shared emotional pain. In relation to these points, the chapter articulates a distinction between normative outcomes (the objective conditions that we would judge to be consistent with ethical imperatives, whatever their motivations) and ethical choices (the decisions that derive from ethical motivations, whatever their results). Additionally, the chapter considers the dynamics and ethical implications of guilt, shame, and attachment bonding.

Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.

Trust and reciprocity are two closely linked concepts that are ubiquitous within cooperative exchange. To distinguish the two, we first review potential motivations that drive trusting and reciprocal behavior. Economic theories suggest that both preferences over monetary distributions (outcome-based) as well as considerations about others’ intentions (belief-based) may contribute to decisions to trust and reciprocate. Outcome-based theories suggest that individuals’ internal preferences over monetary distribution influence decision-making. In comparison, belief-based theories assume that individuals’ expectations about themselves and others generate emotions that influence decision-making. Turning to the neuroscience of trust and reciprocity with the trust game, we find that neural activations in insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex are common to belief-based motivations, while neural responses in caudate and amygdala reflect outcome-based motivations. Integrating economic theory with neuroscientific findings, we suggest that reciprocal behavior is primarily driven by belief-based motivations while trust behavior is associated with outcome-based preferences. We propose that future research should examine the potential context-dependent nature of behavioral motivations, investigate both positive and negative reciprocity, and leverage the trust game and related paradigms to parse potential sources of social dysfunction in mental illness.

Both Othello and Macbeth show how men can be shamed by other people into committing murder, and how guilt can motivate self-murder. Othello felt humiliated when Iago deceived him into believing Desdemona had made him into a “cuckold.” When he discovers she has actually been faithful, he feels so guilty he punishes himself by suicide – as many such murderers still do. Iago shames Othello into ruining himself because he felt Othello had shamed him. Lady Macbeth shames Macbeth into murdering Duncan, which finally leads to so many murders that she feels guilty enough to kill herself; and he feels so exhausted he longs for death as the only face-saving way to rest in peace – again, like many murderers we have seen.

In his history plays, Shakespeare shows how the hierarchical shame- and honor-based political system called monarchy leads to an endless cycle of violence. But he also shows us through the character of Falstaff and his famous speech about honor how debunking or satirizing honor has no effect on honor- and shame-driven personalities. In the context of current US politics, this can explain the inability of the two sides to hear one another. Henry V, often celebrated as a national hero, becomes a killing machine when he ascends to power, pursuing wars that are as futile as they are bloody. In contrast, Henry VI, the exception that proves the rule, adheres to the guilt ethic of Christianity, which renders him powerless to protect himself from the violence generated by the shame culture in which he lived. Richard III shows the power of shame and humiliation to stimulate violence on a scale that ultimately consumes him as well.

Starting with the story of a man, a successful publisher, who like Othello kills his wife and then decides to kill himself, we find that Shakespeare’s plays are the richest source of insight into what motivates violence, toward others and also toward oneself, and what is needed to prevent violence. In contrast to Shakespeare, the mental health system has directed its attention almost exclusively to suicide, and relegated homicide to the criminal justice system. But that system asks only how evil are people who have committed murders and how much punishment they deserve – not what caused them to commit murder, and what we can do to prevent such behavior before it occurs. Criminology is of little help, because most violence is not criminal, and most crimes are not violent. More than experts in any of those fields, Shakespeare illuminates the thoughts, feelings, and social forces that drive people to kill others, themselves, or both.

Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes the fact that there is room only for war, not love, in an extreme shame culture, such as the Roman Empire. Their suicides were motivated partly to avoid being shamed in Octavian’s “triumph” in Rome, but more importantly because it was only by dying together, and in response to each other, that they could avoid being separated from each other. Enobarbus illustrates the fact that guilt feelings also motivate suicide, so guilt is no solution to the problem of violence. Ironically, the main losers in this tragedy may have been the putative victor and his associates, who were incapable of love, and hence life, on the scale and intensity that Antony and Cleopatra achieved with each other.

Shakespeare’s plays dramatize the difference between the opposite and antagonistic moral emotions of shame and guilt, the moral value systems those emotions motivate (shame ethics vs. guilt ethics), and the shame and guilt cultures that are organized around those feelings and the values they inspire. His shame-driven personalities in their preoccupation with honor and dishonor differ from his guilt-ridden characters who feel compelled to punish themselves, but both are driven to violence. The difference lies in the object of violence, namely, others or the self. With Othello and Lady Macbeth he also shows how the same person can experience both emotions but at different times and with opposite results. Through his plays, by his focus on the actions and thoughts of his characters, Shakespeare shows us in vivid terms the relationship of both shame ethics and guilt ethics to violence.

The image of Gestapo officers relying on threats and violence is a myth. Informants were for investigating opinionmakers and torture was for networks of organized resistance. Routine procedure was different with lone critics. The Gestapo knew that denouncers could abuse the system. The return to formal prosecution also demanded proof of both an offence and subversive motive. An “impeccable conviction” required corroborating witnesses to establish subversive attitudes and either confirm a single public offence or a broader pattern. As a result, the Gestapo used conversational techniques to gauge the reliability of witnesses and suspects as officers gathered information from their social circle. Behaviour during questioning, discrepancies, connections between witnesses, and personal quarrels were all evaluated. Political background, severity of the statement, and publicness of an offence dictated how widely the net was cast. However, laying out evidence and offering clemency ultimately secured far more confessions than violence. The result was a two-track system of routine police work according to the demands of formal justice subject to cancellation under specific criteria.