Two Approaches to Guilt

Morality has two main aspects: judging others and conscience. Conscience is in effect judging oneself. If one judges oneself bad, or something one has done or is considering doing wrong, then one is, as it were, finding oneself guilty (of a moral infraction or lack of integrity). Typically such a judgment is accompanied by or indicated to oneself by a feeling of guilt or of being guilty. This feeling is one of the most painful known to a human being. We are therefore highly motivated to eliminate it. The whole point of this feeling in the moral scheme of things is precisely to incentivize us to avoid doing the sort of thing, or being the sort of person, that incurs guilt and hence feels guilty. Presumably natural selection favored those with a healthy dose of this feeling capacity in order to keep our behavior in line with the survival of ourself or of our community (although a more refined analysis might hold that the feeling, like anything preserved or tolerated by natural selection, is really only “out for itself” and to hell with the individual who feels the feeling or even the community to which the individual belongs). But also, by the same logic, there may come a time when, due to changing circumstances, the feeling becomes counterproductive and hence a liability. I believe such a time has come. 

            The liability is due to a loophole we have discovered for eliminating guilt. (Note: From now on, “guilt” will refer to the feeling of guilt, which is a real phenomenon, unlike guilt as such, which I believe is a phantasm, since there is no such thing as moral wrongness or badness in the first place.) For in addition to avoiding behaviors or cultivating a character that one’s conscience has been biologically programmed or socially acculturated to deem wrong or bad and hence make one feel guilty about, one can avoid (or seek to avoid) guilt by denying the attribution to oneself and instead diverting it to someone else – typically someone (other than oneself) who is accusing one of being guilty (i.e., of having done something wrong or being a bad person). Thus the self-judgment becomes an other-judgment, the flip side of the moral coin. This then initiates the spiral of recriminations that makes interpersonal life so miserable and intercommunity relations so dangerous. 

            Amoralism seeks to nip this process in the bud by offering an alternative way to (strive to) eliminate guilt—simply by denying guilt’s legitimacy. That is: The feeling of guilt is “just a feeling” since there is no such thing as actual moral guilt to begin with and so the feeling of guilt refers to nothing but itself. (Cf. “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”) Hence, if it is painful, one can seek to treat it as one would any pain that serves no useful function of alerting one to some actual harm, by taking some sort of psychological or physiological … or philosophical … Tylenol. I would prescribe a teaspoon of meta-ethics, and specifically, a rational understanding of moral guilt as part of a mythology of morality, having no more reality than the gods of Mount Olympus (or the God of Abraham and his, or His, descendants).

          Over time I would expect this remedy to break the cycle of recriminations…even if practiced by only one party to a dispute. (I give an example in “Two Opposing Ways that Intuitional Data Bear on Ethical Theory.”) My special point now is that the moral judging of others is often (if not always?) rooted in moral judging of oneself, specifically, as a means of lifting guilt off one’s shoulders and placing it on another’s; and therefore the elimination of guilt by extirpation is to be preferred as a method of removing it, since this will short-circuit the whole process, thereby reducing conflict in human relations …which is an outcome that I like and think most of my readers would too on reflection.

A moralist would argue that the loss of guilt (that is, the tendency to feel guilty about certain things) would yield its own bad consequences, and they would have even greater weight in our reflective deliberations than the conflict I am seeking to reduce. My reply, as suggested at the beginning, is that however true that may have been in human evolutionary development heretofore, the circumstances of our life in the present have reversed this balance.


Note: See "The Psychic Basis of Morality" for a more detailed telling of this story.

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