Doctoral defence: Heidy Meriste "The Emotion of Guilt: Integrating Cases Without Perceived Wrongdoing"

On 19 August at 14:15 Heidy Meriste will defend her doctoral thesis "The Emotion of Guilt: Integrating Cases Without Perceived Wrongdoing" for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Philosophy).

Supervisor:
Professor Margit Sutrop, University of Tartu

Opponent:
Professor Edward Harcourt, University of Oxford (UK)

Summary

The emotional phenomenon of guilt is traditionally defined as a painful feeling about having done something morally wrong. Yet it is relatively common that people report guilt feelings even in the absence of perceived moral wrongdoing. One common type of counterexample involves cases of merely causal harm to others—for example, when one has caused fatal harm in a car crash, even though there was nothing that they could have done to prevent the accident. The second common type of counterexample concerns survivor guilt, which is experienced when the subject survives a catastrophe that others did not. This dissertation shows that such folk discourse is not just a confused way of talking about guilt but captures a relatively unified guilt concept, which emerges from a value-based approach to morality. This approach puts the focus on the badness of states of affairs rather than the wrongness of actions, and the relevant guilt feeling involves perceiving oneself as contributing to a morally bad outcome. Contribution is here understood in counterfactual terms, which highlights the idea that the subject makes a difference to the world. For example, had the subject not driven a particular road at a particular time, the relevant accident would not have happened. Had the subject died with the others, the situation would have been, at least in some sense, less bad. The value-based account of guilt offers the following way to explain the cases of merely causal harm and survivor guilt. The former involves the subject perceiving themselves as causing a state of affairs that is unjust towards the victim, who had done nothing to deserve such a fate. Survivor guilt involves the subject perceiving themselves as a constitutive part of a morally bad state of affairs that consists in the comparative injustice of the fact that while they made it out alive, others who were no less worthy did not. In general, the dissertation shows how our understanding of guilt depends in great part on our general normative framework.