Philosophical Arguments for Individuals, Memberships, and Collectives in States of Guilt or Shame

While there is ample evidence that people experience collective guilt and shame, many philosophers and laypeople reject such experiences as unjustified either because they reject emotions as significant realms of experience or because they dismiss the possibility of collective agency and therefore find guilt or shame feelings about collective acts, like those leading to climate change, absurd. Chapter 4 addresses these concerns, building an account of collective agency, responsibility, and identity that demonstrates the importance of moral emotions including those of collectives. This argument draws on but extends the work of multiple philosophers and theologians including Karl Jaspers, Larry May, and Tracy Lynn Isaacs to argue that individuals, memberships, and collectives can be guilty and shameful and that collective and individual guilt and/or shame do not reduce to each other. Collectives have identity, agency, and a form of intent that is more than the sum of their constituent agents. Collectives include both well-defined collectives, such as corporations or nations, and diffuse collectives such as people living resource-intensive capitalist lives and/or supercollectives––those which are larger than but not reducible to collectives. They may contribute to climate change alongside individuals, membership groups, and well-defined collectives. The chapter also argues why in some cases it is not only possible but also appropriate to experience environmental guilt and shame about climate change as an individual or collective.

Environmental Guilt and Shame

Bloggers confessing that they waste food, nongovernmental organizations naming corporations selling unsustainably harvested seafood, and veterans apologizing to Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for environmental and social devastation caused by the United States government all signal the existence of action-oriented guilt and identity-oriented shame about participation in environmental degradation. Environmental Guilt and Shame demonstrates that these moral emotions are common among environmentally friendly segments of the United States but have received little attention from environmental ethicists though they can catalyze or hinder environmental action. Concern about environmental guilt and shame among “everyday environmentalists” reveals the practical, emotional, ethical, and existential issues raised by environmental guilt and shame and ethical insights about guilt, shame, responsibility, agency, and identity. A typology of guilt and shame enables the development and evaluation of these ethical insights. Environmental Guilt and Shame makes three major claims: First, individuals and collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including collectives, should feel guilt and/or shame for environmental degradation if they hold environmental values and think that their actions shape and reveal their identity. Third, a number of conditions are required to conceptually, existentially, and practically deal with guilt and shame’s effects on agents. These conditions can be developed and maintained through rituals. Existing rituals need more development to fully deal with individual and collective guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.

Environmental Guilt and Shame

With a typology of guilt and shame and philosophical justification for both individual and collectives experiencing environmental guilt and shame in hand, Chapter 5 returns to and expands upon the evidence of environmental guilt and shame to explore how well the theories align with the evidence. It demonstrates that that all of the elements of the typology, including collective guilt and shame, are found in accounts of environmental guilt and shame. As collective guilt and shame are likely to be most controversial to readers and have the least evidence in the previously examined data, Chapter 5 supplements the sources examined in Chapter 2, with additional popular and academic literature about collective guilt and shame, particularly claims about the human species in Anthropocene literature and the existence of naming and shaming campaigns which target governments and corporations judged to contribute to environmental degradation. The presence of so many forms of environmental guilt and shame in popular culture indicate that a multifaceted response to these moral emotions and the actions and conditions that give rise to them is necessary.

Autochthony Belief and Making Amends to Indigenous Peoples: The Role of Collective Moral Emotions

Intergroup relations in settler societies have been defined by historical conflict over territorial ownership between indigenous peoples and settler majorities. However, the indigenous groups were there first, and first arrival is an important principle for assigning ownership to a group. In two studies among Australians of Anglo-Celtic origin (N = 322 and N = 475), we argued and found that the general belief in entitlements for first comers (i.e. autochthony) is related to more support for reparations in terms of apology and instrumental compensation for Aborigines, as well as to less topic avoidance. We further proposed that the group-based emotions of collective guilt, moral shame and image shame account for these associations. We found that majority members who endorsed autochthony belief experienced more guilt (Study 1 and 2), moral shame (Study2) and image shame (Study 2). In turn, guilt and moral shame were related to more support for reparations and less topic avoidance, whereas image shame was related to more topic avoidance, thereby partially suppressing the negative association between autochthony belief and topic avoidance. Our research points at the importance of considering autochthony belief and different types of moral emotions in research on past transgressions and current attempts to restore social justice for indigenous peoples.

Novels about the “erased”: The social-critical discourse in Slovenian prose of the 2010s

The increasing attention that writers pay to the consequences of cardinal political and sociocultural changes in the life of Slovenia is one of the trends observed in the national prose in the first decades of the 21st century, indicating that the socio-critical discourse has been gradually returning to literature. At this time one of the most pressing problems of independent Slovenia comes to the attention of novelists’ field of vision — that is, the fate of the so-called “erased”, persons with Yugoslav passports, who at the time of the proclamation of sovereignty were living and working in Slovenia and for political and bureaucratic reasons were excluded from the register of its permanent residents. In 1992, the newly proclaimed democratic state deprived them of their citizenship status, that resulted in ethnic cleansing of over 25 thousands of such people. The truth about this “inconvenient” episode has been hushed up or falsified for years. The writers M. Mazzini, P. Glavan and D. Bauck in their novels “Izbrisana” (2014), “Kakorkoli” (2014) and “Konec. Znova” (2015) seek to use the ethical potential of the artistic word to convey the practice of empathic experience. Despite the difference in genre varieties (thriller, social novel, novel with elements of surrealism), all three texts are united by the mimetic method proposed by the authors to overcome the collective trauma and collective guilt through artistic expression. Drawing the readers’ attention to the actual social conflict, writers, each in their own way, seek to destroy the stereotypes of its perception existing in the society.

Správní mechanismy přesunu knižních fondů v letech 1918–1954: odrazový můstek k výzkumu knižní provenience

The history of Czechoslovak private libraries reflected great historical events, specifically in the change of ownership between 1918 and 1945/1954. The biggest change came after the Second World War, when the highest state officials decided to punish war criminals. In general, all Germans were labelled as enemies of the republic and were to bear collective guilt for starting the war. Their punishment included, among other things, the loss of property, which also concerned their libraries. This study focuses on the state administration dealing with such property.

Children in World War II—"German elderly psychoanalysts remember"

In the research project, Children in World War II—"German elderly psychoanalysts remember", psychoanalysts of the German Psychoanalytical Association born between 1930 and 1945 were interviewed on this topic, first with questionnaires and then with interviews. The author takes an approach about how today's psychoanalysts, who grew up during World War II, viewed their experiences, damages, losses, and traumatisation in connection with coming to terms with the collective guilt of the Germans. How were they able to address and work through the childhood experiences and traumas of war in their analyses? The author emphasises how important remembering is for a whole society after genocide, war, and dictatorships that are like that of the Third Reich in Germany.