Heidy Meriste - Can You Feel Guilt about the Future?

[Music] so it's my great pleasure to introduce Hedy Maris day from the University of Tartu we met Haidee while we were working in tattoo in the summer and we thought straight away that she would be a perfect fit for this seminar series and so yes without further ado I'm very glad to see you all here and today I want to talk to you about non retrospective so I want to go really and beyond retrospective guilt which is how I think that people normally think about guilt they think about retrospective instances of guilt so here I have just a few examples of this very common conception of retrospective guilt case of Lady Macbeth for example who is driven into madness because she had encouraged her husband to kill King Duncan but later of course she doesn't feel so good about it and also Oedipus who is devastated by the fact that he has killed his father and her mother his mother and wet Wed his mother sorry and and and also brought about the disaster to his City here too we have an instance of retrospective guilt and and also notice that both for cases where the person feels that he or she would like to take back what has been done right so it's like we would like to undo but it and and this case is also and yeah we're characterized by this some really tragic sense of irreversibility you feel that you can't take it back but you would like to take it back you would like to do things differently and of course such incidents these do make good stories so I think that it's no surprise that we often hear about these retrospective cases of guilt but today as I already said I want to go beyond those cases and more precisely the view that I'm going against is the view but thinks that guilt is always exclusively retrospective and that we can only become to feel guilty after we have committed the deed or the thing about which we feel guilt and and this kind of conception of really exclusively retrospective guilt it removes the wish to take it back which accounts for this tragic sense of irreversibility of lived time and and it also accounts for this kind of like an puzzlement and perception of a self who committed the immoral deed as alien to oneself and for example people are often characterized as thinking but how could I do it in my right mind I would not have done so and so there is this kind of so-called emergence of the alien self that you're somewhat like puzzle but how could this happen in the first place so yeah this is the idea of the retrospective a retrospective guilt and which as I won't argue is not the only one and yeah I've got here a reference to one in a study by Carson and Schubert which is actually a qualitative study where they analyze like a lot of lots of interviews about people's experiences of guilt and then they try to extract a conception of guilt from those interviews and they were really like studying the phenomenology of guilt and how these people like described their experiences and while I don't agree with the authors I think that their article is very very fascinating and but what we get out of those stories that people tell them and is this kind of conception that they say that their guilt and has this really clear temporal and unfolding the moment of guilt feeling occurs after the moment and well basically what they say is that first you go through reaction in a kind of easygoing way and then a sense of guilt starts to emerge as you realize that the thing you did was really bad and or as you go through a change of heart and just really start to care about the thing maybe earlier you didn't care and and then yeah when you feel be skilled to reconstruct this post act is a kind of moment of negligence so their account of duties like really exclusively retrospective you can't feel guilt like while you're doing the action it always comes in later and the action earlier is only lived in a more easy and easygoing way this kind of conception I mean it's not only there in their paper you can also see similar conception when you read more Continental accounts or phenomenological accounts of guilt because it's a common theme but some authors say I think that guilt is supposed to like break down and pry it understanding pride as a kind of like not a very reflective way of living thinking but you're kind of doing everything or rights and it kind of likes this kind of self and reflection and so as already said I want to defend but it is possible to feel present and future focused guilt and I also want to show you that there is also something really unique about those episodes and compared to direct respective guilt and maybe just to highlight the first point but I want to show that it's possible it is going to be your P beyond the scope of this talk today to defend that it is always and also morally appropriate or like maybe maybe I'm going to present some cases but you don't agree that the person should be feeling guilty but I will not have a time to defend all those cases but all I want to show you is that it is credible that some people might feel guilt in those cases so I'm just defending the possibility of present and future focused guilt and but I do believe that many of you will at least in their mind also agree that this can be appropriate appropriate instances um so first I'm going to start with definitions of guilt and temporal focus then I'm going to tackle with the general obstacle and in the way of conceiving most cases and then I talk more about present focus guilt and when future focus guilt and in the very end I also want to take a bit of time to go back to this retrospective post focused guilt and to see what can we learn and about this post focus guilt because I mean I do agree that a dominant kind of guilt is still a boss focused guilt but we will revisit it in the end so definitions when I talk about guilt and first of all I'm talking about the emotion of guilt so whereas we might say that the murderer also bears some guilt which is a more objective state even though the murderer might not feel guilty this is not what I am interested in I am interested in the emotion of guilt the kind of feeling and then I see Kristen feeling to rise from three conditions at least in prototypical cases so first when it has to be a kind of underlying concern for morality you need to care about doing the right thing so you have to value morality or you have to desire to do the right thing then there must be a belief or a belief like state that the intentional object of guilt exemplifies a moral failure right so I try to kill to be moral failures and I will be later talking about cases of killed for breaking your diets I don't think that there is an inconsistency where because I think that those cases when you feel guilt for breaking a diet you are violating a kind of promise to yourself you have promised to yourself so all kinds of non moral things can become moral matters when there are promises involved and and of course since it is an emotion there must be a kind of painful feeling as well and so I take it as self-evident so yeah these are the main three components in many cases I will later refer back to B's concern for morality and the kind of belief which are necessary conditions for guilt to arise and this will help us understand why sometimes guilt does not arise so the definition of past present and future focused what do I have in mind when I use these words and I take it that the emotion is past present or future focused if the intentional object of emotion is accordingly perceived as located in past present future with respect to that phenomenal now now that was a long definition so what is the intentional object of emotion it is that which the emotion is about you know I might feel joy or be sad being glad that there is water here so when like water being here is the object but of course of in case of guilt it's usually by kind of teeth or this kind of immoral thing there and now why do I have this qualifier that phenomenal now this is added because if if I simulate a scenario and for example yeah I mean whenever you could like just simulate a scenario or like let's take a case where I haven't I haven't done anything wrong yet and but I'm contemplating doing something wrong so I'm really vividly simulating myself committing some bad deed and I'm becoming to feel guilt living this simulated scenario right and let's say but I imagine it as a kind of futures scenario now I would not want to say that this is future focused guilt proper because between this simulated scenario you still feel post focused because you have already played through the scenario and like you feel guilt for what you have done in this scenario so here I'm not interested in this kind of thing I want to show you guys that there is really the kind of guilt which you can feel for your future actions even if you are not simulating them and so this is why I why I have this phenomenon now here and and just another qualifier I mean I don't need to I don't want to say that all episodes of guilt can be neatly categorized as either past present or future focused I am totally happy to say that in many cases we have mixed forms of guilt and because many kinds of actions can extend in time and I mean I might feel guilt for my present intention and the content of this intention which is the future deed so in many cases we can have mixed poems I'm not against it but I just want to show that it is possible to feel I have these episodes of guilt that also can have this future focused aspect and present focused aspect so the most general obstacle why do people not think about those present and future focused instances of guilt and I think that the most general obstacle is that they think that people who already care about morality would not do morally problematic things remember when I told you showed you the definition of guilt I showed you where but you have to care about morality so there is a kind of puzzle that why would someone who cares about morality go on and at the moment commit something bad or plan to commit something bad so yeah some people might think that this might count as a reason why present and future focused guilt cannot exist but we should be too hasty to make this kind of generalization because we're actually in fact various reasons why one might go on committing the wrong even though the person fool is fully where that he's committing wrong and also cares about morality so the first type of case is weakness of will so we can imagine those cases where somebody breaks the diet eat something unhealthy and and I mean I mean people do not always act upon their long term and desires and goals so they might just indulge in a kind of more short term and temptation and and of course guilt you would only have when you have these really lucid cases of weakness will when the person is aware that I shouldn't be eating this or or like any case where somebody is maybe maybe cheating on his or her partner also could be lucid case of weakness of wills giving into a kind of than temporary temptation secondly and one can also be torn between plural values and loyalties and these are now more complicated cases and for example we could have moral value competing with moral value this is what we normally see in tragic dilemmas for example you have to sacrifice something for the greater good and but we can also see these kinds of cases where a moral value is competing with non moral values so for example where personal ambitions are taken to outweigh morality so if you think about Macbeth not Lady Macbeth for anymore but Macbeth same stuff then I mean he didn't point to kill King Duncan I mean he didn't want to do it but he's ambition outweighed like his morali so of course I'm not making any claims about what Macbeth actually feels in the play but like in principle he could feel that like it's the wrong thing to do but I am going to make me sacrifice because I want I'm gonna be she's man and I want to be a king myself and so I don't know why the slides disappear all the time and leave it's like a character of life I mean you don't pay attention to it so and I think that rather than making these kind of present of future focused incidences of guilt impossible and this kind of tension between like caring about morality and yet still acting against it it is actually something that makes those instances really interesting because there is with some really peculiar tension there and in many cases this tension between what caring about doing the right finger not doing the right thing and it's I mean we can already go to that it actually exists in a rubber and fragile balance which can easily dissolve into over rationalizing reaction because then it's easier to go through with it or cutting reaction off so this is why in many cases you don't get very long standing instances of this present and future focused guilt because various really fragile balance and yet these cases of usage weakness of will and cases of pluralism may give us a reason to also imagine more stable cases where this kind of guilt feeling could linger a bit longer and sorry a very interesting psychological conflict where often also a kind of emotional ambivalence because if you think about these cases of prison focused guilt for example where you indulge in a temptation then there is a kind of like bitter sweetness where it's on the one hand I mean and you want to do it and it's kind of sweet but on the other hand you don't want to do it so and yeah sometimes you can you've also probably heard about guilty pleasure so like the guilt and the pleasure are kind of competing they're not necessarily in all cases but especially I think in those cases of weakness of will where you have this competing temptation there which also brings joy so I think this is actually interesting interesting on its own and and also perhaps point ownself alienation a philosopher called Gabriel Taylor has actually said that guilty moves a perception of an alien self I mentioned this alien self a bit earlier as well and so the agent sees himself as a doer of the wicked deed and so was alien to himself and so I mean I think it is easy to say this kind of thing when you are really focused on the retrospective cases because in the retrospective cases you can distance your present self from the past itself right I mean you think that now I'm a different kind of person now I would not do this kind of thing and so you can still perceive your present self in a more harmonious fail as univocal II condemning the deed or and the past self now this cannot be the case when we think about present or future focused guilt and because to some extent at least you have to identify with the deed because you're at the moment doing it or you're planning to do it and so yeah unless we are really dealing with pathological cases it is I think a bit far-fetched to say that there is this like totally alien self there and so perhaps we should like make more fine-grain degrees there and this like alien self I'm not sure if it's the best word for all those cases but I think that it is easy to overemphasize be alien self when we only think about most retrospective cases because yeah who would not who would want to identify too much with bad things so so yeah these were a few really interesting points about the types of guilt guilt I want to talk about and and yeah these were about peculiar tension there which can result in those bittersweet feelings sometimes and also this point about self alienation but to some extent yeah of course to some extent Rory but to some extent you are not really that daily elated and now let us have a closer look on present focused guilt I think this is this is easier to defend and I mean are there any further obstacles in the way of conceiving present purpose guilt and compared to is that I already mentioned that people find it hard to imagine why people who care about morality go on doing the things and of course I mean somebody could say that there's a kind of tension between taking a self-reflective stance as in case of guilt and being absorbed in the activity and it's open for example when you're acting on an impulse it is really easy to lapse into it's non reflective mode and you see this unhealthy food and you just give in to craving and you maybe you don't even think about it but and of course there might be some kind of actions like you want to rob a bank then maybe it's not the best idea for you to take a self-reflective stance because you need all your full focus on your activity if you really want to succeed with it so you might want to like suppress it and but of course none of those cases are like general arguments against the possibility of taking the self rest reflective stance because like even then somebody is for example cheating on their partner even an external clue like looking at your wedding ring could kind of trigger this kind of guilt that you realize that no this is not right what I'm doing and where would still be this kind of bitter sense of guilt accompanying backed so-and-so yeah I don't see a general reason here why we could not feel guilt for our present actions because we are not always fully absorbed in the things that we do and I mean I think that this present focus guilt is really underestimated and people have not given due attention to it especially philosophy and I think that this is mainly because philosophers have been very focused on actions and in case of actions which have a rather short duration the guilt that we feel is normally going to be past focused because there is only a very limited time during the act itself that you could feel guilt and I mean once you have done the guilty deeds then later inevitably your guilt is going to be post focused and but I think that if you think about different kinds of states in addition to actions when with some prison police killed it can become much more visible so let us think about long lasting omissions I mean they have much longer durations and many iteration than many many actions do so for example and this is I actually I was actually googling about different instances of guilt and Varys with some it was a bit like ran random study and I was not quite pleased with their references but we're very listed like twenty two reasons why Britons feel guilt and I think one one of the top things there was like not calling people who are close to you or yeah some some other things as well but so I hope that with some these examples some familiar or easy to relate to people's like ordinary lives so yeah if you're not maybe calling your parents often enough or also when you're procrastinating and delaying things doing something else instead of the things that you should be doing and this too is the kind of omission and what is really interesting about those instances of guilt is that I mean if earlier we looked at those cases of guilt that really have this kind of an tragic sense of irreversibility then this is not the case at all here or at Lee it need not be the case and because there could just be this kind of constant nagging awareness that you are in the wrong unless you do something about it I mean of course in some cases you can think that oh I have lost valuable time and I will never get that time back but I mean this need not be the case in many cases for example when you're just procrastinating I mean you can just be guilty you can finish the guilt if you actually start doing the thing but you should be should be doing so there is where doesn't need to be this tragic sense of irreversibility there so so in that sense I think that this kind of permission guilt has a very different phenomenology from this really tragic retrospective action guilt and we should take it into account when we try to give like general characterizations of guilt because there are very many different kinds of phenomenology and also and this is actually a controversial point now and I think that it is perfectly possible to feel guilt for traits and dispositions and it tends to be a very communist assumption that guilt is something that you feel for deeds and shame is something that you feel for your character traits or dispositions but let us just look at some examples and Patricia greenspan for example has suggested that when you're not very bright and ambitious and but this is what your parents wanted you to be then you can feel that you're letting your parents down and this can elicit the kind of guilt and this would be a kind of character guilt because it's not about the specific thing but you do but it's about who you are and well this might not always be like maybe people shouldn't feel that kind of guilt and I also have a different kind of example and for example imagine in the context of like romantic relationships where somebody is not apathetic and sensitive enough to the other person's needs and this can lead to arguments and I mean taken in isolations all kinds of all these little kinds of instances you might be able to find excuses but you were really tired that day and but what might really lie behind all that might still be with more general tendency to overlook another person's needs and this is also why we ever person might get mad at you because not because of the single act but because of a more general tendency that it reflects and here too I mean quite directly you are letting the other person down so and I think this is really what accounts for the guilt of course portrayed you can feel shame as well but yeah I think that the crucial thing is that you feel that you're letting the other person down by MOT you by what you are and then of course States as well like survivor guilt for being the libe and enjoying life's pleasures which is also sometimes been characterized as a Robert Peter sweet Fink but in a more sad sense memories and little giving in to temptation kind of situations and orbits are called Scandinavian guilt guilt for being rich and well-off especially felt when you and when you walk past a beggar or something like that so yeah when we move past actions and when we look at omissions traits States then it becomes much more visible that we can have long standing episodes of prison focused guilt as well and I want to go even a bit further and I want to say that some forms of guilt are actually very strongest in the present focused form and and I think that this case of procrastinate procrastination guilt is a really good example because as I said once you quit procrastinating you don't have to feel guilt as in tense as before I mean you can of course still be guilty that you did procrastinate but you have already done something to compensate for it right and this is very different come like when you think about a murderer committing a murder murder is stunning and he's not committing murder anymore there is no inherent compensation there so there is no reason to feel like less guilty after the action has been completed so so yeah some some types of guilt can be really like the strongest in the present focused form and which is I think something that has been overlooked by many conceptions of guilt because we always tend to think about it in a kind of like post workers form and sometimes it's usually it's sport that like as a time goes on and you really realize the full gravity of your own when you're kind of feel and more guilt though of course in those cases - maybe you should feel guilty of course earlier but here I'm saying but you have the most reason to feel most intensively guilty while you're doing it so so yeah let us now move on to future focus guilt because I think this is going to be more controversial than those cases of present focused guilt which are very familiar from our ordinary lives and I'm gonna start with a few examples and I've been trying to quit that bringing up that example of Abraham and Isaac but I'm going to bring it up again today because very something about it that I think is good and so and I'm not appealing to like how the stories originally told I'm just inviting you to think about a version of an Abraham who is told by God that he has to sacrifice his son and and but I mean it would make sense that he doesn't want to sacrifice his son any parent kind of doesn't want to like inflict suffering on children so I think that in this case it would be possible that like if if Abraham knows in advance he makes up his mind he knows that he's not going to disobey God he's going to sacrifice the son he might already feel guilty for sacrificing the son because he has made up his mind that he will do that in the future also um something but I have felt and when ending a relationship you have already made up your mind you know that you're going to end the relationship you know that this is going to cause suffering for enough for the other person and and you can't already feel guilty in advance because you know that you are going to do it then also perhaps let's take the fictional Gaughan who is going to abandon his family he's going to move to Tahiti and he's planning to do great art there and like let's imagine that he has already arranged and traveled and knows how to get there and he already has a ticket to a ship or I don't know whatever Cogan would have used to commute there then too I think that in principle he could already feel guilty about it even though he has not yet done that it he's again or more tragic cases like especially the case of Abraham and Isaac but I think but yeah it's probably related to the kind of like that you have this really pointed like action we're not to dealing with those emissions here anymore and sometimes these actions can be quite tragic but not necessarily of course in all cases especially in cases of these tragic dilemmas where you have one moral value competing with the other moral value and that's why I think that the Abraham and Isaac case is good because he feels it as a moral obligation to obey to God and he feels it as a moral obligation to not inflict suffering on his child so these cases can be like quite tragic yeah here's a picture of Abraham taking guys active and mountain so I want to say that these were these are all cases very you could in principle feel this future-focused guilt and maybe some people are already convinced by these examples and it seems quite intuitive that you could feel so but I'm also going to back up and back it up with them more general defense and here I want to tell you about a very classic way of differentiating between two groups of emotions it was more popular in the ancient times and in medieval times not so much nowadays anymore but nevertheless we can imagine two groups of emotions one is a backward-looking emotions common examples have usually been joy sadness and the so called forward-looking emotions common examples hope and fear a music volleyballs backward and forward looking because this is how they have been traditionally called but then I kind of I have I only use use use those words in brackets and of course one might think that it's the temporal orientation but differentiates and because when we feel fear when we hope and we think about things in the future no normally and normally we are also glad and sad about the things that have kind of happened and but I think that there are actually really good reasons to think that this is not the temporal orientation is not really the best criterion to kind of make this distinction and because and this is also pointed out by philosophers like Robert Gordon and and also some others actually a better criterion is perceived certainty and uncertainty so perhaps it would be useful here too think about few a few examples because this is how visa argument is normally made that authors appear to like different examples and where we see but the temporal orientation is different but certainty uncertainty criterion never nevertheless works so when so let's take a few examples so a conductor for example who knows in advance that the train will arrive late could feel joy or sadness because this might relate to avoiding like congestion at the terminal right and this is an example by Robert Gordon and also William Lyon has said that a mother could be sad and grieve over the loss of her son when the son he has been sentenced to death like again we have a case of like a future event but we have already like we already believe that it will take place so a temporal criterion does not work but perceived certainty is there and so really what's crucial is that you need to believe but we even take place and I maybe furthermore I would like to appeal to with some analogy with like sadness so I mean all in all I want to say that guilt to belongs to his son and Paul a category of emotions we're traditionally called backward-looking emotions like joy and sadness rather than hope and fear right because like intuitively when we think about guilt I mean it's more akin to sadness than to kind of fear of course I might be different fears related to guilt but guilt itself is kind of like you're kind of sad that you did the kind of thing and so I mean I think that guilt clearly belongs to this traditionally backward-looking emotions to be scary berry and I mean these emotions belonging to this backward-looking category or emotions of perceived certainty category and I mean structurally they are all similar they are effective ways of being directed at some believed state of affairs which is very intentional object and and of course you can be directed into all kinds of intentional objects regardless of whether they are in the past or whether they are in the future so in case when we think about this analogy with sadness when in case of sadness I mean it's easy to think about cases of being sad about the future like you know that due to global warming life is gonna be a disaster on earth at some point and you might be since the early said about it and so there is no I kind of like restriction there and since these emotions guilt and sadness we are structurally similar there are no restrictions to like thinking about sadness or thinking about guilt as focused on the future and either I mean of course there are differences between these two emotions and between guilt and sadness for example they have a different shape and sadness has a very general kind of shape it's a kind of negative evaluation of the state of affairs in case of guilt we are talking about a kind of negative moral evaluation of the state of affairs where you are contributing to where you are involved and you perceive yourself as bringing about some immoral immoral state and but but this kind of difference in the scope I think that it only makes us easier to like understand why this why it's not that hard for us to imagine most cases of future focus sadness because the scope of the emotion is so much wider I mean you just need to neck chiefly evaluate something whereas in case of guilt you have to give a negative moral evaluation to some your deeds right so and so I think that it's just accounts for how frequently we feel these different emotions but and this difference in scope is no reason for thinking that guilt could not be focused on the future and also one might say that there's a self-reflective element in case of guilt and that's why it can't be focused on the future but I mean let's imagine a case of self reflective sadness you might be sad that one day you are going to die so I don't even think I don't think that the self reflective element is going to make any difference here because in case the future look for future still - you can imagine a state where you're involved in in the future right so and so self reflective element I don't think is really relevant however and and yeah I think that once you agree that guilt belongs to this category of backward or like the emotions of perceived certainty and that when you don't when you also agree that sadness as an emotion of perceived certainty can be focused on any of the temporal dimensions then like since there is an analogy between the two emotions and they belong to the same general category there isn't really any reason to think why one cannot be focused on the future and the other can and so so yeah here I have another little diagram here that simply you have to you need to have this belief but you will do something in the future and then in this belief and occasions the kind of guilt I do not want to imply that they must be very far off in time they can be very quite simultaneously this belief or a belief like state and that in the occurrence of his future action but yeah basically this belief is this crucial element there because there might be many cases for example and let's take this bank robber again who was planning to rob a bank but he's not very sure whether he's going to be successful right I mean I don't think that he's going to feel this truly future focused gilts he might feel guilt that he's the kind of person who's going to rob a bank and he has a kind of intention to do it but like since he doesn't believe yet that this will be successful then there is no reason to feel this truly future and guilt but all those cases that I told you like the case when you know that you're going to break up if somebody when you you're Abraham and you know that you're going to sacrifice your son then myths and cases are slightly different because this belief is there [Music] of course some people might still want to say that perhaps this kind of future focus still they still reducible and the present focused skilled sorta Pastor Chris guilt now first what I want to say I think that these kind of reductionist strategies are question begging because I think that someone who's skeptical about future-focused guilt should first give a reason and to say why we cannot look guilt as analogical to sadness so I think that the burden of proof is really there on their side to kind of show us the reason why we should be skeptical in the first place and so so yeah I think that these strategies reductionist strategies are question begging but let us go through some of them and and perhaps you'll see that some of those strategies are not very convincing anyway and so one might virtual types of strategies one might say that actually you just feel positive present within a simulated scenario and the other is that you are the intentional object is and already existent in present you feel guilt for your character or intention and so let's look at the first strategy and can we really say that this so-called future focused guilt that Abraham feels for soon like engaging in the sacrifice and is it really mere simulation guilt isn't merely due to the fact that Abraham is simulating in his mind he's doing and I don't think so first because I don't think that simulation is really necessary particularly future-focused guilt I mean Abraham can feel guilt even if he is not constantly simulating the situation in fact he might be very reluctant to simulate it but nevertheless he would be walking around all day we were very and heavy heart and we were with a very heavy conscience even if he is not simulating that and also I don't think that the simulation could be sufficient to account for truly future-focused guilt because I mean conducting a mere fourth experiment and when you don't really think that anything is going to like actually happen this is not going to give us so intense guilt feelings and so persistent guilt feelings I mean if Abraham was just imagine the sacrifice without me actually believing that this is what will take place then of course you might feel some guilt but this is not going to be a guilt as strong as in this real scenario and this is because he's not just conducting a thought experiment he is involved in a real situation where he will commit and he knows or at least where he believes that he will and commit the kind of deed but he wouldn't want to so I don't think that the simulation strategy is the best strategy where we could like really reduce this future-focused guilt a mere simulation and but there is also a different reduction strategy and basically one could say that the person is feeling a character gift instead he's feeling guilt for the current character and for example Anthony Steinbach who says that the person might think that I am this person who cheats or who will steal without ever having done so and so before and I experience this is possible for me and I think that in case of visum like when we think about Abraham there need not be anything wrong with his character or any person who is involved in a tragic dilemma you could also imagine Sophie's Choice where Sophie was like confronted by a Nazi officer and had to give away one of her babies and had to choose it herself and I mean in those cases I don't think it doesn't reduce to a character character of the person because there need not be anything wrong with a person's character I mean of course maybe someone could like try to push the point and say that how you realize its potential in you to do horrible things to sacrifice your son but this kind of potential I mean if we have red or we know more about those tragic dilemmas when like all many of us should know that this kind of potential might be in us that in in really difficult cases where we only have two very bad options when we are going to do something bad but but again I mean this kind of potential is going to stay within Abraham also later when we are review when the messenger comes from God and says that actually you don't have to sacrifice your son I mean Abraham himself would still know that this potential is in him to go through with the sacrifice but he wouldn't feel guilty anymore because he doesn't believe that he will like actually do it so again there is going to be this kind of difference in the intensity there so it can't be merely guilt about the potential and but the most difficult reduction is strategy to counter is actually one but reduces it not to a character kills between tension guilt and this is this is really tricky because in case of like when I told you about simulation guilt I told you how simulation and this future poker skills can come apart I cannot do this with intention because it's very difficult to bring you like in cases where you have no intention but you believe that you are going to do something maybe someone who believes in an Oracle and he is told by an Oracle that he's going to do something maybe this kind of person could feel this future focused guilt but I mean this is such a rare and exotic example I don't think that we have very like stable intuitions about what the person would feel in this kind of situation and of course this person would really have very sincerely I have to believe that vehicle so but I don't want to appeal to these kind of cases I think these are so rare cases that what we don't have reliable intuitions about them so I think that in most cases with future focused guilt is going to be and mixed with the intentional guilt yeah I think that the intention guilt will be there so this kind of guilt will have and it will be partly focused on the present your present intention but in your mind you have already betrayed the person but I still want to say but it also has this future focused aspect as well and I think it becomes more more visible perhaps in retrospective cases because after the sacrifice was cooled off then Abraham could feel still feel guilty but he had this kind of intention to go through with it and but service to could be kind of like intention guilt but it wouldn't be as intense because again have the belief in reoccurrence of the actual sacrifice and I mean maybe not all of you are going to be pleased with this but with this strategy but I really don't think that there is any other way of showing it rather than appealing to this kind of retrospective comparison but if if you're not pleased in this example then again I will appeal to the fact that the reductionist strategies themselves are question begging and a person who's skeptical about future-focused guilt should first say why guilt is different from sadness that we cannot imagine like these kinds of cases so without this kind of reason I don't think that it's it makes much sense to opt for a reductionist strategy as well so here are which is them play with the burden of proof and in fact partly I also think that the person who would only feel guilt for with intention I think that there would be something and this is perhaps a more speculative point I think there will be something may be moral morally weird about it because this kind of person would have to be maybe have maybe a person would really have to think that like the only true object of guilt is like your current mental state not what actually happens but at least in real life many people do you think that you should feel guilt for like what actually happens as well not just about your own mental state so so it might be quite weird to feel this intention guilt but not really care about like what actually it's going to happen so there might be even reasons to think that it's kind of morally obligatory in those cases to feel this kind of and future-focused guilt and very briefly also a few words about like a phenomenological uniqueness of future-focused guilt has already said earlier I think that this tragic sensation is often going to be there similarly to retrospective cases but I think that it's interesting to compare this future focus tilt with post-paris guilt because then we can see some characteristics of guilt in a more general way and it helps to put these some things in to put these things that are often said about a retrospective guilt into a more wider perspective so the tragic sensation here is not really about the reversibility of time that I can't turn back time and do things differently rather in those cases you feel guilt because you're trapped in circumstances but do not allow you to uphold or your loyalties or to translate all your values into action so what is then common here is really that the situation cannot be changed either because it's in the past or because the situations at the moment are such that you just can't or you won't - otherwise so this highlights actually killed as an emotion of certainty and yeah we shouldn't only talk about this tragic situation in relation to irreversibility of time but it's a more general thing and also an interesting thing and this is also emphasized by Anthony stained Steinbach who's very skeptical about the future focused guilt and and he says that with some guilt we can imagine guilt even if you have this really weird temporal experience where you can't like can wear future is kind of closed down for you you could still imagine people feeling guilt and that sometimes killed itself could close this future down for you because there's some horrible deed in your post and you're so focused on it that just you can't think about your future and now since I hope that I've given reasons to think that you can't have this future focused guilt then I would say that actually it can also be the other way around Abraham who know that he will still lay his knife on his son for him all his boss might be like broken down or closed down because there is one event that is waiting for him in in the future and and the more general characteristic here what I think that it highlights is actually that gravitating force of emotions especially negative emotions that emotions and the objects of emotions they really draw our attention to them and why I really want to highlight the negative emotions part is because positive emotions sometimes I think when you have the kind of we can at least have a kind of freeing potential that if something good has happened and then now you can move on a few things you can move on with your life you don't need to be focused on the good thing that happened it gives you a kind of confidence but with negative emotions I think it's different it doesn't free you from anything it rather ties you to the negative event and absorbs your mind so yeah I think that the consideration of future focus still guilt better helps us see these more general characteristics but lie behind these little things that our centers sometimes emphasized when people talk about post focused guilt and last but not least as I also said I want to go back to of retrospective guilt and and I want to ask first why do people mainly talk about retrospective guilts and is this really bad let me talk about it and so of course do in one sense all other types of guilt will eventually become retrospective because once the deed is over you will be it will have to become retrospective but perhaps one of the reasons also why many people in Wisconsin and Schubert's studied and talked about retrospective think tilt might be that it has a special mnemonic function because when when you didn't realize the gravity of wrong then it really makes sense for you to kind of save this incident in your mind and guilt kind of helps to do it but if you are involved in a stroke in a tragic dilemma there isn't much to learn about that from - like that would help us in the future because I mean it's gonna be very difficult to kind of stay clear from what was really difficult circumstances so so perhaps this retrospective guilt has really with special mnemonic function it helps us remember the things that we didn't realize were bad at the time when we did them and is it really bad that we talk so much about retrospective guilt or that retrospective guilt is so prevalent well I think that if we try to imagine a world where we would feel more present and future focused guilt then it would be a bit sad to imagine this kind of real world because it would either indicate that we ourselves would have an internal conflict and we would need to have this weakness of will or the world itself would have to be a rubber hostile places but sets those really tragic dilemmas in our in our way and or maybe also it could be an indicator of people having too many commitments but if you have so many commitments you care about so many people you can't always be there for all of them but the dominance of exclusively posture good guilt this mainly just indicates the kind of ignorant that you didn't realize how wrong the bad or bad the thing was and perhaps I'm not certain maybe this ignorance is easier and to kind of tackle Weaver than hobbies coastal circumstances of world so perhaps it is not that bad after all that most of the time we are burdened with past focused guilt [Applause] thank you very much for tremendous talk we've got 10 15 minutes for questions thanks very much hey dude that was such an interesting talk and it had the quality some interesting talks have that irritatingly at sort of four or five points I thought AHA now I've got a really good question and then you answered it I was really interested at the end when you were just talking a little about the mnemonic role of guilt partly because I have some Buddhist friends who talk a lot about the the ideal of being able to be serene in the face of everything and I'm always found that very appealing and just the other day I I was thinking about how I'd arranged something in a stupid way and I was thinking oh god why did I do that and it occurs me if I felt serene about this I just go and do it again and again this agony over what I've done but my question is so and you did address this to some degree towards the end the distinction between intention guilt and future focus guilt I understand the distinction and I can see I think the structure of your argument for thinking there really is future focus girl as well but I'm wondering what our story as story is about what happens when to be to begin with your bank robber your potential bank robber or whoever is merely contemplating a future action and they they already feel a certain degree of guilt which is presumably focused on their present contemplation they feel feel a bit bad about seriously contemplating this thing okay yeah and then uh you know they they they realize they're they're even more hard up for cash than they were and they start to form something more approaching intention and and finally belief that they're going to perform this action over the course of that development it sounds like not only must the intensity of their guilt increase but it's intentional object has to subtly shift from their current contemplation to their future action yeah and say I just wondered if you had anything to say about how that happens whether that shows up phenomenologically if it doesn't why why we don't notice it right I mean I do believe that in great extent this is going to be a rubber gradual kind of than shift because first you're just contemplating on doing it but I think that when the moment you form a really strong intention this will be accompanied by the belief that you will do it if it is a very strong kind of intention because I realize you intend to try doing it right then this belief comes with the intention and while I mean you are I think that this intention guilt grows out from this contemplation I mean your earlier guilty about contemplating contemplating contemplating now your guilty about intention but now this belief comes up that you will actually do it and this will add with an element of future-focused guilt there as well and I mean this is going to I think it's it's going to add much to a persistency of guilt because you kind of now you know that you're going to do it but of course like phenomenologically it's probably not going to be like like a really poof like POW here's the future focus guilt as well because this in people form intentions kind of gradually like there's this way that leads up to it thank you I I wouldn't follow up length but I was just occur to me maybe it would be interesting to think about it in terms of Bayesian degrees of credence as opposed to just belief and disbelief because they knew they have a gradual increase okay thank you it's very very interesting um I I'm grappling to understand what you're talking about as someone who feels guilty about everything obviously but I feel that imagine you've got a lot of stuff when you're going on holiday and you're trying to pack a suitcase and you simply have too much for the suitcase it just will not go in however you fold it right this what seems to be going on here is generally speaking a space between what is the right thing to do and something that isn't that and you're feeling bad that you're in that space well I'll tell you because imagine there was a language where you had a word for being in that space in the past which is tilt and you have a word for being in that space in the present which is print and you have a space for being in that space in the future which is filt and you have a word for being in that space where you might do something which is milt okay and you have a space for being where you could do something which is guilt when you're in Scotland so if you had those words for these states would this problem go away in other words are we having are we having this discussion simply because the word guilt is not big enough to push everything into it or is it a real problem okay well I meant that maybe maybe indeed some people might be tempted to use a different kind of word for this future focused kids but I don't think that there is a good reason for that because when we think about what emotions generally are and as I said they are effective ways of being directed at certain object different emotion theories are going to put it differently some say that they are cognitions say that their appraisals some say that they are perceptions in a more metaphorical kind of sense but none of those states is restricted to only one temporal dimension so you can like like in case of sadness you can be effectively like and I mean what individuate emotions I mean this was a thing common to like all emotions or at least this is what all the emotion theories would kind of say and none of those states are like restricted to one temporal dimension but now what's supposed to individuate emotions and matron unique is supposed to be the shape and this is often cached in terms of like and this kind of evaluation but is at the core of the emotion so like in case of sadness its evaluating something negatively like in very generally in case of guilt it's a kind of negative evaluation of your teeth right so so here here too I mean we can see that that varies like structurally this post and future-focused instances are going to be similar because in both cases you are effectively directed at a state of affairs where you do something wrong or where you have done something wrong so when you look at the basic structure of the emotion then this is going to be the same there is no additional or different kind of element simply in one case the Lee believed state of affairs is in the past and in the other case it's in the future but when we feel sadness we don't use we don't have different kinds of words for retrospective sadness and future focused sadness so again my question would be why would we want to use different kinds of words in case of guilt and I don't think that there is a good reason for it I think that we are simply see those cases are going to be a bit more rare because we don't always find ourselves from these hostile situations or these kinds of dilemmas when we are not used to using this word guilt for future focused situations but but this is no reason for saying but we are not dealing with the same kind of emotional or affective phenomenon so so it is it still has exactly the same structure so so this is why I think that we shouldn't just go for like calling it by some other kind of name hi thank you for your talk and in regard to that question and your answer I was thinking when you explained the Abraham situation that the future guilt in terms of naming as guilt may be easily understood perhaps I don't know it's just like some a question as well if we distinguish between the act itself and the consequences of the act because perhaps Abram feels guilty for the act of deciding to kill and he has fear in the future for the consequence of his actual decision mm-hmm I don't I don't that I think so because I think that I mean fear is related to uncertainty but you don't know what is going to going to happen but if you if you know what you're going to happen he knows that he's going to like lay his knife on his son then then of course he might be afraid that he will feel very sad but I mean he still believes that he's going to do a thing so I don't think that he's here only concerned about the deed as a consequence of present intention it's it's maybe it's a bit hard to explain it but like since he believes that or maybe you could like yeah laborat a bit more I'm not sure if I'm getting your point correctly the perhaps the point is that like you are guilty you feel guilty about something you do okay and then when you think about the consequence of that act in the future okay you feel more guilty but because of the fear of that consequence in the sense of like for example perhaps you can feel guilty about deciding to do something now okay and then the stance of like thinking about the consequences of your actual decision mm-hmm it's like a different feeling that it's more connected to fear and therefore okay well still I would say that avakov maybe back to his case of a bank robber who was like decided to rob the bank but if there is no belief there but he will like actually do it then I think that intensity of the guilt is going to be different so he do can contemplate on the possible consequences but like he will actually roll the dice but it's going to be a bit different like because he doesn't yet know what this he doesn't believe that this will be the case that he will necessarily succeed so yes in that case would be okay okay thank you is there any relationship between guilt and dependence okay that's a good good question I'm not sure if repentance is best categorized as an emotion because it's also a more cognitive I think that may perhaps guilt is a part of the process of repentance but I will draw a review repentance as something more than just the feeling of of guilt where you kind of like contemplate about it more and you set different intentions for the future or like I wouldn't categorize repentance as an emotion so mine is really in defense of Abraham because we can't even for a second remember forget that he was in direct relationship with God and it was more of a test of hope and Trust which is the other side of your thing yeah and so how can we imagine what that might have been like but that's not really where your emphasis is right now my son here says the word dread might be the word that you're talking about some of the time when we dread something mm-hmm that's his and that's it really the only other thing is that imagine guilt you know from adverts I don't have that car there's no guilt but we get guilty because we like that car in the advert and we don't get it and I don't know how your what you've been saying relates to that situation so where were many questions there first you mentioned be straight I think there might be dread there as well the trade is a more general emotion that you can feel not only for your own actions but also for for other other things so I don't not think that the trade would be specific enough to kind of capture what's going on when you know that you're going to sacrifice your son and guilt this kind of better fitted for it because it's it cons involves this kind of negative moral evaluation of your own act and now um but come when it comes to both commercials where you feel guilty because you see you see like a fancy car and you know what you don't have it and you feel guilty but it okay I have not felt it but I can I can resonate with it because often commercials might try to elicit guilt in you what you're not a self-respecting person if you don't use this service shampoo or like whatever like this guilt appeals in general are like very very common I think that these are quite standard cases of present focused guilt because they elicit guilt about like your current omission or like you not having the car you not using the best shampoo or like so perhaps this is a way that we could conceive them Yeah right alas this is all we have time for but there be a little bit of time to those questions over drinks now we do let's see I should we should just say the next talk we're going to have is in February 20 the website mark octal evil also a book launched on 14th February at the mathematical Institute for the new Arab sent a serious on science and religion and the former Adria's chair Peter Harris won't be coming from Australia for that and the present hideous chair will be speaking as well and it'll be quite a big event so 14th of February do look at the website thank you many tremendous things to look forward to and in the meantime [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: IanRamseyCentre

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Length: 77min 59sec (4679 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019