In Our Time - Guilt

Episode Date: November 1, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss morality by taking a long hard look at the idea of guilt. The 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was once moved to comment: “Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.”Guilt is a legal category but also a psychological state and a moral idea. Over the centuries theologians, philosophers and psychologists have tried to determine how it relates to morality, reason and the workings of the mind? The answers seem to cut deeply into our understanding of what it is to be human.With Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford; Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Oliver Davies, Professor of Christian Doctrine at King’s College London

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was once moved to comment, guilt was never a rational thing, it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion. Burke was touching up on a question that has animated theologians and philosophers for centuries. Is the feeling of guilt a vital part of our moral lives,

or can it do more harm than good? Is it innate or learned? And how does guilt relate to reason? The answers seem to cut deeply into our understanding of what it is to be human. We'll be looking at guilt as a moral and psychological phenomenon and not as a legal category. With me to discuss the concept of guilt

and examine its relationship to morality, I'm Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecture in Philosophy. at Birkbeck University of London, Stephen Mulhall, fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College Oxford, and Oliver Davis, Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College, London.

Stephen Mullell, as I understand it, there's a traditional distinction made between guilt cultures and shame cultures. Can you elaborate on that? Sure, yes. I think one can think of shame and guilt has two different ways in which human beings acknowledge an awareness that they've done something wrong,

that they've violated a norm or a value that they take to be important or significant. But one get a much clearer sense of guilt as a specific kind of awareness of wrongdoing if one contrasts it with shame. Suppose we start with shame then. Shame, in effect, has to do with the notion of saving face or losing face.

So that already gives you a sense that it's concerned with appearance. It's concerned with the way in which you look in the gaze of other people. Sometimes it's to do with some behavior you've performed. Sometimes it might have to do. do with your appearance, how you're dressed, how you look. But of course, the most basic example, I suppose, is feeling ashamed if you're caught naked. So it may just be the simple fact that you

have a body in effect. And what makes shame distinctive is, in part, the ways in which it drives us to act. If one feels ashamed, what is one instinctively inclined to do? And I think the immediate answer that question is to hide, to remove yourself from the gaze of others, ideally to disappear altogether. you want the floor to open up and swallow you in effect. So the implication would seem to be that a way to avoid feeling shame would be to do the shameful lead in private. And if you manage to pull that off, then you shouldn't feel that response,

that sense of doing anything wrong. And if we have that kind of conception of shame in place initially, then guilt becomes much more clearer in contrast with it. Because you're not going to escape feelings of guilt. simply by hiding yourself away in a corner, away from some other people's gaze, the critical voice, the voice that tells you you're doing something wrong, is going to come with you into that private place. And that's because in guilt, the sense is that it's an internal voice of criticism.

It's the voice of conscience, I suppose, in a familiar way of picturing the whole idea. And what that means, in effect, is that you're engaged in a process of self-criticism when you experience guilt. You're saying that there's a certain kind of ideal that you've internalised. You're measuring yourself against, and you're failing to measure up properly to that standard. So we get a picture of the self as being sort of split between what it thinks it ought to be and what it actually is. And the aspiration is, ideally, for those two parts of the self to come back together to synthesize. So there's no gap between what the voice of conscience wants you to do and what you're actually doing.

and that means in effect also that you've got a notion there of autonomy. You've got a notion of the individual subjecting himself to his own kind of criticism. And that contrasts quite sharply with shame, at least on the surface, because shame tends to focus you on the gaze of other people, and it suggests that you're responding to their sense of what's right and wrong, and it suggests that the individual is being subordinated to the social group as a whole. The only other important contrast I'd like to draw before we maybe talk more generally is between, as it were, the ways in which one can alleviate the experience of shame and of guilt.

I said about shame a little earlier that what you try to do in effect is get out of the side of others to disappear ideally. In the case of guilt, that won't do any good. What guilt drives you to do is actually to atone for the wrongdoing. You try and engage in some kind of act of reparation to try and alleviate the whole. that you did that created the guilt feeling in the first place. And that means that in guilt, you have a focus on the victim of the wrongdoing. And if you put together that focus on the victim with the idea of individual self-criticism, what you get is a sense that guilt might be thought of as a much more mature, progressive form of moral thinking than shame. So if you have

an ethical culture that's built around the notion of guilt, you're building into it an idea of autonomy, emancipation from social expectations and norms, and a genuine concern for the harm that you did to others. And that sounds like the core of any genuine morality. Thank you very much. Miranda Fricker, shame has been a feature of the classical world, guilt of the Christian world bluntly in broad terms. But also in the classical world, you could be held responsible for something that you didn't intend to do because something had unluckily happened to you. Could you develop that idea, develop the idea of shame and luck? Yes. Yes. In the classical world, there's a wholehearted confrontation with the fact that

luck can permeate life, including permeate the ethical aspects of one's life. So in the story, for instance, of Oedipus, most famously perhaps, where there's a sort of prophecy that he's going to do the things he ends up doing. Edibus lives his life. He marries someone and he ends up in a fight and kills someone. And it turns out that the person he's married is his mother and the man that he's killed as his father, unbeknownst to him. Now, in that story, the Greek understanding of that story is, as it were,

not that there's nothing to be said about the moral status of Oedipus because these things he did were involuntary in a crucial sense. but rather his life remains ethically marked by these terrible things that he's done, even though he did them entirely through no fault of his own, for he did these actions under another description. He didn't think, I shall marry my mother and I shall kill my father. But unfortunately, it turned out that in fact that's what he'd done. And his, in a sense, it's shame that he's marking,

and the way that he's ethically marked by these terrible deeds that he's done through no fault of his own is marked by him, by dashing out his eyes. And it's crucial that it's his own eyes he dashes out for, as Stephen suggested, shame is a sentiment which above all is a feeling of wanting to hide from disapproving eyes. And in this case, Oedipus is hiding from his own eyes, so to speak. And that points as to something we might say later about how shame perhaps can take much more complex and internalized form than the way Stephen was setting it up at the beginning.

So we're talking about the Greek idea of destiny coming into this, aren't we? What you're destined to do becomes part of your moral life as well as part of your active life. Yes. I mean, the notion of fate or destiny, you can think of it as marking the possibility of being subject to shame and ethically scarred, so to be, by things which were entirely beyond your control. Things you did, yes, but things which you couldn't have known would either have the consequences. they turned out to have, or where in fact the acts they turned out to be, because the woman you married was in fact your mother and so on. And one role for the

notion, I think, of the fatedness of Oedipus' plight is that it marks the fact that it was entirely beyond his control. And yet in the culture and on say, he has to take responsibility for that. It is his fault, as we would say. Indeed. I think what...

So what's that saying? Well, I think that's the sense in which Greek ethical culture acknowledges that we can, as I say, be, our moral copy book, if you like, our ethical copybook gets blotted by things that are beyond our control. That's a very non-modern thought. We tend to think these days that things that one have done beyond one's control, for instance, because of unforeseeable consequences of one's actions or things one couldn't have possibly

known about one's actions, leave one unblameworthy. And I certainly share that intuition to some extent. And yet I also share the intuition that, of course, Edipus, though we may not exactly blame him, one wouldn't want to say that shame was out of place there. His life is ethically marked, and there's a tension between an ancient moral outlook

there and the modern moral outlook in terms of what sort of significance these events and actions whose significance is beyond one's control have on one's moral record, if you like. Does the idea of shame play a big part, this is a big question, sorry, I'm obviously sorry about this. Does it play a big part in classical literature?

Do you often come across examples of it, of the word, whatever the word is in Greek, being used? I think so. I think that's right. I think it's the crucial moral concept in the ancient world. Shame and fleeing the battlefield. I mean, the writers that I'm thinking of and that Bernard Williams in particular writes about in his book, Shame and Necessi, which is informing some of our conversation here, are really the poets and playwrights that come before.

the philosophers. And of course we've just got scraps and so on from that. But on the whole, I believe the orthodoxy is that shame is the central notion and it comes up plenty. But what there's disagreement about is how complex, how morally complex and how complex in terms of the agents deliberations, we should take their notion of shame to be. Some people have argued for an orthodoxy whereby shame is a very thin, it's a moral notion. And as Stephen suggested, that really the Greek notion of shame was just a matter of, if they can't see you do it, then it doesn't matter. That's somewhat infantilising, it seems to me, of Greek moral culture.

But Williams argued that shame itself can be internalised to take on the aspect somewhat of what Stephen was describing, rightly that guilt certainly has. Oliver Davies, broadly, when Christianity came in, one could say that the idea of shame was succeeded by the idea of original sin and sin and guilt coming out of original sin. Could you take us into that area and tell us if you see a substantial difference? Well, I think the relationship between early Christianity and the classical world is intriguing and complex

and, again, presents us with the same kinds of difficulties of really getting into the otherness of that situation. For instance, I think the concept of moral luck is very informative. A moral luck is taken from the realm of the individual in the specific society to become effectively a cosmic thing. it affects the whole of humanity. So the fall through Adam, as it were, is an instance of moral luck that affects all humankind thereafter, according to... Moral bad luck, indeed.

At the same time, I think because of the sort of universal aspect of it, the shame function probably doesn't work in the same way because you haven't got a local society for whom these are the norms. Although shame and honour is very extensively used later in the 11th century by Antsum, for instance, specifically gives an account of atonement based on a cosmic shame and honour.

But how did the idea that the idea of original sin came in, that we were fallen, the humankind was fallen, could never be good, could never be fully truthful. How did that inform the way that people looked at guilt? Well, I think what has to be careful here, I'm not sure how useful the notion of guilt is for that early period. Therefore, let's switch to something to issue, so original sin. What was that saying that gave a basis for conduct? Well, two things to be said.

One is that original sin comes on the back of incarnation to the Christian world. So it's a fundamental impairedness of the created order. It's a cosmic thing, which has at the same time been fixed by incarnation. So the issue for the individual and for communities as a whole is that they've been born into this state of sinfulness, for which very indirectly they're held to be responsible through the Adamic, principle, the principle of the whole of humanity having fallen in Adam, which they were probably pretty realist about. But at the same time, the way to appropriate the fix, as it were,

was through the sacraments and above all through penance and mortification. Overall, I think we don't see much instance of something that we'd want really to go, well, I mean, the Latin words that might translate guilt are not used much. There's no one's really interested in them. It's sin, death and life are kind of the ways. in which what we might call guilt play through in that pre-modern period. It is true only of the pre-modern period. But this is more to do with a society than with individuals. So when a plague comes, that society has been as sinned,

is given as the reason for the plague's arrival. I think it's more fundamental than that. I think the state of sinfulness causes divine wrath, which affects the whole of the created order. And when you have something like the plague affecting Europe in the 14th century, it's a sort of a reasonable logic of the human mind confronted by something awful it would prefer to avoid it comes out with reasons why it's happening

and if you don't have any technology of course those have to be reasons of divine wrath and you then try and circumvent that by particular acts of mortification which will allow you as it were to access the cosmic fix which is incarnation so it's not operating on the idea of personal culpability quite in the way we would associate with the notion of sin

because I don't think there's that scent of a moral subject, of a subject to human subjectivity who could feel guilt in that way. I'm just going to say it sounds almost as if in that sense there's a closer connection with shame than with guilt in the idea of original sinfulness. If you think back to that idea of nakedness as being one of the kind of primary context in which one has that feeling of shame, what you get in the notion of original sinfulness, the idea of the human condition as such as being in a certain sense,

burdensome and orienting you away from God, that's partly to do with the fact that you're an embodied being. It's part of your being part of creation and hence disordered. Yes, that's right. That's right. That's right. Our problem is because the cosmos itself is impaired. It's not just us, as it were. But as I read from what I've read about what you've written, Oliver Davis, you think that guilt became a more individualistic concern following the Protestant Reformation 490 years ago yesterday in 1517?

and that change matter, that brought us the idea of modern guilt. That began to bring us the idea of modern guilt. So things changed then. Well, yes and no. I think Luther... There's not much knowing your notes, but never mind. Luther seems to me to exhibit, is the first Christian anyway, to exhibit what we would begin to recognise as guilt,

which is a state of mind, it's an awareness of culpability, and he suffers from that. But I think the reason why that happens is simply that there are very fundamental, fundamental changes going on in the world at that time to do with cosmology, the biggest change of all is a redefinition of what it is to be material. That is specifically happening in that period. And instead of having a sort of an enchanted world in which God is in charge and we have to negotiate that authority to get by in our own lives,

suddenly matter is no longer something that can be transformed by the divine power in terms of new creation in terms of sacraments and so on. And what's actually happening is that matter is being known, and it becomes available to us in terms of measurable forces that we can imitate and reproduce. But another line is, I'm sorry to hammer away, is I'm going to hammer away, is that the individual comes much more to the centre of this.

It is not society, it is not destiny. Maybe this is blunt, maybe, please contradict, you know what you're talking about, but I'm asking questions. We start with shame in classical society and destiny. We have original sin and societyism. Now Luther said it's the individual. The individual has direct access to God,

how the individual operates in the world is of crucial importance. And that brings the idea of individual responsibility much closer to a modern sense of it. Is that right? That's right. But I don't think one should see that as being the cause of this move. I think the cause of the move is deeper in society at the time and is a redefinition of what human knowledge is of the world of which we are a part. Matter is being understood in a different way

and suddenly become something that's determinative of human life. Why do you resist individual? I keep saying individual. You keep saying matter. It's as if it's a different thing. I'm not quite clear about what's going on here. The moment matter is no longer something that's open to divine power and to be understood with respect to essentialism and hierarchies

and that sort of the moment it becomes something that is, the moment technological knowledge emerges, which is happening exactly in this period. And we know this because there's a great Reformation debate on the nature of the Eucharist. And one of the people uses modern materialist arguments to give the justification for the view that transformation cannot be happening.

So we glimpse the changes in physics and science that are happening which redefine the human agency as something giving us power over matter and the material, technological power, rather than having to rely upon a divine power working through matter in ways that are laid out in scripture. Got it. That's the other. Thank you very much. Miranda Fricker. So that takes the Enlightenment, obviously. Where we are attempting to base the idea of morality on reason,

which takes us to Kant. Can you tell us what he was trying to do in this area? Yes. Well, Kant's a fascinating figure and a key enlightenment figure. In fact, what Oliver was just saying leads me to present Kant in a way I haven't before, which is that you see in the Kantian scheme of things are sort of attempting to treat human agents as both something cosmic or, let me say, universal, since that's a more Kantian notion,

and as individuals at the same time. because Kant has this conception of us as rational beings. Perhaps there could be other rational beings, but human beings are certainly rational beings. And that's not a measure of how reasonable we are. It's just in our nature that we are capable of acting on reason, capable of acting on principle. But it's also a feature of us,

and this sort of echoes notions of not exactly original sin, but things that are, again, are universal in the human character. We're also capable of failing to act on reasons because the pushes and pulls of, other impulses and inclinations in us can sometimes win out against the forces of reason in us. So our will is permanently a site of potential conflict between reason on the one hand, which comes from us but is universal for all rational beings, and the contingent idiosyncratic pushes and pulls of our perhaps entirely personal inclinations

or perhaps inclinations that arise from more general interests, but they fall short of the kinds of pure reasons that Kant thinks morality is basic. on. Now, the project here is to show that morality is grounded in something which is absolutely binding on us. And the way he does that is to show that it comes from something within us that has this universal status and which we can't get rid of. So unlike any of the contingent interest we might have or the way we might have been trained as children to be kind to our friends and to be loyal to our parents and so on, which all of which are contingent. And incidentally, also the contingency of whether we happen to believe in God's word or not,

the authority of morality comes from something that we cannot get rid of, our rationality. Now, that means that the authority of morality and what is brought under our control, the control of the individual agent, yes, and therein lies our capacity for responsibility, but also something which is, if you like cosmic, or let me say universal. And so issues of luck, for instance, matters of the accidental consequences of one's actions, are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether some action I've done is an action of moral worth or not. The only thing that determines whether an action of mine has moral worth is the motive from which I, in fact, did it, and can cause that motive duty.

That's to say it's my doing it just because I see that it's right, and he has a long story about why that is a matter of pure reason alone. So I think what we see in Kant is a kind of reconciliation between the cosmic and the individual, if you like, through this universalism that he has about the reasons we can act on when we act morally, but also a kind of internalization so that the moral status of our actions is under our control in a way for the ancients it absolutely wasn't. And in that sense, morality becomes a kind of luck-free zone. So if you related that to the kind of basic structure of guilt that I was laying,

out a little bit earlier, it looks as if count is making two very significant shifts in that structure. On the one hand, he's saying that guilt is only ever appropriate when the action concerned was, as it were, under your voluntary control, and only insofar as it was under that control. So a notion of voluntariness gets built in to guilt at this point in a way which isn't absolutely required by the sort of basic structures I was laying out. You could argue that one or to feel guilty about things for which one is responsible, even if one didn't fully and clearly intend to perform them or intend all their consequences.

But the second thing is that the voice of conscience I was talking about, the kind of internal voice of self-criticism, is now being identified with something super individual, something super-historical, supercultural, the voice of reason, and in that sense in a certain way, the voice of God, I suppose, in Kant's thinking. and both of those additions or inflections of the concept of guilt in Kant's hands become very significant later on because they create objects of criticism that later philosophers and later thinkers are going to worry about.

They're going to worry about the extremity of Kant's volunteerism, the freedom of the will, and they're also going to worry about the sense in which we're starting to think about morality as some kind of atemporal deliverance rather than a human construct. Before I come back to you, Miranda, I know like that. I'd just like to ask all over, how does this come into, as it were, the Kant was a Christian,

but he didn't rely on God for this basic notion. Now, so what does that say to you about the, had the Christian notion run out? Well, I think it's an intriguing point in the evolution of the Christian notion, and I think in terms of the language I've used, what's happening in Kant is that the cosmological dimension of revealed morality, as it were,

become internalised, hence it's universal in its force. I mean, what that precipitates is a problematics of authority fundamentally, which was what leads into these debates in the immediate post-Canchian period, is there a universal reason? How would we recognise it? How does it perform and so forth? And by the time we get to the day, of course, that's all that's become very heavily questioned indeed, as we've assumed all this, I think, cosmological material. from that period into our own narratives and traditions and so forth.

And we have this fragmentation of moral discourse today with which the Kantian inheritance is very much at odds. And maybe it's worth saying that Kant has plenty of room in his way of thinking for a concept that's at least analogous to original sin because he has a notion of, as it were, the human being as being oriented in a more than merely accidental way to failures of the moral law. And that brings into the picture again. it seems to me, again, a perfectly natural extension of the notion of guilt, but it is an extension,

maybe the third one that we've been talking about, which is to go beyond, as it were, noting that we do tend to do wrong. In other words, we can fail to live up to the moral law in Kant's terms, but as it were, one might be struck by the sheer systematic, pervasive extent to which we do wrong, and begin to wonder whether really it's just an accident that it could have gone either way, and begin to wonder whether there's something rather more kind of deeply rooted in our nature that tends us towards wrongdoing rather than doing right. And the moment you make that step from, as it were, just individual acts of wrongdoing for which you could in principle imagine a complete atonement or reparation,

and then the slate is clean, you move from that thought to the thought that, as it were, beyond any individual acts of wrongdoing, there's something wrong in the agent that leads to this persistent pattern of behaviour. Can I turn to, before we move on, Miranda, again launching a great figure on you, David Hume, as a contemporary of Kant, contemporary of Kant, argued that feelings like guilt and morals in general evolved because they were socially useful. They were part of a social construct. Can you develop that? Yes, yes. Hume was writing a little bit earlier than Kant, but they overlapped, and his view couldn't be more different. he was a very naturalistic sort of humanistic thinker and I think a very sympathetic thinker in lots of ways perhaps an optimist about human nature in some ways

he thought that actually that most of the virtues were what he called natural virtues, that there are lots of character traits that human beings just tend on the whole to admire and he has great long lists of them and various different categories and they include solicitude to ones children, social virtues like wit and so on

but of course the more extended ones of benevolent, and honesty and so on. And he then thinks there are also some artificial virtues, which come about not just through any sort of natural admiring, but through, as you say, social utility, where something has become a virtue because it's responding to a certain sort of institutional or social need. So, for instance, he thinks of what he calls justice,

by which he in fact means broadly respecting other people's properties, so not stealing the fruits of other people's labour and so on. evolves not quite naturally, but out of a very, very basic need to coordinate social resources and from the fact that it's in everyone's interests that we should not smash and grab, but we should, as it were, respect certain boundaries, then everyone will be better off. But what's crucial, I think, in Hume, and what's fascinating about him when we read him through this lens of looking at the role of moral psychology is that actually he's really talking about what we now might call a kind of social moral psychology, because for him,

All of morality really gets off the ground by the fact that I care about your respect for me, you care about my respect for you. And for that reason, we like to avoid blame. We like to avoid the disapproval of other people whom we respect. We want to maintain ourselves as a respected party in their eyes. Now, that mechanism creates a certain sort of stability in our moral motivations and a certain publicity about what we do. And it also, I think, makes for a fairly full-blown notion of conscience,

whereby the explanation for why we have the moral motives we do is given from a distance in relation to what human beings naturally admire or what's socially useful. But those explanations do not feature in the individual's head as their motivation for acting. So Hume's story is that in the beginning, human beings found that they'd all be better off if they respected each other's property. But he's not saying that when we're... we look at the virtue of justice now and we look at what motivates people to respect other people's

property, we'll find that they've got self-interest in mind, not at all. A genuine moral motive has pulled itself up by its own bootstraps, if you like, and by this mechanism of caring about others' respect for oneself and wanting to avoid blame, into a full-blown moral motive. And so the story he tells about how morality began is a bit like sort of how the whale became is different from what's in our minds in terms of our actual motives for action. So it preserves, moral motivation, but explains how morality gets off the ground by reference the notions of blame and wanting to avoid blame in particular. A lot of people listening to this programme are not, well, I don't know how many, I mean, some

people listen to this programme will think that we'll see guilt in terms of its later development, in the terms of the psychological dimension and even the pathological state of mind. Sigmund Freud's interpretation, explanation of guilt, which in some people's lives, the guilt dominates their minds, really. Can you develop that, Steve? Why Freud got there and why then it reached out to quite a lot of people and seemed to affect, afflict them so much? Well, in certain ways, it's a development of the line of thought

that Miranda was attributing to Hume. There's a natural question which arises when you recognise that there is a kind of internalisation of moral values. particularly if that takes the form of a voice of conscience, which is how does it get there? I mean, Kant's story is that it's always already there. There's no story to be told, and that's one of the ways in which Kant might look as if he's lacking a critical element that someone like Hume can provide. And what Freud does is tell a particular story about the construction of that interior voice. What he says, in effect, is that when we hear this inner voice telling us that we're doing something wrong and we mustn't do it,

what we're doing is in effect hearing the internalization of an external figure of authority. In the case of the primary structure of society being the family, Freud thought of that as the voice of the father, particularly, a kind of paternal authority figure. And part of, as it were, growing up in the context of a family and in society is internalizing this initially external sense of what's right, what's wrong, what must be done and what mustn't be done. So you get a picture within the individual psyche of a kind of complex structure in which a super ego is the source of the repository of this voice of authority.

And that immediately raises a question for Freud about what the balance is going to be, the interior balance between this voice of authority and the various other aspects of the psyche that are as it were naturally inclined not to do what this voice of authority wants to do. Freud is very clear that a certain kind of interior voice is absolutely required if social life is going to be possible. You can't have a civilisation, you can't be a properly functioning member of that civilization unless you're capable of criticising yourself, restraining yourself, and living up to certain necessary norms of reciprocity. But precisely because there's no sort of pre-given blueprint, it's perfectly possible for that internalization of the authority voice. to become pathological, so that what happens is not so much a process of self-criticism, necessary in elimitable self-criticism, but one of self-punishment, so that it becomes, as it were, almost a masochistic structure.

On the one hand, it taps into a certain kind of aspect of human nature, which, as it were, enjoys cruelty. But because, as it were, it's internalized, the cruelty is directed at oneself, and that can be extremely crippling. Can I turn here to you, Oliver Davis. Nietzsche launched an immense attack on Christian ethics. He said slave morality, a libel on humanity. But linking the idea, going on from what Stephen Mulhall has said,

that guilt can be driven in so deep that it can be crippling. And do you think that what Floyd was talking about was still associated with and is more relevant to people who have had a Christian background, a Christian upbringing? Do you think that Christianity is responsible? I think there must be a very important sense in which it is, but I think I'd probably want to define it fairly exactly in the sense that what we inherit. I mean, religions are very conservative things,

so we inherit within religion's thought forms that we would never have come up with ourselves. They belong to an earlier age. And one of those in Christianity is culpability beyond the actions of the individual, which is fairly foundational to the system. This is the cosmic aspect, as it were, original sin, I spoke about briefly earlier. Well, I think the moment you move into a society where social regulation is very important and where there is a sense of human empowerment, which doesn't really know its limits, and the shadow side of that is guilt.

I mean, the awful responsibility of ourselves as human beings with our ability to change the world through technology, but it seems to be an unlimited ability, or until recently has seemed unlimited, and then there's the problem of the moral concerns about are we in control of ourselves and so forth. forth. What I think you get is a transfer from the emphasis upon guilt as not actually wholly dependent upon the actions of individuals who have exercised moral responsibility in the world, linking in with this sense of ourselves as a species who are following a trajectory of control of the material order around us through technology. All that serves to disassociate guilt from the healthy concerns.

of which Stephen spoke of, well, I've done something wrong. I really must try and fix it, sort of an innate moral disposition, as it were. Do you think, what's your view of Nietzsche's attack on Christianity and the slave, was it, the slave morality, Miranda? Well, my view, shall I explain it a little? Yes, yes.

Well, let me say first what, what I take Nietzsche to be up to, particularly in his work, the genealogy of morals, he's engaged in telling a sort of story, actually rather like the Humian story, is a sort of semi-made-up piece of history about how a certain institution began. But in Nietzsche's case, he's telling a story which is wildly extravagant, historically speaking, but which draws on contrast between ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian sensibility. And roughly speaking, his story is designed to show that at the root, of this thing called morality by which he really has in mind

a certain Judeo-Christian tradition in moral thinking is a really mean-spirited feeling, the feeling he calls Rassantiment, which is the German word preserves the French form, but in the German, unlike the French word Ronsantémer and the English word resentment, the German notion of Rassantiment retains explicitly the kind of bearing of grudges aspect of resentment,

and it's that that he characterises at the root of Christian moral sentiment, And he tells this story contrasting the noble ancients who strode around asserting themselves. And if they did something wrong, they wouldn't have a kind of degenerate moral compunction that comes from Christian thought and the notion of sin and so on. Rather, they might think they were foolish or so on. But later then there's this moment in something called history, so slightly dubious historical credentials, of the slave revolt in morality,

where, according to Nietzsche, we have more or less the invention of this thing called Christian morality by the underdog. It's the worm turning. I think he would have rather liked that phrase. And he thinks that the week, the week, yeah, the weak decide to turn the tables on the powerful, the nobles by inventing a morality according to which the meek shall inherit the earth and so on. But Nietzsche, though he is thoroughly contemptuous of this style of moralising,

he also admires it, as he's always ambivalent about these things. He admires it because he diagnoses it as, in a certain way, the most marvellously sublimated, concealed ruse of a will to power, which he thinks is the most basic drive in human beings anyway, because, as it were, these weaklings succeed in turning the tables on the powerful. can't help but admire that too. So he's thoroughly contemptuous to the morality they produce, but he, as it were, admires the worm succeeding and turning.

Now, you ask me what I think about it. It's wildly extravagant, but also extraordinarily insightful, and it's this mixture of vitriol and wit, which is always a very powerful combination. But I think what Nietzsche is getting out, and of course there are various different interpretations as to whether he's simply arguing for a kind of immoralism or whether really what he's getting at is a specifically

moralistic style of moral thinking, which he wants to help us get rid of. And his vitriolic text is designed not to persuade through argumentation, but to smash our allegiance to this by revealing the mean-spirited origin of it all, namely Rissantimo. Stephen, can I ask you something,

then you can add it on to what you're going to say anyway. I just wanted, as we're coming towards the end of the programme, I ask you whether you think that the idea of shame, which Bernard Williams in shame and necessity said it could be much deeper than it had been originally. And Gild are inateness that we do feel this not only as a rational, universal notion of reason, which Miranda talked about Kant,

but as something that will always and has always tugged away. Say what you want them and I'd like you to answer my question. I think the idea of us being responsible for our actions and therefore acquiring a sense of responsibility for our actions, That is as close to innate as anything could be because it's essential to the idea of being an agent, actually acting in the world at all. But do you think the great heroes that Nietzsche worship, let's get the Genghis Khans of this world or even the Alexanders, in what way did they think they were responsible, i.e. guilty for their actions. They were victors, they saw themselves as heroic victors. That's right, but as it were, they have to be responsible for their victories before they can take pride in those victories.

Taking pride, yes, but not taking guilt that lots were slaughtered and that sort of stuff. No, but if you, well, the difficulty here is whether you really want to say in the end there is a very clear and sharp distinction between shame and guilt at all. I mean, part of Nietzsche's critique, for example, just to go back to that thread of the discussion, is designed to suggest that we should take the notion of a shame culture much more seriously, that it has a great deal more substantial moral content, a great deal more to be said for it than Christianity has tended to allow us to say. That's part of his critique of slave morality. and part of that depends upon the thought that most of what we need in order to have a properly functioning moral culture could be got from something like a version of shame culture as we see in the ancient Greeks.

But my worry about this, and it's a worry that is sharpened by one of the most famous aspects of Nietzsche's thinking, is that Nietzsche seems to combine his condemnation of slave morality with a certain sort of, however ambivalent, contempt for the weak. part of what he centrally dislikes about slave morality is the fact that overtly it expresses compassion for the week and a central aspect of the concept of guilt, just to go right back to the beginning of the discussion,

is the way in which it focuses our attention on the victim. And however complex one makes the notion of shame, it seems to be much harder to get the same unvarying, absolute focus on the victim of the wrongdoing in that kind of context. That seems to be a central moral insight that the Christianised versions of guilt retain and that Nietzsche risks losing. Oliver Davis, almost finally,

do you think that the church used guilt to retain power on those in its congregation? Oh, I'm quite sure it did so. It did and does? I think, well, I think that's a common habit of power in human societies. I think it does so far less and very interested at the exposition there of Nietzsche. I confess I read Nietzsche as a very, very radical Christian

theologian. And I do so because of the way he wonderfully opposes the figure of Jesus Christ himself precisely to the constructs of Judeo-Christian morality. And he invests the figure of Jesus directly with what he calls unshort, I mean, innocence and joy, which for him are the supreme life-affirming motifs. And I think that is the, that gets back to what the original Christian insights were into the nature of guilt. I mean, guilt is responsibility that focuses upon the suffering of the other, and within that awareness, is the fruit of a possible reformed character and reformed human life.

I think Nisha sees that, it seems to be. I think, sorry, Miranda, I think we've run out of time. I'm very sorry, but thank you very much to Miranda Fricker, Oliver Davis and Stephen Mulhall. Next week we'll be talking about someone claimed to be the greatest philosopher in the Islamic tradition, the 11th century Persian, Avicenna. Thank you for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio four.