The primitive and mature kinds of guilt in Freud identified in Chapter 7 are revisited and related to the two parallel kinds of guilt Melanie Klein finds in infant life in the paranoid–schizoid and depressive states. In both accounts, guilt is seen to be either primitive and persecutory or mature and restorative, and these are foundational for adult life. I take the two accounts so consolidated to represent different ways of organising guilt in modern social, political and legal practices. I argue that legal guilt as understood in existing retributive theory is essentially primitive and punitive and consider the counter-productive impact of a persecutory penal regime on the immature and the maturing psyche. I argue that an alternative approach based on a mature retributivism is possible. I consider Jeffrie Murphy’s view that there is no logical reason why retributive theory should lead to persecutory practice and argue that there is an historical logic behind it. A mature retributivism based in moral psychology on a person taking responsibility leads to a conception of guilt as reparative and reconciliatory. This constitutes an ethically real basis for critique of law’s existing institutional practice, in what I call an ERIC critique.

The ethics of climate change are deeply problematical – a “perfect moral storm.” This ethical terrain is characterized by a dispersal of cause and effect, a fragmentation of agency, and an institutional inadequacy. However, the greatest moral pitfall derives from the severely lagged nature of climate change, leading to dire issues of intergenerational equity. Common notions of justice in the climate arena include distributive, reparative, and procedural elements. The precautionary principle is also perceived to be a salient consideration. Ethical challenges particular to climate interventions start with the "moral hazard" or mitigation deterrence reservation as well as the risk of hubris in seeking to engineer the earth system. Some argue that geoengineering shirks responsibility for our emissions and saddles the future with a burdensome climate debt. An alternative though not universally accepted view is that since climate change is likely to have asymmetrical adverse impact on the poor, geoengineering would convey to them asymmetrical benefits. Though ethics would seem to demand not merely societal climate sacrifices but personal ones as well, few among my Yale students or Harvard colleagues have yet to undertake them. I can’t claim to be any holier than they, which is itself a dilemma.

The chapter works, step by step, through the problem of reading as Joyce constructs it, using Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to explicate the structure of the problem and where its solutions lead. In the literature, Kleinian and Lacanian theory are almost never brought into contact; this chapter offers a new comparison of the theories, both for readers of each theory and for readers of Joyce. In addition, the chapter furthers, and intensifies, the analysis of ‘The Dead’ as an invitation to paranoid reading, and it traces the ways Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ invites the reader into a position of paranoid complicity.