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6 - Guilt Beyond Philosophy’s Limit

from Introduction to Part III: Synthesis and Atonement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2025

Alan Norrie
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

This chapter pursues the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris in their opposition to orthodox political and normative views. It follows Williams’s view that modern liberal society involves a ‘peculiar’ political morality of voluntary responsibility and his underdeveloped line that a naturalistic understanding of ‘psychological materials’ like anger, fear and love is needed. It notes his recognition of the psychological role of the internalised other in human guilt. It pursues Morris’s philosophical account of guilt as involving psychological feeling: ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). It notes the importance of ‘atonement’ and identification with another in his account, the former involving being ‘at one with’ oneself. It identifies the reaction he notes to deep-seated psychological problems and cycles of violence as ‘quantum guilt’. Williams and Morris push philosophy beyond itself to the brink of a new psychological understanding. Following Jonathan Lear, the moral psychology they initiate renders psychoanalysis part of a broader conception of philosophy in line with its original Greek self-understanding. It gives the ancient Socratic principle that we should know ourselves a modern post-Freudian twist.

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Chapter
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Rethinking Criminal Justice
Punishment, Abolition and Moral Psychology
, pp. 129 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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