Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011
GUILT: FACING THE PROBLEM OF ETHICAL SOLIPSISM Sami Pihlström
ABSTRACT: This article deals with the constitutive role played by the emotion of guilt, or the capacity of experiencing such emotions, in our moral life. The deeply personal nature of moral guilt (or remorse) leads to the problem of ethical solipsism: it seems that guilt can in the end concern only me, not anyone else, in a morally profound sense. Echoing Dostoevsky, the truly ethical thinker ought to acknowledge that everyone is guilty in front of the entire mankind, “and I more than anyone else”. This problematic feature of our moral perspectives on the world is examined through comments on a number of authors, including Kant, Wittgenstein, Levinas, Gaita, and Todorov. While we do need to avoid solipsism, there is a “truth” hidden in it: morality is something that we are individually and personally deeply responsible for.
1 Immanuel Kant remarks, in a famous footnote to the First Critique, that [t]he real morality of actions (their merit and guilt), even that of our own conduct […] remains entirely hidden from us. Our imputations can be referred only to the empirical character. How much of it is to be ascribed to mere nature […] no one can discover, and hence no one can judge it with complete justice.1
Although commentators have drawn attention to this important passage,2 its full significance still deserves substantial consideration. So does the significance of another famous Kantian remark, according to which, for each one of us, “the depths of his own heart (the subjective first grounds of his maxims) are to him inscrutable”.3 1
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A551/B579n (original: 1st ed. 1781, 2nd ed. 1787). I have also used the German original, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 3rd ed., 1990). 2 See, e.g., A.W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2003; paperback ed. 2005), p. 111. 3 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, Akademie-Ausgabe (AA), 6:51. For illuminating discussions of this inscrutability – in particular, the inscrutability of evil – see Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); and Robert B. Louden, “Evil www.cosmosandhistory.org
114