Animals Who Think and Love: Law, Identification and the Moral Psychology of Guilt

Abstract

How does the human animal who thinks and loves relate to criminal justice? This essay takes up the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris. Against modern liberal society's 'peculiar' legal morality of voluntary responsibility (Williams), it pursues Morris's ethical account of guilt as involving atonement and identification with others. Thinking of guilt in line with Morris, and linking it with the idea of moral psychology, takes the essay to Freud's metapsychology in Civilization and Its Discontents. Two conflicting routes to guilt are noted in Freud, one involving internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts, the other loving identification with others in the process of selfformation. This second route is developed through the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of selfformation makes loving identification with others the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement. Following Lear, the moral psychology of guilt developed on these lines renders psychoanalysis part of a broadly understood philosophical project following Aristotelian and Socratic principles. Underlying Morris's account of guilt is the possibility of 'prospective identification', understood as the moral and psychological ground of guilt and reconciliation. This is the rational core of criminal justice, which maintains an uneasy relationship with law's 'peculiar' morality.

Identification, atonement and the moral psychology of violation: on Patricio Guzman’sNostalgia for the Light

“…What underlies our moral choices is a moral psychology that binds the levels of the moral and the psychological and helps us understand what is truly at stake for human beings who deal with moral emotions. We should consider the realm of moral psychology as one which brings together the moral and psychological aspects of human life, and indeed including their physiological elements too, to understand the kind of being, the human animal (Norrie, 2018b), that expresses its embodied emotional reactions in ethical terms, and that therefore finds moral decisions psychologically necessary. Embedded here is a complex, emergent, relationship between different layers of being: the physical, the psychic, the emotional, the moral.…”

“…Like forgiveness, another example here would be guilt, which is a prime candidate for treatment as a form of moral psychology. Guilt engages ethical, psychic, and somatic dimensions of human being (Norrie, 2018b) -think of famous figures in literature such as the Macbeths, or Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. 'Feeling guilty,' says Herbert Morris, 'we feel bad … rotten, depleted of energy, and tense' (Morris, 1976, 99).…”

“…Returning to the linking of the ethical and the psychological, with both Williams and Morris there is an underlying push in their naturalism towards a psychological understanding that is related to themes in psychoanalytic metapsychology. In my own work (Norrie, 2018b), I have tried to move in that direction by following Jonathan Lear (1990, 1998, 2017), and Hans Loewald (1980. They develop Freudian metapsychology by considering the implications of the later Freud's structural account of ego formation from the earliest state of primary self-love or narcissism.…”

“…In recent work, I have explored Freud's account of guilt in his Civilization and Its Discontents (1985) (Norrie, 2018b(Norrie, , 2020. I argue that one can identify two accounts of guilt in Freud, one that can be described as 'Kantian', persecutory and repressive, the other as 'Aristotelian', restorative and reconciliatory.…”

“…The first is that they have taken on the ego ideals given to them through the process of identification with parent figures, so that any falling short of those ideals is experienced by the individual as a tension between what they have done and what they think they ought to do (Norrie, 2018b). That tension, or anxiety, is what we call guilt, and it emerges from identification with parent figures, but also from others in the course of a life.…”