The Moral Legacy of Communal Wrongs: Ethnic Identity Groups and Intergenerational Moral Sentiment

Abstract

Many individuals experience feelings of collective guilt or shame for the blameworthy historical acts of the nations or ethnic groups to which they belong. I reject the idea that collective moral sentiment rests on inherited moral responsibility. I suggest that the possibilities for individual action inherent in membership in ethnic identity groups can be a source of special moral duties. I argue that collective guilt and shame are moral emotions that individuals experience in response to complex assessments of their groups' histories and of their own practical responses to those histories. The approach I take to analyzing the concept of an ethnic identity group makes use of tools developed by Max Weber. Weber's conceptual work on social groups and related phenomena has been strongly criticized in a widely discussed book by Margaret Gilbert. I show that Gilbert's arguments fail to discredit Weberian analyses of social groups and their properties.Communal wrongs are moral wrongs that are committed by one collectivity against another. Many individuals experience feelings of collective guilt or shame for the blameworthy historical acts of the nations or ethnic groups to which they belong (Branscombe and Doosje 2004;Barkan 2000). Not infrequently-perhaps typically-these moral emotions seem to fit the circumstances in which they are experienced. When members of a historical perpetrator group feel no moral discomfort connected to the serious wrongs of their group-particularly when those wrongs have not yet been rightedwe might see personal moral failure in their disengagement from the group's history. A theory of intergenerational moral sentiment is an attempt to explain why grave moral wrongs committed by a collectivity at one point in time leave a mark on the moral lives of members of that collectivity who live at a later time and who can have had no part in the commission of those wrongs. It is a normative theory of the phenomena of intergenerational feelings of moral guilt and shame.Most theories of intergenerational sentiment rest on the idea that subsequent generations of perpetrator groups are morally compromised r

Children of societies transitioning to peace: an instance for moral recognition

“…Grave moral wrongs committed in the name of a collectivity leave a mark on the moral lives of the members of that collectivity (Kovach 2010) as well as in those of the persecuted. On both sides there are children, and the statement holds true also for communities where groups of the same society reciprocally wronged each other.…”