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JackM comments on Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants - Less Wrong
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Guilt is not merely the acknowledgement of a mistake, is it? Isn't it self-punishment?
It's self-punishment that seems paradoxical to me. Punishment only makes sense if the punisher and punished are different people.
Another way to look at is that It takes a good judge to accurately judge someone as bad. So which are you when you're feeling guilty, judge or judged?
The OP disagrees with you; it points out that self-punishment can be a good idea if you're doing it in front of other people, because it signals that you have genuine regret over your actions, and makes it seem less likely that you'll do something bad again because you're precommitted to punish yourself again if you did.
I agree it may make sense to feign it. But to do it sincerely, to actually inflict the emotional pain of guilt on yourself, and not just feign it, seems irrationally paradoxical. When I isolate for consideration just the interior subjective phenomenon of feeling guilty, I can't see how to escape the paradox that believing you're bad makes you good and vice versa.
If everyone feigned it, then nobody would believe anybody else's feigning. It's a typical game theory pattern; cheating the system is possible, but if everyone or nearly everyone cheated then there wouldn't be a system.
Plus, there are forms of self-punishment that are hard to fake, and these accordingly seem to get more respect.
So are you imagining a kind of rapid back-and-forth state change here? I don't think that necessarily has to be the case, because what we think of as somebody's moral state has to be a sum, taking into account all the things they've done and are doing and adding them together.
Being guilty over having done something bad is itself a moral good, no doubt, but it doesn't replace the bad moral state that was arrived at by doing the bad thing, it's just added to it.
Thanks very much for your help on this DSimon. I really appreciate it.
You say "Being guilty over having done something bad is itself a moral good, no doubt, but it doesn't replace the bad moral state that was arrived at by doing the bad thing, it's just added to it."
Are you saying that one can be in two moral states in the same moment? How can that be?
Sort of. I'm saying that one's moral state, as we typically think about it, can be modeled (in a simplified way) as a sum of the god and bad things you've done.
So let's say you do a bad thing, pushing you from morally neutral at 0 down to -6. But, you feel correctly guilty about it, which is +2 good. Now your moral state is at -4, which is better but still not up in the positive numbers that we'd call "overall morally good".
This is also why there isn't any flip-flopping back and forth: guilt in this model is about a particular historical action, not your current overall moral state.
I can also approach this from the other side and show that a simple good/bad binary doesn't work as a model of our sense of moral evaluation. If you imagine the various combinations in the table I made earlier, it feels right (at least to me) to be able to sort them from most to least moral like so:
If that (or any other single ordering) also feels about right to you, then it follows that you'd need more than just one bit of input (i.e. whether or not a person feels guilty) to morally evaluate a person; with only one bit of information, you can only sort people into two groups, you couldn't come up with an ordering for four people like above. Therefore your earlier statement that "believing you're bad makes you good and vice versa" can't be correct, because it only takes as input that one bit of information.
Isn't this true all the time? Say you took money from your sister's wallet and lied to her about it...that's morally wrong...but you donated the money to charity, which is morally right.