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?
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.
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?
Maybe that's the point. Maybe the way we evolved to demonstrate group loyalty and therefore, trustworthiness, was to forfeit our rationality as a rite of initiation. We agree to be irrationally loyal.
If so, can't we dispense with that by now?
I like Drescher's derivation of a logical foundation for the Golden Rule even when it benefits no one to abide by it. It's essentially the same logic that leads one to forgo the $1,000 in Newcomb's problem.
If I know you're committed to rationality, then I can trust you to abide by the golden rule.
I'll be there.
Jack M.