Publisher Description

Do people ever feel guilty about the harmful actions their group has committed against another group, even if they personally were not responsible for, or played no role in, the harm done? The research in this volume reveals these experiences of collective guilt as well as provides answers to "when" and "why." Moreover, the consequences of collective guilt for reconciliation between groups in conflict are examined in diverse nations. How collective guilt may be garnered for peaceful purposes and the resolution of social conflict is critically considered in this timely book.

From the author of the international bestselling novel The Reader comes a compelling collection of six essays exploring the long shadow of past guilt, not just a German experience, but a global one as well.?I know of no other writer who engages with the struggle between the individual and the political world as deftly - and poetically - as Bernhard Schlink.' - The Herald Bernhard Schlink explores the phenomenon of guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. He considers how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behaviour, how to.

Bloggers confessing that they waste food, non-governmental organizations naming corporations selling unsustainably harvested seafood, and veterans apologizing to Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for environmental and social devastation caused by the United States government all signal the existence of action-oriented guilt and identity-oriented shame about participation in environmental degradation. Environmental Guilt and Shame demonstrates that these moral emotions are common among environmentally friendly segments of the United States but have received little attention from environmental ethicists though they can catalyze or hinder environmental action. Concern about environmental guilt and shame among “everyday environmentalists” reveals the practical, emotional, ethical, and existential issues raised by environmental guilt and shame and ethical insights about guilt, shame, responsibility, agency, and identity. A typology of guilt and shame enables the development and evaluation of these ethical insights. Environmental Guilt and Shame makes three major claims: first, individuals and collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including collectives, should feel guilt and/or shame for environmental degradation if they hold environmental values and think that their actions shape and reveal their identity. Third, a number of conditions are required to conceptually, existentially, and practically deal with guilt and shame's effects on agents. These conditions can be developed and maintained through rituals. Existing rituals need more development to fully deal with individual and collective guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.

Drawing on the non-individualistic perspective of social representations theory, this book presents an alternative view of social identity by articulating the inseparable dynamic relationships that exist between content, process and power relations when social identity is embedded in social knowledge.

The title of our collection is owed to Hannah Arendt herself. Writing to Karl Jaspers on August 6, 1955, she spoke of how she had only just begun to really love the world and expressed her desire to testify to that love in the title of what came to be published as The Human Condition: "Out of gratitude, I want to call my book about political theories Arnor Mundi. "t In retrospect, it was fitting that amor mundi, love of the world, never became the title of only one of Arendt's studies, for it is the theme which permeates all of her thought. The purpose of this volume's a- ticles is to pay a critical tribute to this theme by exploring its meaning, the cultural and intellectual sources from which it derives, as well as its resources for conte- porary thought and action. We are privileged to include as part of the collection two previously unpu- lished lectures by Arendt as well as a rarely noticed essay which she wrote in 1964. Taken together, they engrave the central features of her vision of amor mundi. Arendt presented "Labor, Work, Action" on November 10, 1964, at a conference "Christianity and Economic Man:Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society," which 2 was held at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.

Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts is a philosophical investigation of the complex moral landscape we find in collective scenarios such as genocide, global warming, organizational negligence, and oppressive social practices. Tracy Isaacs argues that an accurate understanding of moral responsibility in collective contexts requires attention to responsibility at the individual and collective levels.

Environmental rhetorics have expanded awareness of mass extinction, climate change, and pervasive pollution, yet failed to generate collective action that adequately addresses such pressing matters. This book contends that the anemic response to ecological upheaval is due, in part, to an inability to navigate novel forms of environmental guilt. Combining affect theory with rhetorical analysis to examine a range of texts and media, Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics positions guilt as a keystone emotion for contemporary environmental communication, and explores how it is provoked, perpetuated, and framed through everyday discourse. In revealing the need for emotional literacies that productively engage our complicity in global ecological harm, the book looks to a future where guilt—and its symbiotic relationships with anger, shame, and grief—is shaped in tune with the ecologies that sustain us.

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama's Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass's Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

Shortly after the Nazi government fell, a philosophy professor at Heidelberg University lectured on a subject that burned the consciousness and conscience of thinking Germans. “Are the German people guilty?” These lectures by Karl Jaspers, an outstanding European philosopher, attracted wide attention among German intellectuals and students; they seemed to offer a path to sanity and morality in a disordered world. Jaspers, a life-long liberal, attempted in this book to discuss rationally a problem that had thus far evoked only heat and fury. Neither an evasive apology nor a wholesome condemnation, his book distinguished between types of guilt and degrees of responsibility. He listed four categories of guilt: criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgment among one’s friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities). Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) took his degree in medicine but soon became interested in psychiatry. He is the author of a standard work of psychopathology, as well as special studies on Strindberg, Van Gogh and Nietsche. After World War I he became Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, where he achieved fame as a brilliant teacher and an early exponent of existentialism. He was among the first to acquaint German readers with the works of Kierkegaard. Jaspers had to resign from his post in 1935. From the total isolation into which the Hitler regime forced him, Jaspers returned in 1945 to a position of central intellectual leadership of the younger liberal elements of Germany. In his first lecture in 1945, he forcefully reminded his audience of the fate of the German Jews. Jaspers’s unblemished record as an anti-Nazi, as well as his sentient mind, have made him a rallying point center for those of his compatriots who wish to reconstruct a free and democratic Germany.