Concept

Guilt (emotion)

Overview

Guilt is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation. Feeling guilty is unpleasant for people while they experience it, but it can prompt positive, pro-social efforts to restore relationships and make amends.

When understood as a collection of basic emotions, guilt is composed of self-directed anger, sadness for the victim, anxiety, and fear (e.g., of damaging or losing relationships with individuals and society). Guilt is closely related to the concepts of remorse, regret, and shame.

Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Guilt (emotion) is discussed.

We ought some day to be able at last to understand these things; as yet we cannot. Here perhaps is the place to remark that at bottom the sense of guilt is nothing but a topographical variety of anxiety, and that in its later phases it coincides completely with the dread of the super-ego.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
It is essentially in hysteria and in states of a hysterical type that this condition is found. The mechanism by which the sense of guilt is kept unconscious is easy to discover. The hysterical type of ego defends itself from the painful perception which the criticisms of its super-ego threaten to produce in it by the same means that it uses to defend itself from an unendurable…
Sigmund Freud, The ego and the id
names the idea; states what it is
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
And this being so, brethren, what perversity must it be to maintain that he who is guilty by reason of his own offences should make another free from guilt; whereas our Lord Jesus Christ says, 'A good tree bringeth forth good fruit: do men gather grapes of thorns?' And again, 'A good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good things; and an evil man, out of the evil treasure, bringeth forth evil…
of Hippo Augustine, Writings in Connection with the Donatist Controversy
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Hence they push their doctrine, in practice, to its merciless conclusion, that there is always a secret guilt in isolation. Poor Schopenhauer had this secret guilt too in his heart, the guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow-men; and he was so unhappy as to have learnt from Goethe that he must defend his philosophy at all costs from the neglect of his contemporaries, to save its very existence: for…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
states what it is; names the idea
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
16. The same is to be said of a family or a race; and, moreover, the punishment for inherited guilt may often have a curative, or even a preventive efficacy, so that children or posterity may refrain from guilt because the ancestral penalty falls upon them before they become guilty. 17. The immortality of the soul asserted, on the ground that God would not have deemed a race doomed to perish after a brief earthly…
Plutarch, Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice
names the idea; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Guilt (emotion)

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Guilt (emotion)

Related ideas

Place in the tradition