A while back, I ran the following set of Twitter polls on collective guilt. Here’s what people think at the most abstract level.
How often are people collectively guilty?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 24, 2020
Overall, I was surprised by how few people said, “Never.” I expected more like 70-80%, especially when phrased so baldly. What really puzzled me, though, were people’s views about the sources of collective guilt. People are about as willing to accept national collective guilt as they are to accept collective guilt itself.
How often are people collectively guilty for the actions of their nation?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 24, 2020
They’re slightly more skeptical of familial guilt, even though people have astronomically more influence over their families than over their nations.
How often are people collectively guilty for the actions of their families?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 24, 2020
They’re moderately more skeptical about religious guilt, even though people can exit their religion of birth far more easily than their countries of birth.
How often are people collectively guilty for the actions of their co-religionists?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 24, 2020
Almost no one accepts ethnic guilt. But people’s control over their co-ethnics, like their control over their co-nationals, is near-zero.
How often are people collectively guilty for the actions of their ethnicity?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 24, 2020
Gender guilt is the least-accepted of all.
How often are people collectively guilty for the actions of their gender?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 24, 2020
What’s so puzzling? The two most-accepted forms of collective guilt – national and familial – bear almost no resemblance to each other. Given immigration restrictions, most people are stuck with their nationality of birth. Given the size of most countries, most people have negligible influence over what their country does. Yet this is the form of collective guilt my respondents most endorse. In contrast, you can deFOO your family; and even if you don’t, families are small enough for individual action to matter a lot.
At the other extreme, almost everyone rejects ethnic and gender guilt. On the surface, this makes sense: Even today, almost everyone is cisgendered, and aren’t you stuck with your ethnicity? Indeed, plenty of people do abandon their ethnicity; demographers call this “ethnic attrition.”
I’m tempted to say that people are doing reverse moral engineering. Conventional foreign policy relies heavily on collective guilt; leaders do evil, so you bomb the civilians they tyrannize. But that hardly explains why respondents are so soft on familial collective guilt. So what’s really going on?
READER COMMENTS
Garrett
Sep 23 2020 at 1:25pm
I’ll take a swing: in our increasingly nationalistic world, your political faction is your religion and your family. That is how people define themselves and their enemies, so the guilt of other nations and political parties is how they judge the moral standing of their members.
Tyler Wells
Sep 23 2020 at 1:45pm
It is political and people are thinking of BLM and reparations. It would have been fun to have them auto-identify politically after taking the test.
Daniel
Sep 23 2020 at 2:10pm
Could it be the obvious answer that you are more collectively guilty the more you have touchpoints for influencing others’ behavior? Gender/ethnicity- these could be randos across the country, you have no influence. Co-religionist, family, nation- in a democratic society, a household, and a congregation, you have social influence to bear, however practically little. Though the national collective guilt responses stand out as slightly beyond that- perhaps a little motivated reasoning or sampling bias from followers of Dr. Caplan.
Daniel
Sep 23 2020 at 3:33pm
How often are gang, mafia, and terrorist leaders collectively guilty for the actions of their group? How often are generals, officers, and politicians responsible for war crimes committed by their troops? How often are conspirators in a crime collectively guilty for the actions of their co-conspirators in the commission of it?
The correct moral answer is not “never,” even if you are skeptical about the degree of guilt conventionally assigned to people under the felony murder rule.
nobody.really
Sep 23 2020 at 6:13pm
I LOVE THAT. That Caplan is one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is. Moreover, I think he’s right.
It is unclear what people mean when referring to collective guilt. But I think Tyler Wells is on the right track: Some are thinking about which groups should be prepared to offer reparations for social harms. (And presumably these groups, in making such reparations, would have to impose more taxes, or curtail benefits, to members of the group.) Thus, when people think that nations and families may bear collective guilt, they’re thinking, “I deserve to be compensated by that nation/family for the wrongs I’ve endured at their hands.”
Why wouldn’t they have the same reaction to religions, ethnicities, or genders? Maybe it hasn’t occurred to them to seek recompense on this basis. Or maybe they more closely identify with their identity based on religion/race/gender, and see that part of their identity as under attack–thus causing them to shield this aspect of identity from responsibility.
Caplan certainly has a talent for finding anomalous results in survey data. But I always end us suspecting that the anomalies result from underspecified questions.
p.s. Guess who might share this view of collective guilt?
“Perhaps it is best to view some patterned principles of distributive justice as rough rules of thumb meant to approximate the general results of applying the principle of rectification of injustice. For example, lacking much historical information, and assuming (1) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendants of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices (assumed to be those better off, though sometimes the perpetrators will be others in the worst-off group), then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in the society…. In the absence of … a treatment [of the principle of rectification] applied to a particular society, one cannot use the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme of transfer payments, unless it is clear that no consideration of rectification of injustice would apply to justify it. Although to introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices might be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state in order to rectify them.”
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, at 231.
Mark
Sep 23 2020 at 6:56pm
I think this is easily explained by the fact that many people inherit benefits from wrongdoing by their co-nationals or family members whereas people rarely inherit benefits from wrongdoing by their co-ethnics and almost never from other people of their gender. If you receive benefits from wrongdoing, it’s not crazy to suggest that you might also have some guilt even if you had no part in the wrongdoing.
If you are the scion of a crime family that left you a huge inheritance, it’s not crazy to suggest that you have some responsibility for your family’s misdeeds even if you were never personally involved, and indeed even if those misdeeds occurred before your birth. Similarly, if your country used imperial expansion to develop into a wealthy and powerful country that gives its citizens a lot of opportunities that citizens who happen to have been born into other countries don’t have, you might never have personally been involved in said imperialism but you still derive benefits from it so on some level it seems reasonable to assign a bit of guilt. At a minimum, in these scenarios, it’s reasonable that the beneficiary of wrongdoing by one’s country or family ought to have more of a duty to positively do good in their life with the benefits they received as opposed to the normal moral position that people only have a duty to do no harm and not to affirmatively do good (from those to whom much is given, much is expected…)
Mark Z
Sep 25 2020 at 8:07pm
While recognizing that my position is pretty extreme, I would say those concepts of collective guilt are indeed crazy. IMO, a descendant of Adolph Hitler or Osama bin Laden would have no more obligation to do, well, anything, for anyone, than any other person would. The only case of inherited responsibility that makes sense imo is if one inherits something specific (or maybe a specific sum of money still in your possession) from a parent and find out they stole it from someone else, one should return it, but beyond that, I don’t think there’s any use for the idea.
For that reason, it seems more intuitive to me that guilt is assigned to nationality because of the illusion of choice that comes in the form of voting. People think of governments were chosen by the people collectively, whereas ethnic groups don’t choose ethnic presidents to do things on behalf of ethnicities. One might test this by seeing if perception of national guilt is with regard to people living in autocracies. For families, I think it’s just that unfortunately people instinctively give some credence to the idea of hereditary guilt.
Sam
Sep 23 2020 at 7:45pm
I think it’s useful to examine the counter point to this, collective pride. If i can be proud as an American when watching footage of D-Day or for the ingenuity of great American Inventors, collective shame is not so mysterious. The same goes for my family’s accomplishments. Ethnicity is just seems too diverse to lock in a particular association to. As a White man, that distributes between people like Abolitionists and Nazis equally.
Phil H
Sep 23 2020 at 8:58pm
One obvious shared feature might be an identifiable governance structure. If you wanted to hold a country to account, you can do it. If you want to hold a family to account, we all know how the Sicilians did it. But a religion, gender, race… how would you even go about it?
So I think it’s likely that the results reflect the answers to the question, would it be meaningful to have a concept of collective guilt for this collective?
Weir
Sep 24 2020 at 1:40am
“It requires agitation, disturbance, crisis–the ‘continuous frenzy’ that Orwell describes. Political (as distinct from religious) messianism is an impossible creed without a lively sense of motion, the constant overcoming of material obstacles and, what is probably more important because more dangerous and stirring, of human enemies.” Michael Walzer.
Scapegoats, in other words. Stone them, lynch them, burn them. The whole business model of CNN.
Walzer: “The movement must move, the members must march, toward the end of days. In the course of the struggle for power, the movement cultivates this sense of motion, and can’t relinquish it afterwards. In power, too, the movement requires permanent revolution, permanent war, or what Brzezinski called ‘permanent purge,’ else enthusiasm flags and the new regime, committed in principle to total transformation, is itself transformed into something less than total.”
And although a sclerotic and arthritic bureaucracy may look pallid and uninspiring compared to violence and arson, we can see for ourselves that the two can co-exist.
Phil H
Sep 24 2020 at 2:00am
“Stone them, lynch them, burn them. The whole business model of CNN.”
None of that is remotely true, though. CNN doesn’t say any of those things.
Weir
Sep 24 2020 at 5:37am
CNN thought they’d hit the trifecta when they went after Nick Sandmann.
You wrote the list. Religion. Gender. Race.
So they unleashed on this teenager. Not because of anything he’d said or done. He was simply, from birth, evil and wickedness in human form. He was their new Brett Kavanaugh.
There were CNN hosts who wanted Michael Avenatti to run for president. And CNN hosts who endorsed Jussie Smollett’s hoax because the actor chose, as the target of his slur, all those people that CNN would like to “hold to account.” In a TV pogrom, presumably.
It’s not news that there are bigoted mobs seeking vengeance against scapegoats. They’ve been around a long time.
nobody.really
Sep 24 2020 at 11:04am
“All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.” H.L. Mencken
nobody.really
Sep 24 2020 at 4:24pm
“They find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age. The assembly punishes men, many, if not most, of whom abhor the violent conduct of ecclesiastics in former times as much as their present persecutors can do.”
Edmond Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, at 242 (1790)
h/t Daniel Klein
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