Margaret Gilbert (2002), The Journal of Ethics 6(2):115–143 (June 2002; reprinted in Joint Commitment, OUP 2013, ch. 11, pp. 229–256) — DOI-10.1023/A:1015819615983
Key takeaways
Not read. Everything below is second-hand, from Huebner’s paper (LIT-702, read in full), which quotes and paraphrases this one with page references, unless marked otherwise.
- Three kinds of guilt feeling. Gilbert distinguishes personal guilt feelings, over one’s own contribution; membership guilt feelings, felt by a member over what her group did even if she did not contribute; and collective guilt feelings (Huebner, pp. 3–4, citing Gilbert 2001 and 2002).
- Collective guilt feelings are a plural subject’s. “For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feeling guilt as a body over our action A” (Gilbert 2001, 139, as quoted by Huebner, p. 4). The 2001 source is her “Collective remorse”; Huebner treats the 2002 paper as stating the same account.
- Emotion without feeling. Gilbert “argues that we must distinguish emotions from feelings, that feelings are inessential, though common concomitants of emotional states”, so collective emotions “require no specific phenomenology” (Huebner, p. 2, citing Gilbert 2002, 119). Huebner also says Gilbert uses psychoanalytic cases of unconscious emotion to support this (p. 15).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, Deferred because it could not be read lawfully. It is the plural-subject pole of the three-way debate the owner named, with Huebner’s distributed account (LIT-702) and Schmid’s phenomenological account (LIT-697), and Gilbert’s side of the debate on collective guilt with Isaacs (LIT-698). No anthology topic holds it.
Rival to Huebner (LIT-702), declared rivals. Huebner argues
against this paper by name. His charge is that a plural subject’s emotion is
“a distribution of individual states” sustained by members’ connections, and
reduces to individual commitments plus aggregation rules, which an
individual’s emotion does not (his p. 4). He also rejects, “pace Gilbert
(2002)”, the use of psychoanalytic cases: they show emotions inaccessible to
awareness, not emotions with nothing felt (his p. 15). Both hold that a
collective emotion need not be felt. They disagree about what has it: a
plural subject made by joint commitment, or an integrated computational
system. Each excludes the other’s bearer, and neither has settled the
question, so the relation is rivals.
Against Isaacs (LIT-698), no relation declared. Both works are unread. By the abstract of Isaacs’s chapter, as a search service returned it, Isaacs engages Gilbert’s account of collective guilt feelings and concludes that collectives may be guilty without having guilt feelings. If so, Isaacs accepts collective guilt as a moral status and denies the collective feeling that this paper defends. That is a disagreement about whether collective guilt needs collective feeling, but it should be checked against both texts before a relation is declared.
Against Schmid (LIT-697), no relation declared. Gilbert’s collective emotions need no phenomenology; Schmid’s, by his abstract, rest on a group’s consciousness. On whether a group feels, the two disagree.
Where it would bear. Gilbert’s plural-subject theory is held unread as On Social Facts (LIT-492) and “Walking Together” (LIT-477). This paper is where that theory reaches emotion. List (LIT-700, §3.4) judges plural-subject attitudes “more akin” to his corporate attitudes. A reading should check:
- what Gilbert says a joint commitment to “feel guilt as a body” requires of each member, and whether any member must feel guilt;
- whether the paper answers the charge, made later by Huebner, that the account reduces to individual commitments;
- what argument links appropriate collective guilt feelings to collective guilt, which the search-engine summary of the paper describes but which no read source states.
Access when seeded: Crossref records for the article and the 2013 reprint; Unpaywall (closed); Semantic Scholar (abstract elided). A summary returned by a web search service, not the abstract itself, says the paper “considers what collective guilt feelings amount to”, argues that if collective guilt feelings are sometimes appropriate then collectives can be guilty, and gives a plural-subject account. That summary is recorded here as unverified.