Guilt (emotion)

"[3] For his later explicator, Jacques Lacan, guilt was the inevitable companion of the signifying subject who acknowledged normality in the form of the Symbolic order.

People appear to engage in targeted and specific reparatory behaviors toward the persons they wronged or offended.

[22] Individuals high in psychopathy lack any true sense of guilt or remorse for harm they may have caused others.

Others suggested that it remains unclear whether psychopaths' experience of empathy was the same as that of controls, and also questioned the possibility of devising therapeutic interventions that would make the empathic reactions more automatic.

[25][26] Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue – in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city – these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.

According to Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California, one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse.

Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets.

"[27] Some evolutionary psychologists theorize that guilt and shame helped maintain beneficial relationships,[28][29] such as reciprocal altruism.

As highly social animals living in large, relatively stable groups, humans need ways to deal with conflicts and events in which they inadvertently or purposefully harm others.

"This produces a perceptual shift from thinking of oneself in terms of 'I' and 'me' to 'us' or 'we'.”[31] Guilt and shame are two closely related concepts, but they have key differences that should not be overlooked.

He says that "The fear of shame and ridicule can be so strong that people will risk serious physical injury or even death to avoid it.

The evolutionary root of shame is in a self-focused, social threat system related to competitive behavior and the need to prove oneself acceptable/desirable to others"[37] Guilt on the other hand evolved from a place of Care-Giving and avoidance of any act that harms others.

The same has been said of Ancient Greek society, a culture where, in Bruno Snell's words, if "honour is destroyed the moral existence of the loser collapses.

in Western civilizations to question why the word ethos was adapted from Ancient Greek with such vast differences in cultural norms.

[41] Guilt is a main theme in John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat", and many other works of literature.

[42] Guilt is a major theme in many works by Nathaniel Hawthorne,[43] and is an almost universal concern of novelists who explore inner life and secrets.

In his Kyriai Doxai (Principal Doctrines) 17 and 35, Epicurus teaches that we may identify and diagnose guilt by its signs and perturbations.

According to Norman DeWitt, author of "St Paul and Epicurus", confession was one of the Epicurean practices that was later appropriated by the early Christian communities.

"[46] The Greek New Testament uses a word for guilt that means "standing exposed to judgment for sin" (e. g., Romans 3:19).

The New Testament says that, in Jesus Christ, God took upon Himself the sins of the world and died on the cross to pay mankind's debt (Rom 6:23).