Saturday, March 9, 2013

The Paradox of Inevitable Guilt

Many religions and ideologies include the concept of inevitable guilt, often as a central feature. I have been thinking about this concept a lot, and I think that it is unsound philosophically for a simple reason.

My reasoning relies on a very simple, very intuitive principle in ethics formulated by Kant among others: "ought implies can." When I say that Mary ought help her neighbor, it implies that she can actually do that. In other words, it does not make sense to say that someone has responsibility to do X if it is impossible for her to do X.

So here is what we have:

(0) Ought implies can: see paragraph above for explanation.

(1) Guilt is the result of a failure to attend to an ethical ought: what this means is that if Joe is guilty of Y, this means that Joe failed to fulfill a basic obligation or violated a basic rule that he ought have followed.

(2) Therefore, guilt has to be avoidable: assume there was a guilt that was unavoidable, this guilt implies an ought that cannot be fulfilled, thus violating "ought implies can."

(3) It follows that unavoidable guilt is impossible: follows clearly.

I wonder if, for example, the Christian doctrine is able to respond to this paradox, I'm sure that it's already been brought up before. 

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