"When we look at how the concept of guilt is used in practice, we see that people talk about guilt even when they, for example, unintentionally caused a car accident or left someone behind. In these situations, people may not think that they acted immorally," said Heidy Meriste, a research fellow at the University of Tartu's Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics. Likewise, people who survived a disaster while others did not also speak of their guilt.

According to Meriste, the traditional approach to guilt emphasizes wrongdoing, where a person has done something morally wrong. By contrast, the guilt felt by accident-causers or survivors is not always understood by others. In her recently defended doctoral thesis, Meriste therefore proposes a benefit-based approach to guilt, where the emphasis is less on the individual and more on the world around them. "I am not talking about a person perceiving a moral stain on themselves. Rather, the problem is how they themselves have left a stain on the world," she illustrated.

What is guilt here?

In her doctoral dissertation, Heidy Meriste focused on two types of guilt cases. The first are causal, meaning situations where harm has been caused — for example, a car accident where someone is behind the wheel. "In those cases, there really was nothing that could have been done differently. Everything just happened so quickly," explained the new PhD. Similarly, one person may cause another heartbreak if they do not return their feelings in the same way. "We don't think we necessarily have a moral obligation to reciprocate the feelings of just anyone. And yet, people still feel guilty," Meriste reflected.

The second type she described are so-called survivor guilt cases, where someone might end up being the only person to survive a disaster. But this can also apply more broadly to perceptions of unfair privilege. "For example, two children inherit an estate. Both were good to their parent, but one receives a much larger share of the inheritance than the other," she pointed out. People may also feel guilt about social injustice — for instance, living in a wealthy part of the world while elsewhere local communities suffer famine.

"In everyday psychological discourse, it's very common to talk about guilt in such situations. The question is, in what sense can we speak of guilt here, when no wrongdoing has taken place?" Meriste said, outlining the central issue of her dissertation.

She also offered a solution. In such cases, the focus should not be on searching for moral fault, but rather on whether the person in some way contributed to the negative outcome. In philosophical terms, Meriste said, this can be understood as a counterfactual connection. "That contribution means that the person makes a difference in the state of the world. If their contribution had been absent, things would have turned out better," she explained.

In cases of causal guilt, a person's contribution to the negative outcome is a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship. "If you had not been driving on that road at that time, the accident would not have happened. Even though it wasn't your fault, you still caused it," Meriste said.

In cases of survivor guilt, however, a person's contribution lies in the present state of affairs: they are alive, but others are not. According to the new PhD, in such cases the person becomes, in a sense, part of the injustice in the world. "If things had gone differently for me, the situation — at least in a comparative sense — would be less unjust."

"This is my contribution to the world"

As a counterbalance to the traditional fault-based view, Heidy Meriste proposes a benefit-based approach to guilt. She emphasizes that this is not about self-blaming guilt rooted in anger. "Rather, this kind of guilt can be felt as a sort of moral sadness — that this here is my contribution to the world. In some sense, I am making the world a worse place," she explained.

In her work, she examined social psychology studies as well as autobiographical accounts of guilt. A common concern that emerged was that people experiencing causal or survivor guilt want to tell others that they feel guilty. "But often, the response they get is: 'But you didn't do anything wrong.' That seems to suggest they shouldn't feel guilty," the new PhD noted.

Responses like "There's nothing to talk about" or "Move on with your life" suggest, according to Heidy Meriste, that the listener does not truly grasp the nature of benefit-based guilt. "It should be understood that guilt, for this person, is not about feeling they did something wrong, but rather a tragic awareness of their impact on the world," she advised. A person's impact on the world is not always intentional — they also affect it simply through their physical presence. "For example, a miscarriage is by no means necessarily the woman's fault, but it is still tied to her body," Meriste pointed out.

She added that when discussing causal and survivor guilt, it is also worth considering the concept of deservingness. In other words, someone experiencing guilt may sense that the victim suffered unfairly. "Let's say a professor gives a student a bad grade. The professor may feel sorry for the student, but they may not feel guilt if they do not believe the grade was undeserved," Meriste explained. By contrast, victims of a car accident, in the eyes of the driver, did not deserve their fate.

Even when there has been no moral wrongdoing in the cases Meriste examined, people still want to frame their guilt in moral terms. With her proposed approach, the new PhD offers them a way to do so. "People report a strong sense that something is morally wrong, but it is not about moral misconduct. I would say it is the state of affairs itself that is morally bad. In my approach, the moral element shifts from one place to another," she said.

Her framework also points to a way out of guilt for those struggling with causal or survivor guilt. "Even if you cannot change what happened in the past, you can still work toward a better world," Meriste emphasized. For example, someone may have been in the hospital with a roommate who died. "In that case, you can raise awareness and do prevention work so that such things happen less often," the new PhD said.

Heidy Meriste defended her doctoral dissertation in philosophy, "The Emotion of Guilt: Integrating Cases Without Perceived Wrongdoing," on August 19. The work was supervised by Professor Margit Sutrop, with Professor Edward Harcourt of the University of Oxford serving as opponent.

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