Uncertain guilt

Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday. (Perhaps I have suffered from some memory loss.) What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right. For guilt to be appropriate, I should believe that I’ve done a wrong thing, and 75% is not high enough for belief.

Guilt does come in degrees, but those degrees correlate with the degrees of culpability and wrongness, not with the epistemic confidence that I actually did the deed.

If I am not sure that I’ve done something, then a conditional apology makes sense: “Due to memory loss, I don’t know if I did A. But if I did, I am really sorry.” Maybe there is some conditional guilt feeling that goes along with conditional apology. But I am not sure there is such a feeling.

However, even if there is such a thing as a conditional guilt feeling, it presumably makes just as much sense when the probability of wrongdoing is low as when it is high. But it seems that whatever feeling one has due to a probability p of having done the wrong thing should co-vary proportionately to p.

Here’s an interesting possibility. There is no feeling that corresponds to a case like this. Feelings represent certain states of the world. The feeling of guilt represents the state of one’s having done a wrong. But just as we have no perceptual state that represents ultraviolet light, we have no perceptual state that represents probably having done a wrong. Other emotions do exist that have probabilistic purport. For instance, fear represents a chance of harm, and the degree (and maybe type: compare ordinary fear with dread!) of fear varies with the probability of harm.

While we can have highly complex cognitive attitudes, our feelings have more in the way of limitations. Just as there are some birds that have perceptual states that represent ultraviolet light, there could be beings that represent a probability that one did wrong, a kind of uncertain-guilt. But perhaps we don’t have such a feeling.

We get around limitations in our perceptual skills by technological means and scientific inference. We cannot see ultraviolet, but we can infer its presence in other ways. Similarly, we may well have limitations in our emotional attitudes, and get around them in other ways, say cognitively.

It would be interesting to think what other kinds of feelings could make sense for beings like us but which we simply don’t have.