Guilt Without Fault.

Many suffer intense guilt feelings when they harm others, even when they did so blamelessly and they know it. For these faultless injurers, therapy and other treatments face a distinct challenge: the subjects experience their guilt feelings as fitting, something they should not even try to overcome, despite being fully aware that they are above criticism. Some theorists have sought to explain this resistance to treatment or consolation—what I call the normative meta-phenomenology of faultless guilt—by showing why faultless guilt can sometimes be reasonable or justified. Here I argue, to the contrary, that it cannot be justified. Instead, I try to account for faultless guilt as the way moral agents naturally experience the tension between what they have done and what they are deeply invested in not doing. On this understanding, faultless injurers are bound to feel guilty, on pain of abandoning their basic moral commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]