This chapter focuses on historian Charles Sellers’ argument that by the mid-nineteenth century, many white southerners, influenced by the spirit of American democracy and the values of evangelical Christianity, could never fully embrace the proslavery argument and maintained only a half-hearted commitment to the region’s peculiar institution based on economic necessity and racial fear. Sellers argued that most white southerners experienced moral unease if not full-fledged guilt over how to justify living in a slaveholding society. In Sellers’ view, this “travail of slavery” burdened white southerners throughout the late antebellum period and even beyond emancipation. Subsequent scholarship initially supported Sellers’ argument that white southerners experienced varying measures of guilt over slavery. But during the 1970s, an array of new scholarly studies revealed that most white southerners eagerly defended slavery as a necessary institution and accepted the racial justification for slavery and thus retained a deep commitment to white supremacy.

When we witness another person experiencing pain, be it emotional or physical, we have an empathic reaction. And even if we commit a harmful action against another person, we most of the time experience guilt in the aftermath, which prevents us from performing the same action in the future. Guilt and empathy are critical moral emotions that together usually prevent us from harming others. However, as this chapter shows, systematic processes of classification and dehumanization at play before a genocide can alter moral emotions towards another part of the population. Activity in empathy-related brain regions is generally reduced towards individuals that we consider as outgroup or towards dehumanized individuals. Neuroscience studies have further shown that when obeying orders to hurt another person, neural activity in empathy- and guilt-related brain regions is reduced compared to acting freely. Such results show how obeying orders diminishes our aversion to harming others.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

Productive scholars establish a routine, a rhythm, that boosts productivity. Most preserve morning hours to tackle their most intellectually demanding tasks and push more routine tasks like meetings and teaching to the afternoon. Most work 40-50 hours per week, though some work more, with about half that time focused on research activities. Productive scholars set goals, prioritize tasks, and orchestrate to-do list plans for reaching them. They are efficient. They fill large time blocks and small time pockets with scholarly work. They take breaks to keep fresh but don’t procrastinate. Productive scholars have learned to say “no” to invitations that interrupt priorities and other time-killing tasks and distractions. Most productive scholars seek and attain a healthy work-life balance that includes time for family, mental rejuvenation, and physical activity, and they lead stable lives marked by routine. Some, however, find it difficult to disengage from work. Female scholars, perhaps because of societal norms, are particularly challenged in attaining a work-life balance.

Session 5 focuses on the sensations that comprise low-arousal emotions such as sadness, guilt, and boredom. The pit of dread in your gut when you have done something wrong (Ricky the Rock), the feeling of being weighted down with sand that can happen when one is sad (Bertha Blah), or when your mind and body feel like you are utterly empty but still eager for something to do (Empty Eliza) are some friends we meet this session. Seeing what happens to feelings of heaviness when you snuggle with someone or something and challenging an empty mind to come up with 50 things to do are some of the adventures in this session.

This chapter explores the greater issue of moral responsibility for Mao-era injustices. Following a broader discussion that touches on intellectual debates beginning in the late 1980s, it focuses on a series of essays published in the semiofficial journal Yanhuang Chunqiu between 2008 and 2014 that provided a space for Chinese intellectuals to reconstruct alternative narratives of history. The term chanhui (“confess and repent”) provided a culturally significant and yet sufficiently flexible framework for a public discussion of individual guilt and atonement for acts of collective violence. The resulting Chanhuilu column represented a rare public forum accommodating both detailed narrations of events and public reflections on guilt, atonement, and justice. These authors not only took on the burden of individual guilt, but also shared historical knowledge that contextualized if not attenuated the perpetrators’ responsibility and sought the lenient judgment of later generations.

Evolutionary psychologists have long maintained that humans’ moral sense is essential to their success as a species and part of what makes humans unique among animals. Moral systems have functional roots, helping individual organisms survive, thrive, and pass on their genetic material. It is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have an ethical sense. Evolutionary theorists identify moral condemnation and binding morality as crucial for the emergence of other-regarding, altruistic behavior that makes liberal morality possible in the first place. When others harm us, or even third parties, we condemn, passing moral judgments and sometimes retaliating; we do not speak evil but speak of evil. Moral condemnation encouraged the development of moral conscience to avoid the outrage of, and often violent group punishment by, those who were wronged. This internalized sense of right and wrong in turn acted as a credible signal of cooperativeness that unwittingly and unconsciously paid material dividends. Group favoritism, also thought to have evolutionary origins, is moral in nature as well. Those early humans who felt obligated to contribute to the collective defense against common threats in an extremely dangerous environment could prosper enough to offset the competing incentives to free-ride within the group.

The concept of justice that A Theory of Justice theorizes is, as Rawls puts it early on, “the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.” Shortly thereafter, he comments, “Now this approach may not seem to tally with tradition.” The topic of this essay is the difference between Rawls’s concept of justice and the traditional one. My main observation is that the significance of injustice in Rawls’s sense is very different from the significance of injustice in the traditional sense. Traditional injustice entails that someone has been wronged in a way that warrants resentment, guilt, and indignation. Injustice in Rawls’s sense does not entail this.

Emotion motivates prosocial behavior, and interest in this topic usually focuses on empathy. This chapter explores other emotions that can also motivate prosocial action and the research directions and practical implications that follow. It opens with consideration of two perspectives on the association of emotions and prosocial behavior offered by Malti and Thompson, and then proceeds to discuss research concerning the following prosocial emotions: happiness derived from assisting another, moral pride derived from prosociality, indignation over observed harm, empathy and sympathy, and gratitude. Guilt as a moral and possibly prosocial emotion is also discussed. The shared element of these prosocial emotions is that they derive from a personal connection between an observer and another’s emotional experience. An overview of the research on emotional development and emotion regulation follows to explore how this connection emerges developmentally. The conclusion summarizes much-needed areas for further research along with the implications of these ideas.

This chapter describes the development of prosocial motives and the social contexts within which these motives emerge and differentiate. Initially, prosocial behavior is based on a blend of motives, namely, participating in social interaction and early forms of feeling for others. During early childhood, concern-based guilt emerges and mere participation transforms into contributing to collaborative activities. During childhood, the normative turn complements these motives by a sense of obligation (living up to), and, during adolescence, aspiring to one’s ideal self can become an important prosocial motive. In this sense, doing good often is an expression of central human motives, namely, belonging to others, feeling for others, contributing to joint endeavors, affirming a sense of responsibility and normative obligation, and striving for our ideal selves.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

In Chapter 4, the second vantage point of the book is introduced, that of the German citizen. It describes a record of how average men and women, from different backgrounds and living in different occupied territories, experienced the campaign to eradicate Nazism; how it impacted their daily lives and what they felt about it. Journal entries, private letters, newspapers, memoirs, and interviews chronicle much of the everyday denazification experience. An examination of on-the-ground activities reveals that the ideological cleanse was tethered to employment, and hence, political screening. If a shared denazification experience existed, it was the completion of Fragebögen. This chapter also shows that the consequences of denazification were more severe than what is often suggested. The form had the potential of permanently altering one’s material security, as well as professional and community status. Going through political screening was emotionally exhausting. This chapter includes a detailed case study of denazification experiences in Hersfeld (Hesse), a seemingly typical German district in the US occupation zone.