The condition of the person who has knowingly and willingly acted against the moral order (the Personalist Norm). Guilt is real and objective — it exists independently of whether the person feels it. It concerns the Third Dimension of personhood: moral degradation, the opposite of moral perfection.
Guilt as a personal condition
Guilt presupposes freedom and conscience: only a person can become guilty, because only they can act freely and recognize the moral quality of their action. Guilt is no mere feeling but an objective condition — the person is guilty, independently of whether they feel guilty. Conscience can recognize the guilt; the repression of guilt is itself a form of oblivion of the person.
Guilt and dignity
Even the guilty person remains a person with inalienable dignity. Guilt diminishes the moral quality of the person in the Third Dimension, but not their personhood in the First Dimension. The Personalist Norm holds also for the guilty — they are to be affirmed for their own sake, even when their action is to be condemned.
Paths out of guilt
The ontology of personhood knows three ways of dealing with guilt:
- Reparation: the material redress of the harm done
- Atonement: the conscious act of restoring the disturbed moral order
- Punishment: the outward, legal response of the community
All three presuppose that the person is taken seriously as someone — as a free being who answers for their actions.
Ontological classification
- Superordinate class: State
- presupposes: Freedom, Conscience
- concerns: Third Dimension
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 279–283, 298–301 (guilt and oblivion of the person).
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 21, a. 1—4 (guilt as a consequence of the free action).