The proper response to mistakes that have harmed others?
I have a tendency to feel very guilty when I have harmed others, especially when the harm was quite large. And I do think I’ve been legitimately quite hurtful and harmful to a number of people over the course of my life.
Some of my guilt has persisted for years after recognizing the mistake[1]. I think I prefer this to not feeling remorseful at all, but I do also wonder if I’m responding optimally. I suspect that a form of social anxiety might nudge into excessive feelings of guilt.
Guilt done right?
So here are some musings on how to actually respond when you realize you’ve harmed another person through your own error. I’m writing this to help myself thinking about it, and sharing it partly to maybe benefit answers, and partly to elicit answers from others.
Principal #1: Your guilt and remorse should not make things worse for the person you harmed. If you’re now behaving in ways they disprefer, you’re only adding more harm to the previous harm. What even? More on this in a moment.
Understand and address the causes of your mistake
If have harmed someone in a way I regret, then I want model why I did that with sufficient accuracy so that I can change something to avoid repeating that mistake. If it was a skill gap, then put in effort to learn the skill. If I had the skill, but failed to notice to apply it, then train myself into better recognition of applying it.
Possibly one ought to apply 5 Why’s analysis to their mistake (I haven’t done this, but might try it later):
Five whys (or 5 whys) is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem.[1] The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question “Why?” five times. The answer to the fifth why should reveal the root cause of the problem.[2]
The technique was described by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota Motor Corporation. Others at Toyota and elsewhere have criticized the five whys technique for various reasons (see § Criticism).
An example of a problem is: the vehicle will not start.
Why? – The battery is dead.
Why? – The alternator is not functioning.
Why? – The alternator belt has broken.
Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced.
Why? – The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (A root cause)[
Apologize and make amends
If it seems like it would be welcome (and it not always is and can take some modeling to guess where or not it is), I think it’s good to acknowledge to a person you harmed that you did so. Express remorse, express understanding of how you harmed them, and if possible, take some action to rectify any damage done.
In my ideal world, we’d have established general ways to compensate others for harms we did to them. I don’t think this is trivial to make work, but part of me would like a world where you can say “Hey Jared, I realize I was a total ass to you at the Christmas party two years ago and embarrassed you in front of everyone, I’ve Venmo’d you $300 to apologize.” Arguably, you’ve then succeeded once the harmed party feels indifferent between having been harmed and compensated, and never being harmed.
But this is not the world we currently live in. I think some harms will have natural means of making amends, e.g. I forgot your birthday but then I got you an extra nice present, and some will not. Which is tough.
Note, I think some apologies are for the other person and some are for yourself (or both). I think in many cases, the other person doesn’t owe it to you to hear out your apology, and might not want to, in which case it’d be wrong to push your apology onto them. Cf. Principle #1. And relatedly, apologizing doesn’t automatically mean that you deserve forgiveness.
Principle #2: Not all harms can be rectified
Ideally, you realize your mistake, you apologize, make amends, the damage is undone, and things proceed as though no harm had been caused (or sometimes, things are even better than before because of the trust and caring that get established).
I think sometimes you can’t though, and things are really permanently worse and you can’t take them back. I hate that feeling, but my fallback is to do what I can: i.e. take responsibility, make changes so I avoid repeating that mistake, and make what amends I can.
Improper guilt?
Guilt as penance? Guilt as social signaling?
A close cousin, even sibling, of guilt is shame. My sense of shame is that it is very social. You are ashamed because you think what you have done is very judgment-worthy, and others would judge you if they knew about.
(An aside: my model is that humans simulate the judgment of others inside their own heads when no others are present.)
I think what can happen with guilt is you realize you’ve done something that would get the judgment of others, and you self-punish via unpleasant feelings of guilt. The hope is that if the matter comes up, you will be able to authentically display your guilt, i.e. self-punishment, and signal that you think what you did is wrong, and are committed to not repeating it.
At its core, this might be a fine thing to happen. I think it goes wrong if the shame/fear of judgment is excessive, leading one to “punish” themselves with extreme feelings of guilt, hoping to redeem themselves thereby.
I think this can go even worse if a person starts seeking what feels to them like adequate acknowledgment of their guilt display. I think that gets you into the territory where apologies start to be about the apologizer to the detriment of the apologee.
Disruptive Guilt
Swimmer963 commented that excessive guilt can go awry if it prevents a person from responding productively. If a person feels so painfully guilty when they think about something they did such that they don’t allow themselves to think about it all, this prevents them from reflecting on it, making changes in response to their mistake, making amends, etc. In that case, would definitely be better to feel less guilt.
Harming Others and the Social Contract
A thought that brings me some solace when I feel bad about having harmed others is realizing that hey, I’m human, I’m going to make mistakes, including mistakes with bad effects on others. So are other people. If we want to have a society at all, we have to forgive people – especially if they earnestly work to not repeat mistakes and make amends.
I imagine there’s a tacit social agreement (contract) when you engage with others that says “I might screw up badly and hurt you and you might screw up badly and hurt me”.
For me, doesn’t make me feel okay with harming others. Just saves me from the excesses of guilt that I might fall prey to. Humans gonna human.
Thanks you to my spouse, @Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) whose conversation on this topic were very helpful.
- ^
Sometimes I only developed the guilt after years, when I reflected on a long-past situation and empathized with another person in a way I wasn’t at the time.
I like the perspective of the Andalite forgiveness ritual, from Animorphs, which goes something like, “I have fixed all that can be fixed, I have learned all that can be learned, I have sworn not to repeat my mistake, and I now claim the forgiveness that is mine by right.”
Under this view, it is not up to those you have wronged to choose to forgive you; at best, they can decide only whether or not to acknowledge that you have been forgiven (through doing the things in the ritual). You might still care about that, of course, but that’s now a separate thing.
(The precise text, from “The Andalite Chronicles”, book 3: “I have made right everything that can be made right, I have learned everything that can be learned, I have sworn not to repeat my error, and now I claim forgiveness.”)
This removes a check on self-deception.
Suppose Anna hurts Bob, and Anna finds this really cognitively painful to think about. So she makes some token effort to make it up to Bob, then tells herself that it was really hard for her to do that but she has now made up for it. Yet Bob doesn’t at all think Anna has made up for it. I think it saves Anna from self-deception to actually care about whether Bob believes she’s earned his forgiveness.
There is the counterargument of course, that Bob may abuse this to demand disproportionate recompense for the harm caused, and (if she believes this is happening) Anna may come to the conclusion that she’s not going to keep working on earning his forgiveness. My preferred way of dealing with this is not to say “I have decided that I have been forgiven for my act” but instead to say “I believe I have done enough to make up for my behavior, and while Bob has not forgiven me, I’ve made the decision to move on. I’m sad this is the outcome but I think this is the right call.”
Is there any material difference between these…? On your preferred method, you are still deciding that you don’t, after all, care that the party wronged by you believes that you haven’t earned forgiveness. The same check on self-deception is removed in just the same way.
Anyway, it may be instructive to consider how Jewish religious law handles this. As explained by Maimonides, when one person has wronged another, forgiveness requires, first, that the transgressor:
This having been done, the next step is to actually make up for the wrong:
What if the damaged party refuses to grant forgiveness? In that case:
This, you will notice, works very much like the fictional forgiveness ritual referred to in the top-level comment.
Needless to say, much depends on the question of whether restitution has in fact been made. In a Jewish community, such questions would presumably be decided by a rabbi or similar authority. This seems to me to be the critical missing piece: that the transgressor does not unilaterally assume the authority to decide when he has been forgiven, but neither does the transgressed-against. There are criteria for forgiveness, they are reasonably well-defined, and there is an authority which may be appealed to for adjudication of whether the criteria have been satisfied. You cannot get out of performing due restitution just because you don’t feel like it, but neither have you incurred infinite or even disproportionate debt to someone.
Finding a trusted third-party to make a call on it removes the incentive problems that the transgressor and harmed parties have, and is a better solution than the one I named (if involving such a third-party with an appropriate cost is possible).
There is not a material difference, but from my definition of forgiveness the first epistemic state involves deceiving yourself about whether you have been forgiven.
Another way of phrasing my point: you may decide to give up on being forgiven by the person you have wronged, but for goodness’ sake don’t also deceive yourself about whether you actually have been forgiven.
Indeed, although I would like to emphasize that the way this solution works is by having a pre-existing trusted third party which is already, to begin with, integrated into the framework, and which is seen by the transgressor, the transgressed-against, and all relevant bystanders, as the appropriate arbitrator.[1] If you have to search for some mutually trusted third party after the fact, that is very unlikely to work well.
In other words, this sort of solution works well within the framework of a community. (This is par for the course for the halakha, which is constructed as a body of law by which Jewish communities are to operate and by which Jews ought to live in their communities, not merely as a contextless code of personal conduct.)
This further suggests that the answer to the question in the OP—i.e., what is the proper response to mistakes that have harmed others?—is inseparable from the task of building functioning communities, within which questions of this sort can get workable answers.
Note that “why should any particular person be seen by all and sundry as the appropriate arbitrator in matters like this” is another question which is very hard to answer outside the context of a community of people with some shared understanding of morality.
Forgiveness = forgiven-ness = having been forgiven by someone.
Usually, if you harm someone, you care about being forgiven by them. And surely that isn’t something they can just automatically be deemed to have done.
If you have wronged someone, and then fixed all that can be fixed and learned all that can be learned and sworn not to do the like again, then perhaps you’re entitled to claim forgiveness (just as after the initial wrong your victim might be entitled to claim compensation from you), but if in fact they don’t forgive you then you aren’t forgiven even if you are entitled to be forgiven (just as if you’d refused to compensate them then they wouldn’t in fact have been compensated despite their entitlement) and this seems like an important distinction.
There might be other entitles that could be known to have forgiven you “automatically” if you’ve done those things. Maybe every harm done hurts society-as-a-whole, and society-as-a-whole has somehow decided that anyone who fixes and learns and swears appropriately is forgiven. Maybe every harm done is an insult to the gods, and the gods have revealed an unchangeable divine commitment to forgive anyone who fixes and learns and swears appropriately. But that would be on top of, not instead of, whatever forgiving your actual victim might do or not do.
As Said observes in response to a related objection from Ben, arguably this is mostly a disagreement about words. If you say “they have forgiven me but don’t acknowledge it” and I say “they are obliged to forgive you but haven’t actually done it”, maybe there isn’t an actual difference in consequences. But I think “X has forgiven me” and “X is obliged to have forgiven me” suggest quite different states of affairs and one is nearer the truth than the other.
it can be helpful to check to see if they believe you missed something, though of course humans are not at all guaranteed to be honest if asked such a thing. but keeping the spirit of cooperation alive requires both parties to risk the possibility that the other will say mean things, and to be willing to reject each others’ claims in situations where it is appropriate. filling in the details of this is left as an exercise to the entirety of human history.
I’d start with your principle #2 and strengthen it. MOST harms cannot be fully undone—the trust and happiness impact is on different dimensions than any attempt at recompense. Even if the calculation was possible, the benefit to the offender was less than the cost of the harm, and the universe is poorer now.
I think that modeling guilt-as-signaling is reductive and unhelpful. Your brain is going to think about things that you care about. It’s trying to find ways to better navigate the world. You don’t always/often have control over that. The problem is when that becomes unhelpful and disruptive.
Sometimes in my life, when I have experienced excessive guilt, I been able to resolve it by forgiving my past self, with the understanding that he didn’t know what I know now. Especially when the harm that I caused is no longer especially consequential today.
Other times, that hasn’t worked out so well. Sometimes a song will get caught in my head, and run on repeat for months. Sometimes I’ll have little moments of panic, thinking “what am I going to do,” only to think in the next second, “about what?”
Brains are weird. They sometimes do wonderful things, and sometimes are really annoying. You don’t need to punish yourself. You’re already remembering, building your awareness, and trying to do the best that you can. That’s all you can do.
That’s enough.
If these thoughts are intrusive and frequently causing you pain, I would suggest talking with a therapist. They can help you develop mental tools to better manage those feelings when they occur.
From an evolutionary perspective, feelings of guilt/shame are triggered when your actions result in something you didn’t want to happen; this can include harming others or just be breaking a taboo. Ruminating on the topic makes you consider the “what-if” options, come up with better solutions, and if you encounter the same problem again you’ve run simulations and are more prepared.
Insufficient guilt is the remorseless sociopath, who makes arrogant errors forever because they don’t dwell on their shortcomings.
Excessive guilt is the paranoid loner, who avoids taking any action or interacting with anything because the most predictable path is stasis.
Moderate guilt is just enough guilt not to do it again.
oh and as a parting meme: catholic-style confessionals are an instantiation to directly apologise to God-As-Harmed-Entity-By-Sin and to promise it won’t happen again to permit Shame Catharsis
We should not beat ourselves up over the outcomes of our thoughts or actions.
Outcomes are in the hands of the gods.
All we control are our intentions.
If our intentions were good there is no need to beat ourselves up.
Only if our intentions were bad should we beat ourselves up.
It is true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But we are not the Gods, and only the gods (fate) control outcomes.
All we control are our intentions.