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The other day I attended a workshop on the philosophy of emotions. I was privileged to hear Robert Solomon, Paul Griffiths and Stefan Linquist speak. One of the more interesting topics we touched on was 'guilt'.  I missed the opportunity to voice my hypothesis, so I'm putting it up here. Feel free to give your opinions in this, the first talkback entry.

Guilt, noun.  A failure of duty, delinquency; offence, crime, sin.  Responsibility for an action or event; the 'fault' of (some person).

Guilt is one of those strange emotions, it's something we all feel but how much of that is innate?  Is guilt an involuntary feeling, or more a cognitive evaluation of violating current social norms?  Lets consider this from a different perspective, say that of a dogs.  Most of us have seen how a dog reacts when it thinks it's done something wrong.  An almost guilty manner comes over it.  The question is, does the dog actually feel guilty?  Robert recalled a story involving his two dogs.  Coming home one day he smelt that one of the dogs had peed on the carpet.  Interestingly though, while only one of the dogs had peed on the carpet, both acted guilty.  Which begs the question, did the dogs actually feel guilty?
Think of how a dog behaves when you're at the dinner table.  They whine, jump up on you, and basically do anything to look and sound vulnerable.  Why?  Because dogs, little ones at least, learn very quickly that the best way to extract food from their owners is to engage our protective or empathic instincts.  Certainly the dog has no understanding of why this behaviour routine works, only that it does.  Thus, is the guilt display by dogs also a learned response?

Interaction with a master is a pretty simple thing, there's good attention and bad attention.  Good attention means food, walks and playtime, bad attention means a decrease in one or all of these things.  Think about when somebody does something wrong to us.  When they come in acting as though nothing is wrong we feel angered; annoyed that they do not care for our feelings.  However, when the person acts guilty or remorseful, we feel less hostile towards them; they acknowledge our hurt.

Perhaps then a dog simply learns that acting 'guilty' will decrease the severity of bad attention.  Being a dog owner myself, I know instinctively this to be true.  When my dog behaves 'guilty', I am less prone to punishing her, indeed, sometimes I even feel sorry for her.

Which brings us back to the original question; is guilt learned or innate?  It is important to note that whether a dog feels guilt is a very different concept to that of a human.  Clearly a dog has no comprehension of guilt, or why it is meant to behave as such.  So what about humans, do we feel guilt?  One interesting example, raised by Robert, surrounds the recent death of Slobodan Miloševic.  Despite being indicted for crimes against humanity and genocide, his supporters stood by and cheered at his funeral.  Being members of their socialist party, they were adhering to their political and social code; they had nothing to feel guilty about.   They were endorsing Slobodan's actions; acknowledgement for a man who had, in their eyes, done 'just' work.

It's the same story repeated throughout history, a fanatic believes their actions are justified.  So, do humans have any innate sense of guilt?  While our empathic and protective instincts makes us feel a certain way, is this really guilt?  Perhaps, but on the whole I think the circumstances under which an individual feels guilt is very much the result of culture and environment.