what I talked to the philosophers about today

The Philorum talk had been about collective responsibility. The speaker defined "guilt" as being causally responsible for a harm. So today we talked about it more. The question was, can you obviate guilt by performing other good acts in the future? The speaker thought you could - that if you learned from what you did and avoided doing that harm in the future, or acted to cause good, that would take away the badness of the previous act - it would absolve your guilt, gradually, over time.

I disagreed. If guilt is causing a harm, then once it's caused it's caused. It's a fact, it's in the past and it can't be changed. Any future harm not done is just harm not done now, it goes in the ledger under the present moment, it doesn't change the balance sheet of past actions. Guilt might also be just the psychological feeling, and that might correspond with having caused a harm or not, so maybe that could fade over time through various methods. But that's not the same.

So we got to talking about how people square up balance sheets for past wrongs, and in particular talked about John Howard's (Australian Prime Minister) refusal to say "Sorry" to the stolen generation of aboriginal children, children that were seized from their homes by the government and raised in religious missions, torn from their mothers and families and culture and land. Everyone now agrees it was a horrible thing to do, some people say the people back then were just doing what they truly believed was best for these children, but the controversy is about Australia, this current Australia now, apologising to these people for what they went through (and there are plenty of these people around, they're not that old, it didn't happen that long ago).

John Howard's argument for not saying sorry is that he didn't personally do these things. Someone else made the decisions, so what point is there for him apologising? (We now suspect he refused to apologise because he plans to do the same thing all over again, but that's another bit of news from today's headlines, which I'll leave you to research on your own...)

My argument is that John Howard should apologise in his capacity as Prime Minister. It's not the man who was responsible for the wrong, it's the role, and whoever's in the role has responsibility for the acts of all his predecessors.

However, today it was asked of me - how does this square with my view that current good acts can't obviate guilt for past acts? In other words, what good does saying sorry do?

It put me in mind of a conversation I once had with a Sikh friend. She had been in an arranged marriage which didn't work, only lasted a year and she left it, but now, twenty years later, she went to her temple (or whatever their building is called, I will look it up), and people would say, "So, how is your husband?" and she would say, "Oh, just a bit busy so he couldn't make it." They all knew her story, she knew they knew, but it was crucial for the smooth functioning of the community that everyone lie about it. And I remember her saying, "You know, all you Anglo people, you're so hung up on confessing the truth and being forgiven for it." She didn't feel that way at all.

So, it occurred to me today, in my culture, the way you obviate your guilt - expurgate your guilt - is that you tell the truth about the wrong you did, and then you can be forgiven, and the slate is clear again and the ledger balances. You can't be forgiven if you don't confess, you don't get a blanket free pass to commit however many wrongs you can manage to fit in before you die with blanket forgiveness, you have to tell the truth. Odd, sort of isn't it?

The speaker told the contrasting story of aboriginal communities where if a wrong was done to a member of one tribe by another tribe, the second tribe had to offer someone up to be punished. It was nice if it was the person who had actually done the wrong in the first place, but it didn't have to be, if they couldn't be found or identified, anyone would do. If someone in a tribe was hurt, someone in the other tribe had to be offered up to be speared, any person from that other tribe, but once it was done, it was done, the slate was clear and the balance was restored.

I said, to me that sounds barbaric, but maybe that's just because I was raised with this other practice of truth-telling and forgiveness. When you think about it, truth-telling seems completely irrelevant to setting scores and restoring social balance after a wrong. But then, to me it works, and I'd prefer to live in that society than a vengeful society. All Shakespeare tragedies have the lesson that revenge and retribution are an endless and foolish cycle. But why would we have come up with this other way of restoring balance, and why does it seem more compelling? My Sikh friend's comment was the first time I ever noticed this part of my culture, and realised it was part of my culture.

Haven't reached any conclusions, but it's what I was thinking about today.