Moral Taint in Classic Greek Drama

Johann A. Klaassen

Nor may the hundred-headed dog give tongue
Until the daughter of Earth and Tartarus
That even the bloodless shades call Death has sung
The travel-broken shade of Oedipus
Through triumph of completed destiny
Into eternal sleep, if such there be. ¹

I

The plays of Sophocles have always been recognized as a rich source for moral philosophers, and many have argued about the moral lesson of Oedipus. However, recent traditional interpretations of Oedipus' situation at the end of Oedipus the King and throughout Oedipus at Colonus ² tend to concentrate either on his curse or on his guilt, ignoring the possibility of shame and misinterpreting the moral dimension of his fate. They see in the blinded visage of Oedipus either the victim of the wrath of the gods or someone nearly destroyed by guilt. ³ But if we look at one of the passages most often cited in support of this view, we find something slightly different. Having just explained that he has blinded himself because of his "crimes" against his father, mother, and children, Oedipus declares,

To this guilt I bore witness against myself --
with what eyes shall I look upon my people?

(OT, 1384-85)

This pair of lines is more literally translated:

Having disclosed my stain to men,
how could I think of looking straight at them?

(OT, 1384-85 ⁴) [End Page 327]

Oedipus here speaks of his stain, not his guilt; a similar transference may be responsible for the preoccupation with Oedipus' curse. In his investigation into the murder of Laius, Oedipus laid bare the moral taints which he had brought upon himself despite his attempts to avoid them. If we approach Sophocles' portrayal of Oedipus in terms of the moral taints which Oedipus might bear, the possibility of combining guilt, shame, and fate becomes reasonable. In seeking purification, Oedipus gives clues to what sort of stain he hopes to remove. When he does remove the last taint, he is released, and the gods come to carry him away.

In this essay I will show that Sophocles presents a character who feels guilt, shame, and regret, three of our most important moral emotions. I begin with a sketch of Oedipus' moral situation. I then examine the case of Oedipus as a paradigm of taint attachment and removal through the analytical discussions of guilt, shame, and regret in order to show the ways in which the metaphor of moral taint affects our moral perception and judgment. The philosophical point to this examination of Oedipus' moral states, however, is not just that he feels a complex array of moral emotions. Rather, this complex array indicates two things: first, that shame and regret play a much larger part in our moral life than is generally allowed by contemporary moral philosophers; and second, that guilt, shame, and regret can be understood, and are prob-ably best understood, as structured by the metaphor of "moral taint."

II

The curse which afflicts Oedipus is not his alone. It is an inherited curse passed from his great-grandfather Cadmus, who killed a dragon sacred to Ares before the foundation of the city of Thebes. ⁵ This curse attached itself with full fury upon Laius, the king of Thebes and Oedipus' father. Laius received a prophecy that his son would kill him. To avoid his fate, upon the birth of a son Laius ordered that the child be exposed on the mountainside. The slave who was sent to kill Oedipus took him instead to Corinth, where he was raised as a prince. Oedipus later became aware of his family's curse, though he misinterpreted it: the Pythian oracle told him that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother, but he assumed that the oracle meant Polybus and Merope, the king and queen of Corinth, who had raised him. In an effort to escape his fate, he left Corinth, never to return.

Fleeing toward Thebes, Oedipus encountered Laius, who was on his [End Page 328] way to Delphi to ask the oracle how to free his city from the Sphinx. In a quarrel over the right of way, Oedipus killed Laius and all his entourage but one slave, who escaped and returned to Thebes, telling of the attack and the death of the king. Oedipus arrived soon after, and answered the famous riddle of the Sphinx, who in chagrin committed suicide. Having freed Thebes from the Sphinx, Oedipus was made king and married Jocasta the queen (and his mother).

Many years later, Thebes was afflicted with a terrible plague, which killed pregnant women and animals and withered the crops. Oedipus sent a delegation to the Delphic oracle, which returned with Apollo's instructions: root out the murderer of Laius, and either execute him or banish him from Thebes. Not suspecting himself, Oedipus conducted a thorough investigation, and discovered the circumstances surrounding his birth, his parricide and incest. In his rage he blinded himself. Then, cast out of the city, he wandered from place to place, begging for mercy and sustenance.

Finally, he came to Colonus, outside of Athens, where Theseus granted him citizenship and vowed to protect him. Accosted by his brother-in-law (and uncle) Creon and his son Polynices, who both wanted him to return to Thebes and help decide a civil war by his now heroic presence, Oedipus cursed Thebes, Creon, and his sons, and vowed to remain in Colonus until his death, which he knew was near. In anticipation, he initiated a series of ritual purifications which would prepare him for the afterlife. Once he was purified, the gods guided him to a secret place and removed him from the earth.

There are, I think, three distinct sources of taint in the life of Oedipus as he is portrayed by Sophocles: his peculiar guilt, his defiling shame, and his family curse. The action in OT can be seen as the discovery of his true situation and the tremendous taint which he has unknowingly carried for so long. The action of OC can similarly be seen as the erasure of all his taint in preparation for death. Most modern commentators find nothing more than the discovery of guilt in the first play, and only the passing of the family curse to Oedipus' sons in the second. I hope that the following analysis will make my interpretation more plausible despite the disagreement of the experts.

III

I think that the concept of "moral taint" subtends many of our concepts of moral evaluation, particularly those concepts involved in [End Page 329] assignments of blame. The examination of this and similar claims is complicated by the modern tendency to toss such "root metaphors" aside as uninteresting remnants of a dark, barbaric period in human history, fortunately overcome and well left behind. By doing so, we have lost track of the place of such important moral emotions as regret and shame, and have drawn guilt all out of proportion. In what follows, I will show the relevance, even importance, of the concept of moral taint in organizing and motivating our moral discourse and judgment by indicating the ways in which shame, regret, and guilt are related to one another, as well as to other important moral concepts like responsibility, punishment, and anger when considered as types of moral taint.

In Moral Imagination, Mark Johnson ⁶ argues that our common-sense understanding of morality, like most of the rest of our cognitive life, is metaphorically organized. Johnson finds that the metaphors which together define the moral domain fall into three "clusters" (pp. 36-51): first, those which set the stage for moral interaction, which explain such things as actions, purposes, and rights; second, those which delineate obligations and responsibilities, which "give the primary structures for forms of reasoning about what we owe others . . . and what we are owed by others for our actions"; third, those "by which we evaluate moral character," which organize our thoughts about the moral worth of persons, actions, and characters. Johnson further divides the cluster of metaphors dealing with moral character into three sub-clusters: those which play on notions of power or control, those which appeal to up-down metaphors, and those which deal with notions of purity and pollution, or what I have called moral taint. It is this notion of pollution or taint that I wish to investigate. ⁷

A definition of moral taint is clearly required before we proceed. The concept of taint seems to me to have three main features: first, it assumes a pre-existing (relative) purity which has become polluted in some way; second, it encompasses the feelings associated with this impure state, the state of being-in-the-wrong; third, it prescribes a course of action which returns the tainted person to (something like) the purity which existed before. The concept of moral taint bears a narrative structure: far from being defined merely by a list of necessary and sufficient conditions which something must meet in order properly to belong to the category, such categories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, each of which makes an important contribution to the whole. For example, in moral deliberation we are often concerned with [End Page 330] finding out how criminals transgressed against the community's standards, with ensuring their feelings of guilt and remorse, and with meting out their punishment and the "repayment" of their "debt to society." Its narrative structure does not make moral taint immune to certain types of conceptual analysis, however, and it is to analytical sketches of each of three broad types of moral taint--guilt, shame, and regret--that I now turn.

IV

What is guilt? On the surface, this looks like a silly question--it seems we all know what guilt is since we speak constantly of our guilty feelings. ⁸ Guilt seems pervasive. But what do we really mean when we use this term: what is this emotion to which we all attach this label with such confidence?

Allan Gibbard offers two descriptions of guilt which, taken together, mesh remarkably well with the narrative understanding of morally evaluative concepts introduced earlier: first, on an "attributional" model of moral emotion, Gibbard says,

When I think of myself as guilty, I see myself as being in a state that I conceive as follows: it is typically caused by my own acts of certain kinds, it is expressed by a guilty mien, and it typically moves me toward apology and amends. ⁹

The attributional model defines an emotion as a strong physiological "arousal" coupled with the (self-)attribution of a certain culturally-defined emotional state. Guilt, under such a model (and in Western societies), is that negative emotion which one is likely to feel upon discovering that one's behavior has violated the minimal standards of decency upheld by one's community, often codified as systems of law or taboo. Guilt, then, is grounded in transgression against these standards. Gibbard also offers a description of guilt as a biologically-driven "adaptive syndrome": natural selection has created in human beings a biological pressure to cooperate with other human beings in a social setting. Actions of a certain "anti-social" type naturally cause those injured to feel anger at the perpetrator. The responsible parties, in turn, feel guilt in order "to cope with the anger of others." On Gibbard's attributional model, guilt is the "first-person counterpart" to [End Page 331] anger (p. 139). Understood as an adaptive syndrome, guilt drives the person feeling it to express feelings of pain and remorse, and to offer recompense.

These three features--transgression, remorse, and recompense--form the metaphorical structure of our concept of guilt. They correspond to the three main aspects of moral taint mentioned above, and this correspondence follows from guilt's being one kind of moral evaluation which readily assimilates the metaphors of pollution and purification.

Unknowing, I destroyed one who would have killed me;
I am pure before the laws--in ignorance I came to this!

(OC 547-48)

Oedipus bears the taint of guilt for the death of Laius, king of Thebes and his father. At the opening of OT, Oedipus found that the plague afflicting Thebes was the result of the gods' anger at the city for not having avenged Laius' death. Since the city had not had time to investigate the death of their king, because of the havoc caused by the Sphinx, there had been no investigation. Oedipus took it upon himself to discover and bring to justice those responsible for the death of Thebes' former king. When new information regarding Oedipus himself came to light, the focus of the investigation shifted to Oedipus' parentage, and after he discovered that he was the child Laius had ordered killed, Oedipus closed the investigation into Laius' death, confessed to the killing on the strength of Apollo's oracles, and sentenced himself to exile as the oracle (and the law ¹⁰ ) commanded. Oedipus transgressed against Thebes' laws and taboos against killing kings and fathers. The fact that he did not intend to kill the king or his father does not mean that he is not responsible for his transgression--it may allow mitigation of punishment, but the lack of intention cannot excuse outright. ¹¹ Oedipus' investigation uncovers the king's killer, and more: though not strictly speaking convicted, Oedipus confesses to having killed Laius, taking upon himself all the legal and moral consequences for his double transgression. ¹²

The taint of guilt which Oedipus discovers clearly causes tremendous pain. His remorse drives him to confess everything to the chorus of the elders of Thebes. His confession is cut short, however, by his sense of shame, and he asks that his punishment begin immediately: [End Page 332]

I beg of you in God's name hide me
somewhere outside your country, yes, or kill me,
or throw me into the sea, to be forever
out of your sight.

(OT, ll. 1409-13)

When Creon, who will become king of Thebes in Oedipus' place, arrives on the scene, Oedipus has recovered enough of his dignity to demand, in the name of Apollo, that he be exiled, that he be allowed to pay the price for his guilty actions.

Before committing himself, after the end of OT, Creon sends to Apollo's oracle for confirmation. Meanwhile, Oedipus recovers even more of his composure, and is expelled from Thebes only after great protest.

The truth is that at first
My mind was a boiling caldron; nothing so sweet
As death, death by stoning, could have been given me;
Yet no one there would grant me that desire.
It was only later, when my madness cooled,
And I had begun to think my rage excessive,
My punishment too great for what I had done;
Then it was that the city--in its good time! --
Decided to be harsh, and drove me out.

(OC, ll. 433-41)

What caused Oedipus' feelings of guilt to waver and fall like this? In OC, Oedipus argues against any taint of guilt remaining for his part in the death of his father, because of his ignorance: "I am pure before the laws--in ignorance I came to this!" (OC, l. 548).

If then I came in to the world--as I did come --
In wretchedness, and met my father in fight,
And knocked him down, not knowing that I killed him
Nor whom I killed--again, how could you find
Guilt in that unmeditated act?

(OC, ll. 974-78)

In a kind of plea for excuse, Oedipus admits that he was the one who killed Laius while denying that he should be held responsible for parricide, since he could not have known that Laius was his father, and [End Page 333] lacking this knowledge he must have lacked the intention necessary for parricide. Oedipus also asks his audience how they could blame someone for those events which are fated:

And tell me this: if there were prophecies
Repeated by the oracles of the gods,
That father's death should come through his own son,
How could you justly blame it upon me?

(OC, ll. 968-71)

After all, Oedipus seems to say, if no one can escape fate, what sense does it make to cast blame upon those who are already suffering? It is unclear how Greek society in general might have dealt with such arguments, but it shows why Oedipus feels wronged in his exile; and it seems to have been enough to clear him in the eyes of his audience, Theseus and the elders of Colonus, since they make no further effort to blame him for parricide. With these pleas for excuse, then, Oedipus is able to cleanse himself of any remaining taint of guilt. All the debts owed for his crimes are now repaid or forgiven.

Guilt is not the only sort of taint associated with our actions, however. One who commits a crime is not just a guilty person, but quickly comes to be called a "criminal," since we take actions to be indicative of character. As the consciousness of trespass gives rise to guilt, so also the consciousness of a defect in character gives rise to shame.

V

What is shame? Moral philosophers are not familiar with the terms and conditions of shame, since we have spent so much time worrying about the conditions of guilt, but our culture is infused with the memory, at least, of shame-related terms like humiliation, honor, and character. How do we use the term "shame," and how ought we to use it?

Shame is usually differentiated from guilt on the basis of their origins--that is, as John Deigh puts it, "shame is felt over shortcomings, guilt over wrongdoings." ¹³ In the social and moral human world, we compare ourselves and each other to certain moral yardsticks or ideals, we find ourselves and each other lacking, and on those who fail to attain or approach our moral ideals we cast shame. Allan Gibbard argues that in much the same way that guilt is the "first-person counterpart" to the anger of others, shame is the first-person response [End Page 334] to the disdain of others (p. 139). Shame is not tied to a person's actions directly but only as part of a pattern of behavior. Shame results from the failure to live up to some moral ideal, from falling short of some kind of moral perfection. Shame calls into question the value of one's moral being, and forcefully demands an accounting of who one is. Those who feel shame feel a strong kind of self-doubt, which may fall into self-loathing and despair. ¹⁴ This self-distress leads one to hide one's face--as Herbert Morris notes, "with shame, the disposition is to hide, to vanish; with shame we want to sink into the ground, we cannot stand the sight of ourselves." ¹⁵ One's best response to the uncomfortable self-doubt caused by a shameful shortcoming is to change the offensive part of one's character: "the steps that are appropriate to relieve shame," as Morris argues, "are becoming a person that is not shameful" (p. 62). I will call this kind of transformation moral growth.

These three metaphorical features--failure, self-distress, and moral growth--underlie our common understanding of the concept of shame. Like the three central features of guilt, they correspond to the three main aspects of the concept of moral taint outlined above.

No; I shall not be judged an evil man,
Neither in that marriage nor in that death
Which you forever charge me with so bitterly.

(OC, ll. 988-90)

Oedipus bears the taint of shame for his incestuous relationship with his mother and the consequent births of his children. Incest does not seem to have been covered by Greek law--"its role in Athenian legal records is practically nil," according to Rosenmeyer (p. 102)--but only by social taboo. It was not so much a crime as an indication of something disturbing located deep within the character of those who could have done such things. When the person discovered in incest is one as respected as Oedipus, the fall to dishonor is particularly hard.

Oedipus, "whom all men call the Great" (OT, l. 8), presents himself for public scrutiny as king of Thebes and is regarded as "first" and "best of men" by his subjects. He claims to come from the royal house of the city of Corinth, and his wisdom and good character seem confirmed by his ability to destroy the Sphinx. Unknown to all, however, Oedipus is tainted with shame in his marriage to Jocasta and the children they had. The messenger bearing the news of the death of Polybius, king of Corinth, also tells how Oedipus came to the Corinthian court. Not only [End Page 335] was Oedipus not who he had claimed to be, but not knowing his parentage allowed him to enter into an incestuous relationship with his mother. The fact that he was capable of this indicates a blameworthy moral failing, a serious flaw in Oedipus' character. Traditionally, this flaw has been called "hubris," from the Greek word meaning insolence or overweening pride. Oedipus' two hubristic assumptions--that he knew all he needed to know about his identity, and that he could outrun Fate--only caused him to complete his shameful destiny.

When Oedipus discovers that he was wrong about who he is, and that he has indeed completed the destiny which Apollo's oracle foretold, he runs into the palace, calling for a sword, in search of his wife and mother. But Jocasta had grasped the messenger's meaning long before Oedipus did. She retreated to her chambers, where she hung herself. Oedipus' fury is checked, and turns to shame's self-distress, when he discovers her body:

When he saw her, he cried out fearfully
and cut the dangling noose. Then, as she lay,
poor woman, on the ground, what happened after,
was terrible to see. He tore the brooches --
the gold chased brooches fastening her robe --
away from her and lifting them up high
dashed them on his own eyeballs, shrieking out
such things as: they will never see the crime
I have committed or had done upon me!
Dark eyes, now in the days to come look on
forbidden faces, do not recognize
those whom you long for--with such imprecations
he struck his eyes again and yet again
with the brooches.

(OT, ll. 1265-76)

Oedipus' shameful failure is not knowing, and thus metaphorically not seeing, who he is or what he is doing. Although in his arrogance he thought he knew his situation, he was "blind" to the truth, and in the self-distress caused by the recognition of his shame he makes himself blind to everything.

This expression of his anguish does not serve to remove the taint of his shame, however, but only offers a kind of respite from the world's reminders. As Oedipus himself puts it, [End Page 336]

Why should I see
whose vision showed me nothing sweet to see?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What can I see to love?

(OT, ll. 1334-38)

Oedipus' reaction to the discovery of his shame is thus withdrawal, from himself and from his city. He says that had he been able to think of a way to make himself deaf, he would have done that as well (OT, ll. 1386-91). Since he was unable to remove himself from the world of sense, he closes OT asking to be cast out of Thebes. Withdrawal does not suffice to remove the taint of his shame, however. A deep change of moral character, moral growth, is required.

It takes Oedipus years of wandering, relying for food and shelter on the pity of those who do not recognize his face, to clear himself of the taint of his shame. When he arrives in Colonus, the local elders insist that he must leave their land before he taints it by his very presence. But Theseus, king of Athens and Colonus, offers him refuge immediately upon arriving at his hiding place in a grove sacred to the Furies. This acceptance is more important than it might seem. Theseus treats Oedipus as a hero like himself, one who has suffered much and still survives, someone who deserves honor (OC, ll. 551-69), and in offering him a hero's place of veneration in the holy grove, Theseus publicly acknowledges that Oedipus has been radically altered by his experiences. In coming to feel humble before those who control his fate, Oedipus has again become someone worthy of human respect. ¹⁶ And when he finds that Oedipus bears a new "curse," one which will benefit Athens, Theseus is quick to extend to him the highest honor he can: citizenship (OC, ll. 631-37). In publicly recognizing that he is no longer the person who committed shameful acts many years before, and giving him the gift of citizenship, Theseus and the elders of Colonus help Oedipus to become completely cleansed of the taint of his shame.

Gary Thrane has summed up nicely what shame means: "the liability to shame is the price we pay for knowing who we are, for knowing what we admire, and for wishing that the two be one." ¹⁷ But our actions and our characters are not the only things to which we are morally sensitive. Despite our desire to isolate the ethical realm from any considerations of luck or fortune, we must be careful to consider situations when assessing moral worth. Just as the consciousness of trespass gives rise to [End Page 337] guilt, just as the consciousness of failure gives rise to shame, so also the consciousness of what I will call "moral misfortune" gives rise to regret.

VI

What is regret? It is another of the emotion terms which we use, assuming that what we mean by "regret" is obvious. Regret is almost as pervasive in our daily life as guilt, but somehow it is much less likely to receive attention from moral philosophers. What is regret, that we all claim to know it so well?

The English word "regret" comes down to us from the Old Norse grata, meaning "to weep." Regret is the feeling of intense sadness associated with some unfortunate occurrence: anything which keeps us from achieving or maintaining the moral goods we seek, will be cause for regret. Bernard Williams has made "moral luck," especially bad moral luck, central to his discussion of (agent-) regret; ¹⁸ I call such interventions of "fate," "circumstance," or "luck" cases of moral misfortune. The victims of fortune are right, it seems, to feel regret. Through no fault of their own, they have lost some moral good for which they have worked. In Williams's example, a lorry-driver, purely by accident, hits and kills a small child. Though he is not at fault, his moral landscape has changed for the worse--and, as Williams remarks, "how much better if it had been otherwise" (p. 27)! Think also of the parents of this child. They are victims of a much greater misfortune in the same event, and are thus likely to feel worse about this incident than the driver. Feelings of regret are an important part of our coming to grips with the world as it is. Regret drives us to understand the ways in which what matters to us morally exceeds our capacities of choice. It pushes us toward "the fusion of intellectual insight with emotional experience that goes by the name of 'working-through'": coming fully to feel (and thereby release) regret through "repeated bouts of emotional engagement with reality and with the ghosts of what might have been." ¹⁹ Regret calls for integration, requiring that one take the difficult step of engaging fully with the feeling of regret itself, and thus that one find a place for regret and the regretted misfortune within one's picture of the world and one's place therein.

These three features of regret--moral misfortune, the feeling of regret, and integration--form the inner workings behind the face of regret. Just as the features of guilt and shame did, each of these [End Page 338] corresponds to one of the main aspects of the concept of moral taint outlined above.

If there is any ill worse than ill,
that is the lot of Oedipus.

(OT, ll. 1365-66)

Oedipus' taints of guilt and shame were prophesied, Sophocles tells us, by the oracle of Apollo at Pytho: there, as a youth, Oedipus learned the destiny he was to fulfill.

[Apollo] foretold
other and desperate horrors to befall me,
that I was fated to lie with my mother,
and to show to daylight an accursed breed
which men would not endure, and I was doomed
to be the murderer of the father that begot me.

(OT, ll. 790-93)

Upon hearing this prophecy, Oedipus turned away from Corinth, the only home he had known, and set out to avoid as best he could the dreadful fate foretold by the oracle--but his efforts to escape his fate just complete it without his knowledge. In a remarkable series of coincidences, Oedipus is set up to carry out the Cadmian curse. These and other moral misfortunes are called his curse.

Oedipus' regret at his fated ruin is expressed in his groans about his burden, and is echoed in the response of the chorus of Thebes' elders:

OEDIPUS: Take me away, my friends, the greatly miserable,
     the most accursed, whom God too hates
     above all men on earth!

CHORUS: Unhappy in your mind and your misfortune,
     would I had never known you!

(OT, ll. 1341-48)

Oedipus here has no hope for the future, not even--or perhaps especially not--for the futures of his children. As the curse which has tainted his life is a family curse, Oedipus believes they will not be able to escape its misfortunes. Reflecting on their future, he offers this counsel: [End Page 339]

If you were older, children, and were wiser,
there's much advice I would give you. But as it is,
let this be what you pray: give me a life
wherever there is opportunity
to live, and better life than was my father's.

(OT, ll. 1511-14)

Oedipus does not blame the gods for having given him or his family this peculiar curse, though he blames those who "interfered" by rescuing him as a child (OT, ll. 1349-55). But while he thinks that no one else could have borne the doom which he faced (OT, ll. 1405), he wishes that he had never lived, that his fate were not his. Oedipus pulls away from the pains of the present, and forsakes hope for the future, in concentrating on the misfortunes he has suffered. His retreat into sorrow precludes any possibility of his coming to grips with his curse and integrating it into his understanding of his life.

In the course of his wanderings, however, Oedipus had the time to reflect on his fate. Once he recognizes the approach of his own death, he turns again toward the future. He offers a blessing to Colonus, and to Athens, in the magic of his gravesite--there, the army of Thebes will suffer at the hands of Athens and his own ghost (OC, ll. 621-23). This blessing is, in effect, a curse against Thebes; to it he adds another curse, against his sons specifically. When Polynices, himself exiled by his brother Eteocles, asks Oedipus to accompany him and the armies of Argos (OC, ll. 1284-1345), Oedipus replies:

You cannot take that city. You'll go down
All bloody, and your brother too.
For I
Have placed that curse upon you before this,
And now I invoke that curse to fight for me . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now go! For I abominate and disown you!
You utter scoundrel! Go with the malediction
I here pronounce for you: that you shall never
Master your native land by force of arms,
Nor ever see your home again in Argos,
The land below the hills; but you shall die
By your brother's own hand, and you shall kill
The brother who banished you. For this I pray.

(OC, ll. 1373-89) [End Page 340]

Looking toward the future in this seemingly malevolent way is as close to an integration of Oedipus' own regret as he can manage, especially given that he thinks of his fate as a manifestation of his family's curse. As soon as Polynices leaves, the thunder and lightning which was to herald the hour of Oedipus' death breaks across the sky--offering the boon of his grave to Colonus and passing on the Cadmian curse were the last deeds Oedipus needed to do before he died. In addressing his regret for his misfortunes to the future of his former city and his family, Oedipus cleanses the taint of his ancestral curse.

Of the moral assessments I have discussed, regret is perhaps the most difficult to assimilate to the moral taint model, but I hope that the discussion I have presented here has made such an assimilation plausible.

VII

In this essay, I have shown that three of our most often discussed moral categories--guilt, regret, and shame--are related to one another through moral taint, a "root metaphor" for moral blaming. I offered a preliminary definition and discussion of the concept of moral taint. I examined guilt, tracing the moral taint of guilt from its genesis in transgression, through the pain of remorse, to its expiation in punishment. I said that the taint of shame is founded on a notion of moral shortfall or failure, an individual's sense of not having lived up to some moral ideal, that the pain of shame is a peculiar sort of self-distress, and that the appropriate response to such a taint of shame is moral growth, a renewed effort to become the kind of agent the moral ideal calls for. I discussed regret, claiming that the source of the taint peculiar to regret lies in harms suffered due to bad "moral luck," its pain in the sorrow we feel at the recognition that the world might have been a better place, and its cleansing in the integration of our past sorrows into our plans for the future. I used the example of Oedipus to show how each of these types of moral taint appears in the ambiguities of "real life."

Normally, it is not literally true that those who have done wrong, failed in some significant way, or fallen victim to bad moral luck are stained in some outwardly visible manner. Moral taint is "merely" a metaphor, and discussions such as this one are therefore not taken entirely seriously by most contemporary moral philosophers: after all, "metaphors are customarily suspect in any normal discipline." ²⁰ It is [End Page 341] very easy to dismiss the whole of my project in this way, and to go along with Nelson Goodman in forging a "radical relativism . . . that eventuates in something akin to irrealism" about the very world in which we live from the insight that metaphor "permeates all discourse." ²¹

But metaphor should not be dismissed so quickly. Contemporary cognitive science "takes imaginative aspects of reason--metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery--as central to reason, rather than as a peripheral and inconsequential adjunct to the literal." ²² And our tendency to dismiss metaphors as irrelevant, especially to philosophical discourse, may in fact be dangerous: "Our failure to make explicit, or even look for, the aid that a seminal metaphor provides, not only induces us to mistake an implicit metaphor for reality but also unwittingly to strive to impose such an error on our interlocutors. We may thus be tacitly perpetrating an endemic violence of which we are scarcely aware" (Fiumara, p. 27). According to Mark Johnson, our moral metaphors "are not merely optional ways of talking about morality. There is nothing optional about them at all, and they are not merely matters of words. They are the means by which we define our moral concepts." ²³ Moral theorizing must be responsive to our cognitive capacities and limitations. If human cognition is ineliminably metaphorical, then analyses of central moral metaphors are vital to the construction of any moral theory. It may be objected that the metaphorical account of our moral life is hardly a moral theory, because moral theories are normally thought to provide direction in difficult cases; but perhaps, as Johnson has argued, moral philosophy should not be asked to provide action-guiding rules. Perhaps "moral philosophy will give us the guidance that comes from moral understanding, critical intelligence, and the cultivation of moral imagination" (MP, p. 67).

The framework for moral understanding provided by the metaphor of moral taint is therefore not intended to be normative in the usual philosophical sense. Rather, it is intended to bring out some of the metaphorical structure which has been hidden in our common practices and discussions of moral condemnation, in the hopes that "by becoming more aware of the metaphoric roots of our theories we may be clearer about some of the specific questions that our theories generate" (Fiumara, p. 12). I believe that the better we understand the metaphorical basis of our moral categories, the better we will be able to act and to judge one another.

The analyses and the example presented here indicate that our [End Page 342] standard modern understanding of moral condemnation requires re-evaluation, and the concept of moral taint, as I have outlined it, provides a framework within which to begin such a project. Some philosophers do use the words "stain" or "taint" to speak of the negative judgments which attach to those who are deemed blameworthy. Herbert Morris talks around such a term, speaking of our reaction to evil in terms of "defilement" and feeling "unclean" (p. 159). Gabriele Taylor similarly says that guilt "must leave its mark" on the guilty person. ²⁴ And John Kekes says that a wrongdoer is "stained by the evil he caused." ²⁵ How such notions of stain or taint relate to moral judgment is left unexplored, probably thought unimportant. However, a clearer view of the sources and processes of moral assessment, represented in the further development of the concept of moral taint, will prove invaluable in rebuilding an inhabitable understanding of our practices of moral condemnation.

Cleansed of the taints of guilt, shame, and regret, once Oedipus symbolically completes his purification with ritual baptism in holy water, the gods remove him from the earth. He has words of encouragement for those that survive him:

Children, this day your father is gone from you.
All that was mine is gone. You shall no longer
Bear the burden of taking care of me--
I know it was hard, children.--And yet one word
Will make all those difficulties disappear:
That word is love. You shall never have more
From any man than you have had from me.
And now you must spend the rest of your life without me.

(OC, ll. 1612-19)

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Notes

This essay was presented at the Tenth International Social Philosophy Conference in August 1993 at the University of Helsinki, and as the Sixteenth Helen Stenner Prize Lecture in March 1994 at Washington University. Portions appear in "Guilt, Shame, and Regret in the World of T. S. Garp: Moral Taint and a Modern Novel," in Technology, Morality, and Social Policy, edited by Yeager Hudson (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).

1. Lines 1567-78 of Oedipus at Colonus, as translated by Yeats; W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems (revised edition), edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 579.

2. Except where noted, all references to the Oedipus plays are to the following edition: Oedipus the King, translated by David Grene, and Oedipus at Colonus, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, both in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). References to these plays will be made in the text by abbreviated title (OT and OC, respectively) and line number(s) alone.

3. See, for example, John Kekes, "Moral Depth," Philosophy 65 (1990): 22, and T. G. Rosenmeyer, "The Wrath of Oedipus," Phoenix 6 (1952): 93.

4. My own translations (here and at OC 547-48) are based on the following edition: Sophocles, Fabulae, edited by A. C. Pearson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

5. There are many theories as to who started the curse; some say it was Laius, Oedipus' father, who kidnapped and raped a boy; some say it was Labdacus, Oedipus' grandfather, who roasted a guest's children and fed them to their father. In picking out Cadmus' particular "atrocity," I am trying to reach back to the earliest possible source of the curse, since these other actions might just be manifestations of an earlier curse.

6. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

7. The other metaphor systems mentioned by Johnson do not lend themselves to the kind of analysis of moral emotion which I pursue in this essay. I do not see why Johnson has placed them on the same level as the concept of pollution, and would rather think of them as sub-metaphors according to which we judge shamefulness, since they could be taken to define what it means to be virtuous.

8. I will speak here only of feeling guilty, and not of being guilty.

9. Alan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 148.

10. Exile was the standard punishment for any "murder which did serious injury to the state," according to Rosenmeyer (p. 102).

11. See Peter A. French, Responsibility Matters (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), Chapter One, especially p. 4.

12. R. G. Lewis, "The Procedural Basis of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrranus," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 30 (1989): 63.

13. John Deigh, "Shame and Self-Esteem," Ethics and Personality: Essays in Moral Psychology, edited by John Deigh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 133.

14. William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 121.

15. Herbert Morris, On Guilt and Innocence: Essays in Legal Philosophy and Moral Psychology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p. 62.

16. Perhaps this is the import of Kekes (p. 444): "As the second play opens, many years after the first, we are told: 'Oedipus is no more / the flesh and blood of old'. He has been transformed."

17. Gary Thrane, "Shame," Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 9 (1979): 161.

18. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chapter 2.

19. Janet Landman, Regret: The Persistence of the Possible (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1993), pp. 214; 217.

20. Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Metaphoric Process: Connections between Language and Life (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 76.

21. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. x; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976), p. 80.

22. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xi.

23. Mark Johnson, "How Moral Psychology Changes Moral Theory," Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science, edited by Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 62; hereafter abbreviated MP.

24. Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1985), p. 92.

25. John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 22.