Guilt Without Perceived Wrongdoing

At the age of eighteen, Darin Strauss hit and killed a classmate whose bicycle had swerved, across two lanes of traffic, in front of his car. The police determined that he was not at fault for the accident: after all, he had been driving at a safe speed, and likely couldn’t have stopped in time to avoid hitting her. But the accident wracked him with guilt for decades. It wasn’t that Strauss blamed himself for his classmate’s death. Rather, his guilt was directed toward a “plain, plump truth”: “because I’d driven a certain road, someone who had been alive was dead. I had killed someone.”1 Strauss’s case isn’t exceptional. We often feel guilt about outcomes without taking ourselves to have been at fault for them. We can feel guilt about harm that befalls a friend as the result of bad advice we gave her, even if we had every reason beforehand to think that the advice was good; about an illness that we passed to a family member, even if we took the necessary precautions against passing it; or about the sacrifices that our parents made on our behalf when we were young children, even if we did not ask those sacrifices of them. In all of these cases, we feel guilt about the causal role that we had in a harm to others or in their suffering, even if we were in no way at fault for those things.