Thinking about justice and dealing with one's own privileges: A study on existential guilt.

Resources are distributed unequally. Differences in wealth, prestige, education, freedom, or power are common, within and between families, organizations, social classes, countries, etc. Historians, social philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have often been concerned how people deal with being disadvantaged: When do they consider their lot unjust and possibly suffer from it? When do they tend to act against perceived injustice? When do they put their lot into perspective and justify it? Theories of social conflict of revolution, and of envy have analyzed inequalities from the viewpoint of the disadvantaged. By contrast, relatively little is known about the perspective of the privileged. Do they enjoy their privileges; do they fear losing their advantages; do they deny or justify their favorable lot? Certainly, various doctrines of justice offer ample arguments that can be used by the advantaged to justify their privileges. But what happens if someone fails to justify his favorable lot without having to renounce his preferred principles of justice or the facts? In such cases, a person should experience conflict and feel uneasy about his advantages. We have begun research on this phenomenon of uneasiness caused by one's own privileges as well as on coping with it. Our first study, from which the data presented in this chapter stem, was focused on existential guilt. We conceive existential guilt as an intra- and interindividually varying disposition to react with feelings of guilt to perceived differences between one's own favorable lot or position (i.e., own privileges) and the unfavorable lot of others.