Should i feel bad

Being honest doesn't mean you have to be negative and nasty. When you tell the truth, tell all the truth, including the positive parts. Sometimes we need to set boundaries with the people we care about, and that's okay. Respecting your loved ones' boundaries and insisting they respect yours is a way to insure that your closeness will be authentic. Asking too many questions can make us feel inferior or as if we lack knowledge — or perhaps it makes us feel like we are bothering someone with our requests.

But asking questions is a key component to learning , and it also helps prevent us from making mistakes out of confusion or misunderstanding. But neuroscience tells us it will. A neuroimaging study from Lieberman and a team of researchers found that the act of turning your negative emotions into language disrupts and reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of your brain that drives your responses to stress and fear.

When you see a yellow light, you hit the brakes. Another group of scientists found that labelling emotions increases activity in the prefrontal and temporal regions of the brain—regions that are responsible for processing words and encoding their meaning. A more recent real-world study examined the effects of affect labelling on 74, people who use Twitter. They found that tweets about negative emotions were followed by an immediate and rapid reduction in negative feelings.

The takeaway from all this science is clear. It is important to lead as ethical a life as we can, but it is equally important to do this with joy, and with a clear conscience, knowing that we are doing the best we can, even if that means our behaviour may be unsatisfactory at times.

We need to move away from the view of ethics that personifies morality as someone grumpy and snooty. Moral ideals need not be experienced as a weight upon our shoulders. Quite the contrary: ethics is a tool to help us lead happy lives in harmony with the environment, animals, and people around us. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett. Tangney, June Price, and Ronda L. Shame and Guilt. New York: The Guilford Press. Guilt is necessary for an ethical life in so far as it is a necessary component in human moral development.

Given we currently know of no other way to become the sort of being that lives an ethical life…. Guilt is necessary for human moral development as evidenced by the distinct problems humans who do not feel guilt to be horrible abrupt about the complex phenomena of psychopathy, sociopathy etc.

However I imagine the response concerns moral development per se i. However, I think that the notion of moral development entails a connection between the evaluation of acts and actors both self and other. If you think AI morality or, perhaps better, AI ethics can be achieved with out such emotions or such development that, in that sense, perhaps guilt would not be necessary.

But that is to claim that moral development and moral emotions are not necessary for ethics, which is a different matter and requires a different basis for disagreement! There are people who do not experience emotions like guilt who still develop systems of morality. For example, not every person who could be diagnosed as a sociopath although actually people are not diagnosed this way anymore does horrible immoral things.

People with autism spectrum disorders also sometimes have issues with emotions, empathy, guilt, etc. Similarly, there are people who do horrible things and then experience vast amounts of guilt about it — but still go on to do the things again.

Talking about sociopaths brings to mind serial killers — some of whom experience intense guilt but still go on to kill again, because it is about a compulsion for them that they feel they cannot stop despite the guilt. So, in the end, what function does the guilt actually have? Why do we have to go on to condemn ourselves, instead of just condemning the actions? Because condemning the action without recognizing its link to agent is hardly going to be conducive to the moral development of human being.

Condemning particular actions is only part of the picture. We also have to recognize our responsibility for them and understand why we do the things we do. Regret, guilt and shame are all aspects of this and, I would argue, moral regret — as opposed to the regret we feel at going to see a bad play — entails some form of negative self evaluation.

They believe we should all accept whatever anyone else does as their legitimate choice and not try to make them feel bad about it. Guilt and social shaming can be effective means of control, and people have certainly been made to feel guilty for normal, healthy things like asserting themselves, having sexual feelings, or being attracted to people of the same gender. If you lie to take advantage of someone, or intentionally say something mean, or steal, or assault someone, you have directly harmed another person.

Feeling guilty for harmful behavior is useful: The discomfort makes you pay attention to what you did and motivates you to avoid doing it in the future. That helps you learn and grow, and it makes the world a better place. When is remorse helpful, and when is it harmful? What is that rule? It may be something obvious like a law.

These rules are usually easy to spot even though you may feel pretty awful for having broken them.