Does Kanye deserve our forgiveness? Shame is a vanishing emotion

Professions of personal responsibility are disappearing from common language. Mistakes get made but have no makers. Rules remain hauntingly unfollowed by persons unknown. Even the US President, bloviating on social media about the imminent obliteration of Iranian civilisation, seems the very next minute to become a forlornly passive observer of his own intentions: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Also this week, the British government appeared to hold a man responsible for things he did when in the grip of mental illness. Kanye West has been banned from entering the UK in order to perform at a festival. In the recent past, he has written songs called “Heil Hitler” and “Gas Chambers”; been on several offensive social media benders; made various conspiratorial statements during interviews; sold swastika T-shirts. Earlier this year he offered a fulsome apology in the Wall Street Journal, saying that his behaviour was the result of uncontrolled bipolar disorder, but it has made no difference. According to the Prime Minister, “Kanye West should never have been invited to headline Wireless… We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.”

There is no doubt that West has a serious illness. In the final episode of the 2022 Netflix documentary about him, he is seen raving incoherently to the alarm of his friends. At other times his speech is slurred and his face and body heavy with medication. He cuts a mournful figure, even before deterioration is visible onscreen; sensitive and child-like, coping with the consequences of a serious car crash, devastated by the death of his mother, his ego buffeted by simultaneous currents of adulation and demonisation from the world. It would be a lot for a sane person to deal with, and West is not always sane.

The tracks “Heil Hitler” and “Gas Chambers” were both produced in the first half of 2025 during what seems to have been an extended manic episode. During this period West got into a creative folie à deux with an obscure rapper called Dave Blunts, working together to produce a now-deleted album called Cuck. Before working with West, the 23-year-old Blunts was mostly known for being morbidly obese and in premature heart failure, having gone viral for rapping on stage with an oxygen tank. West would apparently talk to his new friend on the phone for hours, then instruct him to write lyrics based on their conversations at a rate of three songs a day.

Perhaps needless to say, the results of this chaotic process were not good. Aside from all the Nazi lyrics (“Reading Mein Kampf, two chapters ’fore I go to sleep”) there were also a lot of passing references to laughing gas; a confession by Kanye of an incestuous sexual relationship with a male cousin; and a revenge song comparing his ex-wife to the disgraced paedophile Jared Fogle. The album cover had KKK imagery on it. The whole thing has since been expunged from the internet, though the track formerly known as “Gas Chambers” remains in circulation, indiscernibly retitled as “All The Love”.

There has been some discussion about whether West should be “forgiven” for this behaviour. It may seem like annoying pedantry — particularly if you have ever been at the sharp end of a destructive mental illness — but if it is genuinely the case that the mania was in charge during the periods in question, strictly speaking there is nothing to forgive. Actions emanating from insanity can only be excused, not forgiven. You excuse pets, young children, and people in the grip of madness for what they could not help doing. You forgive everyone else — or not — for actions that were within their control.

The ban on West seems appropriate, but not as a reflection of personal culpability. The official rationale for it is that his presence is “not conducive to the public good”. And indeed, it probably wouldn’t be particularly beneficial to the public good to have an extremely charismatic famous person making wildly antisemitic statements in front of adoring Finsbury Park crowds in a time when community tensions are high in North London, and hate incidents are on the increase. But this has nothing to do with whether West should be forgiven for the things he has said, or alternatively blamed and punished. The ban has a different logic: that of the risk manager, dealing with a potentially dangerous dog, or an unexploded bomb.

Obviously, people are not dogs or bombs, no matter what their mental states; and describing a loss of agency like this can sound jarringly demeaning, even if accurate. The assumption of deliberate decision-making and self-control is crucial to many historical constructions of personhood. Viewed in retrospect, periods of dislocation can feel deeply humiliating, partly for that reason. As psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, herself bipolar, writes in her classic memoir An Unquiet Mind about the time when stability returns: “there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. … Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?”. Or as West described it in the apology he paid to publish in a newspaper: “the disconnected moments … lead to poor judgment and reckless behaviour that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience.”

Perhaps partly because of a background worry about dehumanisation, it is increasingly common to suggest that even severely dislocated episodes like these are compatible with moral responsibility. There are ethicists who argue that a person can be criminally responsible, even when subject to hallucinations. And there are  neuroscientists who want to emphasise the similarity of the “normal” case to that of the mentally ill. As scientists get better at mapping the brain, they say, it will become clearer that all of our behaviour, whether functional or dysfunctional, is completely determined by prior neurological, chemical, and environmental events. In that case, the fiction of a responsible self will become obsolete, and it will be obvious that no-one is accountable for any of their actions, mad or sane.

This last one seems to me a particularly daft line of argument. Moral responsibility is primarily a social notion, not a claim about immunity to causal chains. To grant responsibility to someone for their actions is to say that — as philosopher Bernard Williams put it — they are able to belong to “a set of persons, not necessarily known … or specially important to one another, living under a common system of justice”. At a minimum, living communally like this requires being able to run through coherent chains of reasoning; to remember what you just did; to make plans and simple predictions; to show reasonable impulse control; to avoid violence to self or others; and, of course, to recognise reality as it is without delusions. If you cannot do these basic things — not just in the sense that you are unwilling to, but that you are literally unable — your ability to meet local moral standards will be radically compromised. You will fall out of the community of responsible agents altogether until stability can be regained.

To count as responsible in this sense, you also have to know what local moral standards are. Such knowledge is implicit in the M’Naghten rule defining the criminal defence of insanity: either the defendant didn’t know what he was doing, “or if he did know it… he did not know he was doing what was wrong”. When you are manic, you can lose track of the social cues which otherwise would alert you to your own transgression. You may think you are being fabulously witty, sensuous, clever, and provocative, and that everyone else can see this. All the while your family and friends are staring at you, appalled.

So there remains an important distinction to be made, between the personal responsibility of well people and mentally ill people; one, moreover, that is crucial for looking after the latter properly, since it recognises their limits and associated risks. Equally, though, it seems that in smaller ways, ordinary life is becoming more like mentally ill life — though the vibe is more depressive than manic. As we become reliant on technology to do the thinking for us, individual powers of reasoning and memory diminish. Whole days can be lost staring at screens. Our minds feel like passive receivers of whatever content is being beamed into them, and we are growing less able to distinguish true from false. When we do encounter reality, it can feel like a hallucination.

And there’s also the fact that which rules we are supposed to be following, exactly, is increasingly obscure. Ethical codes are often matters of contentious dispute; many laws are only lightly policed; from Trump down, transgressive edgelords seem to be getting away with highly antisocial acts. Shame seems to be a vanishing emotion, and shifting blame onto others common. In order to know when, exactly, moral responsibility is lacking, we need clear cases of people actually owning it. And yet it is all too easy to pretend that nobody really does.

Meanwhile, instead of nurturing the capacities that make for socially responsible citizens, tech elites now valorise something called being “high agency” — a debased version of responsibility which seems to amount to no more than a willingness to move fast and break things. You should not be merely copying other people, apparently; you should be ploughing your own furrow, being insouciantly disagreeable, and doing all the new things all of the time. Take risks, gleefully cause some chaos, and don’t go worrying about what anyone else thinks. In other words, you should be just like Kanye during a manic phase — except that unlike him, you won’t have any excuse.

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