Ideas on how Action as one of the characteristics of Social Systems is related to Guilt, Sorrow and Pain have changed from the classical understanding of Tragedy (Aristotle) to the modern Tragedy. This is the central thesis of Søren Kierkegaard in his book Either - Or.
In Part I, section III, Kierkegaard writes: "In ancient tragedy the sorrow is deeper, the pain less; in modern tragedy, the pain is greater, the sorrow less. Sorrow always contains something more substantial than pain." (Source: Either - Or. A Fragment of Life. Penguin: London, 2004 (1992).
As I understand Kierkegaard, he claims that in the classic tragedy, the downfall of the hero was already clear in the grand schemes of things, in the divine end or completion ("telos"). The character of the hero was a consequence of the action shown to be untenable and leading to downfall. Thus, the classic tragedy understood events and consequences of action in a broad sense, as part of an overarching system.
Modern tragedy, on the contrary, ties the consequences of action that went wrong to the subjective choice of the hero. If things do not end up well for him, he is guilty, the cause and responsibility are entirely his. The sorrow of the classic tragedy then becomes a deeper pain, a sorrow upon which has been reflected.
My personal understandig is that Kierkegaard links the classic understanding of tragedy to esthetics an the Esthetic Man, focused on Form.
The modern understanding of tragedy befits the Ethical Man, essentially focussing on content: on values and value judgements, on right and wrong, on responsibility and guilt, on causation and contribution.
In modern times, Kierkegaard asserts, the modern tragic understanding is visible in how we think about and assign Responsibility and Acountability.
In modern times, we find the idea of modern tragedy reflected in Sustainability thought: the polluter pays (it was his deliberate choice to pollute and the consequences therefore must be his), and the person who suffers because his home was washed away or his farm lost its crops due to extreme weather events are the guilty ones: they were ignorant or unwilling or unable to take climate risks into account.
The Paris Accord seems to assume that governments can control people, enterprises, and countries; that enterprises emit greenhouse gases, and have unlimited power to reduce and avoid emissions, or zero them out.
The company that gets to Net Zero is the hero on a pedestal, those who didn't get their losers or villains. People who work at these companies are villains too since they didn't prevent the company from acting better. All protagonists had choice and used this resource the wrong way.
We see similar thought regarding individual employment: if you are poor, it is your fault since you didn't study enough, didn't work hard enough, and (obviously) made the wrong choices. You are guilty.
Employees are masters of their own destiny and careers. Anything is possible, if you only try hard enough and determined enough.
Modern Western society puts all the onus on individuals, workers, companies, institutions, and disregards the institutional context, the prisoner's dilemma many operate in (if I don't do A, someone else will do A and I lose the game). Besides from disregard of context, this thinking expresses a Fallacy of Scale: a right decision taken regarding one's own entity can turn out collectively bad at the higher level (industry, region, country). Conversely, what a large scale aggregate does right will make some individual components of it perish and it will promote the survival of others.
From a Fallacy of Scale perspective, the individual cannot be always guilty, since individuals do not all have the requisite variety to counter adverse impact from the systems they are part of.