Shame for Kantians, and Others

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Notes

[Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.]

1 See Geaney, “Guiding Moral Boundaries.”

2 Search conducted October 11, 2018.

3 See Sheikh, “Cultural Variation.”

4 See Rawls, Theory of Justice, 390.

5 See Taylor, “Shame, Integrity, and Self-respect,” 163.

6 See Maibom, “Descent of Shame.”

7 For those who believe in an omnipresent God—and who thus never consider themselves truly alone—such shame is inevitable. In section four of the preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche points this out: “ ‘Is it true that God is everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I find that indecent!’ “ Nietzsche is not alone in remarking on the shame induced by an omnipresent God. Martin Luther claimed that the Holy Spirit graced him with his theological insights when he was at his most degraded and shameful: while he was sitting, constipated, on the toilet (see Oberman, Luther, 155).

8 One oddity in the account here is that Ajax’s shame-induced violence is self-directed, whereas most of the other cases of shame-induced violence in Thomason’s book are other-directed. Framing the book, as she does, around Ajax thus casts it in a light that she does not intend.

9 For a discussion of shame and humiliation, see Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni, In Defense of Shame.

10 In this respect, I find myself at odds with Thomason (following Nussbaum), who argues that cases “from literature are important because they provide a rich description of the conceptual possibilities of feelings of shame” (55). My impression is that we are as likely to “misimagine,” to follow Adam Morton in “Imagination and Misimagination,” as to imagine in these cases, and that naturalistic study of actual manifestations of shame in diverse, living populations is a better path forward.

11 For a discussion of the hawk–dove game, see Maynard Smith and Price, “Logic of Animal Conflict.”

12 For an insightful discussion of this idea, see Morton, Emotion and Imagination: “In shame one experiences the contempt that could be directed at one from an external or impartial point of view” (161).

13 On this topic, see McGeer, “Trust, Hope, and Empowerment,” and Alfano, “Friendship.”

14 Doris, Talking to Our Selves, passim.

15 Search conducted October 13, 2018.

16 Thomason says that this shows that shame is a moral emotion. By her test (i.e., is liability to it grounded in moral commitments?), one could make a case that every emotion is a moral emotion. This is not meant as an objection.

17 On this topic, see Jordan et al., “Third-party Punishment Costly Signal.”

18 See Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction.