On the Moral Significance of Shame

Abstract

The paper shows that shame remains the important moral phenomenon despite being the reaction to an actual or imaginary external blame or ridicule. The first step of the research is the reconstruction of the old tradition to interpret shame as the pain from ignominy or the painful anticipation of possible ignominy. The tradition goes back to Aristotle and is relatively widespread in modern cultural anthropology (conception of ‘cultures of shame’ and ‘cultures of guilt’), sociology (the T. Scheff’s identification of shame with the reaction to the threat to the social bond), and psychology (the P. Gilbert’s hypothesis of the inseparable tie between shame and the management of social attractiveness). In ethical theory shame is described as a moral sanction of peculiar kind: ideal but not completely internal. The shame feeling falls beyond the scope of moral phenomena if we presuppose that all moral sanctions are internal. This supposition is usually inferred from the thesis that genuine moral perfection can be attained only through completely autonomous choice (other version: moral perfection is identical with the capacity to autonomous choice). To defend the moral status of shame the author uses two strategies. First one is to demonstrate that shame feeling is not so heteronomous to be independent from moral believes of the ashamed person. The second strategy is to propose such an understanding of morality that allows partly heteronomous character of moral motivations.