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Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses—Two Contrasting Interpretations for Moral Education

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Abstract

This paper offers a sustained philosophical meditation on contrasting interpretations of the emotion of shame within four academic discourses—social psychology, psychological anthropology, educational psychology and Aristotelian scholarship—in order to elicit their implications for moral education. It turns out that within each of these discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasises shame’s expendability or moral ugliness (and where shame is typically described as guilt’s ugly sister), but also a heterodox interpretation which seeks to retrieve and defend shame. As the heterodox interpretation seems to offer a more realistic picture of shame’s role in moral education, the provenance of the mainstream interpretation merits scrutiny. I argue that social scientific studies of the concept of shame, based on its supposed phenomenology, incorporate biases in favour of excessive, rather than medial, forms of the emotion. I suggest ways forward for more balanced analyses of the nature, moral justification and educative role of shame.

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Notes

  1. Obviously, Aristotle’s understanding of ‘virtuous’ is not exactly the same as the typical modern understanding of ‘moral’, for instance in standard deontological and consequentialist theories. However, as virtue ethics has now become a familiar contemporary alternative to deontology and consequentialism, I take it that using ‘morally positive’ here as more or less synonymous with ‘virtuous’ will not confuse readers unduly.

  2. I have also, in previous writings, expressed a number of doubts about the canon (Kristjánsson 2002; Kristjánsson 2010a), although those have not been as systematically formulated.

  3. The essential question is not whether Aristotle is willing to grant shame the status of a full virtue. He might still resent doing so as it is, qua holistic trait, only praiseworthy in moral learners, whereas in adults—as I have argued—it is only praiseworthy in its ‘prospective’ form. Yet Aristotle does have the conceptualisation of a virtue that is relative to a developmental stage available to him, as already noted. In any case, Aristotle never explicitly acknowledges shame even as a quasi-virtue, which is why I claim above that this is a point where the ‘sensible Aristotelian’ needs to depart from Aristotle.

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Correspondence to Kristján Kristjánsson.

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Kristjánsson, K. Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses—Two Contrasting Interpretations for Moral Education. Stud Philos Educ 33, 495–511 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-013-9399-7

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