Abstract
Some of the greatest harms perpetrated by human beings—mass murders, for example—are directly caused by a small number of individuals, yet the full force of the transgressions would not obtain without the indirect contributions of many others. To combat such evils, Larry May (1992) argues that we ought to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility within communities. More specifically, we ought to develop a propensity to feel ashamed of ourselves when we choose to be associated with others who transgress. Grant that we ought to assume greater moral responsibility for contributing to harms that we do not directly commit. My goal is to challenge May’s claim that we should move towards a shame culture, and to argue that we ought to focus on cultivating empathy-based care and guilt instead. An established research program spearheaded by June Tangney (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007) has shown that individuals who are disposed to feel shame are more likely to hide from scrutiny, blame others, get angry, and become aggressive. Cultivating shame, in short, is a recipe for increasing antisocial behavior. Policies that promote feelings of empathy-based care and guilt, however, seem better designed to achieve the desired result, namely, minimizing the harms caused by groups.
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Notes
For detailed information on casualties, see the statistics compiled by the human rights group B’Tselem at www.btselem.org
Another term that May (1992) regularly uses is “moral taint,” but it is unclear whether he uses the term as a near synonym of “shame,” in reference to a type of shame, or in reference to a distinct phenomenon. I will not take a stance on this issue, and use the more familiar term “shame” exclusively.
May does not explicitly define shame in Sharing Responsibility (1992), but he does in The Socially Responsive Self (1996): “Shame is best understood as the response that people feel when they believe that others (an anticipated audience) would judge them to have a particular failing or character defect. Shame has its origins in the feeling of wanting to hide from someone whose gaze betrays some sort of disapproval of one’s person” (p. 81). This quotation clearly illustrates that May accepts the standard definition of shame, favored by most philosophers and psychologists.
It is worth noting explicitly that May (1992) does not base his argument for greater shared responsibility on a mechanism of guilt-by-association, even though it can seem that he collapses the notions on occasion. Whereas guilt-by-association is a troublesome notion, the sorts of shame that May describes are meant to do a similar job, without the impropriety.
Sharing responsibility with others does not mean that one should feel a significantly weaker form of shame: “When a person is assigned less than full responsibility for a harm, that person still is subject to blame, punishment, or shame for what has occurred, and should feel motivated to choose differently in the future, just as in a case of full individual responsibility” (May, 1992, p. 38).
An example of a scenario from Tangney’s most current measure (the Test of Self-Conscious Affect 3, or TOSCA-3) is, “You make plans to meet a friend for lunch. At 5 o’clock, you realize you stood your friend up” (Tangney & Dearing, 2002, p. 207). Participants rate how likely they would be to respond in certain ways, from 1 (not likely) to 5 (very likely). They rate, for example, whether they would think “I am inconsiderate” (p. 207), an indication of shame, and whether they would think “My boss distracted me just before lunch” (p. 208), an indication of externalization of blame.
This has led the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault (2014) to recommend training university administrators on how to avoid blaming the victims of sexual assault.
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and for encouraging me to address several of these objections.
This study was conducted in the United Kingdom when the unjustified military incursion into Iraq was salient to participants. Americans might have been less likely to agree that military action would have constituted a transgression.
The claim is not that there is something intuitively troubling about groups being agents (see, e.g., List & Pettit, 2011), but rather groups undergoing emotions.
Miko Salmela (2012) is another author, I would argue, whose view of collectively experienced emotions fails to distinguish itself sufficiently from May’s (1992) to sustain the concern in question. Those moved by this concern might explore von Scheve and Salmela (2014), Huebner (2011), and Gilbert (2002).
The argument also applies to Gilbert’s (2002) proposal, as Gilbert admits, “There are important connections between collective guilt feelings and feelings of personal and membership guilt. No one of these feelings seems to carry another with it as a matter of logic. The existence of guilt feelings of any of the three kinds, however, will tend to be associated with guilt feelings of the other kinds” (p. 142).
Nussbaum (2004), for example, who clearly distinguishes between shame and guilt, cites many of the same reasons as Braithwaite for rejecting shame in favor of guilt. Nussbaum also notes that she believes Braithwaite’s proposal references guilt.
In this example and others, one might be sufficiently empathic, but choose to act (or not to act, as the case might be) for other reasons, for example, a justified fear of retribution. In such a case, the action (or omission) would not be morally flawed.
This is in contrast to shame and empathy, which usually are not correlated or are anti-correlated with one another (Tangney et al. 2007). This could be because shame is self-oriented, whereas empathy and guilt are other-oriented.
Cassie Striblen (2007) also argues that guilt can be an appropriate response to a group-based harm.
Note that this is not a classic (and problematic) mechanism of guilt-by-association, by which, for example, merely riding in a car during a transgression means that one is guilty oneself.
For a different take on empathy, however, see Prinz (2011).
To reiterate, what makes an action morally deficient on this view is motivation-in-the-moment, not characteristic motivation. The focus on motivation-in-the-moment is what allows the proposal in question to avoid cultivating shame, by focusing on something situational rather than character-based.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Carl Craver, Julia Driver, Ron Mallon, and two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Oakberg, T.J. There Should Not Be Shame in Sharing Responsibility: An Alternative to May’s Social Existentialist Vision. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 755–772 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9684-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9684-y