TY - CHAP

T1 - Self-Understanding and Moral Self-Improvement in Individual Shame and Shame Based on Group Identification

AU - Montes Sánchez, Alba

AU - Salice, Alessandro

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Shame presents us with a dilemma. On the one hand, this emotion has traditionally been accorded an important role in moral learning and self-reformation, as an unpleasant emotion that makes us feel bad about our flaws and motivates us to try to mend them. On the other hand, shame has also been contended to be morally counter-productive: it makes us react in antisocial ways, covering up our failings, shunning contact with others or lashing out in anger. Here, shame may backfire by causing antisocial behavior. This paper seeks to illuminate this dilemma by analyzing how self and others relate in shame and what kind of self-knowledge can we gain from experiencing this emotion. Our central examples are not cases of individual, but of shame based on group identification. Is shame equally appropriate, and does it have the same significance, when it is group-based? We argue that shame based on group identification comes in three different varieties. While their conditions of appropriateness are peculiar, their intentional structure and moral significance remains unchanged when compared to individual shame. In particular, group-based forms of shame can reveal the importance of certain others for our social identities, as well as warn us about the ease with which we can come to be influenced by such others. Shame, in its various forms, may pull us in moral and immoral directions, but it is anyway part of the sensibilities that make us moral. In the best cases, it allows us to understand how we stand in relation to our values, to the social world and its expectations of us.

AB - Shame presents us with a dilemma. On the one hand, this emotion has traditionally been accorded an important role in moral learning and self-reformation, as an unpleasant emotion that makes us feel bad about our flaws and motivates us to try to mend them. On the other hand, shame has also been contended to be morally counter-productive: it makes us react in antisocial ways, covering up our failings, shunning contact with others or lashing out in anger. Here, shame may backfire by causing antisocial behavior. This paper seeks to illuminate this dilemma by analyzing how self and others relate in shame and what kind of self-knowledge can we gain from experiencing this emotion. Our central examples are not cases of individual, but of shame based on group identification. Is shame equally appropriate, and does it have the same significance, when it is group-based? We argue that shame based on group identification comes in three different varieties. While their conditions of appropriateness are peculiar, their intentional structure and moral significance remains unchanged when compared to individual shame. In particular, group-based forms of shame can reveal the importance of certain others for our social identities, as well as warn us about the ease with which we can come to be influenced by such others. Shame, in its various forms, may pull us in moral and immoral directions, but it is anyway part of the sensibilities that make us moral. In the best cases, it allows us to understand how we stand in relation to our values, to the social world and its expectations of us.

UR - https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538177693/The-Moral-Psychology-of-Shame

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9781538177693

T3 - Moral Psychology of the Emotions

BT - The Moral Psychology of Shame

A2 - Fussi, Alessandra

A2 - Rodogno, Raffaele

PB - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ER -