shame

Shame has a bad reputation in modern ethical and political thought because it threatens to fly directly in the face of self-respect of individuals. Your actions (or your failure to act), your failings (or you zealotry) or your defects can earn you the contempt, the derision or the avoidance of others. You then feel ashamed, you blush, you descend a step in the scale of self-respect, you become less respectable in the eyes of others. Next you wish to hide or, better yet, to disappear.

But shame is not only demeaning; it is also enslaving. It robs you of the possibility of becoming a moral agent, an autonomous being capable of legislating for yourself. Shame is a drive, a source of heteronomy. Shame, or fear thereof, has a grip on the knob of the door to autonomy. It means the death of the self-legislating individual, who thus ignores the voice of her reason coming from within and pays head to the shrill of others coming from without.

Is there a way to view shame under a more favorable light? Bernard Williams believes that there are resources in a seemingly unexpected place, Greek thought, which would readily allow us to acknowledge shame’s more positive role. He argues that if the attempt to retrieve a favorable version of shame from a supposedly “primitive” tradition of moral thought such as the Greek appears to you as a stretch –it might even strike you as a perilous idea—that is probably because you have an erroneous understanding of the way in which shame worked in Homeric society. It is a mistake to think that shame in the world of Homer “involves merely adjustment to the prejudices of the community” or that shame has “as its object only the competitive success or failures of the individual.” Shame, Williams argues, is in that society a source of normativity--it helps agents to discern between good and bad deeds, between and moral course of action and an immoral one. Williams:

“An agent will be motivated by prospective shame in the face of people who would be angered by conduct that, in turn, they would avoid for those same reasons. […] These reciprocal attitudes have a content: some kinds of behavior are admired, others accepted, others despised, and it is those attitudes that are internalised, not simply the prospect of hostile reactions. If that were not so, there would be, once more, no shame culture, no shared ethical attitudes at all. […] The other may be identified in ethical terms. He […] is conceived as one whose reactions I would respect; equally, he is conceived as someone who would respect those same reactions if they were appropriately directed to him.”