CHAPTER SEVEN
Never do anything which you would feel ashamed to do and always do what you would feel ashamed not to do. I adopt this as my Golden Rule.
—VIRGIL ALDRICH, “AN ETHICS OF SHAME,” 1939
THERE ARE SEVERAL familiar categories of shame that the critic will call to our attention that seem normatively peculiar and hard to explain, unless shame, as such, has some unfortunate features. These are shame at being caught naked, shame at being a minority or abiding minority customs and habits, and racist, sexist, queerphobic, and ableist shame(s).
Naked Shame
The shame of nakedness, of being seen by unwelcome eyes, especially while doing things that are normally done in private, is widely discussed. Some think this shame is innate, others that it is learned. Critics of shame think that naked shame is irrational, and that more culturally specific and refined forms of shame—for example, Victorian sexual modesty norms—inherit this irrationality. And some think that primitive naked shame accounts for, or even is, the disposition to take one’s entire embodied self as the object of shame.
Recall that there are three different kinds of shame that are thought to be “primitive,” according to different models. First, there is primitive shame of the sort that disposes humans to indicate submissiveness to dominant conspecifics by averting their eyes or taking on a more diminutive, and thus more submissive, posture and to conform to social evaluations. Second, there is psychoanalytic primitive shame, which is activated allegedly in infancy when the child is narcissistically wounded upon discovering it is not omnipotent, and that the world is not completely at its service. Third, there is the primitive shame about one’s body, either just for being a body, or for being a body that is seen by others. Assume that all three models of primitive shame have ways of explaining naked shame. The first two must explain naked shame as a natural extension of their more primitive, theory-specific kinds of shame—appeasement shame or narcissistic wound shame; the third explains naked shame as the original shame itself. In each case, the idea is that some kind of original shame is positioned to take my entire developed psychophysical self as its object or just straightforwardly does so. Thus, we are universally disposed to feel shame when we are seen naked. I doubt it.
Almost every culture thinks that modesty and decorum require at least covering adult genitals. Bernard Williams makes a great deal out of the following observation: “The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately by the wrong people, in the wrong condition. It is straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in sexual connections. The word aidoia, a derivative of aidos, ‘shame,’ is a standard Greek word for the genitals, and similar terms are found in other languages. The reaction is to cover oneself or hide, and people naturally take steps to avoid situations that call for it” (1993, 78).
There are four considerations that weigh against thinking that the Greeks named a universal preexisting phenomenon—naked shame—as opposed to that they were one of many cultures to socially create a normative framework for experiencing naked shame. First, the dominant view in anthropology is that clothing was invented about 170,000 years ago, approximately 80,000 years after the birth of Homo sapiens. We went naked for a very long time. This suggests cultural learning since large leaves—not just fig leaves—were readily available for covering but were not used to cover exposed genitals.
Second, we need to beware of making any inferences about core human nature in general, and core shame in particular, from our lineage, the “footnotes” to the Greeks’ lineage (see Konstan 2007 for some concerns about Williams’s interpretation of the Greek usages). The Greeks were covering their genitals for about 160,000 years, give or take, before they thought and spoke the way Williams reprises. Meanwhile, classical Confucian texts, also Axial Age texts, show no linguistic connection between words in the shame family (xiu, wu, chi, and ru) and nakedness, and there are no examples in any classical Confucian text that connect shame to nudity or exposed genitals, although there are many that connect shame to violations of conventional and moral norms (Geaney 2004). This is not decisive as regards the non-innateness of bodily shame, since naked humans of the first 80,000 years of species history might have felt shame or protoshame, the ancestor of shame, when naked (which they always were), and thus have had a wish not to be seen naked, and an associated disposition to hide themselves when doing certain private, naked things.
But, third, it seems fairly straightforward to think that the necessity of clothing for protection, the eventual ubiquity of clothing, the need to regulate sexual behavior as societies grew larger and larger, and cultural learning regarding human waste practices can explain the development of modesty norms for covering genitals, and propriety norms for urinating or defecating, which in turn can account for modern shame at being seen exposed, or being seen urinating or defecating. Disgust at defecating near the homestead is common in nonhuman primates. And dogs can be easily housetrained in kennels, because they do not favor peeing and pooping where they sleep.
Nussbaum (2004) explores the connections between shame and disgust, and although she thinks that shame might have some minimal social usefulness, she thinks disgust is pretty much entirely countermoral—a motivational source for racism, sexism, ethnic hatred, queerphobia, and ableism. But this is one step too far. One can see how disgust could be utilized sensibly to engender a sense of social shame about urinating or defecating in public. The relevant norm is not to do such smelly and/or dirty things in public, near where people are engaged in activities of friendship, commerce, or home life. In itself, there is nothing wrong with the norm. The problems Nussbaum correctly calls to our attention are those cases where disgust responses that support cleanliness and hygiene norms are weaponized so that certain people, workers, immigrants, or the poor are associated with violations, and this is encouraged and internalized.
Fourth, there are social ideals of bodies that no doubt play some role in this kind of shame. Plato thought it was obvious that the bodies of young men/boys were the epitome of beauty. Other times and places have prized the female body as the epitome of beauty and sexual power. Familiar ideal female bodies range from Rubens’s bodies of the seventeenth century to Nabokov’s Lolita bodies to late twentieth-century Twiggy bodies to twenty-first-century Rihanna bodies.
In modern worlds, the entertainment and fashion industries project ideals that, once internalized, will make most people dissatisfied with their bodies. Some evolutionary thinkers say that hip-to-waist ratio ideals for males of .9 and for females of .7 are proxies for health in males and females of reproductive age, and load the dice in favor of certain bodily ideals. But knowledge is power, and there is no necessity here. Good societies push back against unrealistic and dehumanizing ideals of the body. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) writes beautifully about nonshameful attitudes toward one’s own and others’ minority bodies. Remember, generic shame awaits social determination of what one ought to be ashamed of. If a culture or a subculture projects an impossible ideal of the female or male body, and especially if it engenders shame for neither achieving nor aspiring to meet the ideal, the problem is with the ideals and the bad values it represents.
Minority Shame
Regarding shame at being a member of a minority, I have in mind specifically shame with regard to a minority’s customs or habits, such things as language, accents, religious rituals, diet, and forms of dress. Consider the case of speaking a minority language or having a distinctive accent. It seems inevitable that anyone who immigrates to, or even visits, a place where their ability to communicate is compromised can feel any of a variety of emotions—frustration, inadequacy, embarrassment (which many think is a variety of shame or close kin), and shame. Regarding accents: I almost never ask an American student to repeat what they say in class; at most, I request that they speak up, but sometimes I ask my East Asian students to do so. I try to indicate that the problem—perhaps protesting too much and adding insult to injury—lies with me. But they are receiving feedback, nonetheless, that things would go more smoothly with me communication-wise if they spoke in a way that was more intelligible to me (McWhorter 2020).
The point is that cultures make available a wide array of statuses and ideals. Some statuses—such as native or nonnative speaker, native or foreign accent, posh or nonposh accent—can, in principle, be noticed without being judged. Simply because of the relative frequency of miscommunication and stressful communication, a nonnative speaker, or a native speaker with an unusual accent, might feel bad about the way (the language, the accent) they speak. And one way of feeling bad is feeling embarrassed or ashamed. We are gregarious social animals who seek uptake for our actions and projects. But the kinds of situations I’m describing are ones where there are glitches in the uptake, or in the worse cases, deliberate downtakes.
These cases are especially worrisome because the generalizations that support majority judgments of the minority being “less than” and out of normative conformity, and that lead the minority to feel embarrassed or ashamed, are not normally expressed explicitly, nor are they normally publicly and/or rationally defended by either the majority or the minority. Nonetheless, these feelings can easily be causally produced. How so?
Let’s draw a distinction between a shame script that is socially certified and that protects a good value, and that can, in addition, be rationally defended versus shame that is engendered by bad values, bad norms, or—what is different—by unnoticed and unendorsed causal processes that have bad effects. An example of the first is teaching the youth that one ought to tell the truth and ought to feel ashamed if one lies. An example of the second is the case where an individual with a foreign accent feels ashamed, not because the dominant group believes or defends the norm that one ought not to have a foreign accent, but because the frequency of failures to be understood when one has a foreign accent leads to feeling bad, unwelcome, alien, and possibly ashamed. Again, in the cases I am considering, the expectation that people ought to speak the dominant language without an accent is not publicly endorsed or defended. But genuine difficulties in communication across languages—or between people who speak the statistically dominant language with a normal accent and those who don’t—create an atmosphere relevantly similar to cases where considered norms governing proper behavior are inculcated and endorsed and shame is introduced as an appropriate thing to feel, such as in the “one ought never to lie” type cases. The causal mechanisms that operate in such cases, as I am imagining them, and that might make the person feel ashamed of their accent, do not involve the intention to shame them because of their accent. The shame is produced nonetheless by association with relevantly similar kinds of situations in which shame is in play. That is, the associative mechanisms that operate in the inadvertent, unintentional case are general learning principles, operate across the emotions, and are not distinctive to shame. A child raised on a prideful regimen, designed to constantly boost self-esteem, might become entitled, aglow with confidence and pride, eventually thinking that when any situation goes well, they are the main cause and deserve maximum credit. The problem in this case is due to some bad thinking about when pride is deserved, possibly on both the child’s side and the side of the adults who are teaching the pride norms and scripts, plus overgeneralization. It is not that rightful pride is a problem.
In the inadvertent cases of shame, the situation is one in which the minority reads correctly that their practices are not being easily or smoothly endorsed, not taken for granted, or not judged as fine, legitimate, and perfectly acceptable. The person or group then takes this, mistakenly, as an indication that they are being called upon to feel shame, and they do. Shame is born out of sensitivity to social disapproval, disrespect, and failures to be taken up by others. Those of us who are positioned to produce inadvertent shame in the minority language cases—as well as in cases of religious rites and rituals, dress, diet, and so on—have a special responsibility not to let it happen.
Racist, Sexist, Queerphobic, and Ableist Shame
The picture that makes the experience of minority shame inadvertent is too kind to numerical and power majorities, since typically some segment of the population will, in fact, intend for the member of the minority with the accent or the disability, or who is neuro-atypical or a member of a sexual, religious, or racial minority to read that they are judged negatively and are invited to feel badly about themselves. This brings us to a third kind of shame, which can be distinguished from naked shame and minority shame.
This third kind of shame is deliberate and ubiquitous in many places, and it has the following features: First, the person (as a member of some group) who is being shamed does not share the value with the shamer (who is often enacting an anger or fear script) that would make it appropriate for them (the person being shamed) to feel shame. In fact, they often entirely reject it. But they feel shame anyway (often anger and fear as well). Second, they are disapproved of and downgraded because they possess a certain unalterable trait: the color of their skin, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. The demand to change an unalterable trait is straightforwardly cruel.
Shame asks an individual to modify, extinguish, or reschedule some desire, trait, act, or disposition. Sometimes shame calls on a person, even a group, to change ingrained habits. One example is calling on a racist or sexist culture to be ashamed of their racism and sexism, and to work to overcome it. “Ought” implies “can,” and this, hard as it is, can be done. Sometimes, speaking realistically, it requires generational change. But current generations can aid and assist the process of turning the tables by self-cleansing and working to exorcise the bad values, views, and practices from themselves. Consciousnesses can be raised, and even souls poisoned by racist and sexist values, beliefs, and practices can teach their children, often and well, that it is always shameful to disrespect another for an unalterable trait, even if some particular group or generation cannot entirely stop doing so in their own hearts. My father was raised in racist and anti-Semitic quarters. He knew both were baseless prejudices. He told me this. And he admitted that he was not entirely able to cleanse his own heart of these prejudices. But he was entirely dedicated to teaching his children that both were based on false beliefs and shameful. This is, in fact, one culturally available script in our culture: teach the children well, better than you (your generation) were taught.
One point is that both the racist and the sexist and the antiracist and the antisexist enact shame. The racists and sexists utilize certain culturally available scripts to make people of color and women feel ashamed for possessing certain unalterable traits. Remember, generic shame has this initial structure: The novice is invited to feel bad in a shamelike way about being judged for possessing a trait or characteristic that is disvalued or disapproved of. Shame marks the possibility of social exclusion if the novice does Φ in situation S, where Φ names a violation of a social or moral norm and protects some value v. Feeling bad in the shamelike way is designed to inhibit future acts of Φ type, as well as beliefs, value commitments, traits, habits, or dispositions that might dispose the novice to Φ.
Generic shame permits racists and sexists to express disdain, disapproval, and disrespect for Φ that takes—it is a variable—an unalterable characteristic such as the color of one’s skin or one’s sex or gender or one’s sexual orientation or one’s disability status as the object of disapproval and disdain, and to use shame to protect the values of v1 = white supremacy or v2 = patriarchy or v3 = heterosexuality or v1 + v2 + v3 inside some value system V. In what situations S is Φ disapproved of? In life, in living—in being a person of color or being a woman or queer or differently abled—neither the trait disdained nor the situation is alterable.
Turning the tables involves saying that this is wrong, cruel, and misguided, and insisting on different norms and scripts. The shameful dispositions (Φ) become racism, sexism, and queerphobia, and the values (v1, v2, v3) being protected are equal respect, dignity, and freedom inside a system of value V, which makes sense of these values.
In these cases, and many others, the situation is one where rival norms and scripts for shame—what is shameful, when to induce it, what to do when one feels it, what action to take—are mutually inconsistent and in competition. The racist wants people of color—or in the case of antiwhite racism, wants whites—to feel less than and socially excluded, to quiet down, know their place, and slink away. The antiracist wants the racist to feel shame, come to see that racism is shameful, and change themselves, their racist behavior and practices, and the values and norms they model for the young.
Is the racist, sexist, queerphobic, or ableist person globally bad? Almost certainly not. If the antiracist or antisexist acts as if they are, they simply copy the cruel mistake of substituting a deep-seated characteristic or an unalterable trait for Φ. It is a variable matter how much being a racist or sexist interpenetrates the being of the racist or sexist. But the humane, and also most psychologically plausible, view is that we contain multitudes, and, as hard as it is, we can work to improve aspects of ourselves, even many aspects at once, without needing to entirely undermine our identity, without needing to dissolve our previous self and create an entirely new person.
The best answer to the question of why people are so vulnerable to the shaming judgments of others is Beauvoirian. We are gregarious, social animals, cocreating a world with one another, and vulnerable to uptakes and downtakes, to assessments of our status and worth, to recognition respect and disrespect, and to affronts to our dignity. We are cocreated by and with others, and our weal and our woe are dependent on the goodwill of others. Cheshire Calhoun puts the matter this way: “Feeling ashamed … does not entail that they [objects of racist, sexist disrespect] agree with the shamers’ contempt. That people who wholeheartedly condemn sexist or racist insults are still vulnerable to feeling shamed by those insults … is a perfectly natural response for a mature, well-formed agent to have.… Shame, not just social discomfort, seems the reasonable response to being treated with contempt by people whose evaluations partially define [who one is]” (2004, 137–38).
The Mature Sense of Shame
Now it is time to sketch the positive view of the mature sense of shame and explain why it is good, better even than having a reliable conscience. Recall the two dogmas of shame discussed earlier (Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2011). The first is that shame is essentially a response to the disapproving gaze of others. The second is that shame leads to antisocial behavior, either withdrawal or “humiliated fury.”
The first dogma is false, because it is common for a person to come to avow and accept social values as their own, and to feel shame if they violate or think of violating these values even if they are not seen and never will be seen by any other. The second dogma is also false, because it is primarily humiliation, shaming, and global self-loathing that lead to antisocial behavior in WEIRD populations. A mature sense of shame has no such effects. In fact, a mature sense of shame is more plausibly thought of as “the proper guardian of every type of virtue” (Hume 1751, 140–41). Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni describe the requisite sense of shame this way:
To have a sense of shame is, when the circumstances call for it, to experience shame episodes. These involve the subject’s painful experience of being incapable of meeting, even to a minimal degree, the demands of a value to which she is attached. Being disposed to shame episodes, however, is only one dimension of the manifestation of an individual’s sense of shame. The latter should more generally be associated with all the elements constituting a sensitivity to the lower limit of what is acceptable in our traits and behavior.… Now beyond individual shame episodes and their immediate behavioral tendencies, we should also count as manifestations of our sense of shame—and this is crucial—first, the long-term action tendencies they might encourage, as well as, second, the thoughts—retrospective but especially prospective—regarding circumstances that might be occasions for shame. (2011, 174)
I want to emphasize several important elements in this picture of the sense of shame, add a few elements, and explain how shame, which is initially negative (negatively valenced, as the psychologists say), could become a sense of shame that is positive, incorporating aspects of pride, and making up an aspect of the self that is worthy of self-respect and self-esteem. This needs to be explained, because otherwise the fact that we use the word “shame” to describe both feeling ashamed (which is negative) and the sense of shame (which is not only judged positively by others but is experienced positively by the person whose sense of shame it is) might be a linguistic accident, and indicate nothing about the positive prospects or uses of shame, as I’ve been discussing it so far. The case could, after all, be like the use of the word “right” in the expressions “it was the right thing to do” and “she got lost when she turned right.” But it isn’t like that. “Shame” in the “experience of shame” and “shame” in the “sense of shame” are not homonyms with different meanings. A mature sense of shame is built around, and inspired by, an assembly of value commitments. Ideally, these value commitments are reflectively endorsed, not the result of brainwashing. The violation of these commitments would bring shame; thus, the person with a mature sense of shame is one who knows where shame lies, and doesn’t go there.1
A mature sense of shame has the following features:
· It is largely internal and does not require being seen by others or imagining being seen or judged by others for its activation.
· It is autonomous. The person with a mature sense of shame avows the values that make the action they would feel shame for wrong, bad, beneath them, not what a good person would do, not a disposition that a good person should regularly have (Rawls 1973; Taylor 1985; Kekes 1988).
· The sense of shame applies retrospectively, as when one remembers past shameful actions, regrets them, and vows or recommits not to do them again, or not to be like that again.
· The sense of shame inclines one to make amends for shameful actions. It isn’t solely that the bad, inner phenomenal feeling of shame inclines one to make amends. It is that the child is taught, and then adults know, that the full script for shame involves making amends. Amends might involve acts of reparation and repair, or, in cases where the damage is irreparable (imagine shameful actions that led to a divorce), living amends where one shows that one is now reliable, better, not that kind of person anymore.2
· The sense of shame applies prospectively—proleptically—as when one sees that some possible action would violate one’s sense of shame and decides not to do it, or does not even feel inclined to do it because it is wrong.
· The sense of shame inclines one to self-modify and self-cultivate. People with a sense of shame are attuned to aspects of themselves, to dispositions they have that make them tempted by, or prone to, a certain class of shameful actions, and they work on themselves to improve—possibly by trying to change themselves directly, possibly by working to change themselves indirectly by changing the people they associate with, the places they go, and the social and economic structures that support bad values in themselves and their community (Christakis 2019).
There are a few additional things we can say about a mature sense of shame:
· A mature sense of shame sets boundaries that one should not cross lest one do something wrong; it also serves to make one want to do what produces positive good. The epigraph for this chapter is from a wonderful paper, titled “An Ethics of Shame,” by Virgil Aldrich, that eloquently expresses the relevant idea. Aldrich writes, “Never do anything which you would feel ashamed to do and always do what you would feel ashamed not to do.” He adds: “I adopt this as my Golden Rule” (1939, 65).
· A person with a mature sense of shame is sensitive to social criticism. A mature sense of shame is autonomous in the philosopher’s Kantian-inspired sense of “autonomous,” according to which the person has, to some degree, inspected and accepted the values that their sense of shame protects. But the person with a mature sense of shame is not overconfident that they have everything right. Thus, they are open to challenges from others about their value assumptions, and, as necessary, about the worldview that supports their core value assumptions. In this sense, the person with the mature sense of shame is open to feedback about the quality of their character (based on judgments about its resiliency, reliability, strength, and consistency), as well as to criticism of the values that their sense of shame protects, and any background theories that make those values the right ones. This is to say that a mature sense of shame has several entirely positive heteronomous features born of humility, acceptance of fallibility, and an awareness that one might be self-deceived or be an unwitting heir to bad values. Cheshire Calhoun says that openness to the judgment of others is a “mark of moral maturity” (2004, 129), and she adds: “Shame is the emotion of the practitioner of morality. To attempt to make oneself invulnerable to all shaming criticisms except those that mirror one’s own autonomous judgments or that invoke ethical standards one respects is to refuse to take seriously the social practice of morality” (ibid., 145). Bryan Van Norden puts a similar point this way: “Ethical shame and conventional shame are closely related because caring about how one appears to others is required by the virtue of humility” (2007, 267). “One who is completely indifferent to the ethical opinions of others is a dangerous fanatic” (ibid., 266).
The Sense of Shame Is Not Conscience
A sense of shame is better than conscience, which is not a bad thing to have, because it is less cognitive and behavioristic, and more attuned to making use of our universal species’ natures as embodied and affective creatures. No doubt some people have an innate or acquired taste and ability for tracking logical implications. In fact, there is evidence that philosophers are better than most at tracking where the logic of moral beliefs and principles lead and what action they enjoin. But philosophers are no better than anyone else at actually being motivated to do and then doing what moral logic demands (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014). Logic by itself doesn’t motivate.
The sense of shame is not the same as conscience, at least as I understand the concepts. Conscience in WEIRD cultures has a genealogy that renders it primarily an epistemic-cognitive category. The word “conscience” comes from the Latin con (with) and scientia (know). It involves knowledge (scientia) of right and wrong that one shares with (con) oneself (Hill 2002; Cottingham 2013; Van Creveld 2015). But the sense of shame I am describing and defending is not mostly an epistemic-cognitive concept. It is a cognitive-affective-conative one.3 Admittedly, the concept of conscience, once spelled out, incorporates the feeling of guilt. But guilt, recall, insofar as it can be pried apart from shame, focuses on the deed and its consequences. Shame is focused on the self, the potential doer of the deed and their dispositions. Richard Wollheim writes: “Shame arrives after guilt: A preoccupation of what a person should do gets overlaid with a concern about how he should be.… Once this stage has been reached, it suggests a further development in the moral sentiments. And that is that the sentiment of guilt is now supplemented by a new sentiment, which specifically relates not to actions and how far they fall short of the person’s internal prescriptions, but to the condition of the person himself” (1984, 220). The fact that shame is built to focus on the person rather than simply on the person’s doings and deeds is the great strength of shame over guilt, not a weakness.
Virgil Aldrich, describing his own sense of shame, writes:
My own moral experience tells me what I ought to do [something] despite practical consequences.… Often when my anticipatory “feel” for future consequences of any sort is hopelessly vague, my sense of what I ought to do is quite strong and clear.… Is it conscience? If “conscience” means the voice of God in human experience, expressing itself in axiomatic and absolutely authoritative dictates or if it is to be taken as a kind of proscriptive anticipation—based on past experience—of consequences, I have good empirical reason to say that, for all I know, it is not conscience. (1939, 59)
Aldrich goes on to say that there is a secondary or recessive concept of conscience that might work to describe his own moral experience wherein “the voice of conscience [in this sense] is the feeling of shame” (ibid.).
The concept of conscience has its roots in the Stoics, Saint Paul, and Saint Augustine, who mentions it nine hundred times in his Confessions. Immanuel Kant, a pietistic Lutheran, is the foremost theorist of conscience, who sums up its vertical structure and its juridical nature this way:
Every human being has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened, and, in general, kept in awe by an internal judge; and this authority watching over the law in him is not something he himself makes, but something incorporated in his being. It follows him like his shadow when he plans to escape. He can indeed stun himself or put himself to sleep by pleasures and distractions; but he cannot help coming to himself or waking up from time to time; and when he does, he hears at once its fearful voice. He can at most, in extreme depravity, bring himself to heed it no longer, but he still cannot help hearing it. ([1797] 1996, 189)
Classical Confucian Shame
If conscience is well theorized in the Abrahamic traditions and the philosophy associated with them, something in the vicinity of the mature sense of shame, as I am conceiving it, has been theorized for more than 2,500 years by philosophers in the Confucian tradition, including contemporary ones. I do not want to make my argument for rehabilitating shame as a socializing emotion, and the desirability of achieving a mature sense of shame, rest on the appeal of any one particular tradition. However, Confucianism is long-lived, and both the warrant and the social role of shame are clearly articulated.
There are philosophers who are Aristotelians and Stoics, but there are no countries that are Aristotelian or Stoic. There are, however, countries that are Confucian. South Korea may be the most Confucian country on the earth, but Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and China also have strong Confucian elements (Sun 2013).
Unlike classical Western philosophies, Confucianism remains a live option in today’s world. It has advocates in East Asia and in multicultural cities and regions with large East Asian populations. In classical Confucian texts—which consist of the Analects, the Mencius, and the Xunzi—the characters xiu, wu, chi, and ru all refer to shame. And a mature sense of shame is celebrated.
Two core values of Confucianism are harmony and order, so both moral propriety and conventional propriety are valued. But the distinction between the conventional and the moral is not as sharp as children of the religions of Abraham might expect. One reason is that one of the four major Confucian virtues is li, which is the virtue of abiding and enacting the rites, and many of the rites and rituals might be judged externally to be more matters of etiquette than morals. That said, the orthodox Confucian sense of shame is recruited to protect moral norms over conventional norms when they compete.
Where does the sense of shame come from? Mencius gives one of the first genealogies of shame in the fourth century BCE. Here is a famous text from Mencius where he states his famous “four-sprout” view:
Humans all have hearts that are not unfeeling toward others. Suppose someone suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well: everyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion—not because one sought to get in good with the child’s parents, not because one wanted fame among their neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sounds of the child’s cries.… From this we can see that if one is without the heart of compassion, one is not a human. If one is without the heart of deference, one is not a human. The heart of compassion is the sprout of benevolence. The heart of disdain (shame) is the sprout of righteousness. The heart of deference is the sprout of propriety. The heart of approval and disapproval is the sprout of wisdom. (2008, 2A6; see also 6A6)
Shame is the sprout or beginning of the virtue of righteousness (yi). Yi, the virtue, is the reliable disposition to do “what is appropriate” or “what is right” (Van Norden 2007, 256). We are not born righteous (yi), but we are born with dispositions to experience shame or protoshame, and this disposition can be cultivated, shaped, and extended to yield righteousness (Mencius 2008, 2A6, 7B31, 7A17). Mencius writes: “The shamefulness of being without a sense of shame is shameful indeed” (7A6).4
Confucianism is the possibility proof that shame can play a central role in the maintenance of the normative order in large contemporary cultures. Shame does not speak in the fearful voice of Yahweh, God, or Allah, nor in the internalized “fearful voice” of the Kantian conscience. Shame speaks straightforwardly for norms that govern a common project of respectful and orderly life. A mature Confucian sense of shame expresses ideals for excellence and recommends self-cultivation to achieve these ideals.
Shame: Social and Political, Not Metaphysical
I’ve argued that the mature sense of shame is better than conscience because it is psychologically realistic—better at capturing the cognitive-affective-conative aspects of moral personality than conscience. Shame answers to ideals for excellent convivial social life. Conscience answers to the fearful voice. Shame is less behavioristic than conscience, calling on us to engage in self-work, not simply to refrain from doing certain prohibited deeds.
The contrast between conscience and a mature sense of shame as illustrated in the brief interlude on Confucianism suggests that the sense of shame is better than conscience in three other ways, for three other reasons. First, the idea of conscience is parochial. It is associated with one set of traditions, the lineages produced in the religions that take Abraham as their patriarch: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Conscience is associated with a metaphysics that grounds the warrant for morality in God’s will, and conceives the reason to abide morality in terms of eschatologies, which, at least in their Christian and Islamic form, make compliance a matter of maximal existential prudence, where nothing less than the prospect of everlasting life in heaven rather than hell depends on normative compliance with the law of a judgmental and punitive God. In this way, conscience can be, and often is, superficial. When, as is common, guilt is its favored instrument, it demands primarily behavioral conformity. The focus is on the deed and its consequences. Guilt scores actions as a moral accountant would, as sins or not sins. It is telling that the medieval church sold indulgences that reduced divine punishments for sins. Sins become like traffic offenses. You speed, you pay. All is forgiven.
But, second, a sense of shame is not parochial. Every culture ever studied, including WEIRD ones, knows about and uses shame in teaching and maintaining social and moral norms. One reason is that we are gregarious social animals, highly dependent on others for love, affection, and care, and highly sensitive to being disapproved of or disvalued. Independently of any theology, human sociality must be normatively organized, and shame is one natural feeling that is available universally. Unlike guilt, which is dry and antiseptic—a largely vertical disciplinary emotion initially under the thumb of God—shame is embodied and grounded in horizontal social relations. When shame does have vertical structure, as it did and sometimes still does in Confucian cultures, it expresses hierarchies of wisdom—for example, the acquired wisdom of elders or the value discoveries of previous generations. The power of the elders or various kinds of majorities (power or numerical) to create and enforce norms is, of course, liable to misuse and exploitation by the power hungry, the overconfident, and by various kinds of self-serving oppressors. Thus, it is good that each generation gets to review and critique the wisdom of the ages.
Third, and this follows from the first two points, a sense of shame is especially important for denizens of cultures that were once genuinely Abrahamic but are now becoming secular. Let me explain. If conscience is metaphysically and theologically parochial, and commands in a dry, cognitive way (one can easily memorize what is sinful) that is focused primarily on not doing the deeds for which God punishes in the afterworld, then we can wonder what happens when the theological-metaphysical structure of that world starts to come undone. Friedrich Nietzsche (1887), Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) have thought deeply about this question. And although Nietzsche on one side, and Anscombe and MacIntyre on the other, have very different substantive ethical views, they agree that people who no longer believe in the metaphysics and theology that formerly justified their values, and thus their normative compliance with those values, will have lost their reasons to abide that morality.
I think they are right. But I want to put the diagnosis and prognosis in my own terms, which Anscombe and MacIntyre would likely not entirely agree with. The sort of normative compliance engendered by the Abrahamic traditions was always cognitive (the moral law can be memorized and executed from rules) and behavioristic. Conscience asks for strict compliance. Its rationale, or at least, a large part of its rationale, has to do with God’s views, God’s will, and so on. It is, as I said, vertical. Because it is vertical and focused on doing and deeds, and less on the self or person who is the doer of deeds, less on the person’s character, as ancient pre-Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic traditions were, it is thin, a veneer. And when it comes off, especially in cultures such as those in the North Atlantic, which are antecedently individualistic and expressivist (liberty and the pursuit of happiness are basic values), one is vulnerable to shamelessness.
Now one might wonder how losing theological or metaphysical foundations could produce shamelessness in a culture like ours that wasn’t depending on the sense of shame in the first place. Well, we both were and weren’t depending on it. Shame and guilt are both in the conceptual vernacular of WEIRD people, who interpose these concepts and terms. Thus, we do know about shame, perhaps as a recessive vocabulary, as a lost language. And we often use the language of shame to describe conventional violations, like people with appalling or shocking manners, despite the bad rap that shame has. But, in any case, shamelessness makes sense as a description of a culture that lacks strong inner conviction about values. A sense of shame is inner. Despite what Kant says about conscience also being inner, his language of being “watched,” “shadowed,” “threatened,” “kept in awe,” and “hearing its fearful voice” still infuses it with its theological roots.
When conscience loses its warrant, and a mature inner sense of shame is not in place, we get shamelessness. When there isn’t, in the first place, strong inner commitment to certain values—for example, that only the truth should be spoken—we easily get ideas about “alternative truths,” “my truths,” truth is what I feel, or truth is what contributes to my status or reputation or power.
A mature sense of shame is horizontal in that, unlike conscience, it is grounded in social relations. A person might be more or less indifferent to the quality of social relations, and confused or mistaken about how social relations contribute to their own happiness and flourishing. And they might be confused about whether the norms they were raised to believe in and abide by are the right ones. What cannot happen with a sense of shame, whether mature or immature, is that it loses its metaphysical foundations. A people can stop believing in God or the gods and thus lose the base-level commitments that made their moral beliefs justified. But a people cannot lose their belief that there are social relations (gratuitous skepticism of the “we might be in the Matrix” sort aside), and that their good depends on how things go in their relations with other peoples.
Conclusion
I’ve now sketched a picture of a mature sense of shame that is the antidote to shamelessness. It is not superficial, concerned only with etiquette and manners. It is not external, awaiting the gaze or “the fearful voice.” It is internal and emotionally attuned. It protects and avows values and ideals, rather than just being a register of dos and don’ts. It is subject to self-monitoring and other-monitoring, and thus to self- and other-critique. It is not uncritical and heteronomous. It functions prospectively to protect individual and social values and ideals. Finally, unlike conscience, it is not vulnerable to losing its metaphysical or theological foundations. Whether such a sense of shame actually protects the right and the good depends on what values and ideals it serves. So long as the values and ideals it protects are right and good, then it is a good sense to have.
It is now time for me to sum up how I think I’ve made my case that anger of the payback and pain-passing sorts are bad, and that we ought not to enact them, and for rehabilitating a mature sense of shame as a valuable guide to a good life. I’ll also make some comments about how cross-cultural methods have played a role in my argument, and how my view—that we should turn down the temperature on anger and reconsider the bad rap on shame—could work in multicultures where there are plural views on pretty much everything, including, no doubt, my recommendations on anger and shame. This is the task in chapter 8, to which I now turn.