Just a quick note about Jennifer Jacquet's "Is Shame Necessary? New uses for an old tool". It's an interesting, quite quick read, which, at first glance, seems to be about shame , but it primarily about effectively shaming or deploying shaming as an effective tool for addressing norm violations (and, interestingly, establishment). Like Thompson's essay I recently read, its subject isn't really the primary focus of this blog (i.e. the experience and nature of the emotion of shame itself), still, there was a fair amount to think about. Her history of how individual guilt has been coopted by norm violators to allow them to continue to violate mostly unimpeded was fascinating, linking individual guilt and neoliberal economic's focus on freedom of choice. She has also peppered the book with multiple fascinating examples of how sham ing has been a vehicle for change in different contexts. Still, it's a popular book, and I think that the primary argument...
It has been about a decade (at least) since I last read Ally's paper, and I think revisiting it has been good. Although I'm still a little confused in parts (although, I think that perhaps the paper itself is a little confusing in parts), I've got a good sense of what this paper's argument is (or arguments are). Most importantly are: 1 - Shame can indeed be an expression of autonomous morality, since there are instances where we explicitly endorse the standards of value sustaining the real or imagined contempt that induces shame. 2. Moreover, shame experiences may sometimes be the only way (or, at least, an extremely effective way) for someone who is narcissistic or oblivious to be alerted to real failings in their behaviour or character. Ally (2005: 306-307) sums it up his paper saying that the "distortions of judgement which are so often characteristic of shame should not obscure the fact that there exists also morally appropriate shame which may lead shame su...
Just a short note on Krista K. Thompson's "The Moral Risks of Online Shaming" - a paper that appears in OUP's "The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics" (2018). The paper itself deals with Shaming, the practice of calling out or stigmatizing people, institutions, corporations, etc. Shaming comes apart from experiences of shame themselves - and while individuals may in fact feel shame at being shamed, they need not even if the shaming act is effective in other ways. Indeed, the overall effects of shaming are what are at issue - it can be, it seems, extraordinarily effective, but perhaps not in ways we might anticipate. Thompson identifies two primary motivations for shaming practices. First, shaming is "meant to inspire self-consciousness or self-awareness " (her emphasis). Second, "shaming is meant to send a message of condemnation on behalf of and to the community " (again, the emphasis is hers). I think that these two motivations make ...
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