Ally - The Moral Appropriateness of Shame. Part 1 - Introduction

 

The first paper I'm going to be looking at, and in some depth, is Mashuq Ally's 2005 "The Moral Appropriateness of Shame", which appeared in the South African journal Koers the "Bulletin for Christian Scholarship".

This will be a multi-part blog series because I'd like to write my own paper in response to Ally's basically offering a reassessment of his perspective almost 20 years later.


Background - Mashuq and Me.

I have a personal connection with this paper and the author. Mashuq Ally was a good friend of mine. I met him when I began studying for my BA(hons) in philosophy at the University of South Africa. He was, at that time, the postgraduate coordinator for the department.

After he fielded some initial questions, we got speaking more deeply about philosophy which lead to an almost two year period where we would email one another at least weekly. Mashuq was very generous with his time, and our respective emails were not insubstantial.

I visited with him and his wife Susan a number of times, helped him buy a new laptop, and shared some really intimate conversations. I think that, despite us being quite different people, I hope that I wasn't alone in noting that we shared some deep core similarities. I'd met him after I'd suffered a particularly debilitating bought of depression, something that he was familiar with. We bonded over that, over existentialism and philosophy generally.
 
It was him that introduced me to moral psychology. It was him that invited me to give my first philosophical presentation at the UNISA research seminars where I presented my paper "Shame, autonomy, and Moral Growth" -- of which this blog and my future projects are an extension.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about Mashuq - but, for now, I'll leave off this thread noting that I'd heard about his death through one of his old colleagues at UNISA.
 
It was difficult news to process. I felt that he and I still had so much to discuss.
And, indeed, this is what me engaging with his work is - me, chatting with my old friend.

Structure of the paper

Ally's paper is broken into five parts - which I'll mirror in my blog posts.

  1. Introduction - a general introduction to the paper and to "morally appropriate" shame.
  2. Situating shame - a discussion of shame's nature and its place in our constellation of emotions
  3. Shame, self-respect, and autonomy - really the bulk of the paper, digging into shame's relationship with the self and our evaluation of our selves
  4. The  ability to confront shame tendencies within ourselves - broadly, a discussion of how we can/should/might respond to shame
  5. Conclusion - short summary and statement of the upshot

 Upfront, I have to admit that I've always had something of a hard time with this paper - even rereading it now, it feels somewhat disjointed or messy.

I feel this is almost certainly due to a failing on my side - not paying enough attention, or not being able to hold as many strands as I should at once in my head.

It might also just be part of the nature of the subject itself - shame is multifaceted and messy. It's not clear to me that there is ever going to be a single formulation that will usefully capture all of its manifestations, so perhaps this is partly what's reflected in the text.

Either way, I'm going to try (for my own benefit) really draw out the explicit arguments in the text in these posts. This will allow me to address them directly in my own response.

 

The "Introduction"

 Ally's introduction is fairly clear:
 
Primarily, he wants to "defend the view that the experience of shame may serve as an important warning signal that one's moral values are under threat" (Ally, 2005: 291).

There seem to me to be two major objections with regards to the overall value of shame.
  1. Shame, being "other" centered -- that is, by certain definitions it is inherently caught up with what other people think of us -- undermines our moral autonomy.
  2. Shame, despite its ultimate autonomy or heteronomy, is either too damaging, or primitive, or blunt -- especially given alternative emotional responses available to us -- that "individuals and cultures would be better if they could move beyond it" (Ally, 2005: 291).

We'll need to keep these two major objections in mind as we read the rest of the paper.

So Ally has to do a few things here

First, give a positive account of shame in general and "morally appropriate" shame in particular.

Second, defend the notion that despite shame being inherently social and caught up in the judgements of others, it is possible for shame's force to be morally autonomous (or, reflective of our own moral judgements).

Third, explain why shame's distinctive structure and phenomenology are distinctively useful tools in our moral lives when there are, arguably, better and less damaging emotional responses available (for instance, guilt).

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jacquet - Is Shame Necessary

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...
Read more

Ally - The Moral Appropriateness of Shame. Part 5 - Conclusion

 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...
Read more

Thompson - The Moral Risks of Online Shaming

Image
  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 ...
Read more