Ally - The Moral Appropriateness of Shame. Part 2 - Situating Shame

Here we continue our reading of Ally's "The Moral Appropriateness of Shame", this time looking at the short section "Situating Shame".

This second section deals primarily with Shame's relationship to related emotions, specifically to guilt (and, with far less emphasis, embarrassment).

What's with the Shame/Guilt dichotomy?

Shame and guilt are often compared because they're both painful emotional experiences that have to do with some kind of violation of norms or standards. As Ally says, "both are important moral emotions ... since they generally make people conform to rules and uphold the social order" (Ally, 2005: 292).

 

What has been thought to be primarily distinctive of the two emotions is that shame is heteronomous while guilt is supposed to be more autonomous in its focus.

 

To understand this claim, we need to understand something like the structure of shame and guilt experiences. Both, as noted, are supposed to be related to the violations of some kind of norm or standard. The naive difference between the two emotions is that the norms violated in Shame experiences are those of some external community/group while guilt is supposed to be the violation of one's own conscience.

 

This thought that shame is heteronomous in this way -- that is, subject to external standards, rather than to individually held and, presumably, endorsed values -- is one of the reasons philosophers have tended to be sceptical of the emotion. It seems to undermine our moral autonomy.

 

A critical aside

In addressing this distinction, I think this is where Ally's paper could be  clearer. At the beginning of the third paragraph on pg 293 he says that "[i]n addiction to conceptual considerations, there are factual reasons for rejecting the conflation of shame with 'outer' and guilt with 'inner'".

This is all good and well, but at this point I think I, at least, would've liked it to be made clearer just which conceptual considerations we're speaking about here. 

He mentions in the paragraph directly above that "conceptualising [shame and guilt] as stark opposites overlooks important connections, as I shall argue below" (Ally: 2005, 293) - but then directly goes on to speak about so-called "factual" reasons for rejecting the dichotomy.

To be clear, I do think that he addresses the conceptual distinctions between them in investigating factual aspects of the emotions - but I find this part of the essay weirdly unclear. It would've been useful to see precisely what he thought the conceptual vs factual considerations were, and how, precisely, he saw them interacting.

 

Back to the work at hand

I don't think that the distinction between concept and fact with regards to emotions are arbitrary though - not at all, it is central, I believe, to the idea that emotions can be more or less appropriate as responses.

What I mean by this is, once we're captured the essentials of an emotion conceptually, evaluative considerations can run both ways between the concept and the facts.

Whenever we see a new actual manifestation of an emotion such as shame or anger, we can ask ourselves "does our theory of this emotion actually account for this instance of the emotion?"

We can thereby adjust (or jettison) our theoretical accounts in light of the facts.

However, we can also use our theories about an emotion (whether these theories be implicit common sense understandings, or theoretical accounts) to judge the emotional episode itself. We can ask things like "is the object of this emotion appropriate to it?", "is this emotional episode appropriate to the situation?", "would a different emotional response be more appropriate?"

This isn't some fancy discovery - we do this the whole time. Emotions are more or less appropriate to the situations they occur in, and we're often eager to point it out.

Factual and conceptual considerations around the guilt/shame dichotomy

In discussing the dichotomy between guilt and shame, Ally raises (2005: 293-294) a number of points against shame being purely heteronomous.

The most important of these, in my opinion, is where he discusses the Emperors new clothes.

People could also be ashamed of being admired by the wrong audience in the wrong way. For example, the emperor, in Hans Christian Anderson's famous tale, might have felt equal shame if only he, and no one else in the audience, had grasped the meaning of the child's revelation about his new clothes. Nothing in the nature of so-called "shame societies" thus precludes the possibility of personal moral convictions contradicting that of a "misled" majority (Ally, 2005: 294)

It would have been good if Ally had spent a bit more time exploring this, because it's an important point that undermines the heteronomy charge in two different ways.

Note, this doesn't entirely undermine the worry about heteronomy, it simply goes some way to showing that autonomy and shame are potentially compatible.

Firstly, it makes clear that what's important with regards to shame is not so much that there is an actual audience -- we can feel shame before some imagined others as much as we can be shamed by actual external observers (Ally's invoking of Williams' account of shame in ancient Greek culture serves to make this point too).

I personally often imagine feeling ashamed in the face of a future version of humanity who accept as a given the barbarism of factory farming -- much as we look at slavery today.

But what's interesting about this point is that we don't necessarily have to even imagine some future community who accepts this as a basic moral given - there are already the vegan, vegetarian, and anti-animal cruelty communities (among others).

Secondly, I think this is, further, an important point undermining the heteronomy charge - namely, there isn't one single community with its single standard. While some things are given, there are communities that we choose. And in (autonomously) joining these communities, we open ourselves up to being shamed in a way we endorse.

He ends the section by nothing that "[s]have is implicit in the emphases of the way in which people monitor their own actions by viewing themselves from the standpoint of others" (Ally, 2005: 294).

Which others, present or not, real or imagined, are, I think, up for grabs.