Ally - The Moral Appropriateness of Shame. Part 3 - Shame, self-respect and autonomy.

 Here we get into the longest part of Ally's 2005 paper.

Self-respect and self-esteem

In the opening paragraphs of section 3, Ally attempts to draw a clear distinction between self-respect and self-esteem. The concept of shame is deeply connected to both of these, so it's important to get it right.

I personally find the discussion a little confusing, especially considering he begins with a definition of self respect (courtesy of Rawls) which he then immediately rejects as actually being a description of self-esteem!

I think the confusion here is, again, just due to general ambiguity of the meaning of the terms involved. A brief glance online shows multiple overlapping and conflicting conceptions of both terms (sometimes they are taken to be synonymous, for instance).

What's important for Ally's project, I believe, is not that we hit on a definition of the two terms that are universally accepted, but rather that he uses them to capture two different, but related, concepts, and then is able to use those definitions to shed some light on shame, conceptually speaking.

So what I'm going to do here is highlight the definitions of self-respect and self-esteem that he endorses:

Self-respect

"[S]elf-respect ... is often taken as an appropriate recognition of and response to one's status as a person with rights and responsibilities. What is important in self-respect is that it is a complex character trait involving a desire and a dispositions 'not to behave in a manner unworthy of oneself -- that is, to shun behaviour that one views as contemptible, despicable and degrading' (Telfer, 1995: 109-110)" (Ally, 2005: 295).

Self-esteem

"Self-esteem is the judgement that one is living congruently with one's values and thus is or is becoming a kind of person it is worth being" (Dillon, 1995 in Ally, 2005).

What?

Okay - so let's try understand these, because reading the text leaves me a little confused.

As best as I can make out.

Self-esteem is a judgement about how you're currently living. You have self-esteem if you judge yourself as being essentially living a good life.

Self-respect, on the other hand, is a "disposition and desire" to live in a particular way given your status as a person (with certain rights and responsibilities).

These two concepts seem very similar, but they come apart and reinforce each other in important ways.

I may lack self-esteem, say, because I come home and get blackout drunk every night. My self-disesteem in this case comes from my judgement that this is not the way one who is a "kind of person it is worth being" should behave.

Nevertheless, it may precisely the persistence of my self-respect that results in my ability to judge that I am not behaving in a way that is appropriate.

It's not clear to me that self-esteem or self-disesteem can even arise in a case where a person has lost their self-respect completely.

This is something I'll need to think about a little more though, I don't think this is at all clear to me.

However, later in the section, Ally does draw out specific links between shame and self-respect in an interesting way. Having self-respect, it seems, requires one (following Rom Harre) that we seek out situations that at least threaten the possibility of shame.

The idea is that without risk of shame or of being held in contempt, we fail to live in such a way that demonstrates our values. And without this risk, we're not living in a way that can and should garner respect (or self-respect).

In a later subsection of this section, Ally (2005: 301) reiterates this point with the thought that it's natural for people to avoid shame and therefore "narrow their lives" to avoid it. This is the existentialist in him coming out - he's interested in how our avoiding the pain of shame alienates us from ourselves and those around us.

Shame as a moral emotion

There's arguably a distinction (from Rawls) between "natural" and "moral" shame. The examples for the former are instances of shame where you fall short of, say, standards of beauty, while the latter is "revealed by the presence of defects or lack of those characteristics and traits about which we would be justifiably proud" (Ally, 2005: 296) -- presumably characteristics and traits of a "moral" concern.

 

 There are open questions about natural, moral, and genuine/justified shame -- these aren't dealt with in the text except in passing.

What's important, though, is that there really is shame that is sensitive to moral failings.

 

Further, (Ally, 2005: 301) Ally argues that legitimate experiences of shame are not simply heteronomous since, ultimately, "morally appropriate shame is ... tethered to the agent's own evaluative standards, since she must choose whose evaluative judgements merit her respect".

 

This is a very important point. While we do find ourselves born into social groups with evaluative standards against which we risk contempt, we also, finally, choose our tribes, so to speak. We willingly join and form shared group identities with others, clubs, schools, relationships, churches, etc. And to join is to endorse, at least partly, the evaluative frameworks implicit in them.

 

Those whose gaze we respect are those in front of who we can feel shame. This is not the same as feeling, say, humiliation, which is similarly experienced under the gaze of some other.

What's novel in Ally's account - Shame and the recognition of moral shortcomings

Rather than recap everything that's said in the article, I want to now turn to what's novel in Ally's account of Morally appropriate shame.

It is this: In some cases, the so-called "heteronomy" of shame is a feature, not a bug.

That is, in some cases, our view of ourselves may be so skewed, or we may be so unaware of our failings and/or character flaws that only the view of the contemptuous other (respected other, I believe) is enough to shake us out of our nap.

He says "I want to argue that the kind of shame identified as morally appropriate specifically includes shame over which the ashamed person has come to see the error of her ways through recognition of moral shortcomings" (Ally, 2005: 301).

Further, and most importantly, "[s]uch shortcomings must first be exposed to public view before they can become the source of shame; or, at least, the contempt that others would show us were our shortcoming to be exposed, must be clearly imaginable" (ibid.)

The social aspect in this cannot be understated. In this case we are blind to our faults -- either willfully, or too self-absorbed to see it -- and it is the other that is the vehicle for us to reevaluate our character.

Where does this leave us?

I'm still not entirely sure I understand the distinction between self-esteem and self-respect, so that's a TODO for me. But what we can say is that self-respect is deeply linked to shame.

We also see that Ally holds that sometimes the fact that the respected other doesn't hold the same view about us as we do about ourselves is something morally useful.

Seeing ourselves as others do, others whose perspective we respect, can bring us to awareness of failings which we failed to see.

We see our-selves as deficient, and that is potentially useful as fuel for self-transcendence or change.