Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses—TwoContrasting Interpretations for Moral Education

Kristjan Kristjansson

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract This paper offers a sustained philosophical meditation on contrasting inter-

pretations of the emotion of shame within four academic discourses—social psychology,

psychological anthropology, educational psychology and Aristotelian scholarship—in

order to elicit their implications for moral education. It turns out that within each of these

discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasises shame’s expendability or

moral ugliness (and where shame is typically described as guilt’s ugly sister), but also a

heterodox interpretation which seeks to retrieve and defend shame. As the heterodox

interpretation seems to offer a more realistic picture of shame’s role in moral education, the

provenance of the mainstream interpretation merits scrutiny. I argue that social scientific

studies of the concept of shame, based on its supposed phenomenology, incorporate biases

in favour of excessive, rather than medial, forms of the emotion. I suggest ways forward for

more balanced analyses of the nature, moral justification and educative role of shame.

Keywords Shame � Guilt � Moral education � Aristotle � Conceptual

analyses

1. Introduction: Emotions and the Elision of Negativity

‘we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt and shame’

(Hunter 2000, p. xv).

Amongst the services that philosophers have traditionally attempted to provide—albeit not

always successfully—is the manufacture of methodological critiques of social scientific

research, typically focused on its conceptual underpinnings. The present article which

K. Kristjansson (&)Jubilee Centre for Character and Values, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,Birmingham B15 2TT, UKe-mail: k.kristjansson@bham.ac.uk

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Stud Philos EducDOI 10.1007/s11217-013-9399-7

explores the debate on shame and its presumed ‘ugliness’ as a morally and educationally

salient emotion falls squarely within that job spec. Before zooming in on this particular

topic, however, some wider-angle observations will help set the stage.

One of the most conspicuous and significant developments in latter-day humanities and

social sciences has been the rise of the emotions as a unique object of study. For one thing,

the upsurge of virtue ethics in moral philosophy brought the moral role of emotions firmly

into prominence. Thus, on a widely held current assumption, morally proper emotions form

part of the good life and are implicated intrinsically in moral selfhood at all levels of

engagement (Kristjansson 2010a)—an assumption far removed from the Kantian conten-

tion that ‘no moral principle is based […] on any feeling whatsoever’ (Kant 1964, p. 33).

Moreover, far from being viewed any more as dangerous interlopers in the realms of

upbringing and schooling, emotions have now been invited as guests of honour into those

realms as essential to the development of human beings as learners and moral agents.

Although some of the recent enthusiasm for the emotions has been motivated by a radical

form of ontological sentimentalism, harking back to David Hume (see e.g. Haidt 2001), it is

fair to say that most recent emotion theories in moral philosophy and moral education have

drawn inspiration—directly or obliquely—from Aristotle’s ‘soft’ (emotion-imbued)

rationalist stance (see further in Kristjansson 2010b). This lineage is made explicit in the

works of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, such as Anscombe (1958) and Mac-

Intyre (1981), and is either alluded to or implicit in powerful programmes of moral education

of late, such as social emotional learning (aka emotional intelligence), based on Goleman

(1995), and positive education (or positive psychology turned educational), specified as the

social scientific—psychological and educational—equivalent of virtue ethics (Peterson and

Seligman 2004). Those programmes tend to draw on the distinctive feature of Aristotelian

virtue ethics that emotional reactions may constitute virtues. Emotions can, no less than

actions, have an ‘intermediate and best condition […] proper to virtue’—when they are felt

‘at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end and in the

right way’ (Aristotle 1985, p. 44 [1106b17–35]). If the relevant emotion is ‘too intense or

slack’, we are badly off in relation to it, but if it is intermediate, we are ‘well off’ (1985, p. 41

[1105b26–28]), and persons can be fully virtuous only if they are disposed to experience

emotions in this medial way on a regular basis.

Despite their routine appeals to Aristotle, a striking feature of the recent social scientific

rehabilitation of emotion is the widespread celebration of positively valenced (felt) emo-

tions—so much so that the term ‘positive emotion’ has been specifically reserved for them.

To be sure, Aristotle was also interested in the development of ‘positive emotions’, but he

understood those as emotions that are morally positive, whether of positive, negative or

mixed valence.1 For instance, the two emotions that he connects most intimately to the

developmental trajectory of the moral learner, shame and emulation, are both negatively

valenced—and the emotion that, by modern lights at least, will count as Aristotle’s par-

adigmatic moral one, namely compassion (pain at someone’s undeserved bad fortune, see

Nussbaum 1996), is of course the negatively felt emotion par excellence.

This foregrounding of positivity, in terms of positive affect, has come under heavy

polemical fire in recent years, both generally (Ehrenreich 2009) and with respect to

1 Obviously, Aristotle’s understanding of ‘virtuous’ is not exactly the same as the typical modern under-standing of ‘moral’, for instance in standard deontological and consequentialist theories. However, as virtueethics has now become a familiar contemporary alternative to deontology and consequentialism, I take itthat using ‘morally positive’ here as more or less synonymous with ‘virtuous’ will not confuse readersunduly.

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particular theories of psycho-moral cultivation that incorporate a hedonic view of optimal

human functioning (e.g. Kristjansson 2007, chap. 6; Kristjansson 2013, chap. 8; Tamir and

Gross 2011). Yet its appeal seems to linger on, aided by some trendy sloganeering about

the ‘broadening-and-building’ effects of feel-good emotions (Fredrickson 2009). What

emerges, then, is a striking disharmony between contemporary accounts of emotional

regulation and Aristotle’s account on how to negotiate negativity. Whereas the former are

all about downplaying, eliding or bypassing negativity, Aristotle’s account embraces it

head-on.

I began this introductory section with a salutary reminder from Hunter about how

modern moral educators seem to both want to have their moral cake and eat it. Hunter’s

(2000) critique is particularly pertinent for those who have argued for the retrieval of

something like Aristotle’s form of character education for contemporary classroom use.

Hunter’s sobering thought is that any such retrieval is doomed to failure because con-

temporary moral educators (teachers, parents, educationists) in the West will never be able

to accept the baggage of unpleasantness—involving feelings such as shame—that ancient

and medieval thinkers saw as necessary ingredients in a well-rounded character. We have

lost our appreciation of the need to take the rough with the smooth, preferring rather the

current rose-tinted message that if we learn to smile glibly enough at the world, the world

will automatically smile back at us.

My original plan in writing this article was to take up Hunter’s challenge by singling out

for consideration the negatively valenced emotion of shame and its role in moral education.

As Hunter rightly notes, contemporary moral educators tend to exhibit a great deal of

nervousness about this emotion, if not airbrushing it altogether. Moreover, it has eluded

satisfactory discussion even in those forms of character education that claim to be based

most faithfully on Aristotelian precedents. What I discovered quickly, however, when

starting to delve into the relevant literature, was that there is no independent discursive

tradition about shame in moral education, or even moral psychology (narrowly under-

stood). Rather, when shame makes an appearance on those agendas, the discussion typi-

cally sits atop—and draws upon—more fundamental analyses of shame that have been

conducted in social psychology, psychological anthropology, educational psychology and

Aristotelian scholarship. These four discourses, in turn, tend to run on roughly parallel

lines, as all are about the fundamental nature and empirical contours of shame, although

interactions between their lines of inquiry are not always overt. I realised that in order to do

justice to the educational practicalities of shame, I would need to start with some serious

conceptual ground-clearing. The end-product of that work—the present article—is thus

essentially an exercise in conceptual moral psychology, although I do cast an eye on an

array of educational issues along the way.

The four discourses about shame are interesting—indeed fascinating—for the fact that

within each of them there is a mainstream interpretation that emphasises shame’s ugliness,

expendability or at least impenetrability—but also a minority view, which I refer to as the

heterodox interpretation, that reaches opposite conclusions. The heterodox interpretation

could, in some cases at least, be labelled a retrograde one, since it tends to suggest a wind-

back of the clock to an ancient (e.g. Confucian, Aristotelian or even pre-Aristotelian)

conception. As there are significant variations within the mainstream and heterodox

interpretations—both internal to and across the four discourses—it may seem overly

simplistic to refer to each interpretation in the singular and suggest, as I do in the title, that

they provide two contrasting answers to the question about shame’s ‘ugliness’. Someone

might even question whether the very word ‘shame’ is being used in the same sense across

those four discourses. Yet, as my brisk tour in Sects. 2 (for the mainstream interpretation)

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and 3 (for the heterodox one) shows, the fundamental debate is between an anti-shame

league and a pro-shame league within each discourse, and the general similarities within

those ‘leagues’ dwarf any subtler terminological differences between them. In Sect. 4, I

pause to explore how such a radical dichotomy may have come about, given that both

interpretations profess to draw on empirical sources about the phenomenology of shame.

Subsequently, I identify some serious methodological missteps underlying the mainstream

interpretation. Once those have been obviated, headway can perhaps be made, I suggest,

for the moral and educational rehabilitation of shame in a broadly Aristotelian spirit—

although not necessarily according to the letter of Aristotle’s own account.

Before commencing my tour of the conceptual terrain, a terminological point is in order.

The word ‘shame’ can refer either to an episodic emotion or a more general emotional trait qua

state of character. This distinction between emotion as an episode and a trait is crucial in

Aristotle’s own and all Aristotle-derived theories. We are praised or blamed for our virtues and

vices, he says, but we ‘do not blame the person who is simply angry’ (Aristotle 1985, p. 41

[1105b20–1106a7])—because specific episodic passions do not constitute virtues or vices, any

more than individual actions do. The underlying idea is that we cannot control the experience

of occurrent emotions once the relevant emotional disposition to experience them is in place;

hence what is morally and educationally significant about emotions is how the disposition to

experience them emerges and how we are jointly responsible (along with our educators) for

cultivating emotional traits in ourselves. When Aristotle talks about emotions as virtuous/

vicious or characteristic of good/bad people, he is always referring to them as traits.

In light of this important distinction, it might seem advisable to refer to the trait-

understanding of shame by some other term, say ‘shamefulness’ or ‘sense of shame’. I

decline to do so for two reasons, however. One is that the term ‘shamefulness’ does seem

to carry pejorative connotations in ordinary language, indicating not what Aristotle would

consider a dispositional golden mean of feeling but rather its excess. The other reason is

that by invoking either of those terms and using it systematically throughout, I could be

seen to be overcorrecting the current literature, where this distinction is rarely made

explicitly. For some analytic purposes, the distinction in question is indeed irrelevant;

where it is relevant, however, I indicate it by using terms such as ‘episodic’ on one hand,

‘dispositional’ on the other, to modify the term ‘shame’.

2. Four Discourses on Shame: The Mainstream Interpretation

The most useful point of entry—historical and logical—to an emotion is typically found in

Aristotle. About the conceptual specification of shame, Aristotle says that the emotion

involves ‘a sort of pain and agitation concerning the class of evils, whether present or past

or future, that seem to bring a person into disrespect’ (2007, p. 132 [1383b11–15]). Persons

experiencing shame (a) have disgracefully fallen short of certain standards in the past,

which they now regret, (b) are about to fall short of such standards here and now, but being

held back by their sense of shame, or (c) are reflecting upon courses of action that would

make them fall short in the future, while perceiving a taster of how bad the resulting

emotion would feel like. In (a), we could talk about retrospective post-mortem shame, but

in (b) and (c) about prospective deterrent shame.

Although Aristotle offers us here a reasonable formal definition of shame, we know

preciously little yet about what sort of or whose standards shame-experiencing persons

have violated or imagine themselves as violating. Nor have we been told anything about

the moral worth of not violating them and the educational salience of shame avoidance. I

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revisit those issues in Sects. 2.4 and 3.4 when I explore contrasting interpretations of the

Aristotelian account. Let it suffice to say at this juncture that Aristotle is uncharacteristi-

cally ambivalent and unsystematic in his discussion of shame—and that a clearer picture of

the available interpretative avenues emerges if we begin by looking at contemporary

accounts of shame, which claim to take their cue from how people in our day and age

actually experience shame phenomenologically. Although the present section, which

focuses on mainstream accounts of shame, may seem to bundle together a host of divergent

considerations of varied academic provenance, I propose to show how a common thread is

running through them which justifies the idea of a single interpretation of shame as an ugly

emotion.

2.1. Social Psychology

While most emotion theorists in psychology concentrate on a list of (allegedly) ‘basic’ and

relatively simple natural-kind emotions, such as fear and disgust, social psychologists have

in recent years turned their attention to a set of cognitively complex, socially constructed

emotions called the ‘self-conscious emotions’, most notably pride, shame, guilt and

embarrassment (see e.g. various articles in Tracy et al. 2007 edited volume). What char-

acterises those emotions is that they do not only make up a person’s selfhood, as any

significant emotion can potentially do, but that they (a) have the self as their intentional

object (in other words, they are—at least in part—about the self) and (b) may have an

irreplaceable role in the self’s very creation and maintenance (Kristjansson 2010a, chap. 4).

I focus here only on two of those emotions, shame and guilt. The reason is that pride

happens to be outside my present purview, and the debate about the conceptual contours of

embarrassment—while potentially pertinent to a discussion of shame—is short on

excitement, as most accounts seem to concur that embarrassment is a moderately negative,

fleeting emotion experienced in the wake of a transgression of social convention that is

considered to be trivial (in comparison to transgressions engendering shame or guilt) and

even humorous, at least in retrospect (Tangney et al. 1996).

The best capsule summary of the mainstream discourse on shame and guilt is to say that

it forms a genre that renounces the former emotion but embraces the latter. What the

mainstream interpretation needs is a set of clear criteria to distinguish between the two

emotions, and they are typically provided as follows (see e.g. Lewis 1971; Tangney 1991;

cf. Teroni and Deonna 2008).

a) Formation Whereas shame is a heteronomously formed emotion of social sanctions,

guilt is an autonomously formed emotion of private sanctions. The standards flouted as a

precursor to shame are external standards whose transgression brings disgrace and ridicule

upon myself through the eyes of others. In shame, I view myself exclusively through those

eyes. Shame does not presuppose moral responsibility; I can rationally feel ashamed of

being born with an ugly nose as long as that condition is a source of social disesteem. The

standards flouted as a precursor to guilt, however, are my own moral standards, which do

not require the gaze of others, but for the adherence to which I consider myself to be

morally accountable.

b) Focus Whereas guilt is domain-specific and focuses on a specific set of actions or

reactions, which I consider morally blameworthy but may have been ‘out of character’,

shame is global in that it encompasses the totality of my selfhood and evaluates it nega-

tively as a whole. More specifically, guilt listens to the voice of the superego or conscience

telling me that I have done something morally below par on a particular occasion and in a

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particular context; shame, in contrast, listens to the voice of my global self-disesteem

telling me that I am in general an incompetent, inferior person. Shame is thus identity-

threatening (by creating a choking, overwhelming sense of existential anxiety and

worthlessness) while guilt is not.

c) Formal Object The formal object of shame is a set of ideals or values about how I want

to live my life and how I want to be seen by others: the so-called ego-ideal. The formal

object of guilt is more specific. It encapsulates a set of norms about what counts as morally

acceptable behaviour—and in particular what sort of behaviour is morally prohibited by

laws or moral sanctions.

d) Typical Reaction The incipient tension between guilt and shame is entrenched fur-

ther—according to this mainstream interpretation—when we consider people’s typical

reactions to those two emotions. When I feel ashamed, I turn to navel-gazing and avoid-

ance of contact with others; I try to run away and hide from their ridiculing gaze. When I

feel guilty, however, I approach others and—motivated by reparative concerns—seek to

make amends for what I have done wrong. Whereas guilt, in this way, presupposes and

further stimulates empathy, shame impairs my capacity for fellow-feeling and can even, in

addition to self-loathing, precipitate overt anger and aggression towards others.

As seen above, the mainstream interpretation of shame in social psychology makes

heavy weather of its distinctiveness with respect to guilt. Those are supposed to be—

phenomenologically, conceptually and logically—quite ‘distinct affective experiences’

(Tangney 1991, p. 605). Social scientific moral neutrality is also cast aside here in analyses

that are self-confessedly moralistic about shame’s ‘ugliness’.

2.2. Psychological Anthropology

The mainstream interpretation of shame in psychological anthropology draws upon the

descriptive and normative distinctions made in social psychology between shame and guilt,

but it transposes those emotions from the realm of individual psychology to attributions

about societies as a whole as ‘shame’ or ‘guilt-centred’. Anthropologist and folklorist Ruth

Benedict was perhaps the first academic to preach this gospel in her 1947 study—a pre-

scient text in that it presages much of the discourse that was to follow (see e.g. Furukawa

et al. 2012). Certain societies or ‘self-cultures’ (typically those of the ancient world but

also contemporary Eastern cultures) are then supposed to be characterised, across the

board, by the sort of shame-inducing heteronomy and radical interdependence described in

the previous subsection, whereas Western societies—post-Enlightenment at least—have

developed (progressed?) to the level of autonomous moral evaluations whereby people can

distinguish clearly between inner sanctions and sanctions set by society.

Well-known, at least among philosophers, is Alasdair MacIntyre’s vivid depiction of a

certain subset of shame societies—the ‘heroic societies’ of ancient Greece and the Ice-

landic sagas—where human beings had ‘no hidden depths’, the distinction between the

external and internal in psycho-moral conduct was lost (as well as the possibility of

personal motives and guilt) and to judge a person was the same as judging individual

actions in the light of cultural norms (MacIntyre 1981, chap. 10). Hence, the obsession in

such societies with honour or what the Chinese still call ‘keeping face’.

Benedict (1947) made no bones about her distinction being a qualitative one and shame-

societies simply being more primitive, socially and morally, than guilt-societies. Such

presuppositions count as politically incorrect in our post-colonial times, however, and the

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distinction in question is therefore more likely to be phrased nowadays in terms of epis-

temological and moral relativism. It is not so much that guilt-societies are ‘better’ than

shame-societies, but rather that the standards that operate in each of them are epistemo-

logically impenetrable for people coming from the opposing kind of society (for an ana-

lysis and critique, see Kristjansson 2010a, chap. 8). Despite this apparent change of

compass, representatives of so-called shame-societies still feel that the mainstream inter-

pretation carries implicit assumptions about the superiority of guilt over shame and hence

the inferiority of contemporary non-Western shame-societies (see e.g. Fung 1999).

2.3. Educational Psychology

In recent educational psychology, general models of ‘educational’ or ‘academic’ emotions’

have been developed where shame plays a substantial role. For example, Linnenbrink and

Pintrich (2002) propose a conceptual model linking affect in classroom settings to

achievement goal theory, a prominent social cognitive theory of motivation. Achievement

goal theory is based on a distinction between students’ mastery-goal orientation, focused

on learning or understanding, and performance goal orientation, focused on demonstrating

ability or competence. Linnenbrink and Pintrich’s model posits that affect and goals are

reciprocally related to each other; that perceived classroom mastery is linked, as both as

cause and effect, to positive emotion (such as pride); and that failure to live up to perceived

classroom performance causes negative emotion (such as shame). Meyer and Turner

(2006) have explored findings about classroom emotions in the light of various motiva-

tional theories, and they conclude that engaging students in learning requires ‘consistently

positive emotional experiences’. What is called positive classroom environment reflects, in

part, the re-creation of such positive experiences. In a similar vein, Pekrun et al. (2002)

have studied emotions directly and reciprocally linked to academic learning, dividing them

into such positive emotions as enjoyment, hope and pride, versus negative ones such as

boredom, anxiety and shame.

The general upshot of—and consensus pervading—this discourse is clear regarding

shame and, indeed, does little more than replicate the mainstream consensus from social

psychology: Shame constitutes a global affect that is bad for you as a student because it

perpetuates a causal circle of debilitating effects. If failure to live up to your expectations

as a student results in shame, it reduces your chances of future mastery experiences

(because your wounded self implodes into narcissistic navel-gazing and dares not try

again), which further curtails attainment—leading, in turn, to more shame, and so forth.

Perhaps because the focus here is on shame as an ‘academic’ rather than a ‘moral’ emotion,

the mainstream interpretation of shame in educational psychology does not normally posit

guilt as shame’s pretty sister, but rather proposes a departure from all negatively valenced

classroom emotions.

2.4. Aristotelian Scholarship

Given the fact that Aristotle belonged to a supposedly ‘heroic shame-society’, and that his

views about the role of shame in moral learning are frequently cited, it may come as a

surprise to some readers that the mainstream interpretation by Aristotelian scholars of his

take on shame is in fact quite negative. Notably, in the Rhetoric (2007), where Aristotle

introduces various particular emotions and often makes suggestive remarks about their

trait-forms being characteristic of good or bad people (e.g. in the case of righteous

indignation, compassion and envy), he remains poker-faced about the normative

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dimensions of shame, simply describing objectively its phenomenological and conceptual

contours. His most extended discussion of shame is, however, found in the Nicomachean

ethics and it appears, at first sight, pretty unambiguous about shame’s lack of virtuousness.

Shame does not pass muster as a virtue, Aristotle says, for two distinct reasons, one

conceptual and the other moral. The conceptual reason is that ‘shame’ does not describe a

stable state of character (hexis); it describes rather an episodic feeling or a series of

feelings, closely tied up with bodily reactions. Moreover, even if we could profitably talk

about shame as a trait, it would not be one praiseworthy in good adults, for it is wrong for

them ‘to do anything that causes a feeling of disgrace’. Such bad actions should simply not

have been performed in the first place, full stop. The idea here seems to be that if we

accepted shame as a morally praiseworthy disposition in good persons, we would also be

suggesting that they had a disposition for acting badly that shame could keep in check—but

good people ex hypothesi have no such disposition! Even when Aristotle offers the caveat

that ‘the feeling of shame is suitable in youth’ and that ‘we think it right for young people

to be prone to shame, since they live by their feelings, and often go astray, but are

restrained by shame’, he still refuses to grant shame the status of an age-relative virtue in

the young (although that manoeuvre would have been open to him, cf. his discussion of the

specific hexeis of the young in 2007, pp. 149–151 [1389a16–b3]). Rather, he insists on

continuing to talk about shame at the level of an episodic emotion (Aristotle 1985,

pp. 114–115 [1128b9–35]).

Although Aristotle is more accommodating about shame in other places (as will be

noted in Sect. 3.4), the mainstream interpretation rightly acknowledges that in his most

sustained discussion of the morality of shame, he does break emphatically with a long

Greek tradition harking back to Homer and Plato in which shame was extolled as a

virtue—indeed as one of the two supreme virtues (along with justice) that Zeus sent to

humans so that they could live together in society (cf. Jimenez 2011, pp. 148–149,

although she ultimately rejects the mainstream interpretation).

2.5. Implications for Moral Education

It should now be clear why I have talked about a mainstream anti-shame interpretation. In

all the four discourses shame is denounced: as a non-virtue (Aristotle), an impediment to

learning (educational psychology), a characteristic of ‘more primitive’ societies (psycho-

logical anthropology) and as guilt’s treacherous, ugly sister (social psychology). Tangney

neatly summarises the dominant consensus—which she was in fact herself instrumental in

creating—when she says that both shame and guilt are ‘bad feelings’ (i.e. negative). Guilt,

however, is ‘less global, painful, and debilitating’ than shame, and of the two, only shame

deserves the label of an ‘ugly feeling’ (1991, p. 600). It is rare to see such an unequivocal

normative claim being made by an experimental psychologist.

Although various contemporary moral educationists have discussed the significance of

self-conscious emotions, no independent discursive tradition on shame has emerged within

their field. Rather, the discussion tends to be cluttered with baggage from the discourses

already mentioned. We are constantly reminded of the dire psycho-moral and psycho-

social consequences of shame, such as lower self-esteem, less empathy, more shyness,

social anxiety and moral apathy, and a higher likelihood of depression (see e.g. various

references in De Hooge et al. 2008). The popular and semi-popular literature on child-

rearing and moral education is teeming with advice on how shame can ‘harm our children’

as it leaves them with ‘an enduring sense of themselves as inherently ‘‘bad’’’. Even the odd

word used to shame a child can have the power to ‘puncture’ its self-esteem for years. At

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best, repeated shaming ‘leads to a shallow conformism’ which cannot be the goal of moral

education (Grille and Macgregor 2013; cf. Deonna et al. 2011, chap. 2, for more references

to the academic literature).

The mantra is neatly summed up here: ‘Kids need guilt to keep themselves connected.

What they don’t ever need is shame—a more pervasive self-punishment, an identity that

congeals around ‘‘badness’’’(Abblett 2011). On this mainstream interpretation, shame has

clearly got a lot to answer for.

3. Critiquing the Canon: The Heterodox Interpretation

Despite the ubiquity of the mainstream interpretation of shame’s ugliness, dissenting

voices can be heard in all the discourses canvassed above. Those form even more of a

motley crew than the anti-shame voices; yet—from a moral educational perspective at

least—they add up to what I would like to call the heterodox interpretation.

3.1. Social Psychology

The most outspoken critics of the canon in this field have been academics at the Swiss

Centre for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva (Deonna and Teroni 2008;

Teroni and Deonna 2008; Bruun and Teroni 2011; Deonna et al. 2011).2 Let us now

consider those criticisms in light of the four criteria to distinguish shame from guilt

suggested by the mainstream interpretation (recall Sect. 2.1).

a) Formation Is shame nothing but the heteronomous internalisation of others’ dispar-

aging gaze? First of all, it does not seem necessary for the gaze to be disparaging. A person

could also be ashamed of being admired by the wrong audience in the wrong way—say the

emperor in H. C. Anderson’s fable if he himself, rather than the child, had realised that he

was actually naked (Kristjansson 2002, p. 116). Second, being adversely judged or ridi-

culed by other is more likely to result in anger towards them or indignation, rather than

shame, unless we somehow identify with their judgement or perceive it as a genuine threat

to our reputation (Bruun and Teroni 2011, pp. 21–22). We could say that, in order to elicit

shame, the heteronomous judgement needs to have the required ‘autonomous bite’. Third,

if I allow myself to engage in some armchair phenomenology and consider the issues that I

am most ashamed of myself, the two that most quickly spring to mind are (1) not having

started to engage in regular physical exercise until my late 30s, despite abundant

encouragement and opportunity to do so, and (2) still not having shed the four pounds I

gained when staying with my foodie friends last summer. Neither has got anything to do—

or so it seems to me—with the judgement of others, whether their real gaze (as neither of

those perceived transgressions of my personal standards will be of interest to, or even

known to, others) or their imagined gaze. It is, I submit, only my own gaze that makes me

ashamed. Am I mislabelling my emotional state here? If so, I am at a loss as to what the

correctly labelled state would be, since neither ‘guilt’ nor ‘embarrassment’ seem to be

serious contenders. I would, therefore, agree with Bruun and Teroni that to be ashamed of

oneself because one has violated a standard is one thing; to be ashamed of oneself because

other perceive one as having violated a standard is quite another (2011, p. 26), but that the

2 I have also, in previous writings, expressed a number of doubts about the canon (Kristjansson 2002;Kristjansson 2010a), although those have not been as systematically formulated.

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former is in no way less genuine or primary than the latter. In other words, autonomous

shame is not necessarily parasitic upon heteronomous shame, and the idea that shame is

essentially heteronomous (which was the strongest point in favour of its presumed

‘ugliness’) does not hold water (cf. Deonna and Teroni 2008, p. 67; Deonna et al. 2011,

chap. 5).

b) Focus The problem with the mainstream interpretation of shame as global, stable and

selfhood-threatening—but guilt as domain-specific and merely interrogating individual

actions rather than one’s whole self—is that it, arguably, violates ordinary language. It is

common in everyday language, popular literature and soap operas to see people lamenting

about, for instance, the all-encompassing guilt they feel for having spent their whole lives

failing to appreciate the people who really love them (so much so that their guilt has

morphed into a pervasive existential mood), or to hear them saying how ashamed they are

of some specific inappropriate gesture or remark which slipped through their defence

barriers. One can, it seems, reasonably feel guilty about general aspects of one’s emotional

make-up and ashamed over specific behaviours. Robert Frost wrote that if ‘one by one we

counted people out/For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long/To get so we had no one left

to live with’. Similarly, if every bout of shame meant that we evaluated ourselves nega-

tively overall, then it would not take long until we had nothing left to live for (cf. Kris-

tjansson 2002, p. 108; Kristjansson 2010a, p. 82; Deonna et al. 2011, pp. 104–107).

These considerations put a severe strain on the shame–guilt dichotomy as proposed by

the mainstream interpretation. That interpretation seems to conflate global, all-encom-

passing shame with shame per se.

c) Formal Object There is undoubtedly a kernel of truth in the assumption of the

mainstream interpretation that shame and guilt have different formal objects and constitute

distinguishable emotions. Even the naysayers Bruun and Teroni (2011) admit as much.

Nevertheless, the idea that shame is about ego-values, but guilt about moral values, draws

the distinction too starkly. The typical examples that Aristotle gives of the causes of shame

revolve around moral vices: cowardice, licentiousness, stinginess, flattery, smallness of

mind and boastfulness, for instance (Aristotle 2007, pp. 132–133 [1383b–1384a]). Simi-

larly, all the parents in Fung’s study of the role of shame in parenting located shame firmly

within the moral domain (1999, p. 189). If we define ‘morality’ as broadly as is common in

virtue ethics, to encompass all variables relating to people’s flourishing (eudaimonia), little

room will in any case be left for non-moral objects of shame. Even my failure to lose

weight could then count as a moral failure and the resulting shame a moral emotion. Guilt

does, however, seem to focus specifically upon transgressions that are ‘moral’ in a nar-

rower sense—having to do with breaches of explicit moral obligations towards others. In

that sense, however, guilt would still count as a subclass of shame—witness the point of

Bernard Williams’ delightfully cryptic but insightful remark that ‘shame can understand

guilt but guilt cannot understand itself’(1993, pp. 92–93).

d) Typical Reaction Empirical research simply does not bear out the canonical hypothesis

that shame is essentially about hiding or being shell-shocked but guilt about repairing

damage done. Repeated studies have found that shame does motivate prosocial behaviour

(by activating approach-and-restore behaviours) when its experience is relevant for the

decision at hand, and thus serves an important interpersonal function (De Hooge et al.

2008, 2010). On the contrary, guilt can, at worst, be paralysing and debilitating and thus

have anti-social implications (Mulligan 2009).

K. Kristjansson

123

3.2. Psychological Anthropology

The most resolute, sustained and sweeping critique of the distinction between so-called

guilt-societies and shame-societies is found in Bernard Williams’ book Shame and

necessity (1993). Williams amply demonstrates that the Greek emotion of aidos (typically

translated ‘shame’) also contained elements of what we nowadays call ‘guilt’ under its

rubric, including elements of merely internal sanctions and prosocial reparations. More

generally speaking—given the nature of our species—it seems impossible to envisage

human societies where both shame and guilt are not apparent in some form or another

(Wilson 2001). This is not to say that the tokens of those emotions cannot differ consid-

erably between societies—depending for instance on the levels of interdependence versus

independence in prevailing self-conceptions—but there is little indication that such token-

differences indicate deeper type-differences (Kristjansson 2010a, chap. 8).

3.3. Educational Psychology

The monopoly of ‘positivity’ in educational psychology seems to be slackening. Notably,

although Pekrun et al. (2002) foreground the value of positive emotions (as noted in Sect.

3.3), they emphasise the fact that negative emotions can also play a ‘positive’ role in the

educational process. Such emotions can induce strong motivation to cope with negative

events; shame, in particular, may induce motivation to avoid failures by investing effort in

students who are overall resilient (Turner et al. 2002; cf. Olthof 2012). An increasing

number of research findings have indicated that negative emotions such as shame can, no

less than positive emotions, broaden and build students’ personal resources. Even the

concept of positive emotion, as linked to educational outcomes, turns out to be consid-

erably multi-faceted. Students can, for example, be low in joy but high in pride or vice

versa (Meyer and Turner 2006). A helpful distinction has also been proposed between

‘positive activating’ emotions, such as hope and pride; ‘positive deactivating’ emotions,

such as relief and relaxation after success; ‘negative activating’ emotions, such as anger,

anxiety and shame; and ‘negative deactivating’ emotions, such as hopelessness and

boredom (Pekrun et al. 2002). It is precisely because ‘negative activating’ emotions can

induce strong extrinsic motivation to avoid failure that their effects on student’s overall

motivation need not be overall negative.

According to this heterodox interpretation, the anti-shame consensus in educational

psychology has failed to attend to the distinction between those negative emotions that sap

our energy and those that energise us—and shame seems, in many instances, to belong to

the latter category (cf. Tombs 1995).

3.4. Aristotelian Scholarship

The unrepentant systematiser, Aristotle, is uncharacteristically unsystematic in his treat-

ment of shame. In Sect. 2.4, I rehearsed his rejection of the idea of (dispositional) shame as

a virtue, whether age-relative or not, on the grounds that shame does not even satisfy the

basic condition for virtue-candidacy: that of constituting a state of character (hexis). A

close reading of the Nicomachean ethics reveals, however, a number of passages that do

not sit well with this rejection. In one place, Aristotle says that the person prone to

(appropriate) shame ‘receives praise’. For ‘one person is called intermediate, and

another—the person excessively prone to shame, who is ashamed about everything—is

called excessive; the person who is deficient in shame or never feels shame is said to have

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123

no sense of disgrace’ (1985, pp. 48–49 [1108a30–35]). What we might suppose to be

seeing here is an account of trait-like shame that fits into the golden-mean architectonic of

an Aristotelian emotional virtue (as a medial form flanked by extremes of shamefulness

and shamelessness). If (appropriately felt) shame is praiseworthy, then it cannot simply

involve an episodic emotion or a set of such emotions, because mere episodic emotions

cannot—recall Sect. 1—be objects of praise (cf. Cairns 1993, pp. 412–413). Yet Aristotle

refuses to take this coherent step and still insists that the praiseworthy medial trait-form of

shame is not a virtue. In another place, in his discussion of the virtue of bravery, he

observes that if someone fears bad reputation (for being considered cowardly), ‘he is

decent and properly prone to shame’ (1985, p. 71 [1115a13–14]). But if x is a virtue and

x is connected with disposition y, which is also praiseworthy, why is y then not also a

virtue? Moreover, Aristotle specifically complains about the group of ‘the many’ (those at

the lowest level of moral development) that they only ‘obey fear, not shame’ (1985, p. 292

[1179b11–14]).

The strongest argument in favour of an Aristotelian emotional virtue of proper trait-

shame is, however, found in Aristotle’s sketchy glossing of his theory that no general

emotional traits are expendable from human life, but only their extreme forms. This theory

ties in with Aristotle’s teleological assumption of psycho-social homeostasis, according to

which the parts of the human soul are arranged such that it may adjust successfully to the

various social situations in which individuals will find themselves, inter alia by adopting

medial states of character. In each relevant sphere of human existence, there is thus a fitting

(medial) emotional trait/virtue which makes us respond well (e.g. medially) to situations in

that sphere (see further in Kristjansson 2007, chap. 4). The snag here is that Aristotle

mentions shamelessness as an example of expendable traits that people typically use to

counter this theory. They are mistaken, Aristotle says, because shamelessness is not a

medial state but an extreme state of deficiency (1985, p. 44 [1107a9–26]). But if that is

true, then the homeostasis theory demands that there is a medial, virtuous state with regard

to which shamelessness is the vicious deficiency.

For once, Aristotle seems to be all at sea. Marta Jimenez partly agrees—in her enviable

combination of expert Aristotelian scholarship and suggestive interpretation (2011)—but

still tries to rescue Aristotle. I would go further and maintain that here is a place where the

sensible Aristotelian needs to depart from the historical Aristotle. The coherent Aristotelian

position is to acknowledge proper dispositional shame as a fully fledged emotional virtue

among moral learners. Furthermore, by drawing on the distinction that Aristotle himself

makes between retrospective and prospective shame, the strongest Aristotelian position

would be to hold that while well-developed paragons of moral virtue (the phronimoi) may not

need to draw upon retrospective shame any more—but can throw it aside along with the other

youthful virtue of emulousness like a Wittgensteinian ladder once they have reached that

developmental level—they will still need prospective shame as a deterrent voice to warn

them against potentially base future courses of action. To suggest that they do not even need

prospective shame any more is to assume more intuitive moral infallibility in the phronimoi

than even Aristotle himself—in other contexts—is willing to do (cf. Curzer 2005). There is

admittedly, in Aristotle, a developmental level above that of the phronimoi, of heroic, godly

virtue, where even prospective shame has become redundant, but that is not a level for

ordinary human beings. On a reasonable heterodox reconstruction of Aristotelian shame,

therefore, prospective trait-shame can constitute a virtue (cf. Bruun 2014).3

3 The essential question is not whether Aristotle is willing to grant shame the status of a full virtue. Hemight still resent doing so as it is, qua holistic trait, only praiseworthy in moral learners, whereas in adults—

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3.5. Implications for Moral Education

As noted in Sect. 2.5, the mainstream interpretation of shame in moral psychology and

moral education holds that shame is an ugly emotion, ideally expellable from upbringing

and schooling. The only exception seems to be the bullying literature which has a long

tradition of suggesting shame as a helpful deterrent against anti-social behaviour (see e.g.

Ahmed 2006). On the heterodox interpretation, delineated in the four above subsections, a

radically different picture emerges. Rather than caving into shame’s bad reputation, the

heterodox interpretation deconstructs it (cf. Deonna and Teroni 2008; Deonna et al. 2011,

chap. 5). Variants of this interpretation range from shame not being ‘as ugly as is some-

times assumed’ (De Hooge et al. 2010, p. 123) to its being positively pretty (see e.g.

Bruun’s 2014 reconstruction of Aristotle)—an intrinsic part of effective socialisation and

education. It might be tempting to interpret Fung’s (1999) careful ethnographic study of the

constructive and morally positive uses by Taiwanese parents of shame in moral upbringing

as describing a situation unique to Confucian societies; yet nothing in her study indicates

that the attitudes of those parents is essentially or impenetrably culture-specific.

The heterodox reinterpretation of Aristotle, described in the previous subsection, is

particularly pertinent for present purposes as some of the most popular approaches to moral

education of late, such as US-style character education, social emotional learning and

positive education, claim to be based on Aristotelian precedents. I would like to mention

here two recent works which both show, from different perspectives, how invaluable

shame is—on a coherent Aristotelian position—as an educational asset, guiding moral

learners in the right direction. Howard Curzer, who focuses on a textual exegesis of

Aristotle, foregrounds the role of shame at a particular stage in moral development, where

‘the many’ gradually become ‘generous-minded’ (before becoming ‘incontinent’, ‘conti-

nent’ and finally ‘fully virtuous’). The progress from the level of ‘the many’ is only

possible by Aristotle’s lights, Curzer argues (2012, chap 16), if they are directed by painful

punishments and penalties, including internalisation of the painful emotion of shame.

Jimenez (2011) offers a more intellectualist and less textually constrained account of this

progress, whereby shame not only prompts learners to perform right actions, through

painful habituation, but makes them perform them in the right spirit (through motivating

love of ‘the noble’ and ‘truly pleasant’) by engaging learners at increasingly advanced

cognitive levels. She thus explains how shame is the best candidate to solve the infamous

‘paradox of moral education’ in Aristotle (Kristjansson 2007, chap, 3): the paradox of how

habituated virtue transforms itself gradually into reflective, phronesis-informed virtue. The

learners’ internalisation of shame step-by-step ‘confers upon them an ability to listen to

arguments and restrain their passions accordingly’ (Jimenez 2011, p. 157).

Their different perspectives notwithstanding, both Curzer and Jimenez indirectly

address the concern raised by Hunter at the opening of this article. The upshot of their

writings is, simply put, that if contemporary theories of character education want to have

real-world traction, they had better not shy away from the emotional burden of the neg-

atively valenced—but morally positive—emotion of proper shame.

Footnote 3 continuedas I have argued—it is only praiseworthy in its ‘prospective’ form. Yet Aristotle does have the conceptu-alisation of a virtue that is relative to a developmental stage available to him, as already noted. In any case,Aristotle never explicitly acknowledges shame even as a quasi-virtue, which is why I claim above that this isa point where the ‘sensible Aristotelian’ needs to depart from Aristotle.

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4. Whence Those Contrasting Interpretations? Conceptual Analyses AcrossDisciplines

We have now seen how the mainstream interpretation exposes itself to objections within a

number of different discourses. Rather than expanding further upon those, however, a more

salutary question for present purposes is how such radically contrasting interpretations of

the content and moral contours of (presumably) the same emotion could have come about.

A key to a fresh examination of that question—which has been mostly left unanswered

in the literature—may lie in the fact that most of the contemporary advocates of the

mainstream interpretation are social scientists whereas the heterodox voices tend to stem

from philosophers. Now, although both social scientists and philosophers engage in

analyses of the concepts that they employ in their work—in this case the concept of

shame—their ideas of what proper conceptual analysis involves seem to differ radically.

Philosophers obviously do not subscribe to a single method of conceptual analyses, but in

general they tend to offer critical, revisionary definitions that may involve considerable

trimmings of ordinary language. Social scientists often talk disparagingly (and not always

without justification) about philosophers engaging in armchair phenomenology where they

try to figure out—in poet Auden’s scathing words—‘what their nanny really meant’ and

then superimposing that definition on what the general public is supposed to mean. The

fact is, however, that whereas philosophers generally come clean on what they are doing—

warts and all—social scientists often seem to pluck definitions of concepts out of thin air

(or out of standard dictionaries). Alternatively, a characterisation of a concept that forms

the basis of social scientific research is often justified with a brief argumentum-ad-vere-

cundiam nod to a respected authority in the field who, when unpacked, refers to another

authority, and so forth (see the critique in Gulliford et al. 2013).

It often takes a while to trace the social scientific definitions back to their roots. In the

case of shame, those roots seem to lie, on one hand, in theoretical constructs that are, in

fact, more philosophical than social scientific all the way down to lay people’s actual usage

(esp. Benedict 1947; Lewis 1971), and on the other hand in a fairly limited number of

phenomenological studies (esp. Wicker et al. 1983; Lindsay-Hartz 1984) where respon-

dents were asked, through open questions, to describe real-life experiences (via personal

stories) that they connected most intimately to shame and guilt, respectively. On the

grounds of those responses, tests have then been made (e.g. Tangney and Dearing 2002)

where items are coded in line with the findings from the phenomenological studies, such

for example that if a person self-attributes incompetence and avoidance behaviour after a

transgression, this is coded as ‘shame’. Conceptually, these tests constitute self-fulfilling

prophecies: self-perpetuating in that they cannot but confirm the association between a

given description and a given emotion, as this association was decided upon beforehand.

Subsequent researchers are then shoved to assent to and proceed from a stance that they

may not readily, on full reflection, share. The social scientist can respond that the original

phenomenological studies of shame and guilt have later been replicated—with similar

results—on a larger-scale cross-cultural basis (Wallbott and Scherer 1995). However, there

are deeper methodological problems marring the very phenomenological method

employed. Let me mention three.

First is what I would want to call excess bias. If I were asked to mention a Manchester

United player, the two names that would readily come to mind are George Best and Eric

Cantona. Those are not the ‘average’ Manchester United players, however. I remember

them best because they stood out in terms of their excessive larger-than-life personas.

Similarly, if I were asked to mention a typical episode of shame, I would most probably

K. Kristjansson

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think of a case of global, excessive shame, taken from a Greek tragedy or an Icelandic

saga. In general, it is highly likely in an open-question phenomenological study that the

elicited descriptions are biased in favour of excessive instantiations of a concept rather than

typical instantiations. This is why more careful and considered research into prototypicality

ratings, as a way of eliciting common conceptual intuitions, does need to follow such

ratings up with a second phase of centrality ratings where the original features are taken to

another group of people who are then asked to re-rank them in terms of centrality versus

peripherality (see e.g. Lambert et al. 2009). Because of a lack of attention to excess bias in

studies of shame and guilt, it will seem—to the average philosopher at least—that social

scientists have engaged in ferocious generalisations about the circumscriptions of shame

and guilt based on descriptions that are most likely excessive. Hence, the apparently

exaggerated characterisations illustrated in Sect. 2.1 and criticised in Sect. 3.1—and a

mainstream guilt–shame distinction that is, so to speak, out of its depth. Second, what

social scientists tend to be interested in are intensity variables rather than conceptual

conditions (although they sometimes conflate the two). This is no mystery; social scientists

tend to focus on correlations between variables rather than their logical associations. It is

clearly helpful, from a practical social scientific perspective, to know how intensive epi-

sodes of shame play out in various areas of human experience and what their empirical

antecedents and consequents are. Such research will tells us preciously little, however,

about the conceptual conditions of shame. Third, a large part of the relevant social sci-

entific research on shame emanates from studies of so-called shame-prone individuals:

individuals in whose lives shame has, for various reasons, taken centre stage with dam-

aging effects (see Deonna et al. 2011, pp. 163–169; De Hooge et al. 2010, p. 113). But

there is no good reason to believe that easy inferences can be made from such individuals

to ordinary people experiencing shame as part of their ordinary lives.

5. Conclusion

What started out as a proposed practical spadework on the moral and educative role of

shame—taking its cue from Hunter’s salient observation—has turned into a conceptual and

methodological groundwork on contrasting interpretations of shame. A certain discrepancy

can thus be noted between the initial aim of the paper and its eventual outcome. In my

defence, I am not the first educational philosopher to suffer this predicament. John Wilson

also concluded, in his study of the role of shame and guilt in moral education, that most of

the relevant discourse was ‘grossly premature’, as ‘it is not at all clear what actually is

marked by these terms’, and that little could be said productively about practical issues

until the conceptual ones were sorted out (2001, p. 71). Rather than worrying about the

aim–outcome discrepancy, perhaps there is a larger lesson to be learnt here, analogous to

the one that Anscombe (1958) drove home when she encouraged moral philosophers to

keep quiet until moral psychology had started to produce the goods. Perhaps it would be

good also for moral educators to invest more energy in groundwork in conceptual moral

psychology before embarking on the empirical spadework.

In this paper, I have tried to nudge forward the discourse to which Wilson wanted to

contribute by alerting readers to the underlying disagreements that mar it (Sects. 2 and 3). I

have indicated how discourses about shame in different academic fields are held in thrall

by a mainstream interpretation that, in turn, is based on a number of suspect methodo-

logical assumptions about the circumscription of its basic concepts (Sect. 4). As correctly

noted by Thomas Nagel (2012, p. 127), philosophy usually proceeds best when it offers

Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses

123

alternatives to mainstream ideas, instead of knockdown arguments, and explores how those

measure up. Rather than driving philosophical nails in the coffin of the mainstream

interpretation, I offered in Sect. 3.5 an educational take on the heterodox interpretation of

shame that I believe provides considerable practical benefits, at least for those sympathetic

to current Aristotle-inspired variants of character education. I would like to leave readers

with the question of why the burden of proof must rest with defenders of the heterodox

interpretation when the prosecution has provided such scant support for its own case.

I hope that my exploration has suggested ways forward for more balanced analyses of

the nature, moral justification and educative role of shame. There is only so much that

philosophy can settle on its own, however, and the ground-clearing attempted in this paper

does not imply that the empirical spadework needs not to be done also. Shame may still

turn out to be an ugly emotion. I have simply warned against assuming so from the outset.

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