Shame and Guilt in Shaping the Moral Self

The fundamental question to address here is whether it is guilt, shame, or both that motivate a person toward an overall change in his moral character.

Bernard Williams has suggested that that guilt is not sufficient to motivate a person to change his moral character; only shame can spur a person to rebuild the self or the environment in which he has to live. Williams identifies guilt with actions, and shame with self. I feel guilty about something I have done – it is associated not with my overall sense of being or sense of myself, but something which I have done, which may be an isolated incident. Shame, on the other hand, calls into question the very essence of self.

I attended a conference in which Professor Michael Stocker suggested that most of the time if we experience guilt we should experience shame; otherwise, the guilt is mistaken, misplaced or pathological. It didn’t take me long to think of instances in which that simply isn’t the case, and then I had to understand why such instances of guilt do not involve shame nor should they. It has to do with identification of the moral self and the values toward which the moral self strives and whether or not the incident in question involves those sacred values.

For example: I have a conversation with a friend who is speaking poorly of a mutual friend. After the conversation she asks me not to tell the third party what she’s said. However, I feel very strongly that the third party should know what was said, and so I betray a trust and tell her.

I may certainly feel guilty about having done that. I may feel guilty about breaking a trust or even about “gossip mongering”. But I may not feel at all ashamed. I suspect the reason is actually quite simple: shame involves a disturbing discrepancy between what I believe my moral self to be (or what it should be) and what my actions and/or thoughts actually identify my moral self as being, or what others may perceive my moral self as being. (This actually goes back to an argument I made here a few months ago about how we deal with the differences between who believe ourselves to be and how we are perceived based on our own self-identifications and labels and how pathologies can be borne out of the discrepancy between them). Here I make a distinction between the moral self and, for lack of a better term, the civic self. I may feel guilty because I have broken a civic obligation (to keep a trust) – I have acted in a way that is incongruent with my truest attitudes about a civic or social duty. But if my civic self and my moral self are not wholly congruent, then I may not feel actual shame – I will not feel that I have done something morally wrong.

There are certain values and god-centers (to steal Niebuhr’s term) to which our moral selves strive. These are the ultimate, transcendent centers of all we hold dear – the very things from which we derive our sense of “right” and “good”. It is from those ultimate centers of value that we derive our entire sense of morality. And while we may agree to other shared values in order to operate peaceably in our society and culture, those shared values may not hold ultimate value in our personal lives. And if the shared communal values that we uphold for the sake of peace are not of ultimate personal value, then our civic self and our moral self will not be wholly congruent. And so I may even often experience guilt without shame. (Imagine how true this must hold for those who have rejected the very foundation of western morality as their own moral authority – the Bible (specifically with regard to Christian interpretations thereof). For those who do not subscribe to the moral authority of the Bible, they may find that their civic self and moral self are quite unaligned. But does that necessarily make them pathological?)

Let’s consider a more extreme example. If I engage in sexual relations outside of a monogamous relationship I may feel guilty about that. I may feel guilty for having broken a trust, or for behaving in a way that is deemed unacceptable by my peers. But I may not necessarily feel ashamed. I will only feel ashamed if I hold sexual fidelity as an ultimate, transcendent god-center rather than merely a shared, communal value that I have inherited from my society. If I don’t, then I have not done something that causes me to question my moral orientation, and therefore I will not feel shame. Only guilt. (Of course, the more extreme the example the closer we move toward pathology. But that’s neither here nor there and I am not a psychologist and am going to chose not to go there.)

We behave morally (according to our own inner determinations of what is “moral”) when we are engaged in activity that is wholly oriented towards upholding our own ultimate values. Such actions also spur a sense of honor and pride. When I behave in a way that is incongruent with or contradicts my own ultimate values, I will feel shame. I have caused myself to question the very core of my moral self. I ask, “Am I the kind of person who would do this? ” I am questioning my very essence. I feel disturbed, distressed, and disgusted by the possibility that my moral self is not what I believed it to be, nor becoming what it should. And that experience is, in my opinion, the definition of shame.

There’s more I want to say here on the correlation of guilt and responsibility or even perceived responsibility (such as has been described by Germans born after the second world war, or some American whites towards the institution of slavery), but these are examples where guilt and shame do go hand in hand, and therefore isn’t of ultimate interest to me. What does interest me somewhat, however, is how an inherited perception of self, or rather, extended sense of self, affects shame.

If shame is concerned with the misalignment or perceived misalignment between who I believe my moral self to be (or what it should be) and who my actions dictate my moral to self to actually be as I have posited, then why is it that I can feel shame over things I have not done, such as feeling shame for something my country has done, or for being poor, uneducated, etc?

I suspect this has to do with my having a sense of my self as more than my physical body, mind, and personality. It has to do with how I identify myself, and how my identification reflects on and defines me as an individual. If I identify very strongly with being an American, so much so that I identify American actions as my own or as representative of me, then I may certainly feel shame over what we are doing in Iraq, or for the mistreatment of First Nations people, etc. I feel shame over the actions of others when I identify their actions as some way reflecting on my moral self, on my very nature either because I have inherited this morality (as in this instance) or because I may be seen as the progenitor of the shameful behavior (such as when a mother feels ashamed of her child). Both of these instances involve an extended sense of self that I think goes much unnoticed.

Shame of being is somewhat more complicated. If I am ashamed of being poor or uneducated, for example, I suspect this has to do again with an inherited sense of morality from our culture, but I think this is of the pathological variety. In this instance, poverty and ignorance may be seen as ailments of a society at large, indications that the society in question is fundamentally flawed. We make assumptions about marginalized people – worse, we project onto them our own fears, faults, and flaws. While there is nothing inherently immoral about being poor or being ignorant, we project onto these people associations of violence, crime, lewdness, etc. And so we ascribe immorality to poverty and ignorance by association, and by unjust association at that. And so if I feel ashamed of being poor or uneducated, I may not actually assume that my moral self encompasses a propensity toward violence or crime or lewdness, etc, but I have inherited these feelings from my society, however unjust it might be. I suffer from a misguided sense of misalignment based on the prejudices, fears, and disgust of others. The idea that “there must be something wrong with me” is indeed an indication of shame, even though my actions of self-perceptions may not in actuality be misaligned.

Futher Reading

1. Williams, Bernard : Shame and Necessity

2. Stocker, Michael : Valuing Emotions

3. Nussbaum, Martha : Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law

4. Niebuhr, Richard : Radical Monotheism (at Religion Online)

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