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5 - Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2009

By
Michael Stocker
Edited by
Alan Thomas
Michael Stocker
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University
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Summary

Shame and Necessity continues Bernard Williams' trenchant critique of Morality, Our Peculiar Institution. One of its main themes is that our ethical theories overemphasize guilt and, concomitantly, underemphasize, even ignore, shame. They, thus, make serious theoretical and ethical errors: they misunderstand themselves, misunderstanding even their central notion, guilt; and they encourage us to misunderstand ourselves and our relations with others. Three quotes from chapter four, “Shame and Autonomy,” which focuses on these errors, give a good indication of those claims:

[Guilt] can direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged, and demand reparations in the name, simply, of what has happened to them. But it cannot by itself help one to understand one's relations to those happenings, or to rebuild the self that has done these things and the world in which one has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and how one is related to others.

Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself.

The conceptions of modern morality … insist at once on the primacy of guilt, its significance in turning us towards victims, and its rational restriction to the voluntary … if we want to understand why it might be important for us to distinguish the harms we do voluntarily from those we do involuntarily, we shall hope to succeed only if we ask what kinds of failing or inadequacy are the sources of the harms, and what those failings mean in the context of our own and other people's lives.[…]

Type
Chapter
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Bernard Williams , pp. 135 - 154
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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