Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality: An Investigation into the Experience of Shame and its Ethical Role

TY - BOOK

T1 - Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality

T2 - An Investigation into the Experience of Shame and its Ethical Role

AU - Montes Sanchez, Alba

PY - 2014/9/18

Y1 - 2014/9/18

N2 - In the studies of emotion, shame is classified under several labels: a self-conscious emotion, an emotion of self-assessment, a social emotion, and a moral emotion. All of them are supposed to pick out a defining characteristic of shame. Though all of these labels will be under scrutiny at some point in this dissertation, my primary focus is the last label. My guiding question is: is shame a moral emotion? Does it have a fundamental relationship to ethics or the ethical? Does it have a crucial role or significance in this respect? If so, what exactly? Or is ethics rather a contingent aspect of some prominent episodes of shame? This is the broad question that I intend to explore and clarify throughout this study. In my view, shame is not a unitary phenomenon, but comes in a range of varieties that are linked by what Wittgenstein (1953) called family resemblance. Not all of them have moral significance or a moral role, but I will argue that a general capacity to feel shame, especially the central varieties of discretion shame and disgrace shame, is a fundamental part of the sensibilities that make us ethical, it is a fundamental element of the ground from which ethics can take off. By this, I do not mean that shame is always virtuous or always guided by moral concerns, but rather that it discloses a form of subjectivity that stands in and is constituted by a particular form of relationality and responsiveness to others and to itself, a form of interdependence that combines vulnerability and responsibility.

AB - In the studies of emotion, shame is classified under several labels: a self-conscious emotion, an emotion of self-assessment, a social emotion, and a moral emotion. All of them are supposed to pick out a defining characteristic of shame. Though all of these labels will be under scrutiny at some point in this dissertation, my primary focus is the last label. My guiding question is: is shame a moral emotion? Does it have a fundamental relationship to ethics or the ethical? Does it have a crucial role or significance in this respect? If so, what exactly? Or is ethics rather a contingent aspect of some prominent episodes of shame? This is the broad question that I intend to explore and clarify throughout this study. In my view, shame is not a unitary phenomenon, but comes in a range of varieties that are linked by what Wittgenstein (1953) called family resemblance. Not all of them have moral significance or a moral role, but I will argue that a general capacity to feel shame, especially the central varieties of discretion shame and disgrace shame, is a fundamental part of the sensibilities that make us ethical, it is a fundamental element of the ground from which ethics can take off. By this, I do not mean that shame is always virtuous or always guided by moral concerns, but rather that it discloses a form of subjectivity that stands in and is constituted by a particular form of relationality and responsiveness to others and to itself, a form of interdependence that combines vulnerability and responsibility.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - shame

KW - guilt

KW - moral emotions

KW - self-conscious emotions

KW - intersubjectivity

KW - moral psychology

KW - phenomenology

KW - ethics and emotions

M3 - Ph.D. thesis

BT - Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality

PB - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

ER -