Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T17:22:04.300Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bromberg, Philip (1998). Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press).Google Scholar
Coetzee, J. M. (2000). Disgrace (New York: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
D'Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel (2000). “The Moralistic Fallacy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61, 2000, 65–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fossum, Merle A. and Mason, Marilyn J. (1986). Facing Shame: Families in Recovery (New York: Norton).Google Scholar
Gibbard, Allan (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Hegeman, Elizabeth, and Stocker, Michael (1996). Valuing Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Lansky, Melvin (1996). “Shame and Suicide in Sophocles' Ajax,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 65, pp. 761–786.Google ScholarPubMed
Lewis, Helen Block (1971). Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press).Google ScholarPubMed
Morris, Herbert (1976). “Guilt and Shame,” in Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press).Google Scholar
Piers, Gerhart and Singer, Milton (eds.) (1953). Shame and Guilt (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas).Google Scholar
Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Schafer, Roy (1967). “Ideals, the Ego Ideal, and the Ideal Self,” Psychological Issues, 5, 131–174.Google ScholarPubMed
Statman, Daniel (ed.) (1993). Moral Luck (Albany: State University of New York Press).Google Scholar
Stocker, Michael (1973). “Act and Agent Evaluations,” The Review of Metaphysics, 42–61.Google Scholar
Tangney, June Price, and Dearing, Ronda L. (2002). Shame and Guilt (New York and London: The Guilford Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Gabriele (1985). Pride, Shame and Guilt (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard (1981). “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 20–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Bernard (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard (1993). Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press).Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard (1995). “Moral Luck: A Postscript,” in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 241–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wollheim, Richard (1984). The Thread of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×