Twenty-five years ago the psychoanalyst Gerhart Piers offered what remains the most influential way of distinguishing shame from guilt. Reformulated without terms special to psychoanalytic theory, Piers's distinction is that shame is occasioned when one fails to achieve a goal or an ideal that is integral to one's self-conception, whereas guilt is occasioned when one transgresses a boundary or limit on one's conduct set by an authority under whose governance one lives. Succinctly, shame goes to failure, guilt to transgression. Shame is felt over shortcomings, guilt over wrongdoings.

More recently, writers who have addressed themselves to the way shame differs from guilt, notably, among philosophers, John Rawls, have characterized shame as an emotion one feels upon loss of self-esteem and have analyzed self-esteem and its loss in a way that bears out Piers's influence. Rawls plainly is in Piers's debt. He explains self-esteem in terms of the goals and ideals one incorporates into one's life plans, and he makes this explanation central to his account of our moral personality, in particular, our capacity to feel shame.

A characterization of shame like Rawls's, when set in the context of distinguishing shame from guilt, we are likely to find intuitively appealing. And we may feel a further pull in its direction when we think of shame in comparison with other emotions to which it is thought similar — for instance, embarrassment.