The Moral Psychology of Shame

Alessandra Fussi, Raffaele Rodogno

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538177709
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

Few emotions have divided opinion as deeply as shame. Some scholars have argued that shame is essentially a maladaptive emotion used to oppress minorities and reinforce stigmas and traumas, an emotion that leaves the self at the mercy of powerful others. Other scholars, however, have argued that the absence of a sense of shame in a subject-their shamelessness-is tantamount to a vicious moral insensitivity. As the eleven original chapters in this collection attest, however, shame scholars are entering a new phase, one in which scholarship no longer attempts to defend one side of shame against the other, but rather accepts both faces as faithful to the phenomenon to be explained.
At the core of our understanding of shame there are profound disagreements about the importance of the Other in shaping our moral identity. As this collection shows by its study of shame, the difficulty of the connection between Self, Other, and morality spans over millennia and cultures and currently animates important debates at the core of feminism and disability studies.
Contributors: Mark Alfano, Alessandra Fussi, Lorenzo Greco, JeeLoo Liu, Katrine Krause-Jensen, Heidi L. Maibom, Tjeert Olthof, Imke von Maur, Alba Montes Sánchez, Raffaele Rodogno, Alessandro Salice, Krista K. Thomason, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Themes in Current Psychological Research on Shame
• 2 The Moral Efficacy of the Confucian Sense of Shame
• 3 Plato on Shame
• 4 Hume on Shame
• 5 The Functions of Shame in Nietzsche
• 6 Shame as a Self-Conscious Positive Emotion: Scheler’s Radical Revisionary Approach
• 7 Self-Understanding and Moral Self-Improvement in Shame and Shame Based on Group Identification
• 8 The Situatedness of Shame and Shaming: ‘Little Worlds’ and Social Transformations
• 9 Shame and Trauma
• 10 Shame, Gender and Self-Making
• 11 Shame on Wrong Planet
• Index
• About the Contributors