Christine Vitrano

In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion

Think for a minute about the painful experience of shame: the burning in your cheeks; the tendency to avert your eyes and stand in a downcast posture; the sensation that you have shrunk in size and are insignificant; the feeling that you want to crawl under a rock. Shame is an emotion no one enjoys experiencing, and perhaps its phenomenology has contributed to the overwhelmingly negative view found within the literature, where shame has been deemed morally suspicious and potentially harmful. Some judges in the United States even impose “shaming penalties” as a form of criminal punishment thus contributing to the consensus that shame is an emotion we are better off not experiencing. But just how much should we conclude about the value of shame based on the way that it feels? Not much, according to the account of shame presented by Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni, whose spirited and well-argued defense of this unappreciated emotion does much to correct the misconceptions found within the literature. Not only do the authors diagnose two important “dogmas of shame” that lead many accounts to view it as morally problematic, they also provide a clear, precise analysis of this emotion that highlights the overlooked positive role shame can play in our lives. After reading this convincing account, you will never view shame the same way again. The book is divided into four parts, the first of which builds the argument for why shame has been thought to be morally problematic. Chapter 1 introduces the “first dogma of shame,” which views it as an essentially social emotion. The authors distinguish three strands of “shame socialism,” all of which challenge its moral importance. The first strand emphasizes the “radical heteronomy” of shame, which is the idea that shame is connected with standards that are externally imposed on the subject by others. The second strand views shame as occurring when our social image is compromised before others. The third strand views shame as arising when we adopt an unfavorable third-person view of ourselves. All three strands suggest that shame is superficial and only tangentially related to morality, for