What a shame! Restorative justice's guilty secret

AbstractIn this article, I address a long‐standing issue confronting restorative justice: its shaky ethical foundation. Leading restorative justice theorists have pursued an ethics of shame that has marginalised guilt (and remorse). The resulting shame‐oriented concepts do not adequately capture the complex moral and psychological phenomena that the ethics of restorative justice requires. In part, this is because theorists have failed to account for the depths, not only of guilt, but of shame as well. These depths, I argue, are to be found in Freudian metapsychology. Guilt and shame have primitive and mature forms. It is only through understanding the difference between these formations that we can see how it is that the mature formations are related in ways that are essential to understanding restorative justice. I conclude that that the mature guilt‐and‐shame complex developed in the article provides the grounds for an adequate ethical foundation for restorative justice.