Ajax Redeemed

This chapter argues that shame is a morally valuable emotion, but not in the traditional sense. It argues for a constitutive view of the moral value of shame. Determining an emotion’s moral value involves examining the role it plays in moral psychology rather than the circumstances under which it is permissible to feel. A liability to shame is constitutive of our recognition of other moral points of view and of a wider sense of self. This chapter shows that a liability to shame is morally valuable because it shows that we do not take our self-conception as the final authority on the kinds of people we are. We can see this by examining what is wrong with shamelessness. The shameless person takes her own self-conception to be the final and only authority in her self-estimation.