Moral Psychology of Shame

Alessandra Fussi is associate professor of moral philosophy in the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge at the University of Pisa.Raffaele Rodogno is associate professor of philosophy in the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University.

• Introduction, Alessandra Fussi and Raffaele RodognoChapter 1: Themes in Current Psychological Research on Shame, Tjeert OlthofChapter 2: The Moral Efficacy of the Confucian Sense of Shame, JeeLoo Liu Chapter 3: Plato on Shame, Alessandra FussiChapter 4: Hume on Shame, Lorenzo Greco Chapter 5: The Functions of Shame in Nietzsche, Mark AlfanoChapter 6: Shame as a Self-Conscious Positive Emotion: Scheler’s Radical Revisionary Approach, Íngrid Vendrell FerranChapter 7: Self-Understanding and Moral Self-Improvement in Individual Shame and Shame Based on Group Identification, Alba Montes Sánchez and Alessandro SaliceChapter 8: The situatednesss of shame and shaming: “Little worlds” and social transformations, Imke von MaurChapter 9: Shame and Trauma, Heidi L. Maibom Chapter 10: Shame, Gender, and Self-Making, Krista K. ThomasonChapter 11: Shame on Wrong Planet: A study of shame among people on the autism spectrum, Katrine Krause-Jensen and Raffaele RodognoAbout the ContributorsIndex

This collection brings together philosophers and psychologists to review the contemporary psychological literature on shame, discuss it from a variety of philosophical traditions, and consider different controversies. Issues addressed include whether shame is overall beneficial or detrimental to human life, whether it is inherently interpersonal or intrapersonal, whether it requires a great deal of self-consciousness, and whether it has a common cross-cultural core or differs radically across different cultures and groups. Both because of the different ways to conceptualize shame and related phenomena and the different ways there are of measuring it, disagreements can appear at first blush larger and more intractable than they really are. Something beneficial or detrimental that one school or thinker ascribes to shame another might ascribe to guilt or some other emotion. Indeed, it is not always clear whether theorists are disagreeing about the same thing or discussing two different things. Given how eclectic this collection is, it is unlikely to serve as a primary course text for many classes, but it may serve as a supplement for many classes in both philosophy and psychology. Recommended. Advanced students.