Saturday, July 11, 2020


483. Guilt and shame

There is a well-known but often neglected distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is a matter of being responsible for some harm, that generates censure, and requires admission and acceptance of reasonable  punishment. Shame is a state of mind of feeling bad but hiding, not admitting it, and seeking excuses. This is psychologically corrosive, and may result in finding oneself bad, punishing oneself. Doing bad does not by itself mean being bad. People can do bad in many ways , by accident or by intent, under pressure or coercion, or in solidarity with others. It is part of Aristotelian practical wisdom, phronesis, to take such conditions into account in assigning guilt and meting out punishment. The spiritual corrosion of shame is often to be avoided.  ‘restorative justice’ is aimed, among other things, at making guilt, admission and punishment ‘restorative’, for the perpetrator to come to terms with himself and learn to change course in his life.  

One of the challenges of raising children is to teach them to accept guilt and take responsibility for it, and accept punishment, when doing bad, without thereby falling into an ongoing state of shame, feeling condemned as a bad person. Parents should avoid the condemnation of ‘shame on you’. After admission of guilt and punishment one can go on, start anew. With shame one is deprived of that.   

Martha Nussbaum, in her book ‘Upheavals of thought’[i], showed that the function of confession, in the Catholic church, is to acknowledge guilt and punishment while being saved from shame, in a condemnation of being bad.

Now, to avoid the suffering of shame, rather than confessing guilt, people often deny the guilt, or come up with excuses to disarm it:  the situation required the action, the action is not really that bad, other people do worse, ‘I was merely doing what the boss told me’ (‘Befehl ist Befehl’).

When can one call someone ‘shameless? It can mean that in one’s opinion the other is guilty and is not only unwilling to admit it, but denies it.

But saying that one feels ashamed can also be a foil to avoid punishment: ‘I said I felt ashamed, didn’t I?’ There, one does not really feel bad but pretends shame. That might be an occasion to say to that person ‘You are shameless’.

How about someone who commits suicide while leaving behind adolescent children and a pregnant girlfriend. Can we call that guilt? We cannot judge what overpowering distress that person had to endure. But is would be dubious if that person had not also suffered from doubt and self-recrimination in being impelled to his act. He would need a friend to own up and dodge shame to go on and learn.


[i] Martha Nussbaum, 2003, Upheavals of thought, Cambridge University Press,

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