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.
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