Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality: An Investigation into the Experience of Shame and its Ethical Role
Research output: Book/Report › Ph.D. thesis
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Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality : An Investigation into the Experience of Shame and its Ethical Role. / Montes Sanchez, Alba.
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2014. 176 p.Research output: Book/Report › Ph.D. thesis
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TY - BOOK
T1 - Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality
T2 - An Investigation into the Experience of Shame and its Ethical Role
AU - Montes Sanchez, Alba
PY - 2014/9/18
Y1 - 2014/9/18
N2 - In the studies of emotion, shame is classified under several labels: a self-conscious emotion, an emotion of self-assessment, a social emotion, and a moral emotion. All of them are supposed to pick out a defining characteristic of shame. Though all of these labels will be under scrutiny at some point in this dissertation, my primary focus is the last label. My guiding question is: is shame a moral emotion? Does it have a fundamental relationship to ethics or the ethical? Does it have a crucial role or significance in this respect? If so, what exactly? Or is ethics rather a contingent aspect of some prominent episodes of shame? This is the broad question that I intend to explore and clarify throughout this study. In my view, shame is not a unitary phenomenon, but comes in a range of varieties that are linked by what Wittgenstein (1953) called family resemblance. Not all of them have moral significance or a moral role, but I will argue that a general capacity to feel shame, especially the central varieties of discretion shame and disgrace shame, is a fundamental part of the sensibilities that make us ethical, it is a fundamental element of the ground from which ethics can take off. By this, I do not mean that shame is always virtuous or always guided by moral concerns, but rather that it discloses a form of subjectivity that stands in and is constituted by a particular form of relationality and responsiveness to others and to itself, a form of interdependence that combines vulnerability and responsibility.
AB - In the studies of emotion, shame is classified under several labels: a self-conscious emotion, an emotion of self-assessment, a social emotion, and a moral emotion. All of them are supposed to pick out a defining characteristic of shame. Though all of these labels will be under scrutiny at some point in this dissertation, my primary focus is the last label. My guiding question is: is shame a moral emotion? Does it have a fundamental relationship to ethics or the ethical? Does it have a crucial role or significance in this respect? If so, what exactly? Or is ethics rather a contingent aspect of some prominent episodes of shame? This is the broad question that I intend to explore and clarify throughout this study. In my view, shame is not a unitary phenomenon, but comes in a range of varieties that are linked by what Wittgenstein (1953) called family resemblance. Not all of them have moral significance or a moral role, but I will argue that a general capacity to feel shame, especially the central varieties of discretion shame and disgrace shame, is a fundamental part of the sensibilities that make us ethical, it is a fundamental element of the ground from which ethics can take off. By this, I do not mean that shame is always virtuous or always guided by moral concerns, but rather that it discloses a form of subjectivity that stands in and is constituted by a particular form of relationality and responsiveness to others and to itself, a form of interdependence that combines vulnerability and responsibility.
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - shame
KW - guilt
KW - moral emotions
KW - self-conscious emotions
KW - intersubjectivity
KW - moral psychology
KW - phenomenology
KW - ethics and emotions
M3 - Ph.D. thesis
BT - Self-Consciousness, Caring, Relationality
PB - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
ER -
ID: 131367862