Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Despite shame’s bad reputation as a potential obstacle to the development of moral autonomy, shame is for Aristotle the proto-virtue of those learning to be good, since it is the emotion that equips them with the seeds of virtue. Other emotions such as friendliness, righteous indignation, emulation, hope, and even spiritedness may play important roles on the road to virtue. However, shame is the only one that Aristotle repeatedly associates with moral progress. The reason is that shame can move young agents to perform good actions and avoid bad ones in ways that appropriately resemble not only the external behavior but also the orientation and receptivity to moral value characteristic of virtuous people. By turning their attention to considerations about the perceived nobility and praiseworthiness of their own actions and character, shame places young people in the path to becoming good. Although they are not yet virtuous, learners with a sense of shame can appreciate the value of the noble and guide their actions by a true interest in doing the right thing. Shame, thus, enables learners to perform virtuous actions in the right way before they have practical wisdom or stable dispositions of character. This proposal solves a long-debated problem concerning Aristotle’s notion of habituation by showing that shame provides motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.