Introduction

Shame is a complex and multifaceted emotion and its contribution to our ethical lives is difficult to pin down. For some, shame is a valuable emotion that helps us to improve our character, motivating individuals and even communities to achieve higher moral standards. But shame is also often seen as a feeling we are better off without, insofar as it is a painful experience that can be used as a tool for social manipulation or oppression, and it can be paralyzing or even lead to self-destructive behavior....

Connecting Shame with Honor and the Noble

The goal of this chapter is to argue that the complex nature of shame, and its responsiveness to the moral views of others, is precisely what makes shame a good catalyst for moral development. Shame’s connection to honor, reputation, and praise often leads modern authors to consider it as a morally dubious emotion: heteronomous, superficial, and possibly rooted on the unchecked questionable customs of a stratified society. This chapter is devoted show that the interpretation of shame as a superficial concern with reputation or external recognition comes about as a result of overlooking the connections that Aristotle makes between love of honor and love of the noble. For Aristotle, shame’s connection to honor, reputation, and praise, far from making it an heteronomous and superficial emotion, is what makes it the emotion that puts us in the path towards true autonomy and virtue.

Conclusion: Shame, Love of the Noble, and Moral Development

My goal in this book has been to argue that, for Aristotle, one of the crucial conditions for successful habituation and one of the fundamental elements in our becoming good is shame, a proto-virtuous emotion that makes us receptive to considerations of nobility from our early days. Young learners who respond to shame and are receptive to praise and blame are well equipped to make progress and become better through virtuous practice. Their responsiveness to shame, I have argued, makes them ready to perform virtuous actions in the right way, loving the noble and hating the shameful, reflecting on how their actions are expressions of their character, and being receptive to moral arguments; as a consequence, they are able to make continuous progress towards virtue....

Becoming Virtuous by Doing Virtuous Actions

Aristotle’s great discovery about moral development is that we learn to be good through practice—i.e. we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions. This chapter explores Aristotle’s account of how learners can perform virtuous actions in the right way before they are virtuous, and pays special attention to considerations of continuity between the practices of the learners and those of virtuous people. The chapter shows that (and explains why) Aristotle alludes in his ethical treatises to emotional resources available to non-virtuous people that allow learners to somehow aim at the noble in their actions and grasp the value of virtuous actions before they possess virtuous dispositions of character. Because learners can make use of such emotional resources before having virtue, their practices can resemble those of virtuous people not simply in their external outcomes, but also in the relevant internal motivational aspects.

The Mixed Nature of Shame

This chapter explores why Aristotle insists on the “mixed” character of shame in his ethical treatises, where he characterizes it as a sui generis emotion that is only in some respects like a virtue. The chapter argues that he has good reasons to maintain that shame is a special kind of emotion—concretely, one of the praiseworthy emotional means—but not a virtuous disposition of character. Appealing to the Aristotelian scheme of capacities, emotions, and dispositions, the chapter shows that shame’s peculiar status as a praiseworthy emotion is a necessary feature for it to be able to operate as a bridge towards virtue in young people. For only if shame is an emotion and not a stable disposition of character can he attribute shame to those young people who are not yet virtuous but are on the path towards virtue.

Learning through Pleasure, Pain, the Noble, and the Shameful

This chapter offers a first step towards explaining how the learners’ motivational outlook is shaped in habituation by exploring the role of pleasures and pains. The view proposed is that moral development is not the acquisition of a taste for the new pleasures of the noble, but a development and shaping of the already-present capacity to enjoy nobility and be pained by the shameful. In other words, the taste for the noble does not appear in learners ex nihilo, or through an ascent where we are first attracted only to mere appetitive pleasures and later learn to appreciate the pleasures of the noble, but that instead the taste for the noble is present in us from the start, just as the desire for pleasure and the desire for benefit. Moral upbringing is thus the development and shaping of our natural (but imperfect) tendency to appreciate the noble.

Pseudo-Virtuous Practices, Pseudo-Virtuous Conditions

This chapter analyzes the causes of the different kinds of pseudo-courage suggested by Aristotle in NE III 8 and EE III 1 with the aim of finding the natural conditions that equip learners so that they are able to perform virtuous actions in the right way. By exploring the “missing ingredients” in each of the causes of pseudo-courage, we gain a clearer idea of the complexity of Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between agents, actions, behavioral tendencies, and dispositions of character, and we learn about the preconditions which learners must meet in order to perform virtuous on account of their nobility. The analysis of these passages reveals that the variety of pseudo-courage based on shame is the most promising candidate to equip learners with a proto-version of the conditions for virtuously performed virtuous actions, and consequently, as a potential proto-virtue.

Shame as the Proto-Virtue of the Learners

This chapter offers an analysis of the main texts on shame in the NE to show that Aristotle has a consistent and unified view of shame as a praiseworthy mean between timidity and shamelessness. The chapter’s analysis confirms that shame is a crucial proto-virtuous emotion because it enables learners of virtue to properly engage in the kinds of practices through which they will become virtuous individuals. Aristotle enjoins us to see shame as a necessary element in our moral development, without which we are condemned to remain merely self-controlled or fearful followers of the law at best, and lawless at worst.