Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Bernard Williams
- Introduction
- 1 Realism and the Absolute Conception
- 2 The Nonobjectivist Critique of Moral Knowledge
- 3 Internal Reasons and the Scope of Blame
- 4 The Critique of the Morality System
- 5 Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt
- 6 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy
- 7 Genealogies and the State of Nature
- Guide to Further Reading
- List of Works Cited
- Index
- References
5 - Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Bernard Williams
- Introduction
- 1 Realism and the Absolute Conception
- 2 The Nonobjectivist Critique of Moral Knowledge
- 3 Internal Reasons and the Scope of Blame
- 4 The Critique of the Morality System
- 5 Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt
- 6 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy
- 7 Genealogies and the State of Nature
- Guide to Further Reading
- List of Works Cited
- Index
- References
Summary
Shame and Necessity continues Bernard Williams' trenchant critique of Morality, Our Peculiar Institution. One of its main themes is that our ethical theories overemphasize guilt and, concomitantly, underemphasize, even ignore, shame. They, thus, make serious theoretical and ethical errors: they misunderstand themselves, misunderstanding even their central notion, guilt; and they encourage us to misunderstand ourselves and our relations with others. Three quotes from chapter four, “Shame and Autonomy,” which focuses on these errors, give a good indication of those claims:
[Guilt] can direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged, and demand reparations in the name, simply, of what has happened to them. But it cannot by itself help one to understand one's relations to those happenings, or to rebuild the self that has done these things and the world in which one has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and how one is related to others.
Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself.
The conceptions of modern morality … insist at once on the primacy of guilt, its significance in turning us towards victims, and its rational restriction to the voluntary … if we want to understand why it might be important for us to distinguish the harms we do voluntarily from those we do involuntarily, we shall hope to succeed only if we ask what kinds of failing or inadequacy are the sources of the harms, and what those failings mean in the context of our own and other people's lives.[…]
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- Information
- Bernard Williams , pp. 135 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
References
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