The politics of disgust and shame

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 383-418

  Deigh, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

Conservative; Disgust, Martha Nussbaum; Patrick Devlin; Paul Rozin; Shame

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846559063     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-006-9001-4     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
3. Dan Kahan and Martha Nussbaum, "Two Conceptions of Emotion in Criminal Law," Columbia Law Review 96 (1996), pp. 269-374.
4. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 88.
5. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 94.
6. nd Edition (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), pp. 637-653.
7. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 89.
8. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 183.
9. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, pp. 183-184.
10. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 206. See also p. 102. NUSSbaum further declares, "So powerful is the desire to cordon ourselves off from our animality that we often don't stop at feces, cockroaches, and slimy animals. We need a group of humans to bound ourselves against, who will come to exemplify the boundary line between the truly human and the basely animal" (Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 107).
11. See Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, pp. 218-219.
12. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Three Brief Essays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
13. See Rozin and Fallon, "A Perspective on Disgust."
14. nd Edition (New York: Guilford Press, 2002), pp. 637-653].
15. Horror is a combination of fear and disgust; see Noel Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 235-254.
16. See Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, "Disgust." Thus Rozin and his co-authors speculate that such disgust is a response to immoral conduct that is seen as "inhuman and revolting," such as betrayal of friends or cold blooded killing, rather than springing from normal human motives as, they suppose, is the case with bank robbery. From this speculation, they infer, "This kind of disgust may represent a more abstract set of concerns about the human-animal distinction ..." (pp. 643-644). But such speculation is further evidence of Rozin's original mistake of thinking that the concept of disgust is at its core that of a food-related emotion. There is nothing abnormal about the motives of corrupt officials. Taking a bribe and robbing a bank are just two different ways of criminally enriching oneself.
17. Devlin did not hold this thesis but rather maintained the stronger, ontological thesis that society's very existence depends on there being a high degree of solidarity among its members. It was this ontological thesis effectively attacked in H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty, and Morality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963).
18. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, J. G. A Pocock (ed.) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company 1987), p. 85.
19. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 108.
20. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 111.
21. Nussbaurn, Hiding from Humanity, p. 113.
22. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 45.
23. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 51.
24. See Dan Kahan, "What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?" University of Chicago Law Review 63 (1996), pp. 591-653; and Amitai Etzioni, The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 37-47.
25. Kahan emphasizes this point in "What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?" For discussion of the expressive purpose of punishment, see Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 95-118.
26. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, pp. 203-204.
27. Identification, in the sense I am using it here, implies an emotional attachment to that with which one identifies; Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of rhe Ego, in James Strachey (trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1971), volume XVIII, pp. 105-110.
28. I draw here on the account of shame in John Deigh, "Shame and Self-Esteem: A Critique," Ethics 93 (1983), pp. 225-245; reprinted in J. Deigh, The Sources of Moral Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 226-248. In speaking of a person's identity, I use a "identity" in a sense that derives from the concept of identification specified in the previous footnote. In short, a person's identity in this sense is determined by the people, groups, institutions, etc., with whom or which he identifies.
29. An exception is John Braithwaite, whose theory of what he calls "reintegrative shaming" recognizes these benefits and distinguishes them from the effects of stigmatization. [See John Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and E. Ahmed, N. Harris, J. Braithwaite and V. Braithwaite, Shame Management Through Reintegration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Part 1].
30. Nussbaum, to her credit, sees that the two are different and offers a distinction between them. She writes, "We may also speak of feelings of humiliation, which will be very closely related to feelings of shame but with the added idea that something has been done to the person who feels it" (Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 204). The distinction Nussbaum draws is apt but, as I argue below, an even sharper distinction is needed to understand why certain political programs would favor sanctions designed to induce shame.
31. See Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, p. 236, and Ahmed, et al., Shame Management Through Reintegration, p. 5ff.