Many of the most compelling accounts of how shame is gendered, racialized, and connected with one’s social class and/or physical/mental abilities have considered the phenomenon of shame from a first person perspective. Yet, at the same time, virtually all of these accounts depict shame as a relational rather than a private experience. As Jean-Paul Sartre suggests through his famous example in Being and Nothingness of the voyeur who thinks he has been caught in the act of spying on the inhabitants of a room through a keyhole, shame is always shame before a real or hypothetical other. Indeed, for Sartre, shame as well as pride are affective responses we would not even experience if we were not beings-for-others, that is, if we were not always already in relationship with others. An important question that is often raised, whether directly or indirectly, in discussions of shame-inducing behavior concerns whether or not the experience of shame has unique moral value. That is, since shame is strongly associated with very negative affective responses (regardless of whether or not the sense of shame is justified), a central question that has dominated much philosophical literature concerns whether the experience of being ashamed plays an important motivating role, or, on the contrary, an obstacle in living a moral life.
Of course, as feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability theorists have shown us, it is impossible to make an assessment about the ethical value of shame without also considering what I would call the power dynamics of shame, specifically the fact that sexual, racial, and other minorities have historically been more prone to be shamed by others, even if they have done nothing to deserve their moral condemnation. Thus, it is clear that we cannot resolve philosophical questions about the moral worth of shame without a critical examination of whether or not an individual should be ashamed in the first place. In this essay, I propose to approach the gendered and racial dimensions of this question somewhat obliquely by examining how an individual’s failure to experience shame can actually produce a strong sense of shame in other people. Accordingly, experiencing of shame not for oneself but for an other who is behaving shamelessly will constitute the main focus of my paper.
My contention is that this rather peculiar “secondhand” experience of shame on the part of another when there is no “firsthand” experience of shame by the original agent has its own unique ethical dynamic that deserves further exploration in its own right. Given the shame that citizens around the world report experiencing when their predominantly male political and civic leaders behave shamelessly, and given our ubiquitous social media’s own role in shaming people who might not otherwise (and perhaps should not) feel any shame, it is also urgent to consider the gendered and racialized implications of the displacement of shame from men to women and from those who enjoy racial privileges to those who do not.