The Uses and Abuses of Shaming

When the Russian police broke up a peaceful demonstration and dragged protesting women through snow piles to paddy wagons in 2024, the women shouted at the cops, “Don’t you have any shame?”

This incident in Moscow was reminiscent of a rhetorical question asked during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Sen. Joe McCarthy alleged the U.S. Army was rife with communists and other subversives. The Army’s Chief Council, Joseph Welch, challenged McCarthy to produce proof. McCarthy, who was noted for his unsubstantiated allegations that smeared innocent people, couldn’t back up his claims. Welch accused McCarthy of being cruel and reckless and then rhetorically asked McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

The Russian protesters and Joseph Welch used shaming to express their contempt. However, shaming, except perhaps for online shaming, largely has faded into disfavor. The dismissal of shaming as a legitimate expression of disapproval is two-pronged. The first is psychological: No one should be made to feel ashamed as it is experienced as a crushing blow to a person’s self-esteem. The second is philosophical: No behavior is considered shame-worthy.

The Purpose of Shame

There is good reason to view shaming negatively, but there may be a worse reason to banish it from civil discourse. Shame is an extreme sense of humiliation that undermines a person’s dignity. Unlike guilt, which focuses on rectifying a particular wrong, shame relates to the sense of self.

In her book Hiding from Humanity, philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes that “a liberal society has particular reasons to inhibit shame and protect its citizens from shaming” because it is so destructive of human dignity. But she also states there is a good side to shaming, as it “goads us onward with regard to many different types of goals and ideals, some of them valuable... It often tells the truth: certain goals are valuable and we have failed to live up to them. And it often expresses a desire to be a type of being that one can be: a good human being doing fine things.”

Feeling shame is appropriate—even necessary—when violating a significant ethical norm. The feeling arises when there is a gap between what we have done and the ethical values we hold. Shame can be stimulated from within, as when we recognize how we have let ourselves down, or from without, as when others call attention to our ethical transgression. Shame can be toxic when a person feels pervasively inadequate, that they can never do the right thing, that whatever they do is wrong; it is to be found defective as a person.

The lack of shame can be equally devasting because society has eliminated ethical values as important. Lacking moral standards, there is no shame because there are no reasonable and objective social norms to be broken in the first place. As philosopher Owen Flanagan states, “Shame’s proper function is to mark values of importance, and communicate social disapproval for being careless with these values. In its ideal form, shame marks and prohibits violations of norms that a good community endorses, or would endorse if it were wise, reflective, and morally decent.”

So McCarthy was called out because he was careless with the important values of honesty and fairness. Most Americans agreed that the senator lacked a sense of decency, and the army hearings heralded the end of the senator’s career. Whether calling out the Moscow police to feel ashamed will make a difference will depend upon what moral values the Russian people hold as essential. Which is their ideal self: one that follows orders or one who believes that beating peaceful protesters is unacceptable?

“Perhaps we are failing to live up to the standards we set for ourselves,” writes political philosopher Thom Brooks. “It will not be true in every case that we have set our standards unreasonably high and beyond our reach. In many instances, we may well fall far short of our expectations of ourselves because we have been too lazy, too preoccupied by lesser matters, or perhaps become victim to personal demons, such as drugs or alcohol. Shame can be a recognition that one has fallen short. It is painful. Experiencing shame is never pleasant. Yet, experiencing the pain of shame on account of recognizing our failings need not always force us to effectively hide from ourselves and our community.”

Shame is useful when the standards by which we judge ourselves and others are compassion and fairness. A society without shame is brutish and cruel.