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Shame and guilt are often called the moral emotions, precisely because it seems
difficult if not impossible to discuss the inculcation of norms without some reference to
these emotions. Different societies may well emphasize one of these emotions over the
other and consequently a vast literature has developed around the distinction between
these emotions and between what has come to been known as shame-cultures and guilt-
cultures. Indeed the fact that we can speak of a “shame-culture” or a “guilt-culture”
illustrates the fact that these emotions play an integral role in the very structure of any
society and the ways in which it educates its members into a way of life and into its
particular form of moral and political engagement with others. Shame and guilt are not
simply private psychological states lodged in the depths of the human psyche and related
only to the idiosyncrasies of a particular individual’s upbringing. Rather they have a
form and content that links them to real societal attitudes and practices. And these
attitudes and practices concern not only what one ought to feel shame and guilt about, but
how one is to express these emotions and what one is to do with them within the context
of living a “good” or “healthy” or “moral” life.
In this paper I am not going to treat shame and guilt as two opposing moral
emotions, that is, I am not as concerned about the many fascinating differences between
these emotions, but rather with their similarities for teaching us something about the
philosophy and politics of emotion more generally. And it is my contention that if one
Convention