Shame

Jennifer Jacquet is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University. She focuses on the human dimensions of large-scale social dilemmas, such as overfishing and climate change. She examines shame in her book: Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool.  Jennifer feels that shame is a very useful tool to empower people when powerful interests engage in wrongdoing and thinks that ‘the crowd’ can be  a persuasive corrective to government and corporate chicanery.

Anthony Grayling is a public philosopher and Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy and other subjects.  Anthony feels that shame, when negotiated from an ethical rather than moral perspective by society, is a useful social regulator.  But agrees with philosopher J. S. Mill who said that opprobrium, ie: the shaming of the individual, is usually repressive.

Daniel Fessler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCLA Center for Behaviour, Evolution and Culture and evolutionary anthropologist, whose principal focus is contemporary humans. He combines  anthropological, psychological, and biological theories and methods in which humans are viewed as both the products of complex evolutionary processes and the possessors of acquired cultural idea systems and behavioural patterns. Dan believes that public shaming, such as we see on social media and in some communities is both dangerous and bad for democracy. His evolutionary take on shame is that it is born out of a basic survival mechanism from which it has been refined as we learnt how to co-operate.

Dan Fessler argues that understanding our evolutionary heritage needn’t determine how we behave towards each other. We can and should choose to be kind, to be good, to be just.