Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.

Dante traces the question of happiness to our nature, knowledge of which is available.His decision to persist in rational inquiry is not arbitrary as rests on such knowledge. At the heart of Paradiso Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida about Florentine politics and nobility because the needed self-knowledge is gained through reflection on political life. From the contemplative unity characteristic of the previous Heaven to the political conflict in Mars is an ascent.

The key discussion concerns how candidly Dante’s poem should express the truth. The literary question points to the political problem of posed by the enduring tensions among human goods, and these tensions disclose the conflicts inherent in an embodied mind. Among beings that desire and reason, that are “mortal” and aware of their mortality, there is decisive inequality, inequality regarding the willingness and ability to discern truth.The scope of this difference defies the possibility that good can be understood by deduction from a principle or law, making it a matter for inquiry. The life devoted to this inquiry, as indicated in these central Cantos, is available here and now and grounds every genuinely common good. Dante calls his epic of self-reflection a “comedy.”

Lamb’s essays and letters describe various instances in which sharing a book with someone results in feelings of embarrassment or exposure. He describes reading in the public setting of a reading room, the professional context of the period’s review culture, as well as the more intimate, semi-private, and domestic settings in which he reads alongside friends or his sister Mary. Where public and professional contexts promote an element of performance which helps to shield from exposure, Lamb suggests, it is those more intimate forms of shared reading which in fact prove far more personally revealing. As Lamb recounts these moments in a parodic, part-defensive and part-confessional manner, he reflects on what such social phenomena as embarrassment and blushing have to say about sharing more generally.

A brief conclusion ties together central themes of the book - deception, blame, and stigma - and reflects on how this history of a long-forgotten epidemic can shed light on everyday life hundreds of years ago in ways that resonate with modern disease experiences.

In contemporary discourse hubris is usually adduced as a dangerous state of mind, a form of pride or over-confidence which leads to downfall. This has its origins in the view once conventional among classicists that for ancient Greeks hybris was an arrogant disposition, offending the gods by exceeding mortal limits. This did not accommodate the fact that in many Greek states hybris was the term for a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence or sexual abuse. My Hybris (1992) successfully located the concept within the category of ‘honour’, and it is now widely agreed that hybris involved both arrogance and dishonouring behaviour towards others. Disagreement, however, persists over the balance to be struck between the two. This chapter reviews the debate, partially revises my earlier account (which underplayed the dispositional element) and insists that other-directed behaviour is equally essential to the concept. Using case studies from Sophocles and Herodotus, it concludes by restating the crucial distinction between hybris and related, but not necessarily pejorative, expressions such as pride or ‘thinking big/unmortal’ thoughts.

The 13-item Body-Focused Shame and Guilt Scale (BF-SGS; Weingarden et al., 2016) assesses proneness to experiencing self-conscious emotions, including body shame and body guilt, in the context of body dysmorphic disorder. The BF-SGS can be administered online or in-person, has been validated for use with adults, and is free to use with appropriate citations in any setting. This chapter first discusses the development of the BF-SGS and then provides evidence of its psychometrics. Specifically, internal consistency reliability and test-retest reliability support the use of the body shame and body guilt subscales; convergent validity and discriminant validity further support the use of the body shame subscale. Additionally, this chapter directs the reader to the appropriate location of the BF-SGS items in their entirety, provides instructions for administering the BF-SGS to participants, and describes the item response scale and scoring procedure. Logistics of use, including copyright and contact information, are provided for readers.

The 8-item Phenomenological Body Shame Scale - Revised PBSS-R assesses the degree to which an individual experiences shame about the body’s appearance or functioning. The scale is unique from other body shame scales in that it evaluates the phenomenological or embodied dimensions of shame, rather than its cognitive elements. The PBSS-R can be administered online to adults and is free to use in any setting. This chapter first discusses the development of the PBSS-R and then provides evidence of its psychometrics. More specifically, the PBSS-R has been found to have a one-factor structure within confirmatory factor analyses. Internal consistency reliability, concurrent validity, incremental validity, and convergent validity support the use of the PBSS-R. Next, this chapter provides the PBSS-R items in their entirety, instructions for administering the PBSS-R to participants, the item response scale, and the scoring procedure. Logistics of use, such as permissions, copyright, and contact information, are provided for readers

The chapter offers an ethnographic study of a court trial of a former judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, who was accused of lying in his lustration statement about his past links with communist secret services. Through an observation of the court proceedings, analysis of the court file, and life history interviews with the judge, the chapter engages the questions of violence, guilt, and responsibility. In particular, the chapter focuses attention on the notion of “communist guilt” and the subjective effects of public shaming, and highlights the ways in which lustration articulates the entangled problems about socialist-era state violence and neoliberal capitalist violence, around which rightwing populist groups mobilize. In conversation with the work of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt, among others, the chapter suggests a notion of political responsibility to address this entanglement and thinks past the narrowly construed, individualized, guilt-driven understanding of moral and legal responsibility.

This chapter describes the development towards more substantial legislative activity and governmental involvement in financial conflict resolution, with special attention to the Low Countries. While execution procedures once had a strong individual focus, over time creditors’ rights were increasingly balanced by collectivizing legal solutions. For a long time, legal solutions for insolvency strongly criminalized the insolvent (then called bankrupt, fallitus), seeking to stimulate honest and prudent conduct among citizens by deterrence. The failure to fulfil one’s obligations was indiscriminately punished by shaming rituals in many parts of Europe. While these defamatory practices proliferated well into the early modern period, they seem to have disappeared from the legal treatment of insolvencies in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. This signifies a crucial change in public mentalities, which allowed for the introduction of a more lenient and efficient insolvency regime.

In Tusculans 2 the interlocutors discuss the value of physical pain. They swiftly agree that it is not the greatest evil but take longer to consider whether it is bad or, as the Stoics think, merely indifferent. Enduring pain is taken to be an indication of courage and manliness (virtus) and this is undermined by the claim that physical pain is not bad. Therefore neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics provide a wholly satisfactory account of the value of physical pain and its relationship to virtue.

The work of the first four chapters demonstrates that Nietzsche’s genealogical accounts can liberate us from our moral prejudices by exposing and bringing to light: that our experience is ordered by evaluative templates; how one framework came to subdue other alternatives; why morality enjoyed its factual success; and why it still holds a very tight grip on us. The work of Chapter 5 is to substantiate these conclusions. I achieve this end by way of my reading of “the psychological type of the redeemer,” which shows the links between On the Genealogy of Morality and The Anti-Christ. After clarifying what the type is, I argue that, thus understood, it enables us to notice that Nietzsche uses genealogical methods beyond 1887 and to better appreciate the central roles that feelings of shame and powerlessness, as well as longings for efficacy, play in conceptual reevaluations. Although this reading does not represent a common interpretive strategy, I show that it is one that Nietzsche himself recommends.

In Chapter 4, I explore another way in which morality functions to serve psychological protective functions: the will to “self-tormenting” (GM II 22). By attending to this inwardly directed form of “self-ravishment” (GM II 18), I conceive of the protective, defensive functions of morality thus: To stave off, moderate, disavow, or dissociate a painful affect that is “becoming unendurable” – for instance, helplessness, impotence, “depression, heaviness, [or] weariness” – one turns to oneself as the “sole cause of [such] suffering” (GM III 20). Such self-recriminations thereby: (1) drive “out of consciousness at least for the moment” the painful feeling (GM III 17) and (2) restore a sense of efficacy, a sense of power (GM III 15). After distinguishing between two prominent ways in which such cruelty turned inward may be felt – namely, through guilt and shame – I argue it is shame that plays an underdeveloped and underappreciated role in the Second Essay. In this evaluative framework, our shame, that familiar form of self-reproach, is shown to serve psychological protective functions as it renders us ever more obscure to ourselves.

In Chapter 6, I zero in on one of Nietzsche’s “granite sentences” (EH “The Gay Science”) – “What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself” (GS 275) – to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations offer one possible pathway to such liberation; to freedom, that is, from the shame we feel when in front of ourselves.

Genealogical inquiries – most broadly – give us an account of why we have become self-estranged, so far from being at home with ourselves, so that we might yet become more self-aware. For this reason, as I show in this Introduction, genealogical investigations hold out a distinctive promise: to bring into reflective awareness the systems that organize our subjective experiences but do not even threaten to cross “the threshold of consciousness,” as Nietzsche puts it (GM I 1). I then set out the main claims of the book: Nietzsche’s genealogical work aims to render us less obscure to ourselves, to liberate us from those value systems that no longer serve our interests, and to show us how we might come to feel differently about ourselves, even less prone to shame. How is this to be achieved? This book provides an answer to that question.

In this chapter, I argue that a comprehensive picture of Platonic autonomy must be balanced by attention to mutual interdependence and the ways that ideas arise through interpersonal dialogue. Philosophical ideas arise in a social context, and to this degree, even ideas that are now ‘my own’ have come to be mine in part through the reasoning of other persons. Moreover, as a result of human fallibility, even the fully developed Platonic philosopher still requires conversational partners to both learn and to test out ideas. Rather than overvaluing self-sufficiency, a philosophical life includes being open to challenges to one’s ideas, tolerating a state of not knowing fully, and learning that one needs others due to the limits of individual reasoners.

The emerging awareness of self and other, especially with regard to compatible and conflicting aims, opens up dramatic new meanings for the toddler. Being able to be deliberately contrary gives the child experience with disruption and repair of the relationship and lets them explore the boundaries of appropriate behavior. The toddler also has a beginning capacity to control impulses and manage behavior, but doing this adequately requires continued scaffolding and guidance from parents. Meanings surrounding parental reliability brought forward from infancy impact how readily children now accept parental guidance. At the same time, clear, firm, and warm guidance can increase the child’s confidence regarding parents. This is how the transactional model works.

Describe how children develop fairness, spite, and helping behaviours; understand the role of emotions, punishment, and reputation in moral development; explore cross-cultural differences and similarities in morality.