Self‐Assessment and Social Practices

It appears that the emotions of pride and shame are about living in accordance with one’s personal ideals. One might take pride in being a friendly neighbor, a fierce athlete, or a considerate friend; or in having a sharp memory, a politically distinguished lineage, or a stylish haircut. Likewise, one might be ashamed of being a stingy friend or a cowardly politician, or in having slaveholding ancestors or a bad reputation. Each instance of pride or shame seems to correspond to at least one personal ideal that one regards as worthy and as binding on oneself. However, pride and shame are not merely self-regarding affairs. Pride is a social phenomenon, and this sociality is a significant draw of the attention that moralists and other social thinkers, from Augustine to Rousseau to Malcolm X, have given to it. Precisely because it helps us to understand a person’s relations to others, pride is also an important theme in many literary works, from Homer’s Iliad and Milton’s Paradise Lost to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Wharton’s Ethan Frome. In particular, and notoriously, the emotion of pride is related somehow to a concern for both elevated social status and camaraderie with others. These facts raise two puzzles. First, we must explain how these emotions can be fundamentally self-regarding as well as profoundly social. On the one hand, they are implicated in one’s conception of who one should be and, so, might not seem to concern one’s relations to others (as gratitude and guilt more obviously do). On the other hand, in addition to the religious, political, and literary expressions of the social dimensions of pride alluded to above, the phenomenology of pride and shame seem to involve the image of an observer of oneself. But it is puzzling how an appraisal of the self could take the form of a representation of another person. Call this the sociality puzzle: how pride and shame can be both self-regarding and social phenomena. Indeed, the social dimensions of pride and shame are so pervasive that one might argue that, contrary to appearances, these emotions have little to do with self-assessment. According to this sociality objection, the so-called sociality puzzle arises only for individualistic accounts of pride and shame, such as the personal ideals account mentioned above. Several philosophers have developed this objection to individualistic accounts of shame, such as the account proposed by John Rawls, that construe shame as the experience of a loss of self-esteem or self-worth. John Deigh objects to Rawls’s account by arguing that “we should