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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 537 However, the situation only becomes worse, in Baier's opinion, when it comes to Kant's treatment of female unchastity. He regards female chastity and military honor as similar in that both are worthy of defense, and deplores the actual human behavior, and ineffective social institutions, that fall so far short of preserving these ideals in practice. As a counterpoint, she quotes approvingly Hume's explanation, that all human beings, particularly women, are prone to the temptations of pure time preference; and that the real barbarity consists in the hypocrisy and cruelty of men who impose on women the constraint of chastity and the punishment of its violation through shame (T 571-2, cited at MP 278). But since it is too difficult to prove female unchastity or illegitimate paternity in a court of law, shaming a suspect through "bad fame" is the most practical solution (MP 279). Drawing on Gibbard's analyses of shame and guilt, Baier rightly raises the question of whether shaming a moral derelict is, in fact less cruel as a social sanction than punishing the guilty for a moral dereliction. As Gibbard points out, it is possible to be made to feel shame for things that are not under one's voluntary control, such as one's physical appearance or class background. Moreover, shame is provoked, not by others' anger at one's actions, but by others' disdain and ridicule, which Kant himself describes as "[w]anton faultfinding and mockery, the propensity to expose others to laughter, to make their faults the immediate object of one's amusement, .. a kind of malice, ... in order to deprive [them] of the respect [they] deserv[e], ...[which] has something of fiendish joy in it; and this makes it an even more 11 serious violation of one's duty of respect for other men." Many psychologists treat anger as itself a secondary reaction to feelings of pain caused by a perceived aggressor, and this links anger and so the blame and attributions of guilt in which it is expressed with perceived harm or wrongdoing. By contrast, disdain or derision expresses merely a disapprobation of someone for failing to live up to the norms of one's group, independently of the moral status or legitimacy of these norms. As Baier observes, "What people feel shame for will depend on what they expect others to sneer or laugh at or treat as grounds for excluding them from some charmed circle of initiates" (MP 279). So shame bears no necessary relation to actual moral dereliction, of the sort that guilt does, and therefore can extend to all of one's perceived flaws, not only the voluntary or moral ones. The power and undiscriminating sweep of a shame morality leads Baier to ask, Who would not opt for Kant's version of the moral world, if the alternative is a social world with some version of a shame morality, where each faulty person faces this threat: somehow get rid of your character fault, or rid us of your faulty presence, or stay and put up with 11 Ibid., Ak. 467. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
