ABSTRACT
If it is right to lead the self-made life, it is wrong to prevent someone who is capable of doing so from access to the facilitating environment needed to lead such a life. That preventing access to the facilitating environment is wrong encourages us to conceive failure not as impairment but as deprivation of right, which is to say as injustice. If shame prevents the individual from full access to the facilitating environment, then it would seem to follow, as Axel Honneth suggests, that shame can also be linked to injustice (2003). When we conceive the problem this way, we make shame an imposed deprivation and thus treat it as essentially a political condition.
