ABSTRACT
In an influential paper, D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson distinguished between the moral appropriateness of an emotion, i.e., whether it is morally good to feel it, and its fittingness, whether it correctly represents and evaluates its intentional object. Indeed, when German speakers say they feel Fremdscham, and when English speakers say “I am ashamed of you/him”, often they are not reporting actual experiences of shame. Instead, these expressions might be reports of indignation at shamelessness that seek to reaffirm relevant communal norms. Helm distinguishes between two types of shame: personal shame, which is a “person-focused emotion”, and social shame, which is a “character-oriented reactive attitude”. Social psychologists call this group-based shame. Salice and author call this hetero-induced shame because we don’t think robust group membership is either strictly necessary or actually sufficient for so-called group-based shame.
