ABSTRACT
This chapter critically reviews recent claims about the moral standing of shame and contempt. The moral standing of an emotion is determined either substantively, by considerations that relate the evaluations and action tendencies of the emotion to specific views about what is good or bad; or structurally, by considerations that relate the emotion to central moral concepts such as autonomy and moral responsibility that determine whether something pertains to the moral domain. On the basis of this analysis, recent claims to the effect that shame is (substantively) immoral or, in fact, outside the moral domain due to its (structural) failure to engage the subject’s responsibility are rejected. In conclusion, the chapter considers the globalist nature of shame and contempt, i.e., the fact that these emotions may deny their target all moral worth and thereby the possibility of improving. Attention is in particular given to recent arguments aimed at rejecting the claim that shame and contempt are global, or the claim that being globalist is necessarily a bad or vicious trait for an emotion to have.
