Inequality and Shame’s Knowledge

• In Event: Shame and Other Political Emotions: From Cohesion to Dissent

Abstract

This paper seeks to connect the epistemic dimensions of the experience of shame to the formal idea of “common knowledge.” Using this connection, I then highlight the requirement of what I call “fair public knowledge distribution” for egalitarian societies.

Part of the experience of shame, I hold, involves the conversion of some piece of knowledge from private to public. One feels shame when parts of oneself that are (and one thinks ought to be) private are seen–and thus become known–by others. What previously one knew in isolation, others now know, too. Moreover, one knows that these others now know this newly public fact—this is what makes shame an essentially social emotion. We feel shame in front of an other, even if the other is imagined. Private facts become public—social—knowledge.

The form of the public knowledge generated by an experience of shame broadly matches that of the formal concept of “common knowledge.” A group of individuals can be said to commonly know p when all individuals know p, all individuals know that all others know p, all individual know that all know that all others know p, and so on. Both shame’s ability to linger and its necessarily social aspect are best explained once one understands the distinctive form of the knowledge produced by shame’s occurrence.

Taking in shame’s epistemic aspects, I argue, allows us to build a fuller account of shame’s interaction with inequality, marginalization, and social difference. In virtue of shame’s epistemic structure, those within a society who deviate from society’s norms are more prone to experiences of shame. Occupying a position of social difference means that facts about oneself that would be private knowledge, if not for one’s difference, are, instead, common knowledge.

By implication, in order for equality to be instantiated fully within a society, the possibility of one’s experiencing shame and exposure must be distributed equally amongst all members of a society. Shame has clear (if not determinately so) negative consequences. A society in which certain individuals or groups of individuals experience shame at a higher rate than others cannot justifiably be deemed an egalitarian one. Part of shame’s perniciousness comes from the conversion of private knowledge into public knowledge involved. I develop this idea further, into what I call the “fair public knowledge distribution” requirement of egalitarian justice, which holds that, in order for a social norm to qualify as egalitarian, it must be the case that when the social norm is instituted in a given society, all individuals possess an equal chance of having their private knowledge become public knowledge.

Author

• Priya Menon, Harvard Law School