Stichter, Matt (2020). Learning from Failure: Shame and Emotion Regulation in Virtue as Skill. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2):341-354.
becoming more skillful requires learning from one’s failures, but that turns out to be especially challenging when dealing with moral failures.
The distress prompted by the prospect of having acted wrongly can often cause defensiveness in response, rather than attempts to redress the wrong and work on changing oneself for the better.
A similar story applies to virtue acquisition, as moral failures will be a part of anyone’s life, and we will all have to learn in part from experience. But increasing our skillfulness in virtue will require that we can both acknowledge those failures, as well as learn from them by making genuine attempts to improve ourselves. This is important in both cases of eliminating vice and in becoming more virtuous. So in acquiring moral virtues as skills, we have reason to focus on some of the common moral mistakes we make, along with other frequent obstacles to acting well.
I begin with a brief overview of self-regulation, in terms of the distinction between goal setting and goal striving, and where I highlight the idea that our affective reactions to succeeding or failing at our goals provide us with motivation to engage in self-regulation. I then situate skill acquisition within this self-regulatory framework.
One aspect of skill acquisition I focus on is the need for deliberate practice for improvement, and where this requires us to acknowledge our failures and limitations in order to figure out how we can do better.
This then leads to a discussion of how difficult it can be for us to acknowledge our moral failures, and how we often respond with defensiveness rather than attempts at self-change. In this context I elaborate on the mechanism of moral disengagement as an example of how the distress produced by a potential moral failure can lead us to avoid acknowledging any failure in the first place.
The most potentially distressing response to moral failure comes in the form of shame. However, there appears to be three different senses of “shame” that are often conflated in the literature. I draw on one framework that argues there is at least one form of shame that actually prompts self-improvement in response to moral failure, and this is critical for both eliminating vice and acquiring virtue. But how can we prompt this ‘apt’ sense of shame? Here I claim that one form of emotion regulation- emotion differentiation- will likely play an important role in moderating responses to moral failure. I then go on to point out what implications it has for virtue as skill.
3 Skill Acquisition and Deliberate Practice
skill acquisition is a sophisticated form of self-regulation, as skills enable us to achieve a desired goal in a domain of high complexity.
In committing yourself to acquiring a skill, you begin internalizing standards about what counts as a good performance, which will guide your efforts to learn the skill. Skill acquisition involves a progression from tackling simple tasks to more challenging tasks, no matter what level of skill you are aiming at, and as one advances in skill development which tasks count as ‘simple’ or ‘challenging’ will change. This progressive mastering of a skill requires “practice, practice, practice”. However, neither mere experience, nor rote repetition, is sufficient for improving one’s level of skillfulness. While additional experience may make performing at that level of skillfulness easier, that is not the same as become more skilled such that one is able to tackle more difficult challenges.
4 The Distress of Moral Failure and Moral Disengagement
Moral disengagement refers to the various psychological processes by which we deceive ourselves into thinking that some action that we have taken, or will take, does not violate our personal moral standards (when in actuality it is a violation).
To understand this phenome non, we need to return to self-regulation, as goal setting and striving does take on an added dimension when the goals in question are moral. In general, when we feel that we are keeping to our moral standards, our actions can provide us with a positive self-evaluation. On the other hand, and more importantly, insofar as we feel that an action violates our moral standards, this will trigger self-sanctions– either helping to deter the action ahead of time, or triggering feelings of guilt or shame about it after the fact (and hopefully a different course of action in the future). These positive or negative self-evaluations provide some motivation to engage in future acts of self-regulation.
However, as Bandura’s work has shown, whether these internalized moral standards can effectively guide someone’s conduct depends in large part on the activation of self regulatory mechanisms, especially the triggering of self-sanctions to help us avoid taking actions that violate our moral standards.
When you morally disengage from your moral standards, you reframe an immoral action in suchaway that it no longer appears to violate your standards, and hence no self-sanctions are triggered in response. It is not the abandonment or changing of your moral standards (which could otherwise still effectively guide your conduct on other occasions), but rather a failure to see a conflict between those standards and the immoral action you have taken (or are considering taking).
Nor is moral disengagement the same as akrasia or weakness of will, which is a more widely discussed phenomena. In those cases, you view some course of action as better, but cannot bring yourself to do it, and as such you acknowledge having taken a worse action. That kind of failure would often be one of self-control, where you recognize the conflict but are unable to bring yourself to take the better action. By contrast, moral disengagement prevents you from acknowledging that there is a conflict, for you do not view your behavior as a violation of your moral standards. So internalizing moral standards can help guide our conduct, but only if we also sanction ourselves on the basis of those standards.
It is this link between negative self-focused feelings when they are not managed properly and the undermining of moral functioning that I am particularly concerned with here. The need for negative feelings of self-sanction to help us regulate our behavior according to moral standards, while also needing to be able to keep such unpleasant feelings managed so they do not threaten to overwhelm us, is one of the main reasons we need to be concerned about emotion regulation in virtue theory. Given the potential of moral failure to result in intense distress, we need to have skills to keep that distress within reasonable limits.
5 Moral Failure and Three Types of Shame
Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, people find moral failure, whether committed by them selves or their in-group, particularly distressing, and as such is frequently met by defensive reactions. To be clear, one typically ought to be feeling distress in response to one’s own moral failure, but being able to properly regulate that distress will be important for promoting adaptive responses to that failure (e.g. reparations and self-change), as too much distress has been shown to promote defensiveness instead.
Here it will be helpful to dig further into the recognition of moral failure and why some respond appropriately and others do not.20 There is an interesting set of conflicting results in some of the literature on shame, which indicates that sometimes it prompts defensiveness and disengagement, whereas other times it promotes attempts to redress the wrong as well as self-improvement.
20 Both guilt and shame are feelings one could have in response to recognizing a moral failure. While they are often linked, they can come apart. One way of differentiating the two is that guilt is focused on the act, while shame is a concern for how the action reflects on oneself. Some mistakes may be mere accidents for which one is still responsible, but which do not indicate a problem with who one is as a person. I focus on shame for two reasons. First, I take eliminating vice and acquiring virtue to be working on our moral identity, rather than a one off reaction to a particular action we have taken. Second, shame is seemingly the more distressing of the two emotions, for calling into question not just our actions, but also our identity as a moral person
a moral failure can be appraised as indicating either that others will condemn one or that one suffers a self-defect. If the self is appraised as suffering a self-defect, this self-defect may be viewed as either global (and thus unalterable) or specific (and thus potentially alterable). These appraisals are the central subjective meaning that people give their moral failure
These three appraisals are then connected to three feelings: rejection (condemnation by others); inferiority (a global self-defect); and shame (a specific self-defect). So in this framework, ‘shame’ is picking out a specific feeling that is tied to a self-appraisal where you find in yourself a flaw that you believe can and ought to be fixed
In regard to the next two combinations, the moral failure is an indication to yourself that you suffer some sort of self-defect, regardless of how you might be appraised by others. When your actions reflect poorly on who you are as a person, it can trigger a feeling of shame, and that might have two different sorts of consequences. If it makes you feel as if you are inherently a morally bad person, where there is not much you can do about it, then that feeling of inferiority is likely to lead to defensiveness, and perhaps to anger and aggression as well. In this sense, your whole identity as a morally good person is being called into question, thus producing a lot of distress. The negative consequences that can result from this have led some to evaluate the emotion of shame in purely negative terms. However, as Gausel and Leach have argued:
Although people may describe this experience as a feeling of shame, a feeling of inferiority is a more accurate conceptualization and description. Inferiority is a highly unpleasant and intense feeling of self-criticism that people wish to be rid of. Thus, as shown in the research we reviewed above, there is some reason to expect felt inferiority to predict self-defensive responses to moral failure. Indeed, escape and avoidance is a reasonable response to an unalterable self-defect. What else can one do but run away?2
This feeling of inferiority is going to be a barrier to any kind of productive response in the light of a moral failure, and people may morally disengage to avoid feeling it altogether.
One need not, however, view a self-defect as indicating that one is a morally bad person altogether, where there is nothing to do about it other than a fight-or-flight response. Shame has also been frequently shown to motivate attempts at self-improvement, in addition to restorative acts for anyone harmed by one’s error. When does this seem to occur? If one views the failure as indicating only a specific defect in one’s identity, then that’s something that seems more likely to be repairable, as compared with an overall (or global) defect in your identity. In such situations, it is not the whole of one’s identity as a morally good person that is called into question, but only a part, and as such that seems likely something that one could work on to improve.26 Shame in this sense is tied to a motivation for self-improvement because self-improvement is necessary to fix this part of the self in the long run.
This form of felt shame is important for virtue. When you make a moral mistake you ought to feel bad about it, but if your only concern is about how others might react, then this would seem to indicate a failure of virtue (as in, the virtue is not valued as part of who one is, but is externalized as other people’s expectations of you). So a mere concern for social image is not our target for how one ought to feel after recognizing that one has made a moral mistake. If one is instead concerned for what the mistake implies about oneself, then that is a more fitting response to recognizing that a mistake has been made. However, if what one feels is inferiority, due to regarding the failure as stemming from a morally problematic and unalterable part of oneself, then one will have little motive to make attempts at self-improvement. What we are after then is an appraisal of a self-defect that yields what one might call ‘apt’ shame (to distinguish it from the other emotions that are sometimes felt in response, but which have all been lumped under the label ‘shame’). This apt shame is what we would need people to feel in response to moral failure, in order to motivate attempts to become more virtuous.
6 Emotion Differentiation and Shame
It is important to also point out that this effect was independent of the intensity of the person’s overall affective mood. Emotion differentiation does not necessarily lead to less intense emotions, even if it helps people regulate them more effectively, for people with intense negative affect were still able to ignore the effects of incidental disgust via emotion differentiation. In other words, knowing what you are feeling does not neces sarily alter the intensity of it, but it does help you to know how to respond to it. Emotion differentiation presumably will be effective in counteracting effects of moods on moral judgment in other situations, since moods are undifferentiated affective states that reflect a general valence (positive or negative). Being able to differentiate effectively could allow you to change that diffuse affective state into a discrete emotion with a specific source, which you can then better regulate, even though the act of differentiation does not necessarily alter the intensity of the feeling (though you presumably could then alter it with other emotion regulation strategies).
7 Emotion Differentiation for Virtue as Skill
If my suggestions here are on target, then a lack of skill in emotion differentiation might leave people basically stuck at an initial undifferentiated state of ‘I feelbad’ in response to wrong doing, and thus likely inhibiting adaptive responses to moral failure. Bringing this back to virtue as skill again, these maladaptive responses inhibit efforts at self-improvement necessary to further develop one’s virtue (or to eliminate some vice), as well as efforts to make amends to any victims. If differentiation is based on better conceptual knowledge of distinct emotions, that may go some way to helping people resolve a diffuse mood of “Ifeel bad”, and to make it clear that this stems from a particular issue (as it is usually unlikely to actually implicate the whole self– though that might be how people feel without further clarifying the feeling). That is, in reflecting on one’s failure, one can come to realize that it likely only points to a specific problem with oneself. Knowing the specific issue should then make self-regulation easier, by bringing to mind the proper self-regulatory strategy.
Finally, it may be that emotion differentiation is broad enough in scope to be regarded as a separate virtue of self-regulation. Kashdan et al. argue that the benefit of emotion differenti ation “transcends any single psychological problem, serving as a skill that facilitates psycho logical and social well-being.”44 This can be seen from some of the references earlier to how those low in emotion differentiation may struggle with self-control. Furthermore, in pursuit of so many ofour goals in life, we need the abilities to change our habits, resist impulses contrary to our goals, and regulate both our thoughts and emotions. Nobody is going to live a flourishing life without these kinds of self-regulation skills. In addition, these kinds of skills are crucial for both being able to eliminate vice and to acquire virtue. One may have good intentions to change one’s behavior, but putting that into practice will be challenging. Character change, as a goal, is difficult, and will require the exercise of many skills of self regulation to happen.