guilt/shame

Guilt is the uncomfortable feeling of having done wrong, and therefore deserving the anger of others. Shame is the sense of deserving the contempt or disdain of others. Although anthropologists and historians sometimes divide societies as more prone to stress one of these emotions rather than the other, both appear to be found in a large variety of human cultures. The social function of each of them is readily seen: with guilt we are primed to tolerate the anger of others that would otherwise make us angry in return; with shame we internalize the values that lead to admiration or rejection. It is noteworthy that each emotion is only easily characterized in moral terms. This makes them dangerous starting-points for emotive analyses of ethics, although such an account putting guilt at the centre is given in the American philosopher Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1991).