Shame and Necessity

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) was the most significant English-language moral philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, working at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley over a long career. Shame and Necessity is the published form of the 1989 Sather Classical Lectures he delivered at Berkeley — the most prestigious lectureship in classics in the English-speaking world — and was published by University of California Press in 1993 as Sather volume 57. A second edition appeared in 2008. The book is a short, dense, technically sophisticated argument that draws on Homer and the Athenian tragedians (especially Sophocles) and is written for readers who have done at least some classical philosophy.

The argumentative core of the book is the rejection of the standard twentieth-century narrative — most prominently associated with E. R. Dodds and Bernard Knox — that the Greeks had a primitive shame-based moral culture which Christianity and modernity replaced with a more sophisticated guilt-based moral interiority. Williams argues that the Greeks had something closer to a complete moral psychology and that the modern preference for guilt over shame as a moral category is philosophically suspect — shame picks up on aspects of moral experience (the way the moral self is constituted in the gaze of others, the way moral failure attaches to the kind of person one is rather than only to what one did) that guilt on the modern interpretation does not.

Three of the book's technical concepts are doing structural work in the contemporary moral-injury literature. First, agent-regret — the regret one experiences as the agent who caused harm, even when one is not strictly to blame for the harm — is the philosophical construct that makes sense of the moral wound of soldiers whose participation in atrocity was structured by the situation rather than chosen freely. Second, moral luck — the dependence of moral status on factors outside the agent's control — is the construct that makes sense of Lifton's atrocity-producing situation. Third, the rehabilitation of shame as a moral emotion proper rather than a mere social-pressure response is the philosophical move that the Koenig MISS-M scale's shame subscale and the Litz framework's moral emotions analysis are operationalising, whether or not the operationalisations cite Williams.

The relation to the moral-injury literature is largely indirect. Williams does not write about combat, veterans, or trauma; he writes about Sophoclean tragedy, Homeric guilt, and the philosophical anthropology of the ancient Greek moral world. But the conceptual machinery he develops is what makes the moral-injury literature philosophically intelligible, and Sherman's Afterwar cites him explicitly. Reading Williams is the way to understand why the moral emotions the moral-injury literature centres — guilt, shame, resentment, agent-regret — are doing the analytic work they are doing rather than being mere symptoms of an underlying psychiatric condition.

UC Press is a serious academic publisher and the Sather lectures are the most exacting venue in classics; the book has been substantively engaged-with by every subsequent treatment of ancient moral psychology. The bookseller's mass market the book appears in is the philosophy / classics / political-theory graduate-school audience; it is not a trade book and the prose is demanding.

The stake is philosophical-systematic. Williams is making a long argument against what he saw as the over-reach of post-Kantian universalist moral theory — the view that morality is a matter of obligation and reasons that any rational agent could in principle endorse — and for a more particularist and more affectively-grounded conception of the moral life. The construct of moral injury sits on the particularist-affective side of that disagreement, whether or not the clinicians who use the construct are aware of it.

For the moral-injury corpus this book is the philosophical precursor most worth reading. It is harder than Afterwar and rewards more rereading; it is what makes Afterwar possible. Read it after the foundational clinical and theological texts so that the philosophical machinery has somewhere to go.