Can anger be morally tamed and shame morally rehabilitated when different cultures teach us radically different “scripts” for what these emotions are for?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on mind, ethics, moral psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy.
Check out his book, "How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures"!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691220972
2. Book Summary
In How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures, Owen Flanagan argues that moral emotions aren’t just things that “happen” in us; they’re things we do under culturally learned norms and scripts—and those norms can be renegotiated, especially in multicultural societies. He develops a method he calls philosophical anthropology: using cross-cultural psychology/anthropology to expand moral imagination and to critique parochial assumptions about what’s “normal” or “necessary” in our emotional lives. Applied to anger, this approach targets especially “payback” and “pain-passing” styles (where anger aims at making the offender suffer), and it treats cross-cultural variation—e.g., striking differences in how anger is felt, expressed, and regulated—as evidence that our own default scripts may be neither inevitable nor ethically defensible.
The middle of the book pivots to shame and tries to rescue it from its “bad rap.” Flanagan argues that some influential psychological tools and theories—often developed on WEIRD populations and shaped by contested assumptions—have helped cement an overly narrow picture of shame as globally self-crushing and socially toxic. He presses this critique using concerns about WEIRD generalizability and the replication crisis, and he claims that shame looks very different (and can function very differently) across cultural ecologies. Against the “shame is always destructive” view, he sketches an evolutionary and social-functionalist story in which “protoshame” and later “cultured” shame can help agents learn local norms quickly and avoid social devaluation/ostracism; the problem is not shame per se but what values it is recruited to protect and how it gets deployed—since it can also be weaponized in oppressive systems. He then argues, with sustained attention to cross-cultural cases (including cultures that explicitly endorse shame as a primary socializing emotion), that shame can be refined into a stable, internalized moral capacity rather than a tool of humiliation.
In the conclusion, Flanagan asks what emotional education should look like in “multicultures,” where people with different inherited scripts must live together and justify themselves to one another. He suggests that, compared to guilt, shame can reach deeper because it addresses habits, dispositions, and value-commitments—not just discrete deeds—and so it can support serious self-cultivation rather than mere box-checking moral repair. The ideal he recommends is a mature sense of shame: largely internal (not dependent on being watched), autonomous in a broadly Immanuel Kant-inspired sense (one has inspected and owned the values at stake), and both retrospective and prospective (guiding remorse, amends, and pre-emptive restraint), while also remaining open to criticism and revision. The upshot is a practical ethical proposal: in diverse modern settings, we should deliberately rework the dominant anger and shame scripts—discouraging pain-passing anger and rehabilitating a non-humiliating, self-improving form of shame that can help sustain shared moral life.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:53 - Who the book is for
03:40 - What are emotions?
12:04 - Cultural differences
25:49 - Anger
36:43 - Instrumental anger
41:29 - How to use emotions
46:40 - Methodological concern
55:25 - Concern about anger
56:36 - Shame
1:05:53 - Mature shame
1:11:29 - Metaethics
1:17:24 - The self
1:23:27 - Value of philosophy
1:26:19 - Conclusion
