Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good OXFORD ARISTOTLE STUDIES General Editor Lindsay Judson      Doing and Being An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta Jonathan Beere Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life Sylvia Berryman Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning The Posterior Analytics David Bronstein Aristotle and the Eleatic One Timothy Clarke Time for Aristotle Physics IV. 10–14 Ursula Coope Passions and Persuasion in Aristotle’s Rhetoric Jamie Dow Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology Allan Gotthelf Aristotle on the Common Sense Pavel Gregoric The Powers of Aristotle’s Soul Thomas Kjeller Johansen Aristotle on Teleology Monte Ransome Johnson How Aristotle gets by in Metaphysics Zeta Frank A. Lewis Aristotle on the Apparent Good Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire Jessica Moss Priority in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Michail Peramatzis Aristotle’s Theory of Bodies Christian Pfeiffer Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good MARTA JIMENEZ 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Marta Jimenez 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937527 ISBN 978–0–19–882968–3 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198829683.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. To my grandfather, Mateo Agustín, who was a citizen soldier in the Spanish civil war. And to my parents, who taught me about it. Acknowledgments This book is a distant descendant of a doctoral thesis that I completed at the University of Toronto. My gratitude is due first and foremost to my supervisor and friend, Jennifer Whiting. I could not have hoped for a better person to guide my work and help me during my early academic life. I am extremely grateful for her continued support, encouragement, and challenge. Rachel Barney and Brad Inwood were also part of the original conception of this project and helped me to shape many of the central ideas. I thank them for challenging many of my initial thoughts on the matter, for fruitful discussions, and for their extensive feedback. This project has been in gestation for such a long time that I have incurred many large debts of gratitude. It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the help of those friends, mentors, and colleagues who gave me comments on parts or sections of the material (whether in conversation or via written feedback) or helped me through discussion on particular matters at various points: Julia Annas, Samuel Baker, Juan Pablo Bermúdez, Alessandro Bonello, Sarah Broadie, David Bronstein, Klaus Corcilius, Willie Costello, Jamie Dow, Zoli Filotas, Emily Fletcher, Alessandra Fussi, Corinne Gartner, Paula Gottlieb, Devin Henry, Sukaina Hirji, Douglas S. Hutchinson, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Monte Johnson, Rusty Jones, Rachana Kamtekar, Aryeh Kosman, Danielle Layne, Stephen Leighton, Mariska Leunissen, Patricia Marechal, Jessica Moss, Tim O’Keefe, Chistiana Olfert, Richard Patterson, Francesca Pedriali, Christof Rapp, Gurpreet Rattan, Krisanna Scheiter, Clerk Shaw, Brooks Sommerville, Matt Strohl, Jacob Stump, Jan Szaif, Iakovos Vasiliou, David Wolfsdorf, and Joel Yurdin. Their questions, objections, and comments at different stages of the project have been essential for improving the final result and for helping me bring it to conclusion. I especially wish to thank those who made comments or raised objections after presentations which I gave about parts of the book at the University of Toronto, the Humboldt University, Princeton University, the University of VermontBurlington, Wellesley College, the University of California-Riverside, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the University of Arizona, Haverford College, and Virginia Tech University, and to the audiences of my talks on topics from the book at general meetings of the American Philosophical Society, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, the Ancient Philosophy Society, the Canadian Philosophical Association, and the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions. I am particularly grateful to the participants of the Institute for the History of Philosophy Summer Workshop that I co-organized with Christoph Rapp at x  Emory University in June 2015 on “Aristotle on the Emotions”: Jamie Dow, Craig Henchey, Corinne Gartner, Paula Gottlieb, Stephen Leighton, Hendrik Lorenz, Jozef Müller, Tim O’Keefe, Rachel Parsons, Clerk Shaw, Krisanna Scheiter, Melpomeni Vogiatzi, and Marco Zingano. This workshop provided an ideal environment to test some of my ideas about the role of emotions in Aristotle’s ethics and to discuss my main view about the centrality of shame. More recently I owe also thanks to Lucas Angioni for generously organizing in May 2018 a workshop on a penultimate version of my manuscript at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, where I received insightful comments from Lucas, João Hobuss, Fernando Mendonça, Inara Zanuzzi, and Raphael Zillig. I sincerely thank the participants in this workshop for their valuable comments and questions, and Lucas in particular for his warm hospitality and for many stimulating exchanges about topics from the book. Special thanks are due to Julia Annas and David Konstan, who generously read whole drafts of this book and provided me with invaluable comments and suggestions. I worked out many of the ideas in this book while teaching courses on Aristotle’s ethics and emotion theory at Emory University. I am grateful to my students for their interest, their questions, and their insight as we worked together through Aristotle’s texts and the work of modern commentators. I would like to extend my gratitude also to my colleagues at the philosophy department of Emory University for their encouragement and support. A Junior Post Fourth-Year Review Leave from Emory allowed me to focus exclusively on my research during the Spring and Fall semesters of 2016. I am grateful to the university for this generous support. Thanks are due for the many useful comments of anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press and, before that, for the comments of the anonymous reviewers and editors of the journals where parts of these chapters first appeared as articles. I also thank the editors at Oxford University Press for their guidance and patience. I thank my research assistants and good friends, Chad Horne and Jacob Stump, whose comments on the final drafts helped me clarify some key ideas and saved me from several mistakes. John Proios and Andrew Culbreth provided last-minute vital assistance compiling the indexes. I am of course responsible for any errors. Lastly, I thank my parents, Joaquín Jiménez and Isabel Rodríguez-Valdés, to whom this book is dedicated, and my wife, Stu Marvel, without whom I would not have been able to finish anything and to whom I owe it all. Chapter 1 is a revised version of my paper “Aristotle on Becoming Virtuous by Doing Virtuous Actions,” Phronesis 61.1 (2016): 3–32. I thank Koninklijke Brill NV for permission to reprint this material. Parts of Chapter 2 draw on sections from my paper “Aristotle on ‘Steering the Young by Pleasure and Pain’,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29.2 (2015): 137–164. I thank Penn State University Press for permission to reprint this material. Introduction Shame is a complex and multifaceted emotion and its contribution to our ethical lives is difficult to pin down. For some, shame is a valuable emotion that helps us to improve our character, motivating individuals and even communities to achieve higher moral standards. But shame is also often seen as a feeling we are better off without, insofar as it is a painful experience that can be used as a tool for social manipulation or oppression, and it can be paralyzing or even lead to selfdestructive behavior.¹ This ambivalence about shame is on display not only in contemporary discussions, but also in a good portion of the ancient Greek literature.² In many ancient Greek texts, shame (aidōs, aischunē) appears to be used in at least two senses, typically including both a good sense of shame as virtue, or at the very least as a stepping-stone to virtue, and a bad sense of shame as an oppressive emotion that unduly limits our agency.³ In Aristotle’s ethical writings we also find both positive and negative aspects of shame: it is praiseworthy in young people and crucial to their moral development, while it is alien to the virtuous because it is linked to moral failure and excessively dependent on what others think. My aim in this book is to show how Aristotle reconciles these apparently conflicting aspects of shame in a single unified account, and to dispel shame’s bad name by exploring Aristotle’s views on the nature of shame and its positive role in our early ethical lives. My central claim is that shame for Aristotle is not just a helpful aid to learning to be good, but an essential part of that process. Shame is, I contend, the proto- ¹ Contemporary philosophical discussions of shame often open with remarks about the multifaceted and ambivalent character of this emotion—see e.g. Kekes 1998; Calhoun 2004; Nussbaum 2004; Mason 2010; Tarnopolsky 2010; Deonna et al. 2012; and Thomason 2018. Among contemporary authors who deal with shame, some underscore shame’s moral relevance and its potential to encourage moral improvement—see e.g. Aldrich 1939; Rawls 1971, §67: “Self-Respect, Excellences, and Shame” (440–6); Taylor 1985; Williams 1993; Elster 1999 (149–64); Calhoun 2004; Manion 2002; Arneson 2007; Mason 2010; Tarnopolsky 2010; Appiah 2010; Deonna et al. 2012; Lebron 2013; Fussi 2015; and Ramirez 2017. Others, in turn, argue against its moral relevance—see e.g. Deigh 1983; while many others warn us against shame’s potentially damaging effects—see e.g. Adkins 1960; Kekes 1998; Nussbaum 1980 and 2004 (esp. ch. 4: “Inscribing the Face: Shame and Stigma”); and Thomason 2018. ² An essential study of the complex character of shame in ancient Greek thought, from Homer to Aristotle, is Cairns 1993. See also Von Erffa 1937; Fisher 1992; Williams 1993; and Konstan 2006 ch. 4 (91–110). North’s 1966 study on sōphrosunē is also relevant. ³ See Chapter 5, Section 5.3, for a brief discussion of this distinction and the ways in which it has been attributed to Aristotle. Cairns 1993 offers a thorough study of these two senses of shame in ancient Greek literature and provides numerous examples. Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good. Marta Jimenez, Oxford University Press (2020). © Marta Jimenez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198829683.003.0001 2  virtue of those learning to be good (I shall call them “learners”),⁴ since it is the emotion that equips learners with the seeds of virtue. Other emotions such as friendliness (philia), righteous indignation (nemesis), emulation (zēlos), hope (elpis), and even spiritedness (thumos) may play important roles on the road to virtue. However, shame is the only one that Aristotle repeatedly associates with moral progress. The reason, as I argue, is that shame can move young agents to perform good actions and avoid bad ones in ways that appropriately resemble not only the external behaviors of virtue, but also the orientation and receptivity to moral value characteristic of virtuous people. What, then, is shame, and how can it be seen to figure in our moral development? Although shame is not a virtue for Aristotle, it has three connected features that make it indispensable for the development of a good character: selfreflectivity, other-relatedness, and responsiveness to moral considerations beyond pleasures and gains. First, shame promotes our awareness of the connection betweeen the inside and outside aspects of the self. Specifically, shame focuses on the intimate connection between the praiseworthiness (or blameworthiness) of our actions and the praiseworthiness (or blameworthiness) of our character—it gets us to see our external behavior and, in general, how we seem to be, as a reflection of who we are. Secondly, shame makes us receptive to the moral opinions of others and thus enables us to listen to moral reasons. And finally, third, shame makes agents responsive to a kind of value beyond mere pleasure (hēdonē) and mere gain (kerdos). More precisely, shame makes agents responsive to the value of the kalon (noble, admirable, beautiful, or fine), which is the characteristic goal of virtue.⁵ By turning the agents’ attention to considerations about honor (timē) and praise (epainos), and thus—as I will argue—turning their attention to considerations about the perceived nobility and praiseworthiness of their own actions and character, shame places young people on the path to becoming good. Beyond Aristotle, also in contemporary discussions shame is typically characterized as a self-reflective and other-related emotion. Shame tends to be classified, ⁴ This idea echoes the claim in Burnyeat 1980 that shame is for Aristotle “the semi-virtue of the learner” (78). Deonna et al. 2012 also use the expression “semi-virtue” in their explanation of shame’s function in contemporary terms (178). I prefer “proto-virtue” because it has the connotations of being a precursor of virtue, which I think is more accurate, as it preserves the Aristotelian point that shame puts learners on the path towards virtue. ⁵ I will translate kalon for the most part as “noble,” but occasionally as “admirable,” “beautiful,” or “fine,” or will leave it untranslated as seems most appropriate to the context. See note 11 in Chapter 1, Section 1.2, below for the list of texts where Aristotle claims that doing virtuous actions “for the sake of the noble” (tou kalou heneka) is characteristic of virtue. Some relevant discussions of the notion of the kalon in Aristotle are Owens 1981; Rogers 1993; Cooper 1996; Richardson Lear 2006; Irwin 2010; Kraut 2013; and Crisp 2014.  3 like pride and guilt, as one of the self-conscious or self-reflective emotions.⁶ The self-reflectivity of shame is special, however, because it always includes a reference to the gaze of the other. Central to any episode of shame is the apprehension, imaginary or actual, of oneself as being seen or exposed in a negative light, as being inadequate or failing in some way.⁷ Thus, shame is a response to the kind of exposure that leads to loss of esteem in the eyes of others, as when we fail to conform to social norms and ideals. The other-relatedness of shame is due to its direct connection to our common human concern with status, respect, and recognition—a concern that is also behind our appreciation of honor, reputation, and praise and behind our aversion to contempt, disrepute, and blame. But shame is also a self-reflective response to the exposure (or potential exposure) of our failing to achieve goals and ideals that we ourselves think important and inseparable from what we are or what we aspire to be in life. The self-reflectivity of shame, then, directly involves self-evaluation, and is closely associated with self-esteem.⁸ Specifically, shame is an emotional response to a kind of unwanted exposure that directly affects our sense of self-worth by reminding us of the connection between who we are and who we seem to be through our actions and, in general, through what is visible of us. This explains why shame is relevant to moral development—especially for someone who, such as Aristotle, holds that we learn to be good by doing good actions. If our sense of shame is appropriately cultivated, it will motivate us to avoid doing what is shameful and pursue instead what is genuinely noble and praiseworthy by tapping into our aspirations to be the best we can. From Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity (1993) to Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010), and Chris Lebron’s The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (2013), shame has been at the ⁶ For the self-reflective or self-conscious character of shame see e.g. Taylor 1985; Tangney et al. 1995; Elster 1999; Calhoun 2004; Manion 2002; Nussbaum 2004; Deonna et al. 2012; and Thomason 2018. ⁷ The locus classicus for the connection between shame and exposure is Sartre’s famous analysis of the shame one experiences at being discovered in an embarrassing situation (Sartre 1956, Part 3, ch. 1). More recent discussions of the connection between shame and exposure are e.g. Williams 1993, who holds that “the root of shame lies in exposure . . . in being at a disadvantage: in . . . a loss of power” (220); Velleman 2001, for whom the key events that provokes shame are failures of privacy and “unintentional self-exposure” (38). Sherman 2016 reminds us that the Greek etymology of aidōs (shame), which is related to aidoia, genitals, underscores this connection between shame and exposure; as she puts it “to be ashamed is to be caught without your fig leaf” (128). For the connection between shame and failure see e.g. Deigh 1983 (following Piers 1953): “shame is occasioned when one fails to achieve a goal or an ideal that is integral to one’s self-conception. [ . . . ] Shame is felt over shortcomings, guilt over wrongdoings” (225). ⁸ The self-evaluative character of shame is discussed by e.g. Taylor 1985 (who calls pride, shame, and guilt “emotions of self-assessment”); Tangney et al. 1995 and 2007 (who claim that shame, guilt, and embarrassment are “evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation,” 347); Elster 1999; Manion 2002; Nussbaum 2004; Deonna et al. 2012; and Thomason 2018 (who characterizes shame as “an experience of tension between one’s identity and one’s self- conception,” 11). A classic defense of the connection between shame and self-esteem appears in Rawls 1971 (440–6), while Deigh 1983 argues against the existence of such a connection. 4  center of different important proposals on how to reformulate modern ethics which have brought to the fore the relevance of moral emotions. My book is a contribution to this conversation. I think that the views of Williams, Appiah, and Lebron concerning the potential transformative powers of shame are in line with Aristotle’s understanding of the role of this emotion in moral development.⁹ From very different angles, these authors converge in seeing that by mobilizing people’s concern for how they look, how they appear, and whether they are living up to some ideal, shame (and, for Appiah, love of honor) can encourage people to act in ways that more closely correspond to their individual and social standards of decency, and ultimately to live better lives and be better. Many modern readers, however, are suspicious of shame and maintain that we do better without it, particularly in the context of a theory of moral formation.¹⁰ Shame’s connection with honor and praise (and with contempt and blame), plus shame’s concern with how we appear in the eyes of others, provokes two worries: heteronomy and superficiality. According to the first worry, insofar as shame makes us depend on the opinions of others, it may seem that shame is an obstacle to the development of moral autonomy. Agents who respond to shame are seen as moved by external incentives and societal pressures instead of being guided by their own internal motivations and reasons, and consequently they are seen as excessively heteronomous.¹¹ According to the second worry, insofar as shame tracks how we appear to others, it seems superficial—concerned with reputation and mere appearance rather than reality.¹² These reservations tend to undermine or obscure the positive aspects of shame that Aristotle identifies. How can we square the central role of shame in Aristotle’s theory of moral development with these more questionable features? Part of the aim of this book is to argue that the complex nature of shame, its responsiveness to the moral views of others, and its direct responsiveness to praise and blame, are precisely the features that make shame a good catalyst for moral development. Both the self-reflective and the other-related aspects of shame are key in our progress towards virtue. Against the heteronomy objection, I argue that shame’s connection with love of honor, reputation, and praise, and with aversion to disrepute, disgrace, and reproach, is not an obstacle to the development of ⁹ In fact, both Appiah 2010 and Lebron 2013 emphasisize the Aristotelian roots of their views. Appiah 2010 claims that his study of the relevance of honor in a successful human life “is a contribution to ethics in Aristotle’s sense” (xiv), while Lebron 2013 appeals to Neo-Aristotelian virtue theory, and concretely cites the work of Sherman 1989 and Hursthouse 2001 in support of his analysis of how shame is relevant to contemporary politics (see “Shame and Politics?,” 22–6, and notes 8–9 at 170). ¹⁰ See e.g. Adkins 1960; Kekes 1988; Nussbaum 1980 and 2004; Baron 2017; and Thomason 2018. Tarnopolsky 2010 presents an insightful review of some of these critics in her Introduction at 2–4 and discusses the views in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6. ¹¹ See a list of commentators who hold the view that shame is a potential obstacle to autonomy and my arguments against it in Chapters 4 and 6. ¹² See my characterization of the classic attack on shame (and “shame culture”) and my arguments against it in Chapter 4 (especially section 4.3).  5 autonomy. Rather, the attention to other people’s views explains why shame can help us acquire the intellectual and affective maturity of autonomous moral agents, who live in a social context where giving and taking reasons for one’s behavior and choices is part of moral life.¹³ Against the superficiality objection, I argue that shame’s connection with love of honor and responsiveness to praise and blame does not entail a superficial concern with appearance over reality. For Aristotle, love of honor and concern with praise and blame are not just based on the joy of merely appearing to be good in the eyes of others, but on the joy of getting others to truly see virtue (or the potential for virtue) in oneself through one’s actions. Because of its self-reflective character, shame turns our attention to the intimate link that connects the things we do, and how those things make us appear in our social world, with the kind of people that we are (or will become). As a consequence, the aversion to what is shameful, as well as the aspiration to shine in the eyes of others, are typically indications that learners are attending to considerations about the nobility or shamefulness of their actions as a reflection of who they are (or who they will become), and have a true interest in doing what is right. As Aristotle reminds us in Rhetoric (Rhet) II 6, 1383b13–1385a15, the kinds of things that produce shame are those that are “due to bad character” (apo kakias, 1383b18) or those actions that are generally “signs” (sēmeia) of defective traits of character (1383b29–1384a4 and 1384b17–20).¹⁴ By producing in us aversion to displaying signs of bad character or vice, and by making us alert to those signs and their connection with true vice, shame makes us veer away from the kinds of actions that make us worse precisely because they make us worse (as opposed to veering away from bad actions on account of the mere fear of the potential harms or unpleasant consequences that might follow). Consequently, shame puts learners on the right path towards true virtue. Far from moving learners to simply fake virtue until they acquire stable virtuous dispositions of character, shame makes learners genuinely responsive to the value of the noble, and to how that value is expressed in what they do and what they are. Although it is not controversial that shame plays a relevant role in Aristotle’s theory of ethical formation, the texts that explicitly support this claim are scarce and scattered throughout the ethical treatises, so any attempt to specify the role of shame must confront substantial obstacles. Aristotle himself does not provide us with a direct and detailed explanation of the process of moral development; rather, in his ethical treatises he offers a schematic account. Thus the reader is left to decipher the nature of the practices that lead learners to become virtuous agents ¹³ See e.g. Calhoun 2004 and Sher 2006 for insightful discussions of this point. In agreement with these authors, Aristotle’s view is—as I argue throughout this book, and especially in Chapter 4 below— that responsiveness to shame equips learners with a sensitivity to blame (and praise) which is clear expression of a concern with moral issues and an aspiration to getting things right. ¹⁴ Unless otherwise noted, all translations of passages from Aristotle’s Rhetoric are from Rhys Roberts (in Barnes 1984), sometimes substantially modified, and the Greek text used is Ross 1959. 6  from a limited number of remarks on habituation and good upbringing. Moreover, although Aristotle devotes two long discussions to shame—at Nicomachean Ethics (NE) IV 9, 1128b10–35, and Rhet II 6, 1383b12–1385a15— both are incomplete and fragmentary, and fail to spell out the details of how shame is an integral part of young people’s transition into mature moral agents. To build a more complete and unified account of the role of shame in moral development, then, we will have to look beyond these texts. Some of the crucial passages that help build a deeper story about shame are the discussions of moral development and the relationship between actions and dispositions at NE II 1–4 and Eudemian Ethics (EE) II 1; the characterization of shame as one of the emotional praiseworthy means between extremes at NE II 7, 1108a30–35, and EE III 7, 1233b16–1234a34; the treatment of voluntariness and praise in NE III 1–5, 1109b30–1115a3, and EE II 6–11, 1222b15–1228a19; the discussions of the pseudo-courage based on shame at NE III 8, 1116a15–29, and EE III 1, 1230a16–33; and the final remarks on the ideal audience of ethical lessons at NE X 9, 1179b4–16, where Aristotle directly associates shame with receptivity to ethical arguments. As I will show, these passages offer sufficient textual evidence to establish shame’s relevance to the question of moral education in Aristotle and to make apparent how shame equips us with the necessary orientation for learning to be good. 0.1 The “Moral Upbringing Gap” and Shame as the Bridge to Virtue Let me start by presenting the problem that the proposal of shame as the protovirtue of the learner is designed to solve. Aristotle offers an account in the NE of how we become good that seems, at first sight, relatively straightforward. He famously claims that we become just, temperate, and courageous by performing just, temperate, and courageous actions, and in general, that we become virtuous agents by doing virtuous actions; I call this the learning-by-doing thesis. Yet Aristotle also makes clear that virtuous actions performed virtuously, i.e. virtuous actions done in the right way or as the virtuous person does them, must be performed both with knowledge and with a proper aim, which he often expresses as “for the sake of the noble” (tou kalou heneka).¹⁵ The tension between these claims produces a serious difficulty: How can learners be expected to perform virtuous actions in the right way—and thereby learn virtue “by doing”—unless ¹⁵ The claim that doing virtuous actions “for the sake of the noble” (tou kalou heneka) is characteristic of virtue (and virtuous people) is expressed by Aristotle on numerous occasions throughout the discussion of the particular virtues of character in NE III 6 to IV 8, 1115a6–1128b9. See Chapter 1, note 11 for a list of passages where Aristotle makes this claim.  “  ”        7 they are already virtuous? For if learners are already in such condition as to be able to do virtuously-performed virtuous actions, then they would have the kind of knowledge and motivational tendencies that characteristically belong to virtuous people. The answer is, I propose, that learners are not blank slates, but have instead proto-virtuous resources that allow them to perform virtuous actions in the right way before having the relevant dispositions. And crucially, I argue, the emotion of shame is the key proto-virtuous resource for learners to be able to do virtuous actions aiming at the right goal. Aristotle’s solution to the learning-by-doing puzzle in NE II 4 is cryptic, and as I show in Chapter 1, it has been read in many ways. Some interpretations take the actions of the learners of virtue to be merely externally similar to those of virtuous people—this is sometimes called the “mechanical view,” according to which learners perform the actions in an unthinking and almost automatic way.¹⁶ This view, as many modern commentators recognize, is unsatisfactory because it fails to provide the relevant continuity between the actions of the learners and the dispositions that those actions produce. Specifically, it leaves us with the need to bridge the gap between the learners’ mechanically performed virtuous actions and the reliably virtuous dispositions that such actions are supposed to produce—this is what I call “the moral upbringing gap.” To achieve continuity in the process of learning by doing—i.e. to make the learners’ actions truly conducive to virtue—it is required not only that the learners’ actions are virtuous (in the sense of being the right thing to do in the circumstances), but also that they are done in the right way, i.e. exercising the relevant capacities. The reason is that, the weaker the link between the manner in which the actions of learners are performed and the manner in which truly virtuous agents act, the more difficult it will be to understand how the repeated performance of the learners’ actions can produce genuinely virtuous dispositions of character. Attention to this requirement of continuity has led most contemporary commentators to agree that habituation is not a mindless process and that learners must exercise the relevant cognitive capacities in their practices towards virtue. Concretely, learners must not just perform actions that are right in the circumstances, but must also do them with awareness of what they are doing and involvement of their perceptive and deliberative capacities. By adding this “knowledge requirement” to the practices of the learners, most recent interpretations succeed in maintaining a sufficient continuity in the development of the cognitive powers relevant to the exercise of virtue. For many of these commentators, however, the actions of the learners still differ from those of virtuous people because, they assume, learners do not perform virtuous actions with virtuous motivation—or more precisely, they do not ¹⁶ See a discussion of this view and a list of authors who defend it in Chapter 1, Section 1.2. 8  do virtuous actions for the sake of the noble. Unfortunately, as I argue, this deflationary interpretation of the actions of the learners—this time, deflationary regarding their goal—leaves Aristotle’s view open to a second problem of discontinuity like the one found in the mechanical view. To fully close this second gap and provide continuity to the process of moral development, learners must also have the ability to perform virtuous actions in the right way with regard to their motivation. Their actions must contribute not only to the formation of cognitive capacities that enable them to adequately deliberate about practical situations, but must also lead to the formation of a reliable motivational tendency to orient their behavior towards the noble and consistently act for the sake of the noble. Put briefly, not all instances of virtuous actions are conducive to virtue, but only those that engage both the relevant cognitive capacities and the relevant affective tendencies in the learner. To be successful, then, learners will have not only to learn how to determine what kind of behavior is appropriate to each practical situation, but also to practice the proper ways of being affected, since the goal is to become the kind of person who not only reliably does virtuous actions, but does them out of the right stable disposition, i.e. virtue. For Aristotle, as I will argue, when learners of virtue behave reactively, just following orders, out of mere familiarity, enticed by the prospect of rewards, or simply to avoid punishments, they fail to exercise the relevant ethical capacities, even if they do the right thing; instead, they learn to attend to situational features that distract their attention from the noble and the good. When people are guided by their fears or their appetites, they attend to considerations about selfpreservation or self-satisfaction that often take them away from aiming at the noble and the good. In contrast, the feeling of shame turns agents towards considerations about the public recognition (approval or disapproval) of their actions, and thus it tracks a value that is different from pleasure or gain—a value that, as I will argue, is directly related to nobility and praiseworthiness. Moreover, when learners are guided by their sense of shame, they focus on how their actions reveal their character, and consequently they can exercise their agency more fully, and strive to act in ways that are expressive of nobility and goodness, avoiding to act in ways that express baseness. Although behavior moved by shame might appear externally similar to behavior moved by fear, appetite, etc., there is in fact a significant difference regarding the cognitive and affective capacities being exercised in each case, and a significant difference in the kind of character being built. By focusing on questions about the perceived nobility and praiseworthiness of their actions, or about how to avoid shameful conduct, learners guided by their sense of shame exercise a capacity for responsive awareness to the ethically relevant features of their situations. Thus, as the emotion that spurs agents to perform actions because of their nobility and praiseworthyness and to avoid those actions that are shameful or reprehensible, shame provides learners with the sort of malleable pre-habituated orientation       -    9 towards the noble that allows them to perform virtuous actions with the relevant motive before they have acquired practical wisdom or stable virtuous dispositions. This is why shame is crucial to solving our initial puzzle about moral development. 0.2 Finding Space for Shame as the Proto-Virtue of the Learner Since the early 1980s there have been numerous attempts to understand Aristotle’s account of moral upbringing and to determine the steps that, according to Aristotle, lead towards the acquisition of virtue, with particular attention to the interplay of cognitive and non-cognitive elements.¹⁷ Thanks to Myles Burnyeat‘s seminal paper, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good” (1980), much attention has been paid to two important features of Aristotle’s theory of moral development: first, the claim from NE II 1 that practice, not teaching, generates virtue of character; and second, Aristotle’s contention, against Socratic intellectualism, that moral development requires attention to both cognitive and affective factors.¹⁸ These two basic Aristotelian tenets, which I call the learning-by-doing thesis and the non-intellectualist thesis respectively, occupy a central place in most modern accounts of Aristotle’s theory of moral education and are at the core of the argument of this book. A third basic tenet that Burnyeat’s interpretation stresses is that there is an intimate connection between Aristotle’s understanding of the process of acquisition of virtue and his conception of virtue. As Nancy Sherman puts it, “if full virtue is to meet certain conditions, then this must be reflected in the educational process.”¹⁹ Aristotle himself expresses a similar thought in NE II 3, when he states ¹⁷ Much of the literature aims at rethinking the contrast between cognitive and non-cognitive elements (sometimes expressed in terms of “rational” vs. “non-rational”) and highlight the intertwined character of those elements. See e.g. Sorabji 1973–4; Burnyeat 1980; Kosman 1980; Engberg-Pedersen 1983; Hursthouse 1984, 1988, and 2001; Sherman 1989 (esp. ch. 5), 1997 and 1999a; Broadie 1991 (esp. ch. 2); Cooper 1996; McDowell 1996; Vasiliou 1996 and 2007; Kraut 1998 and 2012; Achtenberg 2002; Curzer 2002 and 2012; Fossheim 2006; Kristjánsson 2006; Lorenz 2009; Lawrence 2009 and 2011; Moss 2011, 2012 (esp. ch. 8), and 2014; and Coope 2012. (This interest in the non-rational and in the role of emotions in our moral psychology is reinforced by a renewed interest in Aristotle’s theory of emotions and their role in persuasion as it appears the Rhetoric (see e.g. Fortenbaugh 1970 and 1992; Leighton 1982/1996; Cooper 1993 and 1996b; Striker 1996; Nussbaum 1996; Rapp 2002 and 2012; and Dow 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2015.) ¹⁸ The so-called “Socratic intellectualism,” a label used to indicate that Socrates underestimates the importance of the affective side of human nature and focuses solely on the intellectual, is probably an exaggeration that we owe to Aristotle, who sometimes aims at characterizing his view as radically opposed to that of Socrates in this regard. Although this interpretation of Socrates has been dominant until recently, an emerging consensus is that at least the Socrates from Plato’s dialogues pays close attention to the effects of emotions in our intellectual and moral development. See Nehamas 1999 and Segvic 2000 for careful discussions of the history and the limits of the interpretation of Socrates as a model of intellectualism, and Blank 1993 for an insightful overview on the relevance of emotions in the Socratic conversations. ¹⁹ Sherman 1989, 159. See also Burnyeat 1980, 69. 10  that “the actions from which [virtue] arises (ex hōn egeneto) are those in which [virtue] actualizes itself (peri tauta kai energei)”²⁰ (1105a15–16). And in EE II 1, 1220a29–32: “Virtue, then, is a disposition of this kind, which is brought about (ginetai) by the best movements of the soul and which produces (prattetai) the best functions and affections of the soul.”²¹ This rule, which I call the continuity principle, is the third main precept behind the argument of this book, and will be crucial to explain the role that shame plays in our moral development. One of the fortunate consequences of paying close attention to the details of Aristotle’s learning-by-doing thesis has been the total abandonment of the old mechanical view of habituation, according to which the practices of the learners of virtue are understood simply as the mechanical repetition of behavior that externally resembles the actions of virtuous people. By contrast, contemporary interpretations highlight that the practices which lead towards the acquisition of virtue are not mere drills but in fact engage the learners at a cognitive level. In relation to Aristotle’s non-intellectualist stance, Burnyeat famously points out that perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Aristotelian account of ethical upbringing lies in the fact that Aristotle, unlike Socrates, allows non-rational factors to occupy a preferential place in moral development. For Aristotle, Burnyeat claims, these non-rational factors are “the fabric of moral character” (1980, 80).²² This overturning of the Socratic intellectualistic model means, as Burnyeat puts it, that Aristotle achieves a “grasp of the truth that morality comes in a sequence of stages with both cognitive and emotional dimensions” (1980, 70–1). In brief, Aristotle’s learners of virtue find themselves at an intermediate stage in which both rational and non-rational factors play an important role. Thus, a second auspicious consequence of Burnyeat’s intervention in the debate has been a focus on the role of the emotions. Nancy Sherman’s The Fabric of Character (1989), which offers a general study of Aristotle’s views on the nonrational sources of virtue, represents a good example of this trend, with a remarkable attempt to take seriously the role of emotions in moral education.²³ However, since the main goal of Sherman’s account of moral development is to argue for a conception of habituation as “reflective and critical,” her focus remains primarily ²⁰ καὶ ὅτι ἐξ ὧν ἐγένετο, περὶ ταῦτα καὶ ἐνεργεῖ. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations of passages from the NE are from Ross-Urmson (in Barnes 1984), sometimes substantially modified, and the Greek text used is Bywater 1894.) ²¹ καὶ ἡ ἀρετὴ ἄρα ἡ τοιαύτη διάθεσις ἐστίν, ἣ γίνεταί τε ὑπὸ τῶν ἀρίστων περὶ ψυχὴν κινήσεων καὶ ἀφ’ ἧς πράττεται τὰ ἄριστα τῆς ψυχῆς ἔργα καὶ πάθη. (Unless otherwise noted, translations of the EE are from Inwood-Woolf 2013, sometimes substantially modified, and the Greek text used is from Susemihl 1884.) See also NE II 2, 1103b29–31 and 1104a27–29; NE II 3, 1104b19–21; and NE III 5, 1114a6–7, all quoted in Chapter 1. Section 1.3 below. ²² This phrase would later be the title of Sherman’s 1989 monograph on Aristotle’s theory of virtue. ²³ See especially Sherman 1989, 44–50. See also e.g. Fortenbaugh 1969 (repr. 2006); Kosman 1980; and Sherman 1997 and 1999a. For a treatment of this issue from a broader perspective see Kristjánsson 2007.       -    11 on “how we refine the discriminatory capacities included in the emotions” (1989, 160). My goal here is to contribute to this study of the emotional dimension of moral development by offering an account of the role of shame as the emotion that provides the minimal starting conditions that make moral progress possible. On my interpretation, shame, which was considered to be a fundamental civic virtue in the tradition from Homer to Plato, does not lose its force and relevance in the works of Aristotle. Although Aristotle, like Plato, partly breaks with the tradition that precedes him by giving shame a reduced role in the life of the virtuous person, his strategy is to transfer the central role of shame from the virtuous life to earlier stages in moral development, and to regard it as a requirement for the acquisition of mature virtue.²⁴ Shame, then, is not less important in Aristotle’s work than it was in the work of his predecessors; on the contrary, for Aristotle shame is an indispensable notion in the explanation of how the acquisition of full virtue is possible. Contemporary commentators often reject that shame can play a positive role in moral development because they assume that Aristotle understands shame as a desire for mere reputation and a fear of mere disrepute.²⁵ For them, Aristotle has strong reasons to reject shame’s role in the development of a fully virtuous agent because shame’s dependence on the opinion of others and its concern with appearance make it incompatible with the sort of orientation towards the noble that is characteristic of a virtuous agent. In other words, they attribute to Aristotle the heteronomy and superficiality worries that we find in contemporary literature about shame. My goal is to show that for Aristotle shame is directly linked with a concern with nobility and praiseworthiness—a concern with being seen as noble and expressing nobility (or avoiding shamefulness) in one’s actions because one aspires to genuine nobility and goodness—and I argue that such a link places shame at the center of Aristotle’s understanding of our moral development. There are some scholars who recently, and as part of the renewed interest in the role of emotions in our intellectual and moral lives, have taken a more sympathetic conception of the relationship between shame, virtue, and the noble in Aristotle’s work.²⁶ Some of them have opened promising avenues for a positive ²⁴ Thus, views like that of Irwin 1999, who sees in the fact that Aristotle denies to shame the condition of being a virtue a sign that he “rejects a long Greek tradition” (347) are exaggerated in my opinion. On the contrary, I hold that Aristotle does not reject the long tradition that considers shame a central element in the regulation of moral conduct. He merely refines this view by limiting the positive role of shame to the sphere of moral development rather than moral maturity. ²⁵ Some representative examples of this negative interpretation of Aristotle’s view of shame (as excessively other-dependent and superficial) are Irwin 1999; Broadie 1993; Richardson Lear 2004; Taylor 2006; and Hitz 2012. This view will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4 below. ²⁶ This is particularly the case since Burnyeat 1980. Other authors who explicitly acknowledge that shame has an important place in Aristotle’s account of moral development are: Cairns 1993; Curzer 2002 and 2012; Grönroos 2007; and Raymond 2017. For challenging arguments against this strategy see Hitz 2012. 12  role of shame in moral development, and the approach that I propose in this book is greatly influenced by their insights. My view on the centrality of shame in moral progress is most indebted to Burnyeat’s account of habituation and learning to be good in Aristotle, and a major part of this book can be seen as a development and defense of his view. For Burnyeat, shame is crucial in moral progress because it is the emotion that turns learners towards the noble by initiating them in the proper appreciation of the pleasures of the noble. Concretely, Burnyeat underscores how shame helps to transform the learners’ motivational outlook by shifting their attention from appetitive pleasures to the pleasures of noble activities. I believe Burnyeat’s account is fundamentally right and provides the right clue to solve the problem of the gap in moral development: the learners’ ability to feel shame—which Burnyeat calls “the semi-virtue of the learner” (78)—is precisely what gives them initial access to the new pleasures of the noble. What I set as my goal to explain, is exactly how shame does that. My view aims at complementing Burnyeat’s initial proposal by explaining how shame gives learners access to the value of the noble through a more basic concern with honor, reputation, and praise. This concern with honor, reputation, and praise performs a double function: on the one hand, it turns the agents’ attention away from the lure of mere pleasure and mere advantage, and makes them able to resist the temptation of shameful pleasures and gains; on the other hand, it turns agents towards considerations of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and thus puts them on the track of the noble and away from the shameful. My defense of shame, then, requires that we pay close attention to Aristotle’s crucial distinction between three objects of choice at NE II 3, 1104b30–31, namely the noble, the advantageous, and the pleasant, and that we acknowledge that while these objects of choice are often aligned in the eyes of virtuous people, agents can be motivated by each of them separately from early on in life. Crucially, young people can be moved by the motive of the noble before they have been fully formed in virtue, and this capacity enables them to perform virtuous actions in the right way and to choose the noble over the merely pleasant and the advantageous in ways that have a transformative effect on their character. A second wave of inspiration comes from some of Burnyeat’s critics (such as Curzer 2012) who propose models of moral education that focus on conditioning strategies, where the weight is placed in associating pleasures or pains to the right objects. I show that these models fail to confer sufficient continuity to the process and are unable to explain how actions guided by appetitive pleasures and pains can yield dispositions to act for the sake of the noble and in avoidance of the shameful. Instead, I argue that young people have from the start a basic appreciation of nobility and a repulsion towards the shameful and that moral upbringing consists in the cultivation of that initial appreciation of the noble—especially       -    13 through our practices of praise and blame—and in the proper integration of that tendency with our other tendencies to be drawn towards the pleasant or the advantageous and to move away from the painful and the harmful. In my argument, I emphasize that to explain how the relevant transformation in the learners occurs we need an independent account of the origin of the love of the noble. A good starting point for moral development will have to be a capacity or tendency that enables learners to appreciate the noble and desire the noble for its own sake. For this reason, a third crucial counterpoint for my view comes from Cooper 1996, whose account of moral development has the virtue of providing exactly that starting point. Cooper holds that thumos (spirit) is the emotion that equips us with an innate impulse towards the noble, and thus it is thumos that sows the first seeds of moral progress by enabling learners to have their first experience of moral value. The idea of a natural emotional tendency that enables learners to identify and be motivated by the noble is, I think, the best way to ensure that there is motivational continuity between the practices of the learners and the dispositions that they are aiming to acquire. In this regard, Cooper’s project is attractive because it provides a coherent account of Aristotelian moral development without any gaps. However, Cooper locates the first impulse towards the noble in the wrong place. The Aristotelian discussion of thumos is much thinner and vaguer than Cooper’s treatment suggests, and it is hard to see how the limited textual evidence could support thumos’ robust orientation towards the noble. In fact, Aristotle’s view of the place of thumos in our psychology is less defined than in Plato, and he tends to characterize thumos as a reactive emotion without a clear object. To further Cooper’s view, some authors (such as Richardson Lear 2004 and Grönroos 2007) have proposed to emphasize the thumoeidetic nature of shame, and conceive of shame as an emotion inseparably linked to thumos and associated with thumoeidetic desires. This move strengthens Cooper’s proposal by adding the important textual support from the passages on shame. However, Aristotle never explicitly associates thumos and shame, and when he deals with these two emotions in the same discussion (as in NE III 8, 1116a15–29 and 1116b23–1117a9, and in EE III 1, 1229a20–29 and 1230a16–33), he keeps the two emotions clearly separated and attributes different roles to each of them. My account of shame’s role in moral development is indebted to these attempts to find in Aristotle a first natural tendency towards the noble, and my view on the role of shame has many features in common with these thumos-centered views. I think, however, that disentagling shame from thumos has important textual and theoretical advantages. Moreover, I have found essential support for my view that shame is at the center of Aristotle’s account of moral development in Cairns’ 1993 comprehensive study on the history of the term from Homer to Aristotle. Much of what I say 14  about the nature of shame and its aptness to guide learners in their path to virtue is in tune with Cairns’ analysis. In contrast with his interpretation (and with Raymond 2017), however, I argue that Aristotle has convincing reasons for conceiving shame as a proto-virtuous emotion, and not as a virtue. While Cairns sees as a failure Aristotle’s reluctance to give shame the status of disposition, I believe that shame can perform a central role in moral development precisely because it is an emotion only appropriate in young people and indeed not a disposition at all. In my view, Aristotle establishes a division between emotions (pathē), capacities (dunameis), and dispositions or states (hexeis) precisely because he is interested in differentiating between the conditions of those who are in the process of acquiring virtue and those who have already succeeded in doing so. For this reason, Aristotle is rightly invested in classifying shame as an emotion and not as a virtue. Shame is appropriate only for those who are in the intermediate stages of moral development, i.e. for those who do not yet have fully formed dispositions in their soul. In sum, my claim that shame is the key emotional factor in the process of moral development stands in harmony with those authors who contend that obedience to one’s sense of shame is what enables learners to make progress towards virtue. Where my analysis differs, however, is in regard to details concerning the relationship of shame with pleasure and pain, the relation between shame and spirit, the nature of shame as a peculiar emotion, and shame’s relationship with honor, with the noble, and with virtue. Finally, my view that shame is at the heart of Aristotle’s account of moral development is not incompatible with accounts that explore the value of musical education to explain our initial steps in learning to appreciate the value of the noble. It is uncontroversial that musical education plays a crucial role in Aristotle’s explanation of how we learn to properly appreciate and enjoy the value of the noble. A number of recent accounts offer rich material to support this point, and I believe that the view I present is in harmony with that important part of Aristotle’s model of moral upbringing.²⁷ In this regard, I depart from the view of Hitz 2012, where musical education is presented as an alternative to education through shame. Yet my contribution aims not at competing with the accounts of moral development through music and imitation, but at highlighting a complementary part of the process, by arguing that we have a natural impulse towards nobility and aversion to the shameful that emerges directly in the context of our social interactions and guides us on the path of learning to be good. ²⁷ For recent discussions of different aspects of Aristotle’s account of musical education and its role in initiating us in the appreciation of the noble see e.g. Fossheim 2006; Hitz 2012; Brüllmann 2013; Cagnoli Fiecconi 2016; and Hampson 2019.     15 0.3 Plan of the Book The first step in my argument is to examine the account of habituation as learning-by-doing in NE II 1–4, 1103a14–1105b18, the locus classicus of Aristotle’s account of how virtue of character is acquired through habits. In Chapter 1, “Becoming Virtuous by Doing Virtuous Actions,” I look at the details of the learning-by-doing thesis and propose a new way of thinking about the conditions that learners of virtue must meet for their habituation to be successful. The gist of my proposal is that there should be continuity between how learners and virtuous agents act. If the actions of the learners are to be conducive to virtue, then learners need to perform them in ways that appropriately resemble how virtuous people act. For that reason, learners cannot be blank slates, but should at least partly fulfill the requirements for knowledge, motivation, and stability that NE II 4 establishes as necessary for doing virtuous actions in the right way (i.e. virtuously). Becoming good, then, requires the proper exercise of both the cognitive capacities and the affective tendencies that anticipate in the learner the way in which virtuous agents think and feel. I argue that to achieve the relevant continuity between the learners’ actions and the resulting dispositions, learners need to perform virtuous actions not just with sufficient awareness but also with the right motivation. This means that learners should be equipped with some initial minimal affective tendencies that enable them to perform virtuous actions for the sake of the noble. Only then, I think, will their actions be conducive to virtue. Chapter 2, “Learning through Pleasure, Pain, the Noble, and the Shameful,” offers a first step towards explaining how the learners’ motivational outlook is shaped in habituation. Specifically, in this chapter I explore the role that pleasures and pains play in the learners’ capacity to be attracted to the nobility of virtuous actions and to aim at the noble in action before they are virtuous. In the view that I propose, moral development is not the acquisition of a taste for the new pleasures of the noble, but a reorienting and shaping of the alreadypresent capacity to enjoy nobility and be pained by the shameful—a reorienting and shaping through which learners of virtue become better able to appreciate the comparatively superior value of nobility over mere pleasure or mere gain. My main point is that the taste for the noble and the capacity to appreciate it is present in us from the start, just as the desire for pleasure and the desire for benefit. Moral upbringing is the process in which we learn to align those desires and tendencies correctly and to give priority to the noble over all other considerations. In Chapter 3, “Pseudo-Virtuous Practices, Pseudo-Virtuous Conditions,” I analyse a number of possible sources for our pre-habituated taste for the noble. My goal in this chapter is to find a natural condition that can equip learners with resources to be able to perform virtuous actions on account of their nobility. 16  To this end, I explore the causes of the different kinds of apparent courage (or “pseudo-courage”) introduced by Aristotle in NE III 8 and EE III 1. These passages are testimony to the complexity of Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between agents, actions, behavioral tendencies, and dispositions of character. By exploring the “missing ingredients” in each of the causes of pseudo-courage— shame (aidōs), fear (phobos), experience (empeiria), spirit (thumos), hope (euelpis), and ignorance (agnoia)—we gain a clearer idea of the requirements that the learners’ actions must fulfill to bring them closer to virtue, as well as a clearer idea of the preconditions which learners themselves must meet in order to perform virtuous actions properly. The analysis of these passages reveals that the variety of pseudo-courage based on shame—the best of the two kinds of political courage—is the most promising candidate to equip learners with a proto-version of the conditions for virtuously performed virtuous actions, and consequently, as a potential proto-virtue. Agents with shame, although not yet virtuous, perform virtuous actions on account of their nobility and avoid base actions on account of their shamefulness. For this reason, shame stands out as a good candidate to bridge the moral upbringing gap. There are, however, widely accepted objections against the claim that shame is a good guide to perform virtuous actions on account of their nobility. Many commentators fall prey to a modern prejudice against shame and hold that for Aristotle shame orients people towards the superficial goal of honor, not the noble, and away from what brings discredit, rather than from what is truly base. Chapter 4, “Connecting Shame with Honor and the Noble,” is devoted to showing that the interpretation of shame as a superficial concern with reputation or external recognition comes about as a result of overlooking the connections that Aristotle makes between love of honor and love of the noble. Indeed, Aristotle has a complex view of the role that our sense of shame, as a sensitivity to honors and reproaches, plays in the social practices of praise and blame, a view that enables him to establish a robust link between love of honor and the concern with one’s own virtue and with the nobility of one’s actions. As a result, learners with a sense of shame can perform actions that are not only externally indistinguishable from those of virtuous people, but are also ultimately oriented towards the same noble goals and are similarly done for the sake of the noble. They therefore fulfill at least partially the core motivation requirement for virtuously-performed virtuous action, and for this reason their actions constitute the right kind of practice towards the acquisition of virtue. If the conclusion of Chapter 4 is correct and shame plays a beneficial role in orienting learners towards virtue and the noble, then it becomes harder to see why Aristotle considers shame to be a “proto-virtue” and not a proper virtue. Chapter 5, “The Mixed Nature of Shame,” explores why Aristotle insists on the “mixed” character of shame in his ethical treatises, where he characterizes it as a sui generis emotion that is only in some respects like a virtue. I argue that he has     17 good reasons to maintain that shame is a special kind of emotion—concretely, one of the praiseworthy emotional means (EE III 7, 1233b16–1234a34; cf. NE II 7, 1108a30–35)—but not a virtuous disposition of character. Appealing to the Aristotelian scheme of capacities, emotions, and dispositions, I show that shame’s peculiar status as a praiseworthy emotion is a necessary feature for it to be able to operate as a bridge towards virtue in young people. For only if shame is an emotion and not a stable disposition of character can he attribute shame to those young people who are not yet virtuous but are on the path towards virtue. A final obstacle against shame’s crucial role in moral development is the apparent tension between the two main texts on shame in the NE, IV 9, 1128b10–35, and X 9, 1179b4–16. In Chapter 6, “Shame as the Proto-Virtue of the Learners,” I present my interpretation of the nature and function of shame and show that these passages complement each other. Together, they offer support for my view that agents who are responsive to their sense of shame already have both a grasp of the noble and the shameful, which allows them to produce value judgments in the right terms. They have also an attachment to the noble and aversion to the shameful, which enables them to be properly affected by the relevant features of their practical situations and act in ways that are conducive to virtue. In other words, in these passages shame emerges as a genuine love of noble things and hatred of shameful ones that allows young people to perform virtuous actions in the right way and make reliable progress towards virtue. Learners who are responsive to shame are in a much better condition than those who have no shame at all (the “shameless”) or those who have excessive shame (the “timid”), not only because they are able to do virtuous actions in the right way, but also because they are able to properly exercise their agency. They are aware that they can shape who they are (and who they become) through their own actions, and thus see their actions as expressions of their selves and as opportunities for becoming better. Although they are not yet virtuous, these learners of virtue can appreciate the value of noble activity and can guide their actions by a true interest in doing the right thing for its own sake. In conclusion, my interpretation provides a genuinely intermediate place for the learners of virtue with respect to both the cognitive and affective dimensions of moral development, and is thus better able to explain the process of becoming virtuous without any gaps.