Стыд в моральной философии Джона Локка

Abstract

The paper deals with John Locke’s understanding of shame and its place in the moral experi­ence. The textual basis of the research includes An Essay Сoncerning Human Understand­ing, manuscripts related to it, and Some Thoughts Сoncerning Education. The Lockean un­derstanding of shame belongs to a tradition that identifies shame with the fear or pain (Locke uses the term ‘uneasiness’) caused by public condemnation and loss of respect. Shame is a central mechanism of the emergence and carrying out of ‘the laws of public opinion, or reputation’, despite the fact that the notion of shame is absent from the Locke’s description of these laws. However some manuscripts on the same topic contain it. In An Essay, the loss of reputation in a particular community is indistinguishable from the loss of virtue. That is why the traditional opinion that a sense of shame is a less perfect personal feature than virtue can not be expressed there. Though it is clearly expressed in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Reputation and, therefore, the capacity to feel shame are not ‘the true principle and measure of virtue’ there. And virtue itself is not the obeyance of ‘the laws of public opinion’, or reputation, but ‘following the dictates of that light God has given’ a man. Nevertheless it is our desire to maintain good reputation and our sense of shame that serve as a gateway to the genuine autonomous virtue. Some hy­potheses about the causes of these changes in the general context of the Locke’ understand­ing of shame are advanced in the paper.