#friday forum

The topic for this last week's Friday Forum was Guilt vs Shame/Honor societies. It was probably the most lively Friday Forum I've ever been involved in. Before anyone realized it, the moderator's alarm went off signifying that 5 o'clock had arrived and it was time for closing remarks.

I tried desperately hard not to turn the discussion into a discussion on economics. So I avoided discussion of the localization of knowledge and the need for combating opportunism with respect to market transactors but couldn't avoid discussing the differences between prudential and moral restraints with respect to guilt and shame/honor societies. 

In a nutshell the problem with shame/honor societies is that to combat socially problematic behavior it must first be detected. Shaming and honoring is what someone does to someone else (or what a group does to a group or an individual, etc). Guilt, in comparison, is an internal response to something that we feel we shouldn't have done. Guilt accompanies shame if the shaming is justified in the guilty's mind; but shame needn't accompany guilt to provide the person who committed the problematic act to abstain from doing such a thing again. We feel guilty first and foremost because we empathize with how others are treated.

Humanity has historically been a small group creature. Our networks were typically around 60-150 persons. And in such small groups the ability to detect people who behave in their own interests as opposed to the interests of the whole is a lot greater than it is in large groups. A simple way of thinking about the problem is by considering roommate scenarios. If you have one roommate, and the house need be cleaned, you know whether or not the other roommate is helping out. If you have 5 roommates, though, it's more difficult to determine which of the 5 aren't cleaning up. As groups get larger, the more difficult it becomes to detect people shirking on both explicit and implicit agreements.

But as groups get larger, we can more easily reap the benefits of specialization and a larger network of people to trade with. So humans face a pretty big predicament: Prosperity comes with large groups who can take advantage of specialization but at the same time large groups make it more difficult to detect whether persons in the group are upholding their side of the bargain.

In small groups, we can shame people. In large groups we can't. So as societies grew, we quickly moved from shame/honor societies to guilt societies because the latter doesn't require detection. However, the latter does require some sort of moral conditioning, specifically empathy.

In Friday Forum I said that we shouldn't try to compare guilt and shame/honor societies because it's like comparing apples to oranges. Really, though, I just didn't want to say "guilt societies are superior to shame societies" because then I would have had to make some assumptions that are ... not necessarily true. Instead I just said that guilt and shame/honor societies develop different institutional structures to counter socially undesirable behavior. That much is obvious. If a society feels more guilt, ceteris paribus, there's less need to drive the cost of misbehavior up through shame. So the institutions will naturally differ. However one of the primary problems with those institutions is that they restrict people's ability to use the local knowledge they possess in an attempt to minimize people from acting in potentially problematic ways; they regulate people more heavily, determining what they can and cannot do, providing greater degrees of routine to behavior so that they can more easily detect people acting out of routine and therefore flag suspicious activity, and they don't allow local managers to exercise discretion in their communities. This makes such societies very inflexible and lack creativity. Because of that they're typically less innovative, and thus less prosperous.

So, despite having said I can't compare them, I believe guilt societies to be superior when it comes to obtaining material prosperity than shame/honor societies.

McKee Wallwork Cleveland

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McGarrah Jessee

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