Embarrassment and the Social Dimensions of Moral Agency

Abstract Unlike guilt and shame, embarrassment is rarely considered by philosophers to be a morally relevant emotion.This downplaying of embarrassment is well justified, given traditional views on moral agency. However, recent theorists have argued that the traditional views are too individualistic and overlook the external social conditions that they believe are part and parcel of our moral agency. Their alternative approach is often referred to as the “socially scaffolded accounts” of moral agency. In this paper, I argue that, if the socially scaffolded accounts are on the right track, then we should re‐examine the moral value of embarrassment. More specifically, I propose a moral alerting model to account for embarrassment's moral value and risks. The basic claim is that a kind of embarrassment—what I will refer to as moral embarrassment—plays an attention‐directing role in the process of responding to an audience's evaluative feedback. The moral alerting model demonstrates an intriguing tension between moral embarrassment's value and risks: though it is valuable in contributing to moral agency by virtue of its attention‐directing role, it causes systematic risks when it comes to successfully engaging with the social feedback that one is sensitive to.