Shame and Justice. How to Save Rawls's Moral Psychology

John Rawls places the social bases of self-esteem among the primary goods. What Rawls calls moral shame can arise whenever one subjectively has reason to disesteem oneself, to evaluate oneself negatively. The distinction between properly personal negative emotions (such as shame and contempt) and negative emotions focused on wrongdoing, and thus on action (such as resentment and guilt), reflects, according to Rawls, the two sides of a "complete moral conception," the good and the right. The paper explores the articulation between Rawls's moral psychology and the theory of justice, and challenges some of the objections that his conception of shame has raised since the 1980s among philosophers of the emotions. Is such moral psychology ad hoc, artificially tailored to the normative construction of A Theory of Justice? The paper seeks to comply with the principle of charity of interpretation.