Social Passions: The case of Humiliation

E-workshop de Gloria Origgi (CNRS, Institut Nicod - PSL) dans le cadre du cycle « Conversations on values and value experience » organisé par Roberta de Monticelli, résidente chercheuse 2019-2020 de l'IEA de Paris.

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Présentation

Social passions are a key to access our values. They are strong emotional reactions that reveal our attachment to certain values and the way they are respected or not in a society. In this talk I will make the example of humiliation as a passion that reveals our attachment to the fundamental values of dignity and self-respect. Humiliation is a complex social passion that involves in most cases a humiliator, a victim and a witness. How does humiliation reveal our attachment to human dignity? Can humiliation be a collective emotion? What is the difference between shame, humiliation and embarrassment? Is humiliation a subjective or a normative concept? Humiliation is a “statutory” emotion: it is the feeling of having been debased in our status at the point of losing our dignity, that is, the sense of ourselves as human agents. It is a positional value emotion that provokes strong moral upheavals and can lead to demoralisation, anger and revenge.