Emotion, Adaptation, and Natural Kinds: A Look at Shame and Guilt

Much of the work on the evolutionary origins of human emotions sees emotions standing or falling together: either all of our emotions are adaptations or none of them are. In this paper, I challenge this orthodoxy. Taking shame and guilt as case studies, I argue that while we have good reason to see shame as a biological adaptation, the case for guilt is much less impressive. But this conclusion raises an important question: if guilt isn’t any adaptation, then what is it? In response, I argue that guilt might be best understood as a kind of emotional technology: a culturally-driven innovation that helped our ancestors address particular, recurrent challenges of social life. The resulting picture not only offers a revisionary account of the nature and origins of shame and guilt, but also sheds new light on the place of these emotions in moral and social life.