What role to embarrassment and shame play in human morality? Probably quite a bit - they are very effective means for controlling people in small groups. At the same time, though, they can lead people horribly astray.

Ted writes at Crooked Timber:

I recently read Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary cover-to-cover in one night. It’s the true story of a man named Jean-Claude Roland who takes a terrible path. Roland missed an important exam at the end of his second year of medical school, but never rescheduled it. Impulsively, he told his parents that he had passed. Roland pretended to continue his studies. He married and had children, convincing everyone in his life that he was a high-ranking official with the World Health Organization. He paid the bills by defrauding his parents, in-laws, and friends. He told them that he was investing their money, or sold them worthless cancer treatments. He managed this way for eighteen years. Eventually, on the verge of being uncovered, he murdered his wife, his children, his parents, and made a (strikingly half-hearted) effort to kill himself.

All of this was effectively produced by a desire to avoid embarrassment. Roland was ashamed of missing a test and that led to an 18-year streak of lies before he murdered the people closest to him. Ted says that this story is fascinating, in part, because it is “utterly irrational.” It is — and it’s also utterly rational.

It would be difficult to find someone who hasn’t lied in order to avoid owning up to some painfully embarrassing event or action. Who is perfectly honest? Usually this doesn’t lead to horrible consequence — and Roland certainly should have found a way to make up his test, even in the context of some lie.

Occasionally, though, people find themselves lying to cover up an earlier lie, spiraling around in a vicious circle that makes things worse and worse — and, of course, makes the need to cover up embarrassing lies more and more necessary. In some sense, each action in Roland’s follows predictably from a previous one — a rational chain of events that creates an utterly irrational life. That’s what’s fascinate here.

Anyone can act irrationally, but it’s not every day that you see an arguably rational chain of decisions lead to such a horribly irrational whole. That’s not simply fascinating, but also very important. People need to learn that isolated rational decision does not make a person rational or an entire sequence of decisions rational. Taken in isolation (or in the narrow context of what comes immediately before and after), a decision may be quite rational — but that doesn’t make it a good decision.

Evaluating a decision requires looking at a much larger context. Not telling the truth about missing the exam wasn’t irrational and, had there been a larger context where the exam was made up, it wouldn’t have been anything to be concerned about. As the lies grew, however, the context became more and more warped, rendering the potential rationality of isolated decisions rather moot.

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics