What a shame! Restorative justice's guilty secret
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Author | Amanda Wilson |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12460 |
Received: 19 April 2021 Accepted: 10 October 2021
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12460
SPECIAL ISSUE
What a shame! Restorative justice’s guilty secret
Amanda Wilson
Leverhulme Trust Fellow,School of Law,
University of Warwick
Correspondence
AmandaWilson, Leverhulme Trust Fel-
low,School of Law,University of Warwick.
Email:Amanda.Wilson@warwick.ac.uk
Fundinginformation
LeverhulmeTrust, Grant/Award Number:
ECF-2020-535
Abstract
In this article, I address a long-standing issue con-
fronting restorative justice: its shaky ethical founda-
tion. Leading restorative justice theorists have pursued
an ethics of shame that has marginalised guilt (and
remorse). The resulting shame-oriented concepts do not
adequately capture the complex moral and psycholog-
ical phenomena that the ethics of restorative justice
requires. In part, this is because theorists have failed to
account for the depths, not only of guilt, but of shame as
well. These depths, I argue, are to be found in Freudian
metapsychology. Guilt and shame have primitive and
mature forms. It is only through understanding the dif-
ference between these formations that we can see how it
is that the mature formations are related in waysthat are
essential to understanding restorative justice. I conclude
that that the mature guilt-and-shame complex devel-
oped in the article provides the grounds for an adequate
ethical foundation for restorative justice.
KEYWORDS
ethics, guilt, moral psychology, psychoanalysis, restorativejustice,
shame, theory
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distri-
bution and reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2022 The Authors. The HowardJournal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:39–52. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 39
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