Phenomenology of humiliation: feeling injustice in healthcare

Abstract

In this paper, I show how humiliation, as a moral emotion, is a pervasive yet neglected dimension of medicine, health and ethics discourse. Although often conflated with shame, humiliation names a distinct self-conscious emotion: not an internalised sense of personal failure, but a relational harm imposed by others and institutions that undermines dignity and self-respect. Recently, medical humanities and ethics literature has attended extensively to shame and stigma, yet humiliation remains underexplored, despite its salience in patient accounts of dismissal, disrespect and degradation. I begin by explaining why it helps to have a conceptual distinction between humiliation and shame, showing how humiliation is an externally inflicted injury rather than a private moral lapse. Drawing on my ethnographic and phenomenological research in India and Zurich, in this conceptual paper, I illustrate how humiliation surfaces in healthcare encounters and spaces, where patients, especially those who are marginalised, are silenced or disregarded. I show that humiliation is diagnostic and has inherent moral insights and reveals injustice. Thus, in this paper, I argue that reclaiming humiliation as a moral and phenomenological category opens new ethical and analytical possibilities: it calls for reimagining medicine as a relational practice grounded in dignity, recognition and justice—one that acknowledges those once humiliated not as passive sufferers but as moral agents whose emotions reveal the truth of injustice.