Numerous attempts have been made at making sense of various conflicting facts and intuitions regarding the moral significance of shame.One of the main issues is how to square the classic and widely defended claim that shame is morally constructive and contributes to moral learning with the fact that it can damage self-esteem and lead to antisocial behaviors, including violence. In this chapter, through a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, I argue that these facts are not necessarily in contradiction. On the one hand, I agree with those who defend that a susceptibility to shame in all its varieties is ethically valuable because it is a powerful guard against moral solipsism. On the other hand, I argue that, in some circumstances, ethics demands that one’s self-identity be damaged (or even fully dismantled), and shame can help do this, as Coetzee shows in his novel. Both these claims are compatible with recognizing that shame often has an ambiguous impact in our moral lives: All varieties of shame share a basic structure that reveals our vulnerability and interdependence, but this revelation can pull us both in virtuous and vicious directions, depending on other factors. This becomes clear in a reading of Disgrace that pays attention to the emotional and moral life of its main character, specifically, the main character’s experience of bypassed narcissistic shame, survivor shame and moral shame.