This chapter outlines the philosophical project of examining four specific orders of reflexive emotional response: shameShame, humorHumor, humilityHumility, and second-order emotionsSecond-order emotions, which it argues are inherently and universally human, regardless of their diverse cultural and historical forms of expressions. While cultural circumstance and context shape what they respond to, the capacity to feel these emotions, it argues, is fundamental to human nature. It frames the study’s philosophical approach by distinguishing it from psychological and linguistic analyses of the emotions under study. The approach to emotion adopted is decidedly cognitivist. It resolutely opposes reductive accounts of emotion as mere bodily responses, in favor of positioning the emotions studied as self-directed judgments rooted in human selfhood and agency. It thus takes a firm side in the broader philosophical debate between cognitivist and noncognitivist accounts of emotion in general. Acknowledging the challenges of evolutionary theory and neurophysiology, emotions like shame, humility and humor, it argues, are critical to understanding the human self and its capacity for rationality and self-critique.