Was that Meade, the guilt-culture/shame-culture thing? I'd forgotten that. People use it a lot to talk about Homeric society; I didn't know they used it to talk about real people. (As you can imagine, given the splitter that I am, I find it over-schematized.) Oddly, I might argue the reverse: that Dean is externally driven, with John setting his moral direction, and that his sense of inadequacy comes from a perceived failure to live up to John's standards, not to his own inner moral compass. Sam is hard to judge, because so much of him is surface, and he's such a chameleon. I think he takes on other people's opinion easily, but I don't know how much they affect what goes on within him these days.

I hadn't thought of law as a way of finding a moral compass, for Sam -- that's interesting. I'd thought of it as a set of tools: law is something you do things with, rather than something that does things to you.