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A Philosophical Exploration of Anger and ForgivenessCraig Alexander HendersonA Dissertation Submitted to the School of History, Anthropology, Politics and PhilosophyQueen’s University BelfastTo be considered for the Degree of Master of Philosophy.March 2020Table of ContentsIntroduction……………………………………………………………………. p.3Chapter One: CONCEPTUALISING THE PUNITIVE EMOTIONS1. An Introductory Note on the Nature of Emotions Generally………………. p.82. Identifying the Elements Which Constitute an Instance of Anger…………. p.153. Resentment…………………………………………………………….…… p.19 4. Indignation…………………………………………….…………………… p.365. ‘Strategies of Hatred’…………………………………….………………… p.39Chapter Two: ANGER1. When is Anger Judged Well-Grounded?....................................................... p.512. Normative Conflict: Aptness vs. Prudential Reasons………..…………….. p.583. Nussbaum: Anger as Normatively Problematic……………………………. p.634. Pettigrove: Anger as Epistemically Troubling …………………………….. p.81Chapter Three: FORGIVENESS1. Distinguishing Forgiveness from Related Concepts……………………….. p.1052. What Constitutes an Instance of Forgiveness?............................................... p.1093. An Argument Against Unconditional Forgiveness……………..………….. p.1294. The Importance of ‘Moral Reasons’ in Conditional Forgiveness……….…. p.1355. A Consideration of Objections to my Account…………………………….. p.145Bibliography………………………………..…………………………………. p.165IntroductionPerhaps now, more than ever, one could claim that we live in an age defined by anger. In contemporary culture anger has assumed pride of place in our discourse on emotions. Zach De La Rocha tells us that “your anger is a gift”, Quentin Tarantino has built a stellar reputation as one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers on the back of a body of work that almost fetishises anger-fuelled revenge, and as fans we demand that our favourite athletes show anger in the guise of ‘passion’ whilst playing for our chosen teams.It could be coherently claimed that the central role anger has occupied in popular culture is, at least in part, a reaction to continual political upheaval in recent years. Of course this has always been the case to a certain degree – the punk scene of the 80’s being marked by vitriolic protest songs aimed at Thatcher’s Government – yet there now seems to be an emergence of anger as a legitimate form of communication in mainstream public and political life, no longer restricted to sub-cultures such as those of the 80’s punk scene.We need only look to Greta Thunberg’s recent address at the September 2019 United Nations Summit for evidence of this marked change. Her ‘controlled anger’, directed at World Leaders who had failed to take strong action against climate change, was not dismissed as petulant or irrational but rather as a stirring call to arms, as proof that something ought to be done and we will hold you to account if it is not. Certainly, much of the support for her comments arose in no small part to the passionate, angry, nature of her address. Anger, it would seem, is here to stay in public and political discourse.There is another side to the coin of course. And whilst there have been movements, such as those above, legitimising and harnessing angry forms of communication to call for societal change, there are also those who are casting a critical light on anger within public life. Think for instance of the increased coverage of the pushback against what has been termed ‘toxic masculinity’. Whilst the term itself has been around since the late 1970’s only recently has it seeped into the public consciousness. In short, toxic masculinity is taken as the harmful practice of overlooking, or worse, praising, troubling behaviour as gender-specific to boys and men. The sorts of norms esteemed among those ascribed to males were traditionally concerned with competitiveness and strength; no surprise then that ‘healthy’ anger was often esteemed among men and boys. The larger debate on the issue of toxic masculinity - and gender roles broadly – is both nuanced and wide-ranging and undoubtedly goes beyond mere considerations of anger; nonetheless given that anger is both seen as traditionally masculine yet has troubling consequences, it is fair to say that it plays an important role in such debates and thus worthy of both public interest and academic discussion.Another indication of the shifting sands in attitudes toward anger can be found in the continual changes enacted in legislation towards anger within the criminal justice system. Recent amendments to the provocation defence (a defence available to those accused of murder) removed all references to anger from the formal legislation to focus more on the notion that the defendant simply ‘lost control’ at the time of crime. Hence, the new ‘Loss of Self Control’ defence, (amended in 2009) is based on the excusing conditions of the defendants (lack of) responsibility at the time of the offence rather than any notion that the anger itself was justifiable.Forgiveness, like anger, reverberates throughout public life. Living in ‘post-troubles’ Northern Ireland the notion of forgiveness is never far from political discussions and is often cited as a useful tool in bringing forth reconciliation between both sides of our still fractured community. Naturally within such discussions anger and forgiveness often go hand in hand and thought here is that should forgiveness be embraced the communities will overcome their lingering anger and start to look towards the future. Perhaps the most famous proponent of such a thought is Desmond Tutu who called for forgiveness to play such a role in post-conflict South Africa.The philosophical discussion of these interconnected topics has been as fractured as that carried out in public life. Even as far back as the ancients there has been disagreement as to the moral worth of anger. Aristotle’s famous approval of virtuous anger – that is, to be angry “at the right things and with the right people, and also in the right way and at the right time” - stands in stark contrast to the broad position of Stoicism. The ‘Stoic Sage’ being beyond resentment as they cannot be wronged “in the sense that counts”. Such disagreement remains in contemporary philosophical discussions on anger and motivated the writing of this thesis. Likewise, there has been a lack of agreement within the philosophical literature (both historical and contemporary) as to what exactly anger is. To this end we shall see that I begin my thesis with a chapter devoted to laying the conceptual basis of the arguments which follow. Here I draw upon the philosophical literature on emotions, anger and forgiveness to reflect on the elements that constitute anger broadly and then highlight the degrees of variation across these elements that serve to differentiate different types and competing conceptions of anger. Chapter One, then, acts as a typology of anger (with a note on the assumptions made on the nature of emotions generally throughout the work) laying the conceptual foundations for the remainder of the thesis. Throughout Chapter Two I then consider what I take to be the strongest objections to the moral appropriateness of anger. These objections are presented by Nussbaum and Pettigrove who argue that anger is normatively problematic and epistemically troublesome respectively. Nussbaum, owing to concerns with the motivational aspect of anger, calls for us to transition beyond this troublesome emotion, whilst Pettigrove, who takes aim at the reliability of anger’s ability to adequately identify wrongfulness, suggests that we resist the urge to limit the role of meekness in our interpersonal relationships owing to its relative epistemic advantages in comparison to what he terms ‘moral’ anger. We shall see that I concede to Nussbaum’s assertion that anger is normatively problematic holds contingently whilst pushing against the claim that all forms (or instances) of anger contain a retributive element of the nature she describes. Similarly, I broadly agree with Pettigrove’s epistemic concerns, however I respond by making a case for the role of anger as one voice among many, including meekness when identifying and responding to wrongdoing.Finally, Chapter Three considers forgiveness and the structure of the closing chapter will mirror the discussion of anger in Chapters One and Two focusing firstly on identifying what forgiveness consists in before asking when it is appropriate to forgive another for wrongful conduct. In the opening section of this chapter we shall see that within the philosophical literature on forgiveness it shares a connection with anger given that it is most commonly defined as the overcoming of anger for moral reasons. Here I present an account of forgiveness that is intimately linked to overcoming of resentment, thus standing opposed to broader conceptions that allow for forgiveness to consist in the overcoming of any sort of negative emotion towards the wrongdoer. Finally, I close by first objecting to Garrard and McNaughton’s argument for the appropriateness of unconditional forgiveness and next presenting an account of conditional forgiveness in which repentance is seen as the strongest moral grounds upon which to base forgiveness. We shall see that I concede forgiveness in the absence of repentance on the part of the wrongdoer is contingently appropriate in cases where the victim’s self-respect is not affected and they do not condone the wrongful conduct by forgiving ‘at any cost’.Throughout my thesis I hope to convince the reader of how worthwhile a discussion of these topics is; not only because of the wider political and social ramifications as outlined early in this introduction, but also on their own merit. I aim to paint a picture of a philosophical debate that is nuanced and requires careful traversal when navigating. Many of the authors I have objected to throughout my thesis have given me much to consider and where we differ it is merely in a matter of degree. I hope my work can contribute to this lively and engaging debate.Chapter One:CONCEPTUALISING THE PUNITIVE EMOTIONSIn this opening chapter I present an account of many of the different conceptions of anger which will appear throughout the thesis. This chapter is explanatory in nature and the conceptual groundwork undertaken here will form a basis for much of the argumentation throughout chapters two and three. I first introduce a brief overview of the philosophical debate on emotions broadly whilst presenting the soft-cognitivist position I endorse throughout the rest of my work. Next, I present a typology of different conceptions and forms of anger – namely indignation and resentment – in which I attempt to make salient the means of differentiation between different types of anger. Finally, I close my opening chapter with a note on hatred; specifically, the strategies which the hate-filled agent are often prone to undertake when their sense of self-worth has been threatened in the face of wrongful conduct.1.A Note on the Nature of Emotions GenerallyAs the principle concern of the first half of the thesis is to enquire as to the appropriateness of anger as a possible response to wrongdoing, it is worthwhile to consider the broader philosophical thought on emotions as a starting point for the discussion. Whilst recent trends in this field have largely diverged from conceptualising ‘emotion’ under an umbrella in favour of building a conceptual analysis of each individual emotion, it is useful, and adequate for the purpose of this section within my overall project, to consider emotions broadly before beginning to look at anger in more detail. The introductory section of this chapter then, contrasts two competing schools of thought of what elements constitute emotions generally. This serves as a means to providing a working conception of emotion within the thesis which necessarily includes both intentional and affective elements. I limit this discussion to a focus on a soft form of cognitivism which holds that some form of cognition accounts for the essence of emotion yet leaves space for an affective element. The following discussion is not intended as an argument for a particular conception of emotions, rather it serves as an indication of the assumptions made throughout the work on the nature of anger within this emotional framework. William James, writing in the late 19th Century, posited his influential feeling-centred theory of emotion in his work, Principles of Psychology. James’ theory viewed emotions as purely affective states; he identified the phenomena as consisting entirely in our experiencing the bodily changes that accompany (or in James’ theory, constitute) the emotion. An example may help to illustrate this claim. If we imagine a person who works in a busy office, one morning during work he spots concerned-looking safety officers, and suddenly hears an alarm sounding indicating a fire on the premises. In such circumstances he experiences a degree of fear and panic which manifests in the associated physiological changes - increased heart rate, shortness of breath, knot in the stomach and so forth. Whilst common sense thinking would hold that these physiological changes occur as a result of the emotion, or form part of the emotion, James’ theory holds that our feeling of these bodily changes is the emotion. Indeed, James himself writes, regarding regret, “we feel sorry because we cry… and it is not that we cry… because we are sorry”. For James, then, bodily changes occur in response to certain stimuli and our awareness of these same changes, in feeling them, amounts to the totality of emotional experience. Such an account permits of no space for evaluative judgement within emotional experience and conceives of emotions as purely affective states. Damasio notes that James’ theory is silent on evaluating mentally the situation which causes the emotion. This thought arises because such a feeling-centred theory views emotion as an automatic response to certain types of stimulus and admits of no role for agency within emotional experience. Concerning this, Damasio writes; “James postulated a basic mechanism in which particular stimuli in the environment excite, by means of an innately set and inflexible mechanism, a specific pattern of bodily reaction. There was no need to evaluate the significance of the stimuli in order for the reaction to occur”.Deigh also summarises the criticisms of theories which focus disproportionately on affective elements as the essence of emotional experience by arguing that it is a misrepresentation of emotions to represent them as, solely, bodily feelings. Deigh’s main objection to such a view is that it fails to account for the notion that emotions are typically directed at something in the world; be that a person, state of affairs, or otherwise. Whatever the emotion is directed at functions as the intentional object of the emotion and bodily feelings alone cannot have such an intentional object in the world. It follows then that bodily feelings cannot wholly constitute emotional experience as we understand it. Deigh notes that such a criticism of feeling-centred theories of emotion, such as that of James, motivated a shift in the philosophical study of emotion in an attempt to accommodate the intentionality of emotion in cognitive content. In what follows I consider theories of emotion which posit a cognitive element to emotional experience. Once again, my writing does not do this subject justice but rather sets the scene for the discussion on anger to follow. We shall see here how introducing some form of cognitive element to our conception of emotions better captures our view of emotions, which Damasio suggests we think of as, “an evaluative, voluntary, non-automatic mental process”.Cognitivist theories of emotion, in contrast to feeling-centred accounts, hold that emotions necessarily contain a cognitive aspect. Note that ‘cognitivist theories of emotion’ is a broad term under which there are many different theories which make different claims and assumptions about both the type of cognition present, and the degree to which this cognition constitutes the emotion. Such considerations led Solomon to conclude that the term ‘cognition’ is, “so variously or ill-defined” that it is unsuitable as a label for this theory of emotion and, whilst this is undoubtedly true and any standalone discussion of the emotions would do well to account for the nuanced differences in the cognitivist theories, a broad discussion suffices for present purposes. Here I consider a notion of cognitivism with regards to the emotions in which it is claimed that emotions whilst having an affective aspect, also necessarily contain a cognitive element usually taking the form of a belief or judgement. The form of cognitivism considered here does not neglect the role of feeling altogether; instead it centres, “on the fact that it is not through feeling but through cognition, perception or evaluative judgement that the nature of emotion becomes intelligible”. The move towards cognitivism, then, is a reconceptualisation of emotion in which thought replaces feeling as the central element of enquiry. This shift towards a cognitive account of emotion arose from the criticisms levelled at the feeling-centred theory’s failure to adequately capture the intentionality involved in many emotions and provide a criterion by which to judge emotional responses in terms of their appropriateness. In returning to a view akin to that of ancient writers on emotion, cognitivist theories overcame these obstacles by positing a notion of emotion that was world-directed and intentional. If we consider the earlier example of the fearful person who finds themselves involved in an emergency in which a fire has broken out in their building, we can conceive of the a cognitivist view of his fearful emotion arising from, and partly consisting in, the belief or judgement that there is a reasonable chance a dangerous fire has broken out in the premises, given that the alarm is sounding and he has spotted safety officers rushing people towards the exit. He may well then judge that he, and many others, are at serious risk of harm given how quickly the fire may spread and the large number of people in an enclosed space. These judgements and the persons concern for his own safety and that of others causes the physiological changes outlined previously: increased heart rate etc. It is worth reiterating that cognitivist-type theories do not necessarily commit themselves to the claim that the emotion wholly consists in these judgements; rather that they are the essence of the emotion that can coexist with the physical changes. Importantly, they do provide a criterion by which they can be judged for their rationality; namely the belief or judgement which occasioned the emotion. If the person in the previous example knew for instance that there was a routine fire drill at the same time and date every month yet still reacted with intense fear on every occasion it would seem to be an irrational response given what he knows, and in contrast, if the alarm sounded outside of the time of the fire drill and he was aware that his wife and small child were in the building waiting for him we would judge a higher degree of fear (for his families safety) as rational. Admitting of a cognitive element to emotional experience, then, not only fits with our intuition that emotions involve some form of judgement and are world-directed - I am angry towards x because he/she wronged me, I am afraid of y because it is dangerous - it also affords us with a richer target to critique.Whilst I am here working under the broad umbrella heading of ‘cognitivist theory of emotion’ in this example the cognitive element specified is that of an evaluative judgement. Of such cases Deigh writes, “every emotion… is necessarily about something, however vague or indeterminate, and what it is about is determined by the evaluative judgement it contains. Consequently, such a judgement is an essential element of the emotion”. It is this evaluative thought that defines the emotion and appears within emotions as a matter of conceptual necessity on cognitivist accounts. Peter Goldie’s treatment of the emotions is perhaps closest to the form of cognitivism which this thesis subscribes to. His position on emotions could be characterised as an attempt to develop an understanding in which there are designated roles for both object-directed cognition and the phenomenological force of the affective aspect of emotion in which neither are secondary, and both contribute to the uniqueness of emotionally charged thought and feeling. He posits a notion of ‘feeling towards’ which he argues can house both intentionality and feeling; it is, “thinking of with feeling, so that your emotional feelings are directed towards the object of your thought”. Such a concept encapsulates both, the spirit of James’ thought which placed feeling at the centre of emotional experience, whilst preserving the intentionality required to view emotions as voluntary world-directed states.In addition to better accounting for our conception of emotions as intentional and involving a judgement or belief, cognitivist theories provide an accurate means of differentiation between emotional experience. Griffiths notes how empirical research supports the claim that we differentiate between emotions owing to the different cognitive content across different emotions (and types of emotion). He refers to a study in which two participants were given an identical boost of adrenaline, and thus experienced similar bodily changes. The emotion which each participant claimed to be experiencing differed, however, depending on the visual stimulus provided during the study; despite experiencing near-identical bodily changes the participants identified their emotional state as anger or euphoria depending on the stimuli. Such findings indicate - tentatively at least - that for the purposes of identifying our own emotions, introspection and interpretation of the phenomenological profile of felt emotion is not capable of providing a sophisticated or reliable means of differentiation.I do not consider a third competing conception of emotion within this section: the position which holds that the cognitive content wholly constitutes the emotion. Such a view, often attributed to the Stoics, admits of no unique nature of emotional experience and instead views emotion as best understood to be a particular kind of thought. Such a position disproportionately focuses on only part of the emotional experience; in this case cognition, and fails to capture the complexity, and affective element which is inseparable from many, or all, emotions.In sum, then, this introductory section serves as a brief note on how adopting a conception of emotional experience incorporating both affective and cognitive aspects accounts for our idea of emotions as intentional, provides one criterion upon which to judge emotions on their rationality – the underlying belief or judgement – and finally, provides a more sophisticated means by which to differentiate emotions than mere introspection and interpretation of the phenomenological affective aspect of emotion. Having established this basis, we can now turn to the emotion of anger.2.Identifying the Elements which Constitute an Instance of AngerAnger, we shall see, is most often an emotional response that is provoked by conduct which we deem to be wrongful. Aristotle’s classic treatment of anger was founded upon his notion of ‘slighting’; we are provoked into a response not only through injury or harm but, importantly through the insult, or slight, contained within such an injury. In this sense, anger focuses its gaze beyond the wrongful act in being concerned with the intentions of the agent who committed the act, and the symbolic message communicated therein. Anger is granted a defensive role across the literature by thinkers as diverse as Bishop Joseph Butler (arriving at this conclusion through reasoning on why a perfect God would bestow upon humanity such a volatile passion), Jeffrie Murphy (who approached his treatment of resentment with social and political overtones in pondering upon whether Adam Smith was correct in claiming that retributive justice has much in common with ‘institutionalised resentment’) and Martha Nussbaum (granting anger a role of instrumental usefulness at best from which we ought to transition beyond).I seek to make clear throughout this chapter that, whilst most conceptions of anger discussed throughout aim to fulfil a defensive function, both what they are defensive of, and how they carry out this role, differs according to competing conceptions and individual types of anger. Resentment broadly, (and particularly so for Murphy) for instance, has close links with self-respect and thus is an attractive response to those who feel the treatment they have been subjected to was somehow beneath the standard of which they can reasonably expect thus defending notions of self-respect. Indignation, in contrast, is typically seen as occupying a more impersonal role in social interactions and is defensive of morality in general. Hampton, as we shall see, posits a novel alternative means of differentiation between these two emotional responses centred upon whether the agent experiences fear of being downranked. Throughout this chapter I aim to show that a common theme amongst these subtly different forms of anger is that they encompass a variety of responses to perceived wrongfulness. The differences between them arise in terms of:1) Their cognitive content: taken to be a belief or judgement. We will establish that anger is a response to wrongful conduct; hence, the person who experiences anger will judge that a wrong has been committed. The differences across forms of anger arise here in the content of the judgement i.e. the nature of the wrong, against whom and so forth.2) The motivations they implant upon the agent, and the form of action which results i.e. how the agent responds to the perceived wrongful conduct. These motivations may vary in type depending on the form of anger or hatred experienced. These can range from a wish to communicate disapproval of the conduct to a wish for personal revenge against the offender. 3) The functional role of each form of anger. Generally-speaking, across all forms of anger the primary role will be one of defence. As we shall see, however, what exactly anger is defensive of varies across these differing forms of the emotion. Whereas resentment may be taken to be defensive of our notion of self-worth for instance, indignation seems defensive of moral rights generally. These variations in functional role are discussed in more detail within the typology of anger throughout the remainder of this chapter.Throughout this opening chapter I hope to show that the plurality of emotions available to us reflect the complexity of social life. Our sense of self, and by extension self-respect, is inseparable from the interpersonal relations we participate in. We are embedded in an interpersonal, social, world, and the injuries we receive reflect this in such a way that the harm suffered goes beyond merely physical injury and instead impact both our social standing and our conceptions of self-worth. As Hume writes, “men always consider the sentiment of others in their judgements of themselves”. Whilst such status-injury may rightly be described as symbolic in nature and secondary to considerations of intrinsic harm, it seems altogether too flippant to merely dismiss such considerations as meaningless and thus, the claim that anger plays an important role in defending our sense of self-worth is worthy of serious philosophical examination. Aristotle captures the important defensive role of anger eloquently:“The deficiency… is blamed, because those who do not get angry at things that ought to make them angry are considered to be foolish… Such a person seems to be deficient in perceptivity and sensitivity and (because he does not get angry) incapable of defending himself; and to put up with insults to oneself, and overlook those done to one’s friends, is regarded as servile”.3.ResentmentCommon amongst all the conceptions of resentment to be considered here is the notion that it is necessarily a response to what the agent perceives as wrongful conduct. Holmgren captures this intimate link between resentment and morality, writing, “The cognitive component of resentment… includes the recognition that an individual has wrongfully harmed us (or someone close to us), or has… extended a morally inappropriate attitude toward us (or someone close to us). Given that resentment is widely taken within the literature strictly as a personal response to wrongful conduct against oneself or ‘one’s own’ the thinkers to be considered within this subsection on resentment largely view the emotion as occupying a role of defence against such conduct. However why such a defensive emotion is required prompts different claims by different authors, and this leads to important differences in conceiving of how this perceived function of defence is fulfilled through different types of resentful response. 3.1 Butler’s ‘sudden’ & ‘deliberate’ distinctionBishop Butler’s motivations for seeking to identify an appropriate place for resentment within social interactions were to understand why a perfect entity such as God would implant in humans such a volatile emotion. He concludes (in such a way as also proves worthwhile to analyse within a secular framework) that it is defensive of the rules of morality and of justice generally. Butler’s work provides the natural starting point upon which to consider resentment and much of the contemporary literature builds upon his treatment of the emotion as initially outlined. It is fitting to begin our conceptual analysis of resentment with Butler’s own distinction between sudden and deliberate forms of the emotion as outlined in Griswold’s perceptive treatment of Butler’s work. This will illustrate that the remainder of the discussion within the thesis concerns itself with the deliberate form of resentment.What we shall term ‘sudden resentment’ (‘sudden anger’ on Butler’s account), is little more than an instinctual reaction to harm we experience. Butler writes, “Sudden anger, upon certain occasions is mere instinct… and no more necessarily implies any degree of reason”. Griswold considers this as akin to the response you have when you accidentally stub your toe and this sort of response is available to both infants and non-human animals. Indeed, this becomes clear within Butler’s sermon:“momentary anger is frequently raised, not only without any real, but without any apparent reason; that is, without any appearance of injury, as distinct from hurt or pain. It cannot, I suppose, be thought, that this passion, in infants; in the lower species of animals; and, which is often seen, in men towards them; it cannot I say, be imagined, that these instances of this passion are the effect of reason: no, they are occasioned by mere sensation and feeling. It is opposition, sudden hurt, violence which naturally excites this passion; and the real demerit or fault of him who offers that violence or is the cause of that opposition or hurt, does not, in many cases, so much as come into thought”.Griswold considers the role which Butler identifies such an emotion playing is still one of defence however, as it allows us:“to prevent, and likewise (or perhaps chiefly) to resist and defeat, sudden force, violence, and opposition, considered merely as such, and without regard to the fault or demerit of him who is the author of them”.Taken as such, this form of response to harm lacks a moral judgement and is seemingly concerned more with the realisation that circumstances have not transpired in one’s own favour rather than a belief or judgement that one has been intentionally harmed by another (either tangibly or in rank or value). As such, the types of response sudden resentment in this sense gives rise to are solely concerned with stopping the harm and pay no heed to the social or status effects the harm may bring about, as per the above quotation. This is best exemplified in Butler’s writings when he claims that a person will react with such sudden resentment when faced with, “mere harm without appearance of wrong or injustice”. This sudden form of resentment tends to occasion similarly sudden responses borne of the desire to prevent the harm from continuing. Much like you may swat away the wasp who has taken an interest in you, the instinctual reaction associated with sudden resentment will involve such actions as silencing the offending party who is slandering you or pushing away the clumsy train passenger who has trodden on your foot.Pertinently, however, sudden resentment is not only concerned with harm, it may on occasion be a coherent response to wrongfulness. Griswold here writes:“sudden anger may also be a response to injury, which, as distinct from harm, ‘suggests to our thoughts’ – or may follow from our ‘representing to our mind’ – some ‘injustice’ or other, along with that which is the cause of that injustice”.This captures the thought that even sudden resentment may have moral concerns as well as just concerns to avoid harm. Griswold is surely justified in attributing this contingently moral dimension to Butler’s conception of sudden resentment, as we see in Butler that: “to be sure hasty, as well as deliberate, anger may be occasioned by injury or contempt; in which cases reason suggests to our thoughts that injury and contempt”. Butler’s conception of deliberate resentment, in contrast, presents much more of an opportunity for critical analysis. Rather than an immediate, instinctual reaction, an agent who experiences deliberate resentment necessarily judges that they have received intentional wrongful treatment at the hands of a responsible moral agent. Griswold again paints an illuminating picture of Butler’s conception of the emotion which is worth a lengthy quotation. On his account Butler’s deliberate, or settled, resentment is:“sustained over time, has in view the presumed cause of one’s injury, is purposeful (as when one seeks to ‘even the score’), plots the means of its gratification (in that sense deliberates), and in some way or other is associated with moral judgement… settled anger is never occasioned by harm alone… settled anger seeks to defend us by attempting to punish the source of injury and not simply to stop the injurer from inflicting the injury”.Thus - to use Rawls’ terminology – deliberate resentment is necessarily situated within the realm of the right rather than the good which has as its target moral, and not merely natural evil. We have seen, by contrast, that sudden resentment is merely contingently concerned with the right. This conception of deliberate resentment presents the emotion as an idea-ridden response - it is not an instinctual bite-back response rather it is a defensive response founded upon the idea that one has been subjected to wrongful treatment. The last sentence of the above quotation from Griswold captures the key distinction between Butler’s conception of sudden and deliberate resentment; whereas the sudden form of the emotion fulfils the role of defence merely by seeking to prevent the injury (or harm) from continuing, the agent who is deliberately resentful goes beyond this by viewing those responsible for committing the wrongful act as deserving of some degree of punishment. Thus, Butler’s conception of deliberate resentment is necessarily retributive in a way that sudden resentful response is not. It is this form of resentment that the remainder of this section will be concerned with.Deliberate resentment then, is taken by Butler as a means of defence against unwarranted injury intentionally carried out by another. Griswold makes an important claim alongside his treatment of Butler’s account in making clear that the proper object of deliberate resentment is not just the action but also the person responsible for the action as its author. In a Strawsonian sense we could say that deliberate resentment takes the agent, as opposed to merely the action alone, as its proper object because the action reflects the manifestation of the ill-will or desires of the agent.Griswold identifies the natural end, or function, of Butlerian deliberate resentment as “self-defence against actual or possible injury”, and it is able to play this role owing to the potential wrongdoer being aware that their actions will make them an appropriate candidate for such resentment and thus punishment. So, the retributive aspect of this conception of deliberate resentment is bound up with the emotion’s effectiveness in fulfilling the function Butler assigns to it – defence. Butler’s deliberate resentment both identifies wrongful conduct and punishes the wrongdoer. In doing so it fulfils the role of defence of oneself, morality as an endeavour, and acts as a deterrent for future wrongdoers. In postulating this societal-wide role of deterrence for deliberate resentment Butler creates a strong link between the emotion and promoting justice. There is, then, a communicative aspect present within Butler’s conception of deliberate resentment as a deterrent; specifically, that the act of resentment itself communicates “a moral principle that all reasonable people would acknowledge and whose acknowledgement is required if one is to form part of the moral community”.Finally, Butler whilst judging resentment instrumentally and morally valuable when constrained within its proper limits, is particularly cautious of the abuse of excess resentment. Such concerns are also present within Aristotle’s classic treatment of anger as captured within the following remarks, “It is the excess that we treat as more directly opposed to patience. For one thing, it occurs more commonly (because revenge is more natural to man (than forgiveness))”. Whilst this will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2 a brief consideration of what Butler warns of excess deliberate resentment will shed further light on how he conceives of the emotion here. Specifically, he grants deliberate resentment strong motivational force owing to the evaluative judgement the agent who is deliberately resentful necessarily makes that they have been wronged. On account of this wrong they feel justified in responding by means of retaliation or protest, hence why Butler takes resentment as defensive – without such a response it would neither deter wrongdoing nor communicate censure. He does, however, indicate that such a passion tinged with anger and perceived injustice is prone to plant a skewed narrative of events in the mind of the victim in such a way that they exaggerate the moral injury contained within wrongdoing and feel personal revenge over above what rational retributivism requires is justified. These considerations will be discussed at length throughout my thesis. However, for now it is sufficient to make clear the link between deliberate resentment, a wish for retribution, and a motivation to take personal revenge against the wrongdoing owing to the belief that they have inflicted a non-excusable moral injury upon the victim.3.2 Resentment as ProtestJeffrie Murphy posits a conception of resentment in Forgiveness and Mercy within which the emotion’s perceived functional role is somewhat narrower than that of Butler’s conception. Murphy identifies resentment’s perceived functional role as defensive of the self; specifically of notions of self-respect. In what follows I outline how Murphy’s conception of resentment differs from Butler’s in the narrowness of its gaze and in being occupied primarily with the disrespectful message contained within wrongful conduct. His account of resentment as a response to wrongdoing is strikingly communicative in nature.Murphy links the notions of resentment and proper self-respect to such a strong degree that he is comfortable claiming that if one fails to respond to disrespectful conduct with resentment that they are necessarily deficient in proper self-respect. Such a thought arises from the belief that our self-respect is – in part – socially constituted and thus his conception of resentment is one which places the emotion firmly within the arena of interpersonal relations involving not only victim and wrongdoer but also interested observers attentive to both; the symbolic messages he perceives within wrongful conduct and the protest against these contained within an instance of resentment. Such issues bear directly not only on what resentment is for but also, and more pertinently for the discussion within this chapter, what resentment is.This is what I take as Murphy’s motivation in postulating the notion of symbolic messages which he identifies in both the act of wrongdoing and protest against it. Murphy writes of these symbolic messages:“they are ways a wrongdoer has of saying to us, ‘I count but you do not’, ‘I can use you for my purposes’, or ‘I am here up high, and you are there down below’. Intentional wrongdoing insults us and attempts (sometimes successfully) to degrade us – and thus it involves an injury that is not merely tangible and sensible. It is a moral injury and we care about such injuries”.A particularly close-to-home example might be best used to illustrate the many elements that constitute resentment and bring Murphy’s idea of the symbolic messages within wrongdoing to the fore. As I write this chapter in the silent study area of my university library, I am occasionally confronted with students who flout the rules and chat loudly distracting others. I think it’s fair to say I often respond to these instances with resentment towards the chatting students at such time. Aligning with the previous definitions and quotes on resentment I do not particularly take the wrong to be the chatting qua chatting but rather as the lack of due respect they show myself and others by adhering to the rules of silence. I judge that they are aware of such rules, that they are aware of the other students being of such rank that they should respect their need to work, and indeed I judge myself and others as deserving of the silence of which we can reasonably demand. Thus, my concern is not merely with the chatter but with what I take to be their implicit judgement that their wishes matter and mine do not. Note that such resentment may not be warranted; I may be, and most likely am, of simply irascible character and exaggerate minor slights against myself – such issues will be considered (more generally of course) in Chapter Two, but for now this example is useful in highlighting how the cognitive judgement within resentment is, something of the form, “I have been treated by x in such a way that reflects x’s belief that I am not worthy of a better standard of treatment”. Importantly, this example also illustrates the personal nature of resentment – I am resentful towards x because the nature of his action betrays to me his belief that I am not worthy of due consideration. Perhaps a calmer person in my position would respond indignantly to x’s conduct because everyone is being disadvantaged however I, in this example, am responding in a very personal way which is typical of resentment. On Murphy’s account, then, my resentment in such a scenario amounts to the judgement that the wrongdoer by refusing to respect my standing as his equal - treats me with disrespect by flagrantly disregarding my right to certain standards of treatment. I judge him as an appropriate object of my resentment not only in lieu of his conduct but also on account of the symbolic messages his conduct communicates about his attitude towards me. These judgements form the motivation to protest such conduct and in doing so assert that I am of such worth that I don’t have to accept such treatment. To not protest in this way would – Murphy argues - be to show a deficiency in proper self-respect as I would be acquiescing to the harmful message contained within the conduct. Thus, a lack of protest would successfully degrade me and my own notions of self as I would be condoning the message that I am not of a high worth. Conceived of in this way - with a necessary strong tie to self-respect, and stirring motivations of retributive protest - it would seem, on Murphy’s account that I ought to protest such disrespectful conduct rather than the protest merely being permissible. So, to summarise briefly, Murphy’s account conceives of resentment as an emotion of communicative protest concerned with the defence of one’s own self-respect. On this account when we respond to wrongdoing with resentment, we affirm that we are worth more than the wrongdoer evidently values us through both their wrongful conduct and message of disrespect implicitly communicated therein.3.3 Fearful ResentmentHampton, defines resentment as follows,“People… only resent injuries that have been deliberately inflicted by one who is able and required to respect – but does not – their value and rank. Resentment is an emotion which reflects their judgement that the harmful treatment they experienced should not have been intentionally inflicted on them by their assailants insofar as it is not appropriate given their value and rank… Hence it presupposes that they have experienced treatment they take to be demeaning and therefore wrong. But not all demeaning treatments are resented; one resents only culpable wrongdoings – demeaning actions for which their agents can be not only held responsible but also blamed”.This lengthy quotation deserves inclusion within this section as Hampton captures both the essence of a Butlerian conception of deliberate resentment and the complex interplay between the many moving parts of resentful emotion. We can see from this how resentment will necessarily involve a belief or judgement that one has received treatment beneath that which they are reasonable entitled to and thus reason that the notion of wrongfulness contained within an instance of resentment is inseparable from a notion of self-worth. So, the victim in an instance of resentment will have an implicit theory of human worth according to which they judge that the perceived wrongdoer has failed to treat them according to their rank and value. We can also see from Hampton’s definition of resentment how it captures Strawson’s thought that the reactive attitudes are concerned with, “the good or ill will or indifference of others towards us, as displayed in their attitudes and actions”. Importantly, the resentful victim isn’t solely reacting to the wrongful act rather they are pushing against the judgements contained within the wrongdoer intentionally subjecting the victim to treatment beneath that which the victim believes the wrongdoer knows they should reasonably expect. Interestingly however, and unique to Hampton’s conception of resentment, is her thought that the agent who responds to wrongful treatment with resentment – rather than, say, indignation – experiences a degree of fear that the conduct was not wrongful, but in fact warranted. The resentful victim’s fear then, on this account, is that their rank and value is lower than they had assumed as evidenced by the type of conduct they have been subjected to and it is this self-doubt resentment also provokes the agent to push against. For Hampton then, resentment is primarily characterised by two elements: the fear that such lowly treatment is warranted owing to the agent being lower in rank than previously thought and an act of defiance that pushes against this fear. It is worth considering this compelling notion of the fear that accompanies resentment here. She terms this sort of fear as consisting of some degree of doubtful belief, writing “you neither fully believe it nor fully disbelieve it”. Essentially, the victim half-believes that the offender was right to treat them in such a way yet also wishes that the belief is not true. This paints a picture of the victim who responds with resentment as struggling against their own self-doubts which have been provoked by the treatment they have been subjected to. The act of defiance which accompanies this fear – and which Hampton characterises as the heart of the emotion (resentment) is that “‘you would have it’… that you are high in rank and value”.Now, Hampton’s conception of resentment builds upon that of Murphy’s just outlined. However, given the central role both thinkers conceive of ‘downranking’ having in the social interaction within which resentment takes place, it is worth briefly considering Hampton’s illuminating thoughts on why this attempted assault on the victim’s rank is wrongful. In doing so she posits an interesting distinction between being ‘demeaned’ on one hand and being ‘lowered in value’ or ‘diminished’ on the other. To be demeaned, as per her conception, would be closely linked to my reaction in the previous library example. In short, I don’t believe that the wrongdoer’s conduct is making clear to me that I am not as highly ranked as I thought, rather I have confidence in my high rank and was demeaned precisely because I was subjected to treatment that falls beneath that which someone of such a rank can expect. Hampton illustrates this through the example of a prince being insulted when he does not receive royal treatment, she writes, “it is because he believes he is not lower in status that he regards the treatment as insulting”.She rightly notes that the victim’s view of whether he has been demeaned depends upon the sort of theory of human worth he holds. A theory of human worth involves several aspects:“first , a conception of what it is for a human being to be valuable or of worth (e.g., is he of instrumental or of intrinsic value?); second, a conception of how by virtue of their value, human beings should be ranked relatively to one another (e.g., must they be ranked as equals or should some be ranked higher than others?) in which an individual’s rank determines her ‘standing’ relative to other people; third, a conception of how evidence for that value is to be ascertained so that rank can be determined (e.g., competitively? Non-competitively…); and fourth, a theory of how (if at all) human beings can gain or lose value (and thereby rank).An example may be best to illustrate this. For instance, if student X submits a PhD application on a topic that is already well established and the proposal itself brings nothing new to the existing discussion, she may rightly get passed over in favour of student Y whose proposal looks at the discussion from a new perspective and makes unique, defensible claims. Now, if student X is resentful over her failed application because she believes she has suffered a wrong this amounts to an inappropriate instance of resentment owing to the fact that her judgement of suffering an unjustified wrong is mistaken. Rather, she has merely been turned down for legitimate reasons. Importantly, one’s implicit theory of self-worth can prevent oneself from feeling demeaned when we would claim that they really ought to feel so. Such cases occur when the value the victim applies to their own worth differs from that which a third party would ascribe to them. We can sympathise here with victims of domestic abuse who, through continual exposure to such abhorrent treatment come to internalise the low worth such treatment attributes to them and come to believe that it reflects a rank lower than that which they hold. Often, victims of such abuse feel resentful at the sympathetic friend who attempts to convince them of their high rank and value such is the impact the abuse has on their own conception of self. Indeed, Hampton mentions being informed by a rape counsellor of a woman who failed to report being raped by a man because she thought this was something women had to accept. Hampton distinguishes such cases from that of being demeaned, and posits that these are instead examples of the injury being one of diminishment. She identifies two ways in which the victim of wrongful conduct can come to be diminished:Presented with evidence of a low rank. When a victim of wrongful conduct suffers diminishment of this type they do not believe that their rank has been lowered as a result of the wrongful conduct, rather they view the conduct they receive as evidence that their rank was lower than that which they previously had thought. Hampton contrasts this with an agent who feels demeaned. The prince who is treated like a pauper, Hampton considers, finds the conduct demeaning precisely because he is confident that his rank is such that the treatment he has received is beneath that which he deserves. In contrast the victim of domestic abuse may come to view this continued low treatment as raising the possibility that this is the sort of conduct they are worthy of and come to view themselves as occupying the low rank the conduct suggests. Hampton writes of this: “To the extent that her sense of self-worth is shaken, any emotional protest against the insult will be mixed in her with the fear that the action wasn’t an insult after all”.Literal Diminishment. This form of diminishment involves the victim feeling that the wrongful conduct is of such a nature that it literally degrades them. Such a feeling involves a necessary adoption of a competitive conception of self-worth on the part of the victim analogous to, for instance, a boxer’s record in the ring. Just like the previously undefeated boxer might, having suffered their first loss, feel that the loss has made them lower in rank, the new parent who has their parenting questioned may come to feel that the act of being publicly questioned and thus having their abilities judged has somehow made them a less esteemed parent. Importantly this does not necessarily reflect a belief that they now come to view themselves as worth less as a human being but rather as parents. Hampton writes of such cases, “they may worry or even believe that the injury from the action which makes them less than their ideal thereby makes them less valuable, so that they no longer merit the same kind of respectful treatment they did before the injury”. This sense of literal degradation is, to lean on Hampton’s words again, “the subjective experience of something one takes to be objectively possible”. So, the parent who feels less valuable in light of receiving a negative judgement of their parenting style may hold that this feeling reflects the objective lowering of her worth as a parent.Griswold raises doubts against Hampton’s claim that resentment necessarily betrays weakness in the sense that the resentful person is so because they fear that the treatment they have received has revealed to them a rightful rank which is lower than they had thought. Rather he views this as a contingent element of resentment – we may fear that this is the case, but we don’t necessarily do so when we respond with resentment. Unsurprisingly he bases his objection to Hampton’s claim on the impersonal aspect of resentment he identifies in Butler’s deliberate sense of the emotion. On Butler’s account, the reaction is not merely a response to oneself being wronged but also of a judgement that the action itself is wrongful – it is the sort of thing which should not be done. Griswold notes that this is partly why the protest within resentment contains a powerful element of indignation and the protest is public in nature. He writes, “the principles being stood up for are shared, and so too must be the indignation at their violation”. The protest within resentment also, Griswold claims, contains the belief that you do have a degree of certainty concerning your social rank and the respect you are due for the protest also says, “’it is not to be done’” but that it is not to be done to you (and of course this assumes that you have the standing to demand not to be treated thus)”. Such an account does not reveal a fear on the part of the victim that her ‘true’ rank has been revealed to them. Rather, the victim is asserting that such conduct is wrongful to all, and I deserve treatment of the same standard as you, or anyone else. Resentment, Griswold writes, “embodies the demand that the wrongdoer show the proper respect - and be accountable for not having done so”. I find myself in agreement with Griswold here yet compelled to concede that Hampton’s illuminating discussion on the fear that accompanies resentment holds contingently, whilst pushing against any claim that resentment necessarily contains such half-belief or self-doubt.4.IndignationStrawson, within ‘Freedom and Resentment’, conceives of impersonal attitudes such as indignation, as ‘kindred’ to the reactive attitudes (of which resentment is one) as:“The sympathetic or vicarious or impersonal or disinterested or generalized analogues of the reactive attitudes I have already discussed. They are reactions to the qualities of others’ wills, not towards ourselves, but towards others”.Taken as such indignation is seen as an impersonal analogue to resentment such that it isn’t concerned with defence of self (or self-respect) primarily, instead it is concerned with a defence of the moral rights generally. This is not to say that indignation strictly cannot be felt in response to wrongs against oneself as Strawson rightly states that this can occur. Rather the distinction holds, on his account, because one can feel indignation in response to wrongs against others hence the impersonal nature of the emotion in contrast to the necessarily personal flavour of resentment. I’m struck that this distinction may be presented too strictly here yet concede that the essence of the difference between resentful and indignant response is captured by the personal nature of resentful responses to wrongfulness. Perhaps we can hold that as the ties weaken between ourselves and the victim of wrongful conduct, we drift from feeling resentment into the territory of indignation. Such a thought captures how we may often harbour resentment towards those who injure or wrong close friends or loved ones despite not being harmed ourselves. Thus, we can commit to the view that resentment is aroused in response to wrongs against ourselves or those within our close circle of concern whereas indignation amounts to an impersonal analogue where the concern is taken more as adherence to a general principle or obligation to respect morality generally.Hampton posits an interestingly distinct conception of indignation which she presents as contrasting her notion of resentment as necessarily betraying a fear that one’s rank is lower than they assumed. She presents a persuasive example to illustrate her conception in which she imagines a mother has been ‘wronged’ by her small child as the child has lied to her. Hampton writes of this scenario:“Of course, it would be appropriate, even required, of the mother to protest the child’s action… but we would think it strange of the mother to resent the lie; surely, we would think, the mother is ‘above’ resentment in such a situation. And if she did resent it, we might speak of her as feeling insecure”.In such cases, Hampton considers, we protest the action because we defend the value which makes the behaviour wrong, not because we fear the behaviour has shed light on our true worth. This form of anger is what Hampton takes to be as indignation as opposed to resentment, and on it she writes, “unlike resentment, this anger is not intended as a personal anger, and the protest it involves is not intended as a personal defence”. Her distinction between resentment and indignation then, bears similarities to the previous conception outlined in that she takes indignation to be impersonal and resentment personal. However, she goes beyond merely this and holds that, “indignant victims only experience being demeaned, resentful victims are both demeaned and diminished”. In doing so, Hampton holds that those who experience indignation are beyond resentment (in the sense that they are beyond fearing the wrongful action is justified in viewing themselves as unworthy of better treatment) in such a way that they:“regard their assailants as merely pitiful, already have a high degree of belief in what the resentful victim is struggling to have full confidence in, namely, that the wrongdoer’s action has failed to respect their true value. So the indignant person experiences neither the fear nor the defiance which is characteristic of resentment”.Hampton herself identifies a certain kind of fear and defiance within indignation. Namely that the indignant person fears that not to defy the wrongdoer’s challenge towards their value would be to fail to discourage future challenges to people’s value. But this differs from her conception of fearful resentment in the following way: indignation (on her account) protests immoral conduct and takes as its perceived function the defence of the value which is threatened by such conduct – the indignant person here has no belief that the conduct is not in fact wrongful and that her conception of self-worth is falsely high. As we have seen, for Hampton, resentment is, “an emotion whose object is the defiant affirmation of one’s rank and value in the face of treatment calling them into question in one’s own mind”.5.A Closing Note on ‘Strategies of Hatred’In closing this chapter, I briefly consider specific notions of hatred. These conceptions of hatred are illuminating as they are seen by Hampton and Murphy as appealing ‘strategies’ for the victim who responds to wrongdoing with resentment. Evidently then both authors identify a link between resentment and a strategy of hate despite the distinctness of these emotions. This linkage rests on the fact that such ‘strategies of hate’ are possible responses motivated by resentful victims who experience the fear highlighted by Hampton; they half-believe they occupy the lowly rank the conduct attributes to them. These are termed ‘strategies’ then, as they are seen to be a deliberate response by the victim who wishes to push against the conduct they have been subjected to (and the rank it attributes to them), as well as their own fear and half-belief. Essentially then despite acknowledging that hatred itself is a distinct emotion from anger this discussion is necessary in understanding and explaining the sorts of responses available to the person who responds with fearful resentment. Those victims who respond with non-fearful resentment i.e. those who are assured of their high rank and value and are demeaned, rather than diminished, by the wrongful conduct, may still undertake such strategies, however.Hatred generally, like the forms of anger considered previously, is constituted both by a negative judgement directed towards another person and a motivation to act on this. One important difference to note between anger and hatred is that anger – as we have seen – is necessarily felt towards another as a response to a wrongful action whereas hatred may be felt towards another without the condition that it be occasioned by an action they have performed. Wallace provides further differentiation between hatred generally, or ‘blind’ anger (as opposed to the conceptions of anger discussed thus far; tentatively termed ‘moral’ anger in that they respond to perceived moral wrongs – not that they are necessarily a moral response). He considers that such hatred or blind anger seeks to inflict harm as an end in itself whereas the ‘reactive emotions expressed by moral sanctions’ (of which the previous conceptions of anger are types) are founded upon the angry agent’s judgement that the object of their anger has failed to meet the moral obligations attributed to them. Such a thought further reinforces the parallels between resentment and moral hatred.Within this sub-section I put forward several distinct conceptions of the ‘strategies of hatred’ posited by Murphy and Hampton. I focus narrowly on these strategies owing to the linkage with resentment previously highlighted. Hampton’s illuminating discussion of hatred posits three distinct forms of the emotion; ‘simple hatred’, ‘moral hatred’, and ‘malicious-spiteful hatred’. We close with an account of Murphy’s ‘retributive hatred’, concluding this chapter with the acknowledgment of these possible motivations of the types of response the resentful person may pursue. 5.1. ‘Simple’, ‘Moral’, and ‘Malicious-Spiteful’ HatredSimple hatred warrants only a very brief discussion due to it being generally uncontroversial in its nature. It is, however, a useful entry point in considering hateful anger more generally. Simple hatred, to quote Hampton, amounts to:“an intense dislike for or a strong aversion to an object perceived as profoundly unpleasant, accompanied by the wish to see the odious thing removed or eliminated”.Taken as such, simple hatred is not inherently social – it is an emotion based on a quality we attribute to something (within this context, a person) rather than a judgement about an action a person has carried out. The cognitive content of simple hatred directed towards another person will thus amount to something along the lines of, “I hate x, he’s far too talkative in the morning” and will lead to motivations to avoid x. This form of hatred will be all too familiar to anyone tasked with encouraging a small child to eat the vegetables they “hate”. Interpersonal simple-hatred is akin to such reaction to a reluctant child when greeted with a portion of broccoli – they both have a strong aversion to it, and both want to avoid it. Of course, such a form of hatred is not necessarily unproblematic – perhaps we can conceive of the racist or sexist person who in a similar way has an ‘simple’ reaction to avoid people of a particular race or gender. However, from a conceptual standpoint ‘simple hatred’ amounts to a straightforward attribution of a negative quality to an object or person, x, and a wish to avoid x, or have it removed. Moral Hatred, taken in contrast, is seen by Hampton as:“an aversion to someone who has identified himself with an immoral cause or practice, prompted by moral indignation and accompanied by the wish to triumph over him and his cause or practice in the name of some fundamental moral principle or objective, mostly notably justice”.Immediately we are struck with a contrast. Whereas, simple hatred could, and most often does (when felt in interpersonal relations), identify as its proper object a person, this moral form of hatred seemingly places its opposition against the immoral cause which the person has come to identify themselves with. Hampton addresses this, however, reasoning that the sorts of causes a person endorses becomes bound up with the sort of person they are. So, it is worth spelling out that although ‘moral hatred’ is directed at another person because they believe in x, the proper object of the emotion is still the person rather than x. Furthermore, this is necessarily the case. Moral hatred cannot be felt outside of interpersonal relations like simple hatred due to it being conceptually entwinned with a value judgement. Hatred of this sort is inseparable from notions of right and wrong. Hampton reiterates this point, writing, “such aversion for her cause and to her is motivated by morality” thus, hatred in this moral sense is an extension of the type of indignation I identified with Hampton above.Importantly, moral hatred does not generate a wish for the agent to act in such a way as to diminish or de-rank the object of their hatred. This is because the ‘hater’ is already convinced of the persons low rank on account of the immoral cause they have come to identify themselves with. Hampton is careful to note that this judgement of low rank does not entail that the moral hater fails to respect the person whose cause they are opposing; on the contrary they fully respect them as opponents of their own moral cause. In this sense, the moral hater may seek – rather than to de-rank their opposition – to reveal to the wrongdoer their true rank and value.A third form of hatred we must consider here is Hampton’s notion of malicious-spiteful hatred in which she identifies a distinctly competitive wish on the part of the hater to see the object of their hate diminished in rank. As outlined in my previous section, Hampton perceives the resentful victim as being in a precarious position – they don’t accept the wrongdoer’s message that they are not deserving of better treatment (or they wouldn’t be resentful they would simply accept the treatment as appropriate) yet, importantly, they fear that the wrongdoer’s conduct has revealed to them a truth of that which they were unaware – they aren’t as highly ranked socially as they had imagined. Thus, for Hampton, malicious-spiteful hatred is an attractive strategy for the resentful agent who finds themselves in a precarious position – they half-believe their worth. Such a strategy is self-defeating on her view however in such a way that renders the emotion irrational and immoral by its very conception. Whilst there are differences in the strategies of malice and spite-fuelled hatred Hampton posits, for the purposes of this discussion I will amalgamate the commonalities between these strategies in order to contrast them with moral hatred. The malicious-spiteful hater’s objective amounts to ‘getting even’ with the perpetrator who caused them to question their own value or self-worth. The strategy for getting even here involves diminishing the rank or value of the other. This wish to de-rank the other is fuelled by the hater’s understanding of the nature of the harm suffered as competitive de-ranking and by seeking to respond in kind the malicious-spiteful hater seeks to diminish the other as “an indirect way of elevating herself” or wants “company at the bottom and so desires to bring the hated one down to her level”. Thus, the hater who responds with a strategy based on malice or spite is committed to a conception of self-worth that is importantly relative to others on a competitive basis. Taken as such – and recall Hampton’s idea of resentment as innately fearful – it should be no surprise that she identifies such a response as one motivated by resentment. It is one way of seeking to assuage the fear that one has been de-ranked or offset (perhaps successfully in the eyes of the malicious or spiteful hater) the status-injury - or fear of status-injury - suffered at the hands of the wrongdoer. Hampton summarises this thought, and the difference between mere resentful response and the of malicious hatred, writing:“Resentment is an emotional response to an action in which one defies what one experiences as the diminishing message in the action. The resenter directs an attack on the one who diminished her, but she is actually attacking what he, through his action, said about her; she does not attack him. The malicious hater, however, does mount an attack on the one who performed the diminishing action, because she sees it as a way to defy his diminishing message”.Essentially then, the malicious hater transitions from defence of self-worth (via attacking the message of disrespect) to an attack on the worth and value of the perpetrator. The key differences between the ideas of moral and spiteful-malicious hatred amounts to the perceived function of, and motivations aroused by, the respective strategies. The moral hater is certain that their opponent has an aggrandised sense of self-worth; they falsely believe their cause, (which they have come to identify with as a person) is worthy of esteem or high rank. The moral hater wants to diminish this false sense of self-worth the opponent has built up. The malicious-spiteful hater, in contrast, believes, or fears, that their opponent really has secured a rank and value above that which they deserve and seeks to bring about a literal degradation of this ill-gotten rank and stature. Hampton, summarising the differences in the motivations between these two forms of hatred writes:“He (the malicious-spiteful hater) wants the literal degradation of his opponent; the moral hater only wants the opponent’s false sense of rank and self-worth (his bad cause) exposed and defeated”.5.2 ‘Retributive-hatred’Murphy, responding to Hampton posits a fourth strategy of hatred which combines many of the elements of both moral and malicious-spiteful hatred as conceived by Hampton. I close this chapter by providing brief exposition of this strategy as it incorporates much of the conceptual framework of the strategies previously outlined.Specifically, this notion of ‘retributive hatred’ contains a desire to literally degrade or downrank its object (like malicious-spiteful hatred) yet this desire is not motivated by the competitive wish to appear better than the wrongdoer. Rather, the desire to hurt the wrongdoer has a righteous dimension that is partly retributive in nature. Murphy gives the example of a person x who despite harming the victim is now content and enjoying his ill-gotten respect and well-being (perhaps achieved at the victim’s expense). He notes that to hate x and want him de-ranked bears similarities to malicious-spiteful hatred in wanting to literally diminish x because of his ill-gotten high rank but that it also like, “moral hatred in that part of the basis for desiring the hurt is the desire what seems… to be the proper moral balance of whatever goods are in question”. Thus, he acknowledges the supposedly troubling desire to de-rank the wrongdoer, however he takes it as important that this desire to diminish or de-rank the wrongdoer is motivated by reasons that are moral rather than simply competitive in nature. This difference in motivation distinguishes retributive hatred from malicious-spiteful hatred. He argues that such an emotion is not irrational or immoral by definition; it doesn’t make us inattentive to reasons. Instead it is a reason-based wish to see the wrongdoer returned to the rank the victim deems morally appropriate. In basing this wish on a desire to restore moral parity rather than gaining a competitive advantage, Murphy is perceptive in postulating a form of hatred that is distinct from both moral and malicious-spiteful hatred and one which a consideration of the punitive emotions ought to consider.Summary:The Reactive Emotions as Complex and VariedAs we have seen I commit myself to the position that these forms of anger and ‘strategies of hatred’ (and emotions generally) are partly constituted by their cognitive content and differentiate them largely on this criterion throughout the chapter. In assuming that emotions contain a cognitive element I agree with the majority of the literature featured throughout this thesis rather than presenting an argument for this position. Importantly, however, we have seen that the cognitive content does not account for the entirety of the emotions and both (a) the motivations these emotions elicit in the agent and (b) the perceived function they seek to fulfil, serve as important sites of analysis. Chapter 2 will largely refer to these elements of anger when assessing its appropriateness as a response to morally wrongful conduct. Throughout this opening chapter I have sought to lay the conceptual groundwork for the remainder of this piece of work. Rather than argue that one particular conception of resentment, indignation, or even a ‘strategy of hatred’ is the ‘correct’ conception of those emotions or strategies I instead assume that each of these types of response are open to the agent who is met with wrongful conduct at the hands of another within interpersonal relationships. The preceding discussion serves to make clear the multitude of responses available to the agent met with wrongful conduct at the hands of another.I began my conceptual analysis by introducing the broader theories of emotions I draw upon in the remainder of the thesis. This conceptual introduction of the nature of emotions generally informs the opening section of Chapter Two when I consider the conditions under which the cognitive aspect (the underlying belief or judgement) within anger is deemed to be fitting, and latterly when I reflect upon Srinivasan’s dilemma of whether fittingness (or aptness) takes precedence over reasons of prudence when deeming anger to be an appropriate form of response to wrongfulness.Throughout the typology of anger, I sought to highlight the differences between each of the conceptions of anger presented. As we have seen, the cognitive content of resentment consists in the judgement that the agent themselves – or someone within their close circle of concern – has been subjected to wrongful conduct. The sorts of motivations elicited by resentment and the functional role of the emotion are also personal in nature, as we have seen. Murphy’s account holds that resentment calls for communicative punishment as protest against the symbolic message of disrespect present within wrongdoing in order to defend the self-respect of the victim of the wrong. Whilst Butler’s account of resentment has a wider scope in terms of functional role – recall that, on Butler’s account, resentment plays an important role of deterrence in defending the values of the moral community – it is nonetheless primarily provoked by, and concerned with, wrongs against oneself.In comparison, indignation, certainly when contrasted with resentment, is impersonal in nature. Whereas the primary role of resentment broadly was taken to be defensive of oneself, indignation, as we have seen, is concerned with the defence of moral rights generally. So, whilst the functional role of indignation is also concerned with defence, it is much broader in scope than that of resentment.We also noted how, on Hampton’s conception, those who respond to wrongdoing with resentment towards the wrongdoer betray a sort of fear that the treatment was, in fact, appropriate. This introduced one further, novel, means of differentiation between resentment and indignation. Rather than viewing the two merely as personal and impersonal kindreds, on Hampton’s account the two forms of anger can be differentiated by the presence of the fearful half-belief within the victim who responds with resentment. She holds that this unique form of fear is importantly absent within those who respond to wrongdoing with indignation.Whilst I hold throughout that this presence of fear within resentment is not necessarily so, Hampton’s account nonetheless coherently illustrates one possible type of resentful response. Within such a fearful response to wrongdoing, the cognitive content is partly-constituted by the victim’s fearful ‘half-belief’ that their rank and value is objectively lower than they had assumed, alongside the defiant wish that this were not so. This defiant wish is one such motivation for the strategies of hate discussed in the closing section of the chapter.These strategies of hatred are taken by Murphy and Hampton as attractive ends for the agent who responds to wrongful conduct with deliberate resentment and highlighted the differences in the accounts of both thinkers. Throughout Chapter Two I will build upon these foundations to consider whether a wish to either downrank a wrongdoer (as either an objective lowering of rank or as revealing a true low rank) is ever morally defensible even when motivated out of a concern of defence of one’s own self-respect or to triumph over a perceived immoral cause.Chapter Two:ANGERWithin this chapter I present my argument for the proper place of anger in interpersonal relationships. I attempt to make clear throughout that, as much of my concern is with anger within dyadic relationships, the main discussion here will centre around deliberate resentment as introduced in Chapter One. Where this varies, I aim to highlight the particular type of anger under consideration.I begin with an account of when anger is deemed to be well-grounded. We shall see that the conditions for aptness or fittingness are dictated by the emotion connecting to the world in a proper way. Following this I lean on Srinivasan’s identification of the normative conflict between reasons of aptness and prudence when judging whether anger is an appropriate response to wrongfulness.The main body of the chapter centres around my responses to what I take to be the main criticisms of the moral worth of anger. The two criticisms I consider are those of Martha Nussbaum and Glen Pettigrove, who argue that anger is normatively problematic and epistemically disadvantaged in comparison to meekness respectively. In responding to these critiques, I aim to build my positive account of the contingent value of certain forms of anger within interpersonal relationships, while granting that it can have judgement-skewing effects if left unchecked. 1.When is Anger Judged Well-Grounded?The distinct forms of resentment, indignation and ‘strategies of hatred’ outlined in Chapter One have parallels with Goldie’s conceptions of emotions more broadly as being complex, episodic, dynamic and structured. Such a conception of emotional experience adequately accounts for the object-centred intentional aspect of resentment: ‘He is the one who wronged me!’, as well as the phenomenological effects on the agent following this judgement, both of which contribute to the forming of our future beliefs and actions. For instance, if I judge that a person inflicted a moral injury on me, I may now form the belief that he is untrustworthy and sever ties with him or amend my relationship with him accordingly. In making clear the judgement involved in cases of resentment then we can assess it by non-moral standards (does it correctly identify x as the cause of the injury) and moral standards (was the injury non-excusable?).As noted throughout Chapter One, I am agreeing with the vast majority of the literature which holds that anger conceptually contains a cognitive aspect. This aspect is generally taken to be an evaluative judgement or belief. Wallace captures this thought, writing:“The reactive attitudes… all seem to have fairly complex propositional objects: one feels resentful or indignant about something that somebody has done, or guilty for having done something oneself. To account adequately for this aspect of the reactive emotions, we must suppose them to have a cognitive dimension; in particular, it seems that a person subject to a reactive emotion must have some kind of evaluative belief, one that figures in the explanation of the emotional state”. The cognitive element of resentment i.e. the judgement that one has been unjustifiably wronged by another, serves as a means to differentiate both anger as distinct from other emotions, and forms of anger as distinct from one another. There is an important difference between the anger one experiences at losing out on a job because another candidate was more qualified and feeling resentful towards the interviewer because he employed the other candidate on the basis that they knew one another socially. Of course, one can form a belief, or have a judgement, without it necessarily being either a constituent part of anger or involving any sense of moral judgement. Consider, for instance, that in daily life we form beliefs and judgements which consistently influence and motivate our behaviour; this morning I checked the weather forecast and accordingly judged that there was a reasonably high chance that it may rain today, as a result of which I made sure to bring a coat. It is immediately clear from even the most basic example that our beliefs and judgements inform and influence our actions. This pertains with both non-moral beliefs and judgements about the world such as those just mentioned but importantly also with moral evaluative judgements about the conduct of others within interpersonal relations, as in the case of the example of questionable recruitment above.Importantly, the cognitive aspect common amongst conceptions of resentment that differentiates it from other emotions is that the belief or judgement contained within is of the sort which indicates that oneself, or someone whom we care about, has been subjected to a wrongful injury. Within resentment then, there is a uniquely personal nature to the emotion accompanied by a judgement of intentional wrongdoing carried out by another. Resentment takes aim at wrong as opposed to mere harm. This distinction is best exemplified by Rawls’ assertion that the reactive attitudes must invoke notions of ‘right’ as opposed to merely ‘good’. Such a conception of the cognitive element which constitutes a particular instance of resentment is not a commitment that it necessarily involves a sound judgement of unjust behaviour and if the person is incorrect in this judgement they are experiencing a similar, yet different emotion, rather we are saying here that in order for an instance of resentment to be well-grounded, one of the conditions that must be met is that the judgement of wrongfulness must involve an accurate notion of the right and not merely a narrow conception of the good. Thus, when assessing the appropriateness of an instance of anger it can be asked whether the wrongdoer really did commit the act which the agent attributed to them and whether the act was indeed wrongful in a moral sense and not just on a skewed definition of wrongfulness adopted by the agent. The question we ask then when assessing whether the evaluative belief or judgement contained within an instance of anger is sound is whether it connects with the world in an apt manner.Cases of cognitively well-grounded resentment arise when we are treated in a way that is objectively beneath how we should reasonably expect to be treated. In this sense the cognitive element of anger – as is the case with emotions generally – is deemed to be well grounded when the beliefs and judgements which constitute it connect with the world in an apt, fitting, sense. So, if we consider the intentionality aspect of anger briefly introduced above (i.e. I am angry at X), for an instance of anger to be well-grounded the agent must have made a correct judgement that a particular action intentionally performed by X was wrongful. With regards to the proper object of anger then we can say that the emotion is directed at the person, as author of the wrongful action. Hence, anger is directed at the wrongdoer – specifically their attitudes and intentions towards the victim – which are evidenced by the action they intentionally carry out.The intentionality aspect of the cognitive element of anger not only picks out an object in the world but, as briefly alluded to, attributes certain characteristics onto the emotions proper object (the wrongdoer, as author of the wrongful act). If we were to be fearful at the sight of a snake, for instance, it is because we believe or judge certain features of the snake to be threatening or dangerous. So, the fearful person who can coherently point to the facts of the matter that this particular type of snake is venomous, or known to be vicious, fulfils the requirements that the judgements they make of the object are true because the highlighted features are suitably dangerous to justify fearful response. Now, were the person to perhaps catch a passing glimpse of a snake and react with fear despite the particular type of snake (unbeknownst to them) being completely harmless we would judge the response reasonable rather than true i.e. it was reasonable to assume the snake was dangerous from the information available to the person despite the fact that all-things-considered this judgement of danger was false. Relatedly, this can also explain why we judge those who experience fear at, for instance, balloons would struggle to identify features of the object that ground a judgement of danger. In such cases we resist that the fear is well-grounded and instead judge that the fear is more likely the result of a phobia or psychological quirk on the part of the agent. So, we can assess the belief element of the emotion either in terms of its truth or in terms of its reasonableness. The beliefs and judgements involved in anger bear similarities to those briefly examined within fear. However, as these judgements contain moral judgements, they require further justification beyond mere ‘matter of fact’ judgements. We can thus assess whether the cognitive element of anger is well-grounded, in part, by considering whether the proper (or ‘target’) object of the emotion does in fact have the salient characteristics the person experiencing the emotion attributes to them. Anger is analogous to this which may be best illustrated by a hypothetical example. We can imagine the morally vicious person who has a distorted notion of the value of people which places a morally reprehensible importance on race. He would expect to be treated preferentially by virtue of his race and his belief that all those who differ should behave towards him as manifests his mistaken assumption that they are beneath him. Such a distorted, mistaken basis on which to base a theory of human worth is obviously mistaken and insufficient for grounding judgements of moral injury. Certainly, the family of particular angry responses considered in Chapter One under the broad heading of resentment all seem to be much narrower in scope in comparison to indignant responses. So, where the indignant person, generally, would base their indignation on say, the flouting of a general principle, it seems more likely that one would respond with resentment following the judgement that a wrong has been committed against oneself or someone within one’s close circle of concern (as in the case above wherein the resentful person has abhorrent views on race, for instance). We can conclude then that out of the multitude of angry and hateful responses considered in Chapter One, indignation – being somewhat more detached and impersonal in nature – is less likely to run afoul of exaggerating the perceived wrong. However, resentment and hatred – as emotions strongly linked to notions of self – tread dangerously close to a descent into mere subjective judgement. Such concerns motivate Butler’s consideration of the ease with which resentment particularly can bestow upon the agent a skewed narrative of events and the importance of a morally defensible implicit theory of self-worth in Hampton’s account respectively. Griswold provides insight into the notion of narrative and the central role it plays within resentment in occasioning the motivations and response of the victim. In considering Butler’s epistemic worries regarding anger and resentment, he identifies competing narratives within the social interaction which anger arises (those of the victim, wrongdoer and observers to the fact). Importantly, he notes that the presence of competing narratives does not render resentment inappropriate necessarily rather that resentment, unchecked, has a tendency to go awry and it is by itself, “not a stable basis for asserting whether or when punishment is due”. This is due to resentment’s tendency to lend the victim a partial viewpoint in which they both exaggerate the harm received and the wickedness of the offender who dealt it. This position still allows for resentment, rightly focused, to be considered a morally defensible response to injury however and is not a fatal objection to such a claim but rather a qualification that the resentful person would do well to consider the circumstance from a somewhat more detached viewpoint following the initial experience of resentment.Summarising this introductory subsection, then, we can judge the cognitive element of any form of anger to be well-grounded only when the evaluative judgement of wrongfulness both correctly identifies both the wrongdoer, as author of the action and holds to scrutiny of objective values beyond the agent’s point of view. I have indicated here that resentment, as opposed to indignation – is more likely run afoul from such a standard of objectivity as people are, by their nature, more likely to misjudge or exaggerate wrongs or slights against oneself or those close to them. However, this position also allows for cognitively well-grounded resentment in cases where the agent (or someone within their circle of concern) is uncontroversially subjected to treatment that is objectively beneath that which they can reasonably expect.Of course, the subject under consideration here is when, if ever, anger is a morally appropriate response. Different forms of anger however - as we have seen in Chapter One - amount to more than merely the cognitive pre-conditions which partly constitute them; they also generate motivations for action and - given the nature of anger as an emotion closely linked to wrongdoing against ourselves and those we care about - these motivations are often very powerful in force. These motivations, and the actions which follow, provide a site of critical evaluation over and above the cognitive element of the emotion. At this stage then we can claim that the cognitive element of anger being well-grounded is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to defend an instance of anger as morally defensible. 2.Normative Conflict: Aptness vs. Prudential ReasonsHaving briefly considered what amounts to a ‘fitting’ or ‘apt’ instance of anger I now examine Srinivasan’s piece, ‘The Aptness of Anger’. Her argument throughout centres around a real normative conflict she identifies within the angry agent between reasons of prudence and aptness. In discussing her argument here I aim to shed light on how even if an instance of anger meets the criteria above for being well-grounded, or ‘apt’ as Srinivasan terms it, it may well be the case that prudential reasons dictate that we ought not pursue an angry line of response. We shall see that Srinivasan holds that, in most instances, reasons of aptness trump prudential concerns. In what follows I agree with this assertion before devoting the rest of this chapter to a consideration of whether angry response to wrongfulness and injustice may, in fact, be prudentially valuable also.Srinivasan opens with a compelling account of how the anger of oppressed groups is often judged inappropriate, not because it is not a fitting response to these groups relative position and treatment, but rather because their anger will do their cause more harm than good. This is illustrated by Srinivasan in a vivid quote from William F Buckley Jr’s debate with James Baldwin in which he warned that violent ‘negro’ confrontation of their historical oppression would result in, “a radical confrontation… we will fight the issue, not only in the Cambridge Union, but we will fight it… on beaches and on hills and on mountains and on landing grounds”. The message here is clear: for the oppressed, to co-exist and ‘improve their lot’ they must seek alternatives to anger if they are to have their voices heard as their anger will simply be met in kind. Srinivasan also acknowledges the stoic position as calling for the “total elimination of anger on the grounds that it inevitably produces more evil than good”, as resting on notions of counterproductivity in terms of consequences. Srinivasan judges that those who argue from such a position hold the burden of proof as to why considerations of prudence trump those of aptness when deliberating on whether an instance of anger is judged appropriate. Throughout this section I agree with Srinivasan’s persuasive arguments that we ought to grant real moral weight to anger insofar as it is often “a fitting response to the way the world is” even if it brings about counterproductive consequences, and should the agent choose to suppress their apt anger owing to the consequences their angry display would bring about we ought to accept that such suppression is a sacrifice on the part of the agent.In querying the notion that we only judge anger in terms of its instrumental usefulness Srinivasan rightly notes that in ordinary conversation we talk of anger as reason-based. Certainly, Section 1 of this Chapter in which I considered in what sorts of circumstance anger is seen as well-grounded included many such appeals to cases in which anger is based on different sorts of reasons (of truth and/or reasonableness). As noted earlier then, just as we recoil from danger because of a property attributed to something we deem to be dangerous we respond angrily to particular forms of conduct because we attribute a judgement of wrongfulness to such conduct. Srinivasan notes concerns of aptness and instrumental usefulness are importantly distinct and I agree with her claim that were they to overlap notions of instrumental usefulness are commonly secondary to aptness. Furthermore, she claims that to shift the reasons for anger in ordinary circumstance from the space of aptness to instrumental usefulness is often morally troubling. In illustrating this notion, she considers a case in which a cheating spouse confronts his wife’s apt anger with an attitude akin to, ‘you have every right to be angry but if you are it’ll only make me cheat more’. Clearly in such cases we would baulk at suggestions that the wife ought to overcome her anger for instrumental reasons lest it be morally inappropriate even if fitting considering her partner’s conduct. For Srinivasan there are two wrongs involved in such a position:The initial betrayal of trust within the relationship, and;The refusal to treat the victim’s anger as existing within the space of intrinsic reason.She considers the counterproductivity critique of anger as committing the sort of wrong indicative of (2) above. By denying angry dialogue entry into reason-based discussion the counterproductivity critic obscures the possibility that anger is ever apt by shifting the conversation, “from the space of intrinsic reason to the space of instrumental reason” primarily (or solely).Importantly then, on Srinivasan’s account of aptness (comparable to my opening discussion of the conditions dictating when anger is well-grounded) it exists independent of desirable or undesirable consequences of a particular instance of anger. Referring back to the example of the adulterous spouse above we can see that often apt anger can bring about undesirable consequences for the agent; in this case the dissolution of the relationship/ family. With regards to oppressed groups Srinivasan identifies a dilemma with which they are faced; they can either get aptly angry at injustice or bettering (or at least not worsening) their situation. Certainly, I hold that a similar dilemma is present within individuals who must decide between displaying their apt-yet counterproductive anger. Such as the hypothetical wife who must weigh up the possible undesirable consequences for her family should she respond to her husband’s infidelity with anger.She notes that the counterproductivity critics are right insofar as they claim that prudential reasons would dictate that one should seek to avoid apt anger if the consequences are undesirable for the agent (or group, in her framework). Furthermore, she considers whether there exists an obligation or moral duty of self-care which dictates that we ought to avoid instances of apt anger insofar as they threaten the well-being of ourselves and loved ones. She writes that it may be the case that apt counterproductive anger, “is not merely prudentially irrational, but in at least some cases perhaps morally objectionable”.Srinivasan does however concede that in some instances the best course-of-action is to let go of apt anger but that to do so should be recognised as a sacrifice by the agent. A sacrifice that “lies at the heart of apt counterproductive anger”. She terms this the ‘first-personal conflict’ faced by the aptly angry; appreciating the world as it is and making it as it should be. Interestingly she also identifies a ‘second-personal conflict’ at play. To downplay the genuine moral violation that promoted another’s apt yet counterproductive anger by advising them to simply ‘get over it, it’s not worth it’ is to reduce the moral violation to “a practical problem to be solved”. She notes that to respond in to the apt-counterproductive anger of others in such a way, “risks obscuring the fact that this advice is GOOD advice only because of unjust social arrangements in which the critic himself is often complicit”. Her invitation for us to think about the advice often given to young girls to avoid being raped (‘don’t drink too much’, ‘don’t dress provocatively’) makes a compelling case for her assertion that the logic of such advice to the apt yet counterproductively angry suggests that the moral responsibility lies with the victim rather than the offender. In short; this is good advice for young girls, but it is so because men rape and likewise often it may be the case that apt anger isn’t worth it but for reasons outside of the victim’s control. Srinivasan’s assertion here is that the counterproductivity critic treats the injustice or wrongfulness as a fixed fact in much the same way that proponents of that type of women’s-safety advice take as a fixed fact the notion that women are at risk of being raped by men. She concludes that such wrongfulness is a contingent feature of social reality and that the prudential concern of ‘change that which you have control over’ can obscure real injustice at work.I take Srinivasan’s identification of the conflict experienced by those who are aptly angry yet refuse to act due to the undesirable consequences it would bring about to be an important point in any consideration of anger. This would seem to be the sort of concern Murphy has in mind when he writes that, “Just as rational beings value true beliefs, so they should I think, value appropriate attitudes – attitudes fitting to their objects”. Srinivasan’s dilemma acknowledges such a thought, that real value should be granted to apt anger even when the right action is to refuse to act upon such feelings. 3.Nussbaum: Anger as ‘Normatively Problematic’Nussbaum - defining anger broadly - deems it an emotional response to a wrongful act against oneself or someone who falls within one’s circle of concern. This circle of concern can be narrow or far-reaching in scope – we all, hopefully, notice and are moved by wrongdoing against friends and family but we too feel empathy with victims on a worldwide scale when we see particularly moving stories in the media. In this sense her conception of anger traditionally-conceived encompasses various distinct notions of resentment and impersonal indignation outlined in Chapter One. Nussbaum rightly notes that an awareness of, and emotional response to, the plights of those on the periphery of our circle of concern tend to be fleeting. In addition to the judgement or belief that someone important to oneself has been dealt an injury, Nussbaum holds that anger, traditionally conceived, conceptually includes a wish for payback. She especially focuses on the cognitive aspect of the emotion which she takes to be ‘eudaimonistic’ appraisals and beliefs. This amounts to the claim that the beliefs which constitute an instance of anger are very much an extension of the agent’s point of view rather than a detached impersonal viewpoint. They reflect what matters to the agent. This seems feasible and neatly captures how different people have unique triggers that ‘touch a nerve’. More broadly speaking Nussbaum writes, citing Lazarus, that even if an instance of anger concerns principles, say of justice or equality, this is because the agent has incorporated such concerns into her idea of what matters in life. Lazarus terms these as “core relational themes” important to the agent. On this conception of anger then, it would seem to be wholly subjective. Any objective principles apply only in cases where the agent has incorporated them into their subjective viewpoint.For Nussbaum anger can be judged well-grounded when its cognitive content is correct. In this sense her position is comparable to that which I endorse in the previous section up to a point. Our positions differ however in that she holds that anger is never justified, even if well-grounded, as it is inseparable from the desire to see things go wrong for the wrongdoer. She writes, “All that I am investigating here… is that anger involves, conceptually, a wish for things to go badly, somehow, for the offender, in a way that is envisaged, somehow, however vaguely, as a payback for the offense. They get what they deserve”. Nussbaum’s concerns with anger, then, are focused primarily on the motivational element of the emotion, as opposed to the cognitive content itself.Nussbaum, whilst critical of any notion that anger is morally appropriate or permissible concedes of three ways it is instrumentally useful. First, anger acts as a signal that something is amiss either by drawing one’s own convictions into focus or signalling to the wider world that such forms of conduct are unacceptable. Furthermore, she notes that, whilst one can identify a significant injury through alternative emotional responses such as grief or compassion, these lack the specific motivational call within anger which asserts that ‘something must be done about it’. Even whilst granting this limited role for traditionally conceived anger, Nussbaum retains her thought that should anger arise the angry person should attempt to transition beyond anger rather than acting on anger-fuelled motivations to retaliate and seek revenge, writing, “Anger brings some benefits that may have been valuable at one stage in human prehistory… But beneficent forward-looking systems of justice have to a great extent made this emotion unnecessary, and we are free to attend to its irrationality and destructiveness”.Secondly, Nussbaum concedes that anger can play a supporting role in motivating the angry person to pursue justice. Once again – unsurprisingly - she suggests that this is merely a step towards transition and future-orientated thinking and as such the angry person should continually reassess their motivations lest they become contaminated with a retributive flavour. Finally, she holds that anger can often be a useful deterrent playing a role in protecting rights. Importantly however she contends that deterrence based on anger is not feasible long-term and rarely leads to peace and social utility. Taken within small scale interpersonal relations such thoughts would shift from notions of an uneasy peace based on anger to thoughts of a frayed relationship in which anger acts as a deterrent in Nussbaum’s conception. 3.1. The ‘Wishful Thinking’ of RevengeAs noted in the introduction to this chapter, Nussbaum identifies two ways in which anger, traditionally conceived, is normatively problematic. In this section I first analyse her criticisms of the payback wish which she considers conceptually present within an instance of anger (however vague it may be). The presence - by matter of conceptual necessity - of a desire for retribution within all forms of anger is troublesome for Nussbaum. She argues that it amounts to the angry victim of wrongful conduct as necessarily believing that they have an entitlement for payback against the wrongdoer and that the wrongdoer ought to be punished; coupled with the desire to see this punishment inflicted or inflict it themselves. This thought bears similarities to Butler’s concerns with a desire for revenge arising when excess anger goes awry when left unchecked. However, Nussbaum’s objection is not merely that anger unchecked leads to a desire to see payback inflicted on the wrongdoer, rather it is more deep-rooted in judging that even cognitively well-grounded instances of anger are infected with a wish for payback and thus it can never be a justified or morally defensible response to wrongful conduct owing to the illegitimacy of such a thought. Much of this sub-section considers a hypothetical example which Nussbaum uses to illustrate anger’s shortcomings as a response to wrongdoing owing to the misguided ‘payback wish’. I use this example firstly to best demonstrate Nussbaum’s critique of the retributive element present within anger before considering this example alongside both Srinivasan’s notion of anger as a wish for recognition and a communicative account of retributivism as a means of showing how anger - when conceived as a wish for recognition or communicative punishment - avoids the pitfalls of Nussbaum’s narrow definition of anger as conceptually linked to a particular notion of ‘payback’.Nussbaum dismisses the retributive thinking involved in the payback wish as a mistaken assumption that it will somehow repair the damage that has been inflicted upon the victim if the wrongdoer is subjected to punishment or humiliation. She deems such thinking as ‘magical’ in nature and unjustified. On her conception then, the wish for payback is seen as a (misguided) attempt to mediate the loss suffered through wrongdoing – this loss may be identified by the victim as either the intrinsic harm or the perceived down-ranking as a result of the offender’s conduct. She holds that it is an attractive proposition for the victim of wrongdoing who either cannot, or refuses to, accept the loss or injury the wrongdoer has inflicted upon them. Of course, in many instances the loss suffered cannot be restored – she notes Michael Jordan’s reaction when asked whether he would support the death penalty for his father’s killer was to ask, “Why? That won’t bring him back”. Certainly, this much is true, in many instances of serious wrong there is no way of restoring things to how they were pre-wrongdoing. Furthermore, accepting the injury and looking to the future may have psychological benefits for the victim in many cases by avoiding prolonging the injury through ongoing reflection, however this does not justify the claim that one ought to do so. Nussbaum posits a hypothetical example to push our intuitions on why the angry agent’s wish for revenge is problematic.Her hypothetical scenario centres around two college friends – Angela and Rebecca. Rebecca, is raped by a stranger, ‘O’. Nussbaum poses the question: ‘How should Angela respond to the traumatic injury inflicted upon her friend?’, and outlines several possible lines of response. Angela in this scenario may feel wronged by judging that O thinks he can treat her friends in such a way without repercussion, or she may take her friend’s rape as implicitly demeaning having a connection to fellow women who are subjected to such serious injury. Nussbaum rightly illustrates the injury sustained in a case of rape is both complex and severe. Beyond the physical injury suffered the victim is undoubtedly subjected to mental trauma and in many cases will feel demeaned and helpless as a result of the ordeal. Understandably Angela will want to support her friend however she can, and anger is one possible, and understandable, response. Given the previous exposition on Nussbaum’s conception of anger she notes that an angry response by Angela would include the wish that O suffers for the hurt he has inflicted on her friend. Certainly, given her conception of anger she is compelled to say that any form of angry response would necessarily include this wish. Nussbaum equates such a wish to ‘magical thinking’. She writes, “Raping O does not undo the rape of Rebecca. Killing a killer does not bring the dead to life”. On her account, the angry Angela, in focusing on the perpetrator is neglecting her friend whose interests would be much better served by empathy and compassion. She considers whether Angela could accompany her friend to a rape support group, campaign for better security on campus or pursue other forward-thinking endeavours motivated by compassion. Nussbaum’s conception of traditional anger is one which conceives of anger as a barrier for such constructive forward-thinking. Instead of looking to the future and how best to comfort her friend, all thoughts of future conduct when in the grip of bare anger are devoted towards getting even with the wrongdoer. The payback wish looks backward at the pain inflicted by the wrong and looks forward towards pleasure in getting payback (and by extension the pain of the wrongdoer who is punished). It is an idea of anger as preoccupied with the past and getting even, to a fault, which is captured when she writes of the angry response of Angela as, “a retaliatory and hopeful outward movement that seeks the pain of the offender because of and as a way of assuaging or compensating for one’s own pain”. The conclusion Nussbaum draws from this hypothetical example – that any form of angry response is morally inappropriate – rests upon two related claims. First, the claim that anger necessarily contains a wish for vengeful retribution and secondly that such thoughts of retribution and payback offsetting the wrong are magical in thinking. She considers a possible alternative justification of anger closely linked to payback in analysing Angela’s possible responses; ‘evening the score’ in terms of relative rank or status.3.2 Anger as Promoting an Unhealthy Focus on Relative Status and RankIn this response to Rebecca’s ordeal, Angela may get angry (as in the previous example) yet, in this case want O to be punished because his actions were insulting or degrading. On such a view, Angela would be asserting that O, in raping Rebecca, believes her to be undeserving of respect, and thinks that Angela won’t respond to this by retaliation, so he is by extension down-ranking Angela and her self-respect. Nussbaum identifies Angela’s desire to punish O in this scenario as an attempt to down-rank him relative to Angela and restore balance between them. She writes that such a desire involves Angela wanting to bring about “humiliation of O” and effect “a reversal of positions between her and O: women (and Angela above all) on top, bad men (and O in particular) on the bottom”. She grants that on this scale the response is successful – if Angela has suffered an ego-injury, and O is punished, his status is relatively lowered. What Nussbaum is critical of, however, is this focus on status-injury at all. She claims that there is no tangible restoration of balance in this scenario – Rebecca is still left to deal with the aftermath of a horrendous assault. Anger’s focus on status, then, has averted Angela’s gaze from the intrinsic goods damaged – the attack on her friend’s body and dignity – and instead focused unhealthily on perceived relative status. Nussbaum is dismissive of any concern with relative status and instead claims that even in cases where it seems like status is the good in danger of being damaged this is simply mistaken. For instance, in cases of racially motivated hate crime we may be tempted to assume that the wrong here is concerning the victim being down-ranked relatively to the wrongdoer. Nussbaum instead identifies the good in question as the victims right to equal human dignity. In the case of Rebecca being raped by the stranger, Nussbaum would indeed grant that her equal human dignity has suffered a major injury. However, an angry response attempting to down-rank the perpetrator would be a misstep as human dignity is not relative and lowering that of the perpetrator does not raise Angela’s, Rebecca’s, or victims of rape. Any ‘victory’ by way of de-ranking the perpetrator would then become a hollow victory at best.Nussbaum writes, summarising this thought:“the road of status… is morally flawed. It converts all injuries into problems of relative position, thus making the world revolve around the relative desire of vulnerable selves for domination and control”. Status-focused anger - she claims - commits a narcissistic error when focusing on relative status at the cost of intrinsic good as the person who places undue importance on perceived status is merely internalising a false social value. In contrast, payback often does place appropriate value on the intrinsic good which is damaged (in this case the physical and mental injury to the victim) however is normatively problematic in the extent to which it pursues payback as a response to the injury. A wish for payback, Nussbaum argues, is often a refusal to grieve that which is lost and has gained questionable cultural credibility. I interpret Nussbaum’s conception of anger’s focus on relative rank and status as acting as the imagined justification for the payback wish in the eyes of the agent. Within her framework (where anger’s ‘payback wish’ or retributive element is conceived of solely in the form of a ‘balancing of the scales’ notion of punishment) the only payback which is coherent is that within the context of relative status. Although we can’t restore the intrinsic moral good which has been damaged in cases of severe wrongs, we can try to restore relative status. In considering the problems with traditional anger Nussbaum writes: “when anger makes sense, it is normatively problematic (focused narrowly on status); when it is normatively reasonable (focused on the injury), it doesn’t make good sense, and is normatively problematic in a different way. In a rational person, anger, realising that, soon laughs at itself and goes away”. Within the remainder of this section I judge Nussbaum’s retributive objection to anger to be unsuccessful and will pursue two lines of critique; firstly, I will consider Srinivasan’s thought that we can conceive of instances of anger which contain not a wish for payback, but rather the victim’s wish for recognition of the wrong they have been subjected to. And secondly, I will consider the thought that even those instances of anger which do contain a retributive element can be appropriate, as often this element is communicative in nature. This notion of communicative retributivism sidesteps Nussbaum’s claim that anger’s wish for retribution is misguided as it seeks to restore balance by downranking the wrongdoer. When taken as communicative in nature the retribution anger seeks is a means to express to the wrongdoer (through punishment) that their action was wrongful in the strongest possible sense and not merely as a means to ‘balance the scales’ either tangibly or symbolically as Nussbaum claims. 3.3. ‘Recognition of Wrong’ Rather Than ‘Payback’ as the Perceived Function of AngerAs we have seen above, Nussbaum’s central objection against anger as a morally appropriate response to wrongdoing is that it necessarily deflects the focus from the ‘good’ onto a misguided wish for revenge and retaliation. This was clear from her treatment of any form of angry response in her hypothetical scenario previously considered. On her account the victim of wrongdoing who responds motivated by anger is side-tracked from pursuing responses which will benefit them, and any third-party who is involved in the interaction similarly on her account seems to fail the victim by responding similarly owing to the fact that she claims this wish for revenge overpowers their compassion for the victim and duty to support them. Amia Srinivasan provides a persuasive alternative to this claim. Srinivasan objects to Nussbaum’s claim that anger is never apt because it belies a mistaken belief in the magic thinking of retribution and considers whether we can conceive of anger in such a way that it includes a wish for recognition rather than payback. Srinivasan considers the claim that, “the erosion of the honour code in society has led to the emergence of a form of anger that involves no desire for revenge”. In postulating a form of anger in which the motivation for the victim is that the wrongdoer or a third-party recognises that they have subjected the victim to a non-excusable moral injury Srinivasan objects to Nussbaum’s central claim that the angry victim necessarily wants the offending party to suffer or that the offending party ought to suffer. Nussbaum’s concern with revenge arises from the Aristotelian influence over her reasoning on anger in which one of the supposed justifications for the retributive aspect of anger (an attempted justification which she judges as unsuccessful) was that payback successfully lowers the relative ranking of the wrongdoer in order to restore parity of ranking within the relationship in order that victim and wrongdoer can reconcile and resume relations on somewhat equal footing. Whilst this notion may have been coherent, if not appropriate, in Aristotelian-era society, modern society arguably places a lesser emphasis on the importance of relative rank. These changes in society, rather than rendering an angry response incoherent once removed from a context in which relative rank had more importance instead gives rise to distinct forms of anger as outlined in Chapter One. Srinivasan tracks this change in thought regarding the payback aspect of anger to societal changes. Whilst Aristotle and other ancient writers, operated within a society in which placed great emphasis on honour, Srinivasan argues that, “the nature of anger – how we experience it, what is calls on us to do – might well shift with historical and political circumstance”. Thus, in contemporary society which has largely moved away from the importance the ancients bestowed upon honour, Srinivasan argues that it is conceivable, and intuitive, to think that the defensive aspect of anger is better understood as a wish for recognition of the wrong on the part of the wrongdoer. Specifically, a wish for the wrongdoer to “recognise the pain she has caused me, the wrong she has done me”. Srinivasan concedes that, “it might be that this sort of recognition itself involves suffering. If so then, in a sense, I want my friend to suffer. But I don’t want her to suffer willy-nilly; my anger hardly calls out for her to break her leg, or fall ill. Rather I want her to experience that suffering that comes precisely from taking part in my own”. Taken as such the suffering the wrongdoer experiences through the recognition of the wrong they inflicted upon the victim cannot be seen as revenge or payback strictly speaking; rather it is suffering by means of recognition of who one once was and as a means to facilitate moral growth.It would seem reasonable to assume that often our experiences of the emotion are more in-keeping with Srinivasan’s recognition-based conception and, whilst it is possible that one may experience resentment with a flavour for revenge as Nussbaum claims, it is certainly not clear that this is necessarily so. As per the discussion in Chapter One many of the conceptions of anger (particularly indignant response) throughout the literature posit a notion of the emotion that is more in-keeping with a wish on the part of the victim of wrongdoing to have their moral injury recognised than an outright claim that personal revenge is somehow warranted. We can grant then, that Nussbaum is correct in saying that anger has the potential to, and sometimes does, lead to an agent pursuing an indefensible vengeful response (akin to Butler’s fear of the abuse of resentment) yet still hold that proportionate anger, properly directed and acting as a means to bring about a change of attitudes in the wrongdoer such that they realise that their conduct was wrong, is an understandable and acceptable response. 3.4. Anger’s Retributive Element as ‘Communicative Punishment’What, then, of forms of anger which do contain this retributive element? As seen above Nussbaum characterises the retributive element present within anger as either a wish to repair the damage by inflicting suffering on to the wrongdoer, or as a way of balancing the scales in which the punishment which anger motivates successfully downranks the offender from their lofty ill-gotten position. She rightly judges both approaches to be unsuccessful; we can agree that often the loss suffered is permanent and irretrievable – a person who loses their friend through murder will not get them back through angry response, and a ‘balancing of the scales’ by means of diminishing the wrongdoer’s rank and value to a lowly position amounts to nothing more than a hollow victory for the angry agent. Rebecca, in Nussbaum’s hypothetical example will have to deal with the psychological and physical trauma of her ordeal regardless of whether the rapist is identified and any subsequent downranking.Nevertheless, there is an alternative account of retributivism which seems to sidestep these normative problems Nussbaum attaches to the position generally. I now outline Antony Duff’s ‘communicative retributivism’ and judge that anger as a form of communicative punishment escapes both the revenge and relative-ranking objections which Nussbaum takes to be fatal for anger on competing conceptions of retributivism. I first lay out Duff’s position broadly as he conceives it as concerned with the criminal law before relating the communicative aspect of punishment back to anger.Duff’s communicative retributivism amounts to a positive theory of retributivism which holds that we have a duty to hold to account and punish those guilty of wrongful conduct. It is thus distinct from consequentialist accounts of punishment in that the end of the act of punishment is not merely to mould behaviour or instrumentally adapt the dispositions of intentions of wrongdoers but rather is concerned with deserved censure and hard-treatment. Duff’s communicative theory of punishment is seen as building upon Feinberg’s expressivist theory. On Feinberg’s account, “punishment is a conventional desire for the expression of attitudes of resentment and indignation, and of judgements of disapproval and reprobation, on the part either of the punishing authority himself or of those in whose name the punishment is inflicted”.Duff differentiates his communicative view of punishment from Feinberg’s expressive theory by emphasising that communication is, “a rational process that seeks a response mediated by the other person’s understanding”, so it is, by its very nature ‘reciprocal’ in the sense that the other person involved in (or the object of) the communication is necessarily an active rather than a passive participant in a rational dialogue. Essentially, communication is a dialogue with the offender as opposed to expression to the wrongdoer. Feinberg’s expressive account, in contrast, need not (although it may) involve reasoning or understanding on the part of the object of the expression. Thus, punishment as a communicative enterprise addresses the wrongdoer as a rational moral agent in the normative language of the community’s values. The end of a communicative theory of punishment is to bring about repentance, reform, and reconciliation through a notion of secular penance mediated by communicative rational dialogue. The communication must be directed at the wrongdoer and takes the form of condemnation or censure that the wrongdoer deserves. Communicative retributivism generally-speaking is not only backward looking but has a dual gaze in that it judges the wrongful conduct of the wrongdoer deserving of censure but also looks forward in seeking to persuade the wrongdoer to repent for their crimes and undergo moral growth. Punishment is, for Duff, the most effective and appropriate means of persuading the wrongdoer to repent through this notion of secular penance. He writes, “the very aim of persuading responsible agents to repent the wrongs they have done makes punishment the appropriate method of pursuing it”.Within Duff’s communicative theory convictions (and for our purposes punishment generally) fulfil the role of communicating censure:“They communicate the censure that these wrongs deserve; internal to censure is the intention or hope that the person censured will accept it as justified; and to accept censure as justified is to accept that one did wrong; which entails repenting that wrong and seeing the need to avoid such wrongdoing in future”.The differences between communicative dialogue and deterrence/expressive accounts of retributivism shine through in this extract. The future-orientated aspect of the communicative account is not based upon instrumentally altering the conduct of the wrongdoer merely through the threat of sanctions or fear of punishment but through the communicative aspect of censure as persuading the wrongdoer to come to view his actions as wrongful such that he would have no wish to carry out such acts again in the future. The wrongdoer, on this account, rationally comes to recognise such actions as wrong. Thus, such an account can said to be non-deterrent in nature whilst still containing a consequentialist slant. Taken as such it is undoubtedly a positive aspect of Duff’s account that it respects the wrongdoer as a moral agent and doesn’t merely view him as someone to be treated as a passive recipient of our moral judgements. Rather, it views punishment as encouraging and facilitating moral growth. Since communicative retribution aims towards repentance and reconciliation the means with which it seeks to attain these must be through rational dialogue as one cannot be deceived or forced into moral growth. As Duff writes, “to take wrongs seriously as wrongs involves responding to them with criticism and censure; and the aim internal to censure is that of persuading the wrongdoer to recognise and repent his wrongdoing”. Importantly the wrongdoer is not viewed as a moral ‘lost-cause’ on such a view; rather it presupposes the wrongdoer as a rational moral agent situated within the normative community.Duff defines punishment as:“A communicative enterprise focused on the past crime, as that for which the censure that punishment communicates is deserved; but also looking to the future aim to which it is related not merely contingently as an instrumental technique but internally as an intrinsically appropriate means”.It seems coherent to view certain particular forms and instances of anger as having this nature of communicative retributivism as opposed to Nussbaum’s characterisation of the retributive element within anger as a misguided attempt to balance the scales. Looking back to the conceptions of anger considered in Chapter One we can see that Griswold’s conception of resentment, as well as indignation generally, seems more aligned with the idea of a rational dialogue between victim (or third-party) and wrongdoer rather than the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ picture of anger Nussbaum presents. Importantly the conceptions of resentment considered in Chapter 1 share many of the features of Duff’s communicative account. I noted how Butler’s conception of deliberate resentment has strong ties with defence not just of oneself, but of society generally; as he identified a link between appropriate resentment and justice. Such considerations echo Duff’s claim that in communicating censure, punishment is forward-seeking as it encourages repentance and moral growth through secular penance. We noted previously how Griswold categorised Butlerian resentment as communicating a moral principle that all within the moral community must acknowledge and such a thought seems more akin with Duff’s account of communicative retributivism than Nussbaum’s malicious wish for revenge. Of course it would be foolish to suggest that all forms, or instances, of anger are free from a wish for revenge – Butler himself warned of the dangers of unchecked resentment – but it seems that Nussbaum makes much too strong a claim in tarring all forms of anger as necessarily inflicted with a wish for payback in such brute terms as a balancing of the scales.What then of the normatively problematic pillars of anger which Nussbaum identifies? Clearly a communicative conception of anger and resentment makes no reference to rank or status but is the magical thinking of retribution lurking in the background? It would seem not. We can accept that such brute retributivism as that posed by Nussbaum is confused and magical; indeed, we have seen that she successfully argues for the futility of trying to restore that which has been taken in the majority of cases of wrongful conduct. Yet the desired end of communicative anger and resentment is not to restore that which has been lost or to mitigate the loss at all; rather it aims to both, hold the wrongdoer accountable for their wrongful conduct by way of deserved censure and pave the way for possible repentance and eventual reconciliation by taking place within a rational dialogue. So, when conceived of as communicative in nature the retributive element is not magical at all; it is instead a rational response to wrongful conduct which respects both the victim and the wrongdoer as responsible moral agents.4.Pettigrove: Anger as Epistemically TroublingGlen Pettigrove, in his article, ‘Meekness and Moral Anger’ provides an account of the virtue of meekness and develops interesting arguments that we ought to resist narrowing the types of occasions in which we take meek responses to be appropriate. Pettigrove’s aim throughout this piece is not to say that anger is never an appropriate response to wrongful conduct – indeed he notes throughout that even the meek will resort to anger on occasion – but rather that we ought to consider whether the perceived advantages of ‘moral’ anger (in Pettigrove’s terminology) can be better served by meekness and if so, the conditions within which a morally angry response is deemed appropriate will be constrained. In what follows I provide an exposition of Pettigrove’s account of meekness and his argument why such an attitude is advantaged over one of moral anger. We shall see that there is much of worth here, particularly his claim that meekness provides an agent with a certain sort of epistemic advantage over one who responds angrily. However, I will conclude this section by providing a response on behalf of moral anger. Firstly then, what does Pettigrove take as constituting ‘moral’ anger? He writes,“It (moral anger) involves judging that its object (A) has wrongfully harmed someone or something of value or (B) has failed to take care about something or someone in the appropriate way”.It also,“Involves some level of felt hostility or antipathy towards its object. And it involves the desire to lash out at its object or to see that object hurt”.Pettigrove defines meekness (in contrast with ‘moral’ anger) as:“the virtue whose purview is the governance of anger and related emotions. The meek person is slow to anger and is not prone to resent others, to desire their suffering, or to take pleasure in their distress”.There is an acknowledgement within the piece that ‘meekness’ as a character trait in both contemporary culture and philosophical literature is often associated with servile characters deficient in self-respect. Certainly, we need only think back to Murphy’s necessary linkage of resentment and notions of self-respect within Forgiveness and Mercy to imagine the sorts of philosophical accounts Pettigrove has in mind here. As we have seen Murphy thought that to fail to resent those who commit a non-excusable wrong against us was indicative of a deficiency of self-respect on the part of the victim. Perhaps owing to our cultural landscape I think it’s fair to say that Murphy’s view seems more intuitively appealing here; I daresay many of us have let our imaginations run amok with fantasising about what we ought to say in anger to the unappreciative boss but whether this intuitive cultural linkage between moral anger and self-respect holds firm in the face of philosophical examination is another matter. Pettigrove notes that the victim subjected to non-excusable wrongdoing is not simply presented with a binary choice of either responding with moral anger or internalising the lowly position the conduct ascribes to them. He writes, “there are often ways of resisting wrongdoing or avoiding undeserved hardship that do not involve feeling anger toward or inflicting injury upon another”. This is surely correct, and you would no doubt wonder whether someone who resents every minor slight directed at them is sure of their self-worth at all or is merely resisting against their own fear that they are deserving of the low treatment they receive. Pettigrove further qualifies this conception of meekness by stating that it is not simply absence of anger simpliciter but rather absence of anger for specific moral reasons. In contrasting this notion with despair and servility he then considers the moral reasons behind meekness to be self-control and benevolence. An agent is seen to manifest the self-control associated with meekness when they “characteristically respond in a calm and kindly fashion to aggravating conduct”. We can take from Pettigrove’s explanatory account of meekness that the responses to wrongfulness characteristic of such a trait differ from those of moral anger in terms of the intensity of affective response and their lack of a wish for retaliation. Hence conduct carried out in response to wrongdoing from a position of meekness is vastly different to forms of conduct stereotypical of anger. Pettigrove argues that those responses associated with meekness are better than those of anger in several ways which carry moral significance.The majority of Pettigrove’s paper is devoted to presenting an illuminating argument that many of the functions often ascribed as being unique to, or especially suited as being carried out by, moral anger are in fact better served by the sorts of stereotypical responses of one who is meek. Once again it is important to note here that – unlike Nussbaum’s critique of anger earlier in this chapter – Pettigrove is not arguing that ‘moral’ anger is never appropriate and that we should transition beyond it; rather Pettigrove’s motivation here is to resist narrowing the scope of appropriate meekness and to show that it should be considered a coherent and effective response “by those who are confronted with non-trivial moral wrongdoing”. To grant meekness as wide a scope as Pettigrove is arguing for would also narrow the scope of when anger is deemed appropriate beyond that which I endorse thus far in my work. In what follows I summarise Pettigrove’s epistemic objection to anger and his account of how the meek agent is better equipped to make apt judgments of the sorts of conduct deemed to be wrongful. Later in this chapter I will provide a response to Pettigrove’s epistemic argument where I will first consider Lepoutre’s persuasive argument for the epistemic value in angry methods of communication before drawing upon anger’s linkage to notions of self-worth in identifying an appropriate - albeit narrow - moral role for angry discourse within interpersonal relationships.Before providing an exposition of his argument against ‘moral’ anger as being epistemically privileged in comparison to meekness it is worth highlighting Pettigrove’s brief yet insightful reasons for judging anger to be a less than ideal way of both (a) symbolising what one takes to be of importance or value and (b) facilitating open dialogue between parties. Firstly then, he characterises the evaluative defence of ‘moral anger’ as the claim that should we take something, or someone, x to be of moral value then should someone commit a transgression against x we ought to respond with anger. Entangled within such a claim is the notion that were we not to respond angrily despite believing that x was intentionally subjected to wrongful treatment at the hands of a responsible moral agent this would symbolise that we didn’t really value x at all. Secondly, what does the perceived communicative function of anger amount to? Pettigrove judges that defenders of ‘moral’ anger hold that it communicates what we take to be of value or that we think transgressors are capable of acting in a more appropriate fashion. In short, then, such anger communicates “important moral messages”. The previous section in which I respond to Nussbaum’s critique is relevant again here. As a counterpoint Pettigrove notes that often communication with angry undertones can lead to the recipient adopting a naturally defensive position from which they are less likely to consider the message being communicated. To further elucidate his point Pettigrove invites us to consider why in couple’s therapy often the two partners undertake an exercise in learning to communicate with one another in a non-angry fashion. If anger is seen to be a detriment to productive communication in such instances, it seems that not only can non-angry people communicate messages of moral worth but in particular circumstances they can do it more effectively than their angry counterparts. Meekness, as above, is characterised by, a slowness to anger and a reluctance to be provoked by wrongful conduct and – as such – meek means of communication, Pettigrove argues, are less likely to result in a breakdown in moral communication caused by the recipient instinctually adopting a defensive position in the dialogue when met with anger. I find myself agreeing with much of what Pettigrove claims here regarding anger as a measure of concern and as a means to communicate important moral messages. There are undoubtedly other ways to show concern for x’s wrongful treatment aside from responding with anger and it would be woefully na?ve to deny the assertion that anger can often shut down dialogue by provoking the recipient of anger to adopt a defensive stance within the discussion. I do, however, contend that conceding these points nonetheless allows for a narrow role for anger as a response to wrongdoing in interpersonal relationships. In the following substantive section I respond to these aspects of the critique of anger by appealing to a strong connection between anger and evaluating (and defending) self-worth. I also consider whether having anger as merely one perspective amongst many within a dialogue, avoids – or at least alleviates – the chances of anger closing down discussion before it begins. Before such considerations, however, I now present Pettigrove’s persuasive case for viewing the knowledge bestowed upon us by anger with healthy suspicion.Pettigrove characterises the epistemic claim (as made by defenders of ‘moral’ anger) as the notion that ‘moral’ anger provides the angry person with a “unique perception of the world and may provide the first indications that things aren’t as they ought to be”. This account of the angry person enjoying epistemic advantage is undoubtedly attractive as a position. Certainly, in my exposition of Nussbaum’s critique of anger previously I outlined three ways in which she conceded that anger has a narrow instrumentally useful role and one such consideration she granted was that anger can act as a useful signal that wrongdoing has occurred. I have not argued explicitly for such a position throughout the course of the thesis so far. However, the ‘epistemic claim’ made by defenders of moral anger as characterised by Pettigrove (and loosely advocated by Nussbaum’s concession of anger’s instrumental role) is one I would endorse conditionally. Pettigrove himself does not deny that the angry person does in fact occupy an epistemically unique position, however he provides persuasive argumentation from examples provided by experimental psychology that reasoning from such an angry vantage point may be morally questionable at best and certainly a position of epistemic disadvantage comparative to one who responds to wrongdoing with meekness. Before considering the empirical examples Pettigrove presents, it is worth noting that he judges ‘moral’ anger as a state of impaired judgement in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing. He rightly notes that many thinkers – even those defensive of anger as a morally useful emotion - urge the morally angry to judge the wrong ‘in the cold light of day’ rather than responding suddenly. Throughout Chapter One I acknowledge a similar position regarding several of the forms of anger discussed. Within resentment certainly – most commonly a response to, but not limited to, wrongs against oneself – I endorse the thought that when we are in the grip of acute resentment, we ought to subject the judgement of wrongfulness to cool reflection before responding. As we have previously noted Butler himself recommended that we consider our angry judgement against the perspective of a disinterested observer as spectator to the wrongful act. Taken as such I find myself drawn to Pettigrove’s notion of the impaired judgement of one who reacts with ‘moral’ anger (again, here I take this to be primarily concerned with the forms of resentment in Chapter One) in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing. I don’t judge this to be critical for the position that anger renders the agent epistemically disadvantaged all-things considered, however. We can simultaneously hold that (a) ‘moral’ anger confers unique epistemic privileges to the victim subjected to wrongful conduct (b) this angry epistemic ‘vantage point’ is prone to trigger false alarms, and, (c) the victim ought to resist immediate response solely motivated by the beliefs occasioned by the angry judgement of wrongfulness. Consider an example I mentioned in passing previously in which an employee feels undermined by an unappreciative boss despite her exemplary performance in her position. Were the employee to – understandably some may say – come to resent her boss because of the lack of appreciation and experience Pettigrove’s notion of ‘moral’ anger one can imagine the sorts of thoughts she experiences with this rush of resentful feeling as being of the kind to think ‘I ought to resign, that will show him!’ or similar such fantastical scenarios. Now, Pettigrove’s point surely stands here; the angry judgement may be mistaken and what she deemed to be lack of appreciation was merely a result of her boss being preoccupied with a heavy workload and perhaps the judgement of wrongful treatment was reasonable at best (but certainly not true). Likewise many of the standard fantastical responses anger is prone to provoke in such situations - resigning, giving her boss a ‘piece of her mind’ or any such rash angry responses - would be irrefutably the wrong choice no matter how satisfying they may be in the immediacy of the boss’s conduct towards her. To respond immediately when acute angry feelings have overwhelmed one’s judgement would surely be to let anger divert the focus away from the good (in Nussbaum’s terminology) or - as Pettigrove forewarns - to allow anger to overpower all other epistemic considerations thus exaggerating (or imagining) the wrong and/ or the degree of response deemed proportionate. Consider however that the employee reflects on her position ‘in the cold light of day’ and, rather than acting out her anger-fuelled fantasies of resigning, considers that her best course of action is to open a dialogue with her boss. Importantly the anger felt in the immediacy of the incident remains, yet when she allows herself time to reflect, she sees that her protest or communicative ‘revenge’ is best enacted by taking the high road. The employee remains angry at the treatment she has been subjected to, yet the reflection has allowed her to reason that her best course of action is best-served by suppressing her angry urges felt in the immediacy of wrongdoing. Granted, such dialogue with her superior may be problematic in that her boss may adopt a defensive position, although if she is of good character and the distance that has appeared in the professional relationship is simply a contingent fact of increased workload this explanation will surely lead the employee to reconsider her original judgement of wrongfulness and previously desired angry means of response.I want to say of this example that even when granting Pettigrove’s assertion that anger impairs judgement in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing we can still hold that this ‘rush’ of feeling contributes to an epistemically unique position for the agent who experiences it yet recognises that they ought not react when in its thrall. Of course, to refrain from acting in the grip of anger, or to leave that initial angry judgement open to reflection or new information is sometimes no mean feat and often we are subjected to such conduct that it may seem nigh-on impossible not to enact our angry wishes. Nonetheless, the initial spark that is often associated with an angry response can contribute to a person identifying wrongs against them that they may otherwise have condoned or tolerated. I daresay we’ve all had acquaintances we’ve wanted to take aside and tell to stand up for themselves, and for these sorts of characters the immediate jolt of anger - properly constrained - can play an important supporting role in identifying wrongful treatment. I don’t mean to suggest that Pettigrove holds that this ‘immediacy’ critique shows that we ought to abandon any notion that ‘moral’ anger has epistemic value, rather it is presented as a prologue to his more substantial epistemic concerns with anger. I think it worth noting, however, that the immediate rush of acute felt anger properly constrained can provide the agent with a unique epistemic perspective unavailable to them otherwise. I don’t doubt that there are those people who exemplify meekness and are able to recognise wrongdoing without such prompts yet I still hold that there are those of us who rely upon the appearance of anger occasionally to give us a much needed push into seeing things as they really are.Pettigrove’s more serious rebuttal of the claim that ‘moral’ anger grants the agent with unique epistemic merits revolves around the notion that even when reflected upon it can have adverse effects on an agent’s judgement in morally relevant domains. Perhaps the most alarming of the findings from these empirical studies was that angry subjects, “are less likely to see the ways in which the meaning of an event, action, or utterance might be ambiguous and thus reasonably subject to more than one interpretation”. Again, using the library example presented previously within the thesis, these empirical studies suggest that the angry agent is less likely to judge the noisy students as merely unaware of their presence and more prone to believe that they were aware of the student’s presence and simply didn’t care. It’s important to note here that under such experiments the subjects were not simply in the grips of immediate acutely-felt anger or rage, but rather experiencing latent forms of anger brought about by varying stimuli. Furthermore, Pettigrove identifies within the results of these experiments that angry subjects display a worrying tendency to resort to stereotypical thinking in both attributing responsibility for wrongs and judging an argument persuasive if it is seen to be from an ‘expert source’. Finally, subjects who are angry are more open to civil projects which have a punitive rather than restorative slant. Pettigrove writes, that, “when angry, people were more supportive of punitive measures for persons they judged responsible for inflicting undeserved harm than of welfare-enhancing measures for persons who had suffered undeserved harm”. I am reminded here, of Nussbaum’s hypothetical in which the friend responds to the rape of her friend not by setting up support groups and calling for an increase to on-campus security but by demanding the harsh punishment of the rapist. In my treatment of Nussbaum’s arguments above I conceded that anger could divert the focus of the victim (or those close to the victim) from concerns of support and rehabilitation and – given the wide range of empirical studies Pettigrove presents here – it seems we must grant that, on occasion, anger does divert focus from concerns of welfare of those wrong to punishment of those responsible. As Pettigrove vividly summarises ‘moral’ anger’s epistemically-troubling effects: “Not only is the person who is angry about something at work more likely to come home and kick the cat, but… he or she is more likely to believe the cat deserves it”.Pettigrove concludes his epistemic critique by considering a possible defence of ‘moral’ anger. He writes (on behalf of those defensive of moral anger):“Even though Agent A’s anger about Transgression X alters a persons judgement about Situation Y (an admittedly moral failing) nonetheless with respect to Transgression X, ‘moral’ anger is epistemically advantaged”.Essentially, such a defence amounts to a concession that the angry agent may draw flawed conclusions about the circumstance all-things-considered but that the initial angry judgement of wrongfulness was nonetheless accurate. Pettigrove launches a three-pronged attack on such a defence of ‘moral’ anger. Firstly, noting that such anger operates on a similar operating principle to that of a smoke-detector in that it is likely to generate more false alarms than those that are true. Secondly, he identifies a feedback loop within anger that serves to reinforce the original judgement of wrongfulness. The thought here is that within the loop the more anger one feels, the more one believes the other responsible for the negative event, and the more one believes the other responsible for the negative event, the more anger one feels, and so on. Taken as such, anger becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon that grows stronger upon reflection of the conduct initially judged as wrongful. Finally, Pettigrove notes that people who respond to wrongdoing with anger are less likely to consider counterevidence in their reasoning; even such evidence that would cause reconsideration in their non-angry deliberation. These three considerations on the nature of anger – coupled with the wealth of evidence he presents from empirical psychology - lead to Pettigrove to consider anger an ‘epistemic liability’ when compared to meekness.Pettigrove is comfortable placing meekness in this position of relative epistemic advantage relative to ‘moral’ anger because – as previously acknowledged in his account of meekness – he maintains the meek are capable of identifying wrongfulness as well as those who respond angrily yet importantly, “in the absence of overwhelming evidence, they are unwilling to draw unfavourable conclusions about the agent’s motives”. We can then summarise Pettigrove’s position on the relative epistemic advantages of meekness over ‘moral’ anger thus: those with meek dispositions are less likely to be quick to anger due to a wrongly perceived status-injury as they are free from the inflated self-worth often associated with those who are quick to anger. The meek person who is not so-easily provoked is thus free from anger’s judgment-skewing effects.4.1. ‘Angry Displays’ as Epistemically Valuable to Listeners Finally, I wish to discuss Lepoutre’s notion of anger as being epistemically valuable owing to the special sort of empathy it can spark in listeners. In presenting Lepoutre’s position here I aim to provide a counterpoint to Pettigrove by showing that angry methods of communication are not necessarily as problematic in creating open, constructive dialogue as Pettigrove claims. In doing so I seek to defend anger not only from Pettigrove’s communicative objection, but as a means of arguing that angry methods of communication can also have unique epistemic and motivational benefits distinct from Meekness.Maxime Lepoutre presents an interesting account of how displays of anger communicate important knowledge by virtue of provoking empathy towards injustice in the listener. Lepoutre’s argument acts as a counter to Pettigrove’s epistemic claim outlined previously in which he argued that anger was epistemically disadvantaged comparative to meekness. Throughout Lepoutre’s piece he argues that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects. It can,“direct listeners’ attention to elusive morally relevant features of the situation and;Enable them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing”.This argument centres around the nature of emotions generally and anger in particular. Lepoutre’s conception of emotions (and anger) has important commonalities with the conceptions I have endorsed throughout my work thus far. Specifically, he holds that anger is intentional or world-directed in a way reminiscent of Goldie’s conception of emotions intentionality being characterised as ‘feeling towards’ briefly mentioned in Chapter One. For Lepoutre anger is ‘phenomenologically distinctive’ not just in the characteristic bodily feelings which accompany it but also in the relationship between anger and the content it is directed at. Emotions, ‘do not leave the representation of these objects unchanged’. He agrees that an important element of anger is the cognitive judgement underlying the emotion and draws a connection between this judgement and degrees of aptness, or well-grounded-ness; as discussed in the first section of this chapter. He writes, “Because anger has this cognitive dimension, we can assess it as being more or less correctly directed, or fitting. That is, since anger presents its object as involving an injustice, objective standards of justice give us a benchmark against which we can evaluate whether particular instances of anger are fitting or unfitting”. Finally, anger has a conative aspect; that is, it motivates certain sorts of action. Importantly these conative elements also play a role in the fittingness of anger; he judges an instance of anger as fitting not merely if it correctly identifies a wrong but if the intensity of the anger is “proportionate to the severity of the injustice”. Lepoutre’s argument builds upon these ruminations on the unique nature of anger in order to present a response to the counterproductivity critique by way of arguing that the epistemic benefits of angry communication can lead to desirable consequences thus dissolving the issue at hand. If angry communication - in bestowing morally important knowledge upon the listener - leads to opposition of injustice in the political realm then the best objection the counterproductivity critique can present is that anger is contingently counterproductive, but not necessarily so. As my thesis largely focuses on smaller scale relationships in the social – rather than political – sphere I conclude this section by defending Pettigrove’s account within the scope of interpersonal relationships whilst granting that Lepoutre’s argument has interesting connotations for anger’s epistemic value in communicating about injustice between speaker and listeners on a wider scale.Firstly, Lepoutre considers what is involved in the public expression of anger. He notes that when one communicates angrily we gain the knowledge that they are having a particular sort of phenomenological experience; that they “have the sense that something is seriously morally amiss in their situation, and that they might be driven to action”. He concedes there are two worries here:These functions can be fulfilled without using anger. My earlier exposition of Pettigrove’s accounts of meekness is relevant here. Recall that he argued of the relative advantages of meekness in comparison to anger when accurately identifying wrongdoing.The above noted features of what is communicated in public displays of anger are only epistemically insightful regarding knowledge about the individual experiencing anger and say little specifically about the world as they see it. Lepoutre notes of such an objection that it rests upon anger’s failure to make the recipient or listener, “feel what the speaker feels”.Lepoutre considers, however, that “angry discourse is epistemically important not just because it tells that audience that the speaker is angry but also because it can help them imaginatively experience what it is like to be in the speaker’s shoes, how the world appears or feels from where they stand”. Essentially then, the claim implicit here is that angry displays evoke a special sort of empathy between speaker and listener. In considering how angry displays evoke this sort of empathy in the listener Lepoutre considers a speech on the denunciation of slavery in which the speaker – rather than coldly stating their arguments for the position – expresses intense anger as a means to arouse similar emotions in others. He notes that anger contains a sort of contagion element that gives us a propensity to ‘catch’ the emotions of others.To this point what has been established is that the public expression of X’s anger about O can provoke a similar form of angry response towards O by listeners, Y. Now, there needs to be a further step before one can coherently claim that any moral knowledge is imparted on account of the angry display beyond merely provoking a similar response in others. We need an account of how Y ‘catching’ X’s anger from her passionate angry speech highlights injustice or wrongdoing present within O that was previously beyond Y’s understanding lest it merely be the case the anger has been passed on almost automatically garnering no real moral insight.Lepoutre meets this challenge by noting that emotional deliverances have a distinctive phenomenology and helps one’s listeners “imaginatively undergo a distinctive qualitative experience”. As the listener or recipient tries to reconstruct the speaker’s perspective their reconstruction is altered by the anger they have gained from the speaker. This helps them more fully empathise and see the world as the speaker does (with the unique anger-fuelled intentionality). Summarising this thought so far then: anger (and specifically angry displays) are seen as epistemically valuable on this account because they provoke similar angry feelings within listeners owing to the notion of ‘emotional contagions’. Importantly however, anger is not merely passed along, rather the listener when reconstructing the scenario is now occupying the emotional landscape as the speaker and is better able to empathise with the speaker and come to see the world (specifically injustice or wrongdoing) as they do. Lepoutre notes that emotions are sources of salience and bring to the foreground certain features of a situation. “Emotions help us navigate complex environments by selecting features of the environment and highlighting them”. So what do emotions draw our attention to? As the fittingness of an emotion depends on whether its object involves certain properties; generally-speaking, for instance, fear draws attention to dangerous properties we attribute to the object, grief is associated with loss, and anger, as I have argued throughout, takes as its object wrongfulness in judging an action as wrongful and – as author of the action – the agent as wrongdoer (for Lepoutre’s purposes of assessing the worth of anger within the political sphere he takes anger to be associated with injustice however this is of course consistent with interpersonal anger being associated with wrongdoing on a smaller scale). Angry communication is thus epistemically valuable because it brings to the forefront of a situation injustice. Having our attention drawn to such features of a situation can help listeners come to see why they are unjust also. “Hence the salience role of anger is epistemically valuable not only because it can yield knowledge that an injustice is taking place, but also because it facilitates a greater understanding of the nature of that injustice”.We have already seen that Pettigrove draws upon research within empirical psychology which gives us good reason to assume that anger ‘obscures important facts’. Lepoutre considers whether having anger as one means of communication within political discourse can offset this morally problematic concern. Likewise, in smaller scale interactions having communicative anger as playing a role within the overall narrative of response to wrongdoing may alleviate the issues Pettigrove identifies. Recall both Pettigrove’s notion of anger working on a similar sort of operating principle to that of a smoke detector and the symbolic messages contained within wrongdoing which we discussed in Chapter One. We saw how for Murphy wrongful conduct communicated the wrongdoer’s belief that they matter, and the victim does not. Now, using Pettigrove’s smoke-detector analogy we can envisage the character who is prone to experience anger as occasionally triggering ‘false alarms’ when inconvenienced in daily life. Thinking back to the library example presented in Chapter One; perhaps rather than simply judging my claim to a quiet workspace as not worth taking seriously the other students were simply unaware that they were causing me an inconvenience or didn’t even notice I was there at all. There is undoubtedly truth in Pettigrove’s assertion that anger generates false alarms and this comparison to a smoke detector is a vivid, somewhat fitting metaphor. Now, we can grant both that anger draws features of wrongfulness and injustice to the forefront of an agents’ perspective whilst also holding that it is prone to be over-sensitive and yet maintain that it is a morally valuable emotion. If the student in the library example responds to the perceived wrongfulness of the conduct of the loud students by performing an angry display this immediately communicates to both the recipients and observers that they have identified the students’ conduct as wrong. Now, should this judgement be well-grounded, and the response proportionate, we have seen thus far that we have reasons to think the angry response defensible. Pettigrove’s epistemic claim gives us reason to think that more often than not the anger provoked will be founded upon a mistaken judgement of wrongfulness; perhaps a misjudgement of the intentions of the perceived wrongdoer, or a falsely inflated sense of self-worth on the part of the angry student. Importantly however, in such instances it is rare the only considerations will be those founded upon anger, despite the communication beginning with such angry means of communication. We have seen how communicative punishment for Duff involves including the wrongdoer in rational dialogue and not merely expressing judgement upon them, and likewise with this conception of communicative anger. Whilst angry communication opens with simple expressive judgement it won’t always end here and the inclusion of other perspectives as well as the back-and-forth between ‘victim’ and ‘wrongdoer’ (as well as third parties) will often reveal the real moral landscape of the situation to those involved. So, rarely will the entirety of the dialogue be angry in nature, rather it serves the initial purpose of communicating an opposition to the perceived wrongfulness of the conduct. When then engaging with the recipient and observers such angry judgements will be reflected upon and reassessed in light of the multitude of perspectives present. Of course, this is not an instant process and, as indicated may require a period of reflection following the immediate angry response and ensuing discussion.Relevant here is also the idea that we can grant that on occasion anger will obscure wrongfulness and give false alarms but given the arena within which anger operates, namely responding to wrongdoing, perhaps these misfirings of anger are a necessary evil. Especially when considering that anger will rarely – if ever – be the only voice in a dialogue about wrongdoing we can propose that these false alarms will often be identified and made clear to the agent. Also important is that throughout the dialogue here the angry communication generates a unique perspective on the wrongdoing which – even if it turns out to not be ungrounded - nonetheless contributes to a greater understanding between perspectives. If we consider the alternative -that anger is removed from the rational dialogue, and the salient aspect of anger which brings wrongdoing to the fore is missing - then the relevant fear is that wrongdoing will go unnoticed. I am struck here that Pettigrove himself grants Butler’s assertion that the meek – whilst capable of identifying wrongdoing – would “rather be deceived than be suspicious”. Such a concession strikes me as troubling specifically with regards to wrongdoing or slights against oneself and seems to leave open the possibility that just as anger is prone to misfire, an agent who is slow to anger is prone to ‘fail to fire’ when met with what should be judged as alarming wrongful conduct. Given the discussion throughout Chapter One of the relationship between anger and self-worth, and my assertion throughout the previous paragraph that anger is often met with competing perspectives and ought to be considered in the cold light of day, I hold that we can concede of anger’s propensity to generate false alarms yet maintain that the alternative (a slowness to anger) leads to comparable troubles in morally relevant areas. Thus, given the importance of an accurate conception of one’s own self-worth and the detrimental effect unopposed wrongdoing can have upon one’s sense of self, I judge that the false alarms of anger are a necessary price to pay for the occasions in which well-grounded anger correctly identifies wrongdoing and prompts communicative punishment as per section 3.4 above.Summary:The Proper Role for Anger: One Voice Among ManyWe can then conclude our critique of whether anger is an understandable response to wrongdoing within interpersonal relationships. Pettigrove’s insightful piece highlights many reasons for thinking that it may well be the case that such instances of anger are rare; certainly we can be too hasty in judging conduct against us as wrongful, angry means of communication can shut down dialogue between victim and wrongdoer (despite Lepoutre’s insightful reflection on anger as provoking empathy among listeners) and Nussbaum’s warnings of the ease with which anger can insidiously morph into a wish for disproportionate revenge or payback also give us good reasons to concede that even well-grounded anger can be morally troublesome. Clearly then the social interactions within which anger takes place – and the conceptions of the emotion itself – contain many moving parts. We would do well to subject our own angry judgements and motivations to a healthy degree of scepticism and reflection on account of the multitude of reasons considered throughout this chapter. Importantly however, in cases where anger is well-grounded and motivates the sorts of responses I have endorsed within this chapter I hold that it can best fulfil a dual role of defending an agent’s self-worth and communicating to – and morally educating – wrongdoers, thus treating them with due measure of respect. In summary then, it would be altogether too na?ve to assume that anger necessarily provokes a proportionate response on the part of the angry person; Nussbaum and others are surely correct in claiming that occasionally anger stokes an unjustified wish for personal revenge against the wrongdoer. Similarly, Pettigrove’s concerns regarding the epistemic reliability of anger are certainly troubling. Both accounts give us good reason to judge that anger is a volatile emotion capable of diverting our attention from the good and clouding our judgements of wrongfulness. Importantly, however, I judge that certain conceptions of anger which take the aim of the emotion to be one of moral education or, if retributive, seeking punishment as means of communicating morally relevant judgements have a limited yet invaluable role within interpersonal relations. Any dialogue responding to wrongfulness will ideally include a multitude of perspectives as per my discussion of Lepoutre and Pettigrove. Within such a dialogue anger plays an important role of identifying wrongs against oneself, a role that I fear meekness may fail to fulfil owing to the meek agent’s reluctance to arrive at such judgements of wrongdoing, preferring instead to be deceived than wrongly judge others worthy of blame. To this end I argue that the moral worth of communicative forms of proportionate anger sidestep Nussbaum claim of the ‘magical thinking’ of retributivism and deserve a narrow, but important role within moral dialogue alongside other emotions such as meekness.Chapter Three:FORGIVENESSIn this final chapter I turn my attention to the second focus of the thesis: the topic of forgiveness. The structure here echoes that of the previous discussion of anger in that I first give a brief account of what constitutes forgiveness before asking under what conditions the bestowment of forgiveness is appropriate. In doing so I present an objection to Garrard and McNaughton’s argument for the appropriateness of unconditional forgivenessThe remainder of the chapter considers which moral reasons are appropriate for grounding conditional forgiveness. I suggest here that the presence of sincere repentance on the part of the wrongdoer generates the strongest reasons for the victim to forgive and does so in such a way that the forgiver does not risk condoning the wrongful treatment or acquiescing to the symbolic message of disrespect communicated therein.In closing I consider objections to this claim that forgiveness ought to be conditional on the wrongdoer’s sincere repentance. 1.Distinguishing Forgiveness from Related ConceptsThe notion, and use, of the concept of forgiveness is so embedded in our everyday lives that it almost seems superfluous to subject it to a philosophical examination. We suppose that we forgive, and are forgiven, on an almost daily basis for transgressions both big and small and, we might attest or admit, deservingly or undeservingly. You might, for instance, have ‘forgiven’ the customer who you judged had cut in front of you in the queue for coffee this morning because you reasoned that he was in a rush. Similarly, you might be forgiven in the eyes of the student who sees you using the study room which they had reserved simply because they don’t want to waste time before starting to write an assignment and, really, they can work elsewhere. Instances of forgiveness in the loose sense just described are experienced by us all in day-to-day life and are so entrenched in our social interactions that we would be, forgiven, in thinking that we know full well the ins and outs of this social convention. But, as with all concepts that undergo the test of a philosophical examination, once you scratch beneath the surface there is a lot more to the concept of forgiveness than meets the eye.Take the first example given above. Perhaps you misjudged the situation and the true sequence of events was that the customer who you had judged as rude for not taking his place in line had already ordered his coffee prior to your arrival and was chatting to a friend before collecting it. If you were to have chastised him on account of the judgement based on your mistaken belief, he most likely would have corrected you and provided justification for walking ahead of you in line. All-things-considered then and with all the facts of the case known to you, it wouldn’t make sense for you to forgive him as you were simply mistaken, he had done nothing wrong and thus any anger you may have felt, and overcome, would have been ungrounded. In short, there would be no wrongdoing to forgive. Similarly, in the second example - the study room confusion - there may be more to say. It may well have been the case that, due to a quirk in the programming, the room booking system didn’t show when you booked the room that it was already previously booked for that time slot. Consequently, you had no way of knowing that your fellow student rightfully had priority to the room having reserved it first. If she confronted you about your having taken her place in the room, once this information came to light, it would be much more intelligible and appropriate for her to excuse your having taken the room on the timeslot which was rightfully hers on account of the fact that, although you had been wrong in using the room, you weren’t morally responsible for wronging your fellow student because the information which you were required to know to avoid committing the wrongful act was beyond your control. In short, you weren’t morally responsible for your wrongdoing. These brief examples encapsulate how, for the question of forgiveness to even arise, in addition to the performing of a wrongful act as shown in the first example, it must have been carried out by an agent correctly deemed as being both, a suitable candidate for being judged to be a responsible agent, and responsible for the wrongdoing itself. Forgiveness then, is a step in the narrative which follows responsible wrongdoing (and precedes possible reconciliation).So, having established that forgiveness operates within the framework of being subjected to wrongful conduct, carried out by a responsible agent who is morally responsible for the act itself, we still must differentiate forgiveness from other related concepts and processes which bear similarities insofar as they involve letting go of, or overcoming, negative emotions, yet remain distinct from forgiving. The first such concept to consider here is forgetting. Forgetting, in certain situations, may well be an occurrence with positive implications for the victim, wrongdoer, or both, however unlike forgiveness it is not necessarily motivated by compassionate or moral considerations towards the wrongdoerA brief discussion of condonation will highlight the possibility that one may overcome anger for immoral (or amoral) reasons. Griswold writes of condonation, “to condone is to collaborate in the lack of censure of an action, and perhaps to enable further wrong-doing by the offender”. Whilst this thin definition of condonation bears little resemblance to forgiveness a fuller conception seems much closer in relation. Griswold continues, stating that one may also condone, “in the sense of tolerating while disapproving (a sort of ‘look the other way’ or ‘putting up with’ strategy’)”. Hampton’s account seems to have this notion of tolerant-condonation in mind and she provides an illuminating hypothetical which suggests that we may – on occasion – condone, not just ‘for an easy life’ but even for moral reasons. Hampton’s illuminating definition of condonation is worth quoting at length. She defines it as,“the acceptance, without moral protest (either inward or outward), of an action which ought to warrant such protest, made possible, first, by ridding oneself of the judgement that the action is wrong, so that its performer cannot be a wrongdoer, and second, by ridding oneself of any attendant feelings (such as those which are involved in resentment) which signify one’s protest of the action”.This brief introductory discussion of the above concepts is used to illustrate the importance of distinguishing between these and forgiveness respectively despite the imprecise nature of the everyday usage of the concept of forgiveness. However, whereas in those sorts of cases we judge that either no wrong was committed (justification), or that the person wasn’t fully responsible (excuse), in cases of forgiveness we are concerned with circumstances in which we are asked to forgive a responsible agent who has carried out responsible wrongdoing. Once we rule out the sorts of things that forgiveness isn’t (although we sometimes incorrectly associate it with) we can better begin to enquire as to what forgiveness is. In the following section I first present competing theories of which emotion, or bundles of emotions, must be confronted by would-be forgivers before considering how the appropriateness of forgiveness in particular circumstances is contingent on moral reasons focused on the recipient. 2.What Constitutes an Instance of Forgiveness?Before considering in what circumstances forgiveness is virtuous or praiseworthy, the first substantive section of this chapter contrasts different accounts of what constitutes forgiveness. In considering these competing conceptions of forgiveness I aim to present an account of forgiveness that is partially constituted by the overcoming of moral anger (of which resentment is the paradigm case), and other negative emotions insofar as they are indicative of resentment. Common amongst the different accounts of forgiveness presented here is the thought that the act of forgiving another involves some form of emotional change within the forgiver. This change in attitude towards the wrongdoer is taken to be fundamental to the process of forgiveness which goes beyond merely how the forgiver acts towards the wrongdoer. The precise nature of this emotional change which takes place within forgiveness varies throughout the different conceptions to follow. However, in each case the change centres around the evaluative judgement present within the emotion which is to be overcome throughout the process of forgiveness. Note that this does not amount to the victim overcoming, or reconsidering, the judgement that the action itself was wrongful. Rather, the victim, for particular moral reasons, overcomes their existing judgement that the author of the actions is solely to be seen as wrongdoer, and instead come to realise that they are more than their wrongful conduct. I hold throughout that forgiveness is compatible with the forgiver not wishing to restore her relationship with the wrongdoer should she not wish to do so, as well as defending the notion that the forgiver can coherently judge the wrongdoer deserving of punishment for the wrong.2.1 The Emotional Moderation ViewAs with anger, we begin this section focusing on Bishop Butler’s insight into forgiveness. Butler conceives of forgiveness as strictly linked to resentment and thus situates it within the context of a dyadic social relationship; as the function of resentment is conceived of as defence of self (primarily self-respect) and, on this account, forgiveness is only a possible response to feelings of resentment, it follows that only the victim of the wrongdoing can coherently forgive the offender. He writes,“the precepts to forgive, and to love our enemies, do not relate to that general indignation against injury and the authors of it, but to this feeling, or resentment when raised by private or personal injury”.Chapters One and Two noted how Butler identifies proportionate resentment as both instrumentally and morally valuable, albeit granting that, when left unchecked, it has a tendency to go awry and awaken within the resentful agent a desire for revenge against the wrongdoer. Butler judges this as the worst of the abuses of resentment. Forgiveness, then, for Butler, acts as a limit placed upon resentment which prevents its descent into such projects of revenge. Forgiveness, on Butler’s account, is the moderation of resentment to the level which would be deemed appropriate by a disinterested observer and, importantly, requires that the victim reject any notion of revenge being an appropriate response to the wrong. Butler writes,“Resentment is not inconsistent with good-will… we may therefore love our enemy, and yet have resentment against him for his injurious behaviour towards us. But when this resentment entirely destroys out natural benevolence towards him, it is excessive and becomes malice or revenge”.In the above quotation it would seem that Butler’s notion of love – claimed here to be consistent with resentment – would amount to respecting the other person as an autonomous agent. On this view, then, we can love and respect another whilst still judging them appropriate candidates for resentment owing to their wrongful conduct; we could even go so far as to claim that our resentment relies upon this sense of love or respect towards the other owing to the notion that without respecting the other person as an autonomous moral agent, resentment as a possible response is not even on the table. Revenge, by contrast, is inconsistent with love and respect because, “it expresses the emotion (resentment) in actions designed to cause pain and misery”. Thus, when resentment runs afoul of excess and becomes a wish for revenge the function of the emotion shifts also from defence to attack. Within such a framework which judges that resentment is consistent with love and good-will, naturally it holds that forgiveness can coherently be bestowed upon the offender by the forgiver who still harbours feelings of appropriate resentment. Clearly Butler’s conception of excess resentment tinged with a wish for vengeful retribution is not consistent with love and good-will and so, on his account, forgiveness acts as a constraint on this shift from appropriate to excess resentment and ensures that the emotion remains moderated within its appropriate constraints.Butler’s worry with the ease with which resentment insidiously slips into a wish for revenge is a relevant concern and should the angry agent begin to consider payback against those responsible for the wrong to which they have been subjected, they certainly ought to moderate their anger. Importantly, however, I find myself in agreement with the standard contemporary view that the moderation of anger and cessation of projects of revenge fail to capture the totality of the concept of forgiveness. Conceiving of forgiveness as being appropriately resentful towards another in response to wrongdoing – as Butler does - raises some important questions. Firstly, we may ask what of the victim who immediately responds to wrongdoing with proportionate resentment free from excess or any notion of revenge being justified? It would seem rather strange to claim that the victim has forgiven the offender in such cases. Stranger still is that by extension it would seem to exclude those who respond to wrongs against them with an appropriate degree of resentment from ever being able to forgive their transgressors unless their resentment was to manifest itself in a wish for revenge. Indeed, throughout Chapter Two I discussed at length the moral significance of the absence of a wish for revenge within certain conceptions of anger yet judge this as distinct from the bestowment of forgiveness. Such considerations lead Garcia to consider whether Butler’s account stresses the importance of the process involved in moderating one’s excess resentment to ensure it returns to an appropriate level. Taken as such the essence of forgiveness on Butler’s conception rests in the process of moderation itself rather than in arriving at the end-state of holding appropriate resentment towards those who wrong us. Importantly, however, this process of moderation appears distinct from the act of forgiveness and more in-keeping with the notion of proportionate anger unless the process itself is working towards the eventual complete overcoming of resentment. This is considered by Griswold who judges that Butler’s conception of the act is something distinct from forgiveness and is more akin to merely standing up for oneself to a proportionate degree as opposed to either condoning the wrongful conduct or angrily seeking personal retribution. I agree with Griswold’s assertion here; it is certainly coherent to say that one no longer desires (or never did desire) revenge against another who has wronged them yet maintain that they have not forgiven the offender. So - as per Griswold - I agree that forgiveness requires more than simply forgoing projects of revenge and moderating anger. Butler’s conception of forgiveness as consisting in the moderation of resentment merely identifies a necessary step in the overall narrative of forgiveness when one initially responds to wrongful conduct with vengeful anger yet remains insufficient in telling the full story of forgiveness. Much of the contemporary literature on both anger and forgiveness has used Butler’s work as a foundation upon which to build and as with anger, contemporary authors on forgiveness have amended Butler’s theory. Common amongst Butler’s account and the thinkers to be considered in the remainder of Section 2 is the thought that, in order to forgive, the would-be forgiver must undergo a change in emotions directed towards the offender. We shall see that the following theories differentiate forgiveness from mere moderation of resentment into a standalone concept which remains importantly connected to anger. The first such account I now consider within this subsection is that which holds that forgiveness consists in overcoming – rather than merely moderating – all negative emotions towards the wrongdoer.2.2 Overcoming All Negative EmotionsPerhaps the classic example of these broader accounts of forgiveness is that of Richards who argues that forgiveness ought to be conceived of as the overcoming of any negative emotion, thus broadening the conception of forgiveness beyond the narrow version of Butler previously considered and increasing the burden placed upon the forgiver who must now overcome, rather than merely moderate, the negative emotion in question.One of Richards’ motivations in seeking to move beyond the narrow account previously considered is that he holds that it seems intuitively incorrect to postulate a conception of forgiveness that precludes one who experiences, say, contempt towards another owing to their conduct, from ever forgiving their perceived transgressor for the conduct which elicited this contempt. To draw the lines in such a way strikes Richards as an arbitrary boundary and one which neither fits common usage and understanding of forgiveness in social interactions nor holds up to scrutiny. Here I consider Richards’ argumentation for such a position before endorsing a conception of forgiveness which occupies the middle-ground between the narrow account of Butler and broader emotion-focused conceptions of forgiveness.As section 1.1 showed, Butler’s conception of forgiveness rests upon two notions. First, that forgiveness is strictly linked to the emotion of resentment and secondly, that to forgive amounts to the moderation of excess resentment to appropriate levels. Richards’ account broadly agrees with my assertion within the previous section that the Butlerian view falls short of capturing the totality of forgiveness by allowing moderation of resentment rather than overcoming of resentment to count as forgiveness. Interestingly, however, Richards’ position goes one step further in claiming that in order to forgive their transgressor the victim must, “abandon all negative feelings toward this person, of whatever kind, insofar as such feelings are based on the episode in question”.Richards argues for this position by highlighting two distinct yet related issues with viewing the emotional change involved in an instance of forgiveness as necessarily involving resentment. The first of these – as alluded to above – stems from the notion that, by tying resentment and forgiveness strictly, we preclude those who respond to wrongful conduct with other negative emotions from ever being able to forgive. They may of course overcome these emotions and reconcile with the offender (possibly due to apology or repentance on the part of the offender) however such reconciliation would not amount to forgiveness on Butler’s account and this strikes Richards as being intuitively too narrow a conception. He considers two alternative emotional responses in contempt and sadness, which both seem to share resentment’s enduring nature in that they are neither fleeting nor taking lightly by the agent who is in their grip. Furthermore, both may be occasioned at experiencing wrongdoing at the hands of another. Immediately this broader view seems attractive in the sense that, as our social relationships and thus interactions are so varied in nature, it seems intuitively true that often we will respond to wrongdoing with a plurality of emotional responses even if holding that resentment is the paradigmatic response to non-excusable wrongful treatment at the hands of another. Given that we often respond to wrongdoing with these alternate negative emotions Richards judges that to link forgiveness strictly to resentment is arbitrarily narrow. He writes:“Imagine, for example, that your grown son had badly let you down. This might make you angry, of course, but it might also make you feel deeply disappointed in him, instead… Accordingly, if you were to abandon these feelings you would not be forgiving your son, on the definition in question… since you would not be abandoning an attitude of a specific kind”.An additional problem encountered for the narrow conception of forgiveness considered previously - and one which motivates Richards’ attempt to broaden the definition to include all negative emotions – is that it allows for the puzzling scenario in which the victim could have forsworn their resentment yet still experience a strong negative emotion towards the person owing to the wrongful act in question yet, on the narrow definition we would be moved to judge that in such cases the victim has forgiven their transgressor. He asks us to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a wife responds with vengeful resentment to continual belittlement at the hands of her husband. Within this hypothetical the wife seeks to forgive her husband through religious motivations and in her belief that she ought to forgive those who wrong her as one day she will surely ask for divine forgiveness. This leads her to move beyond resentment through a sheer act of will and endeavour to cut all ties with the husband as a preservation of her own self-respect. So far it would appear that the wife has met all the criteria for forgiveness; she has overcome her resentment, ceased any projects of revenge (should they have been present) and done so out of concern for her own self-respect. However, importantly, Richards asks us to imagine that she now views her husband with scornful contempt. He considers that we should intuitively find it disconcerting to judge that one has forgiven another should they move from resentment to a similar negative attitude like contempt. This notion certainly has an appeal. Consider when we ask for forgiveness from those we care about and offer apologies and sincere repentance. It would seem strange to say that we would be content with such an emotional shift as genuine forgiveness. If we’re realistic and respect the victim of our actions enough to emphasize with them and understand the effects wrongdoing can have on relationships we can accept that often even when forgiveness is bestowed upon the wrongdoer complete reconciliation with the victim is either psychologically impossible or even morally undesirable. Yet to be told you have been forgiven but utterly contemptuous is certainly less understandable. This more expansive view of forgiveness is broad in the sense of the emotions that may be overcome as part of forgiveness yet it doesn’t necessarily demand that one reconcile with, or reaccept into their life, the wrongdoer. The key move is that – even if they seek to have no further interactions with the wrongdoer and view them simply with cool indifference – for genuine forgiveness to have taken place on this account they ought to have no negative feelings towards the other insofar as these arise from the conduct in question. Summarising this position Richards writes:“Evidently, then, abandoning resentment does not constitute forgiving, because a person can stop resenting and still have a hostile attitude of another kind… neither must it be resentment that one is forswearing… Taken together, these suggest that to forgive someone for having wronged one is to abandon all negative feelings toward this person, of whatever kind, insofar as such feelings are based on the episode in question”.2.3 Overcoming of Resentment and Intimately Related EmotionsJeffrie Murphy’s account of forgiveness presented within Forgiveness and Mercy is one such theory that gives resentment particularly centre stage within the narrative of forgiveness yet constrains the concept from Richards’ all-encompassing conception. As we have seen Murphy follows Butler in holding that resentment plays a valuable role in interpersonal relations. As noted throughout, Murphy holds that resentment functions as protective of the agent’s self-respect when met with wrongful conduct at the hands of another by protesting the symbolic message contained within the conduct and seeking to exact due measure of punishment on the wrongdoer. So, Murphy’s conception of appropriate resentment contains – if not quite a desire for revenge – an important retributive element in that it judges punishment as warranted owing to the wrongful conduct. Additionally, Murphy’s account of forgiveness is narrow insomuch as he holds that we can only forgive that which was initially appropriate to resent. Such a claim seems to exclude the possibility that, for instance, a father might bestow forgiveness upon his son for disappointing him by underperforming in academic endeavours (using Richards’ hypothetical above). Murphy’s account holds that we can only forgive in such instances if the negative emotion such as disappointment (or sadness, shame etc.) is in some way indicative of resentment. What constitutes forgiveness for Murphy then, is not merely the moderation of resentment to an appropriate standard, rather it is “the resolute overcoming of the anger… naturally directed toward a person who has done one an unjustified and non-excused moral injury”. This notion of emotions as being intimately related to resentment perhaps needs further clarification before moving on. Firstly, resentment, as I have indicated throughout the previous two chapters, is characterised by being concerned with conduct directed at ourselves, or those close to us, and is thus an importantly personal response. Secondly, it takes as its proper object the ill-will or intentions of another as evidenced by their wrongful conduct towards us. It has intentionality, then, which focuses on wrongfulness (of the conduct of the agent in question). Finally, most conceptions of resentment call for some form of response to the wrongful conduct. This call for response is where different thinkers diverge on what resentment exactly consists of: we noted that Murphy judges this response as taking the form of communicative protest which calls for the punishment of the wrongdoer. Hieronymi’s account echoes this, viewing resentment as an emotion in which, “the victim protests the trespass, affirming both its wrongfulness and the moral significance of both herself and the offender”. In contrast, Garrard and McNaughton seem to define resentment in terms of hostility toward the object of the emotion. Their thought here bears similarities to Nussbaum’s critique of anger as containing a wish for payback as a matter of conceptual necessity. Notably, Holmgren draws upon Judith Boss in conceding that some forms of resentment “need not entail motivation to retaliate for the wrong” and thus importantly distinct from other conceptions.As we have seen I previously judged that some such responses are justified (communicative punishment as educative of the wrongdoer or defensive of one’s self-worth for instance), and others are indefensible (a misguided wish for personal revenge). Our most pressing concern at this stage is not which types of resentful response are appropriate or defensible, rather what in particular about resentment that may be present within instances of other negative emotions such that they too may be appropriate candidates for the emotion to be overcome in order to bestow forgiveness on their proper object (the wrongdoer). Given that different conceptions of resentment call for different means of response it would appear to be a misstep to attempt to ground this linkage on particular types of response. Rather, a more fruitful avenue would be to link resentment and these related emotions as coherent within a narrative of forgiveness such that they rest upon a judgement of wrongfulness. Such a judgement is necessarily involved within an instance of resentment as we have seen. Hughes pursues such an avenue within his article, ‘What is Involved in Forgiving?’ and posits a conception of forgiveness I endorse throughout the remainder of my work.Hughes introduces a notion of ‘moral anger’ defined as emotional response which is, “partially constituted by the belief that one has been wrongfully harmed by another”. Given that he holds that resentment necessarily includes such a belief he ascribes it the position of the paradigm case of moral anger. It should be clear from my taxonomy of anger in Chapter One that Hughes’ strong linkage between resentment and a judgment that one has been non-excusably wronged also holds for all forms of resentment discussed throughout the thesis. Indeed, experiencing resentment and holding the judgement that one has been wronged are inseparable. In stressing the presence of such a belief, we have a working definition of how we deem distinct emotions to be intimately linked to resentment; should they be founded upon the belief that one has been wrongfully harmed by another they contain an element of resentment and are appropriate candidates for the emotion which must be overcome in forgiving another. Now, as I have tried to indicate throughout my work emotions are complex and varied such that one could coherently feel wronged (in a moral sense) by the conduct of another and respond with an emotion such as sadness or contempt. Given the preceding discussion it seems fair to say that such emotional responses are indicative of resentment and one can coherently forgive the agent who caused this emotion in such cases. Taken as such it seems that in the case of the father who feels disappointment at the son who has squandered his financial aid throughout his degree can coherently be said to have forgiven him (should he choose to do so) insofar as he overcomes this disappointment that was partly constituted by these concerns of wrongfulness indicative of resentment. By contrast, if the father feels disappointment in the broad sense that his son merely didn’t do himself justice with his final degree classification it is less clear that to overcome such feelings is to speak of forgiveness. By expanding our conception of forgiveness in such a way as to incorporate other negative emotions insofar as they are indicative of resentment- i.e. they contain the judgement that one has been non-excusably wronged - we can successfully meet Richards’ challenge of arbitrariness. It is perfectly coherent to exclude other emotions from our narrative of forgiveness if they lack this resentful element since without this judgement of wrongfulness it is unclear what exactly is forgiven. Hughes presents an additional response to Richards’ arbitrariness objection by considering the negative emotion of depression. He notes that whilst one could coherently experience depression (or sadness, or disappointment) in response to wrongful conduct, these emotions are much less focused than anger in terms of their intentionality. He writes,“This is not to deny that such states may sometimes have "targets" (or that some cases of anger may lack the required intentionality) just that the belief that one has been wrongfully harmed seems less likely (by itself) to guarantee that such negative feelings as general depression, misery, heartache, or unhappiness are as focused or directed as are one's angry emotions. Put differently, the intuition that moral anger is more likely to have a definitive target than is, say, unhappiness, sadness, misery, or disappointment (even where these are partially constituted by the belief that one has been wrongfully harmed) is perhaps grounded in the recognition that these sorts of feelings are often more diffuse and, like heartbreak and grief, must in some sense "run their course", but moral anger is not usually thought of as having a course to run”.Griswold postulates an interesting account of forgiveness as the eventual overcoming of resentment which encompasses elements of both Butler and Murphy’s theories. On Griswold’s conception forgiveness is both an end-goal and a process in which the utterance, ‘I forgive you’ can mean either that the victim has overcome all feelings of resentment towards the wrongdoer or that they will endeavour to work towards this, having already moderated their resentment to a level which has led to the cessation of projects of revenge towards the wrongdoer. Essentially then, Butler’s account of forgiveness as the moderation of resentful emotion acts as the starting point and Murphy’s account of forgiveness as the forswearing of resentful emotion acts as the end goal on Griswold’s account of forgiveness as a process. This notion of forgiveness as a process seems intuitively correct, it stands to reason that when one utters ‘I forgive you’ they can mean that they are free from the resentment felt in response to the wrong, have made a commitment to overcome the still-felt residual resentment or anything in between.Such a position is consistent with the relationship between victim and wrongdoer post-forgiveness (or during forgiveness as a process) differing from their relationship pre-wrongdoing as - despite overcoming the resentment felt towards the agent who committed the wrong - the victim may now judge them to be untrustworthy or not of the sort of character they want to have an ongoing relationship with. Murphy terms such a circumstance as one in which moral equality is restored within the relationship but not necessarily equality in every respect post-forgiveness. He also notes that, “To forgive a wrongdoer involves a change of heart toward that person (the overcoming of resentment toward him), but this is not necessarily a change in one’s view on how that wrongdoer is to be treated”. Finally, Hampton’s conception of forgiveness is perhaps more demanding in her call for a more weighty ‘change of heart’ directed at the wrongdoer on the part of the forgiver in addition to the mere change in emotions and attitudes specified thus far. Certainly, her conception of forgiveness is one which also holds that the emotions and attitudes overcome in forgiving are those indicative of resentment in such a way as indicated previously (indeed she includes each of the strategies of malicious, spiteful, and moral, hatred within this range). Hampton’s notion of the change of heart the forgiver must undergo is more demanding than that of Murphy who we have seen characterises it as the overcoming of resentful emotion for moral reasons. Rather, for her it entails the would-be forgiver changing their pre-forgiveness perspective of the wrongdoer as simply ‘a bad apple’ and adopting a fuller perspective of the wrongdoer as a decent person prone to less than exemplary attitudes and behaviour. She writes that the victim, “‘washes away’ or disregards the wrongdoer’s immoral action or character traits in his ultimate moral judgement of her". The thought here is that we can coherently view the wrongdoer as more than their wrongdoing whilst retaining the judgement that the conduct itself was indeed wrongful. Such a qualification allows Hampton to distinguish her account of forgiveness from slipping into mere condonation of the wrong. When the victim undergoes a change of heart they retain the judgement of the conduct as wrongful but in widening their perspective of the wrongdoer the victim comes to see that the person amounts to much more than that. In short, we can hold that the person isn’t bad even if the conduct – and character traits that occasioned it – are. Importantly, even on Murphy’s less-demanding account we can distinguish the act of forgiving from condonation because – as we shall see in a later discussion – he grounds the appropriateness of forgiveness on the thought that the wrongdoer is no longer a present threat to the victim (or the victim’s self-respect) owing to the particular reasons behind the forgiveness itself. In doing so we can retain the belief that the conduct was wrongful – and deserving of protest or punishment – and yet overcome the moral anger or resentment we felt as we deem the other person to have changed in such a way that they are unlikely to repeat such immoral actions against us. We shall see that repentance is the clearest (but not the only) indication of such judgements.Within such a framework it is coherent to say that the forgiver may desire legal punishment be administered against the wrongdoer even post-forgiveness. Griswold summarises the thinking behind this neatly by drawing upon Butler’s distinction between the ‘sphere of justice’ and ‘sphere of other moral relations’. On such a view, he notes, forgiveness is viewed as a private matter between the forgiver and his sentiments (in our case, moral anger) towards the wrongdoer in which the forgiver can overcome his moral anger yet still deem judicial punishment appropriate within the sphere of justice. Throughout this section I have sought to give reasons for endorsing a conception of forgiveness in which it is best understood as a process in which the forgiver commits to the eventual overcoming of resentment and other emotions founded upon a judgement that one has been intentionally and non-excusably wronged by another. Whilst Hampton’s qualification that the forgiver ought to undergo a sincere and profound change of heart in her perspective of the wrongdoer is an interesting thought – and one which may be indicative of optimal forgiveness – I’m struck that such a demand is not necessary for forgiveness to have taken place as one can still seek to sever ties with those we forgive despite moving beyond negative feelings towards them. Perhaps a more attainable challenge for those who forgive is to reach a stage where they view the wrongdoer as no different to any other, as opposed to coming to see them in a positive light. In so viewing the emotions necessary as being overcome as those which are indicative of resentment (founded upon this judgement of wrongfulness) I judge that in doing so we can meet Richards’ objections towards an altogether too narrow account of forgiveness which relies upon the overcoming of resentment solely. In broadening the notion of forgiveness to the scope which I endorse here we can make sense of how it is coherent to speak of forgiving another for evoking feelings of disappointment (or similar negative emotions) so long as these are partially constituted by the belief that one has been wronged; thus simultaneously dismissing concerns of the perceived arbitrariness of insisting upon strictly resentment as being present within the narrative of forgiveness and protecting the intentionality that moral anger provides. I find Hughes’ account persuasive here. Whilst I have somewhat neglected the discussion on what sorts of relationships generate appropriate standing to forgive, given the preceding discussing in which I link resentment (or moral anger) strictly to the granting of forgiveness I can hold that one may grant forgiveness only if they were in some way wronged by the conduct of another such that they were appropriate candidates for the attitudes of moral anger. Such a view adequately accounts for us forgiving actions towards others should we also be wronged in some way. Watkins, for instance, discusses a case in which the daughter of a man killed by an IRA bombing in Northern Ireland came to forgive the perpetrator of the attack. The view endorsed throughout this chapter judges such cases coherent as the daughter of the victim clearly was wronged through the murder of her father. Of course, there is much debate as to whether we can extend forgiveness in such a way as to allow third-party or proxy forgiveness to be coherent. However, for my present purposes, and for the examples and argument throughout the remainder of my work, it will suffice to assume that when I speak of possible forgiveness the would-be forgiver has been – in some way – wronged by the offender who is thus seen as a suitable candidate for blame and moral anger of the sort discussed previously.In summary, then, we can proceed with a working conception of forgiveness as a process in which the forgiver works towards the eventual overcoming of moral anger towards those who wronged them. I presented reasons suggesting that moral anger must be overcome completely (or a commitment to work towards this on the part of the forgiver) because mere moderation of moral anger – whilst commendable – amounts to something distinct from true forgiveness as we have seen. Similarly, the entirety of forgiveness cannot be captured by cessation of projects of revenge as some forms of moral anger (think here of Srinivasan’s conception of anger as a wish for recognition introduced in Chapter Two) admit of no such desire in their conceptual make-up. To say that forgiveness consists solely in the cessation of projects of revenge has seemingly absurd implications for such accounts of anger in which we are committed to the view that when one responds to wrongdoing with an instance of recognition focused anger we are committed to the position that either they cannot forgive, or have already forgiven, their transgressor. The preceding discussion throughout this section should also make clear that I judge this conception of forgiveness to escape the arbitrariness objection Richards posits against accounts which focus strictly on resentment. In making room within forgiveness for other emotions insofar as they contain a judgement that one has been wronged, our working conception does not arbitrarily draw boundary lines but rather ensures the intelligibility of the concept in stressing the key role of wrongfulness and intentionality of emotion with the narrative of forgiveness. Finally, I stressed throughout this section the importance of thinking of forgiveness as a process and that moral anger is overcome throughout this. These two notions highlight how forgiveness differs from merely forgetting the wrong or overcoming moral anger by any means; rather, forgiveness is a process undertaken for certain reasons. In the next two sections I will consider what are taken to be common moral reasons for bestowing forgiveness upon wrongdoers. In doing so I present a defence of conditional forgiveness founded upon the value of repentance which admits of space for forgiving unrepentant wrongdoers should the particular moral reasons – and nature of relationship – which ground the forgiveness be consistent with the forgiver retaining their due measure of self-respect. Given that I broadly consider forgiveness within the context of dyadic relationships, for the sake of clarity and simplicity, I speak of forgiveness in the context of overcoming resentment (as the paradigm case of ‘moral anger’) for moral reasons in the remainder of the work. 3.An Argument Against Unconditional ForgivenessIn this section I object to Garrard and McNaughton’s claim that we ought to unconditionally forgive those who wrong us. They base this claim on the common ground we all share – ‘the unfortunate human condition’ we all find ourselves in – and the fact that invariably some day we will find ourselves in the position of wrongdoer and seek forgiveness for our actions. Thus, they argue based on this shared human condition, and the propensity to do wrong it contains, we ought to unconditionally forgive. Within this argument is the implicit claim that we are, by our very nature, imperfect and it is only right and just to factor this into our interpersonal relationships. My objection to their argument is founded upon Murphy’s notion of the symbolic message contained within wrongful action in interpersonal relations; specifically that resentment remains appropriate in the absence of moral grounds for forgiveness irrespective of the role played by either constitutive or circumstantial moral luck. It is necessary, first, to spell out Garrard and McNaughton’s ‘shared humanity’ argument in detail as this is the position the remainder of this chapter responds to, and it will be on this response which the case for a conditional conception of forgiveness rests. Unsurprisingly this argument is one which stresses a commonality shared by each member of the human race which they argue generates a reason to be concerned for one another in the same sense we have concern for the well-being of family members. Importantly this bond we share is one founded on human solidarity not shared respect and amounts to “the concern for the well-being of those who one feels are in the same condition as oneself”. “Human nature”, they write, “is just what we humans are like, and a great deal of human history shows that what we are like is often very dreadful”. Furthermore, empirical research and evidence seems to suggest that it is indeed the case that a great many of us may well be complicit in bringing about great harm to others should the opportunity present itself despite our believing ourselves to be morally opposed to such behaviour. The claim made by Garrard and McNaughton is that we share important features with the wrongdoer – specifically that our character and circumstances we find ourselves in are largely dependent on luck and outside of our control. They argue that these features are such that they ground their own conception of unconditional forgiveness. They write: “What is involved in sharing the wrongdoer’s nature is more than just possessing the bare capacity to do wrong but rather the likelihood that there are circumstances in which we too would have done, if not what the wrongdoer did, some similarly awful deed”. This is the claim that it is not only the case that had we been subjected to a different upbringing or early environment we may well have become a wrongdoer ourselves but rather that we, as we are now, may well act in such a way should the particular circumstances arise. The first claim to be considered here is that, based on our shared humanity, we can reason that had we been subject to different circumstances in our early experience and upbringing we may well have formed a similarly vicious character who acts in similarly (immoral) ways to the wrongdoer. Garrard and McNaughton claim that the fact we are different in character from the wrongdoer in a meaningful way depends on a sort of moral luck and that an awareness of the role of moral luck in character formation creates a notion of commonality between the virtuous and the vicious. This commonality, created upon a mutual acceptance that neither the virtuous nor the vicious can claim total responsibility for the formation of their character, and the acceptance that it may well be largely due to favourable early circumstances that we are not of the same vicious character as the wrongdoer, grounds the thought that it would be inappropriate to withhold forgiveness from the wrongdoer because of indeterminate factors beyond the scope of their (or anyone’s) control. The notion of moral luck which Garrard and McNaughton introduce into their argument at this stage is essentially a blanket term which incorporates two distinct forms of moral luck discussed by Nagel under the headings, ‘constitutive luck’, and, ‘luck in one’s circumstances’. Loosely, these terms cover both the formation of inclinations, capacities and temperament, and luck in the kinds of situations one faces respectively. Thus, the mutual acceptance implicit in Garrard and McNaughton’s argument would be the acceptance of what Nagel writes is the thought that, “it seems irrational to take or dispense credit or blame for matters over which a person has no control… Such things may create the conditions for action, but action can be judged only to the extent that it goes beyond these conditions and does not just result from them”. The commonality which Garrard and McNaughton posit holds between all members of the human race, irrespective of virtuous or vicious character, amounts to an acceptance that our characters, motivations and circumstances are beyond the full scope of our control (or at least outside a degree of control which is morally relevant) and therefore we should unconditionally overcome resentment when a moral injury is inflicted upon us. Such a thought can be considered alongside Nagel’s example in his essay, ‘Moral Luck’. Nagel posits an example of a hypothetical Nazi and reflects upon how a combination of both constitutional and/or circumstantial luck played a large role in both the formation of the persons character in such a way that they became the sort of person who endorsed such an immoral world-view, and how the ‘luck’ of the circumstances being such that these people were presented with the opportunity and platform to spread their ideas and carry out such atrocities. Nagel considers that, “someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazi’s had never come to power in Germany”. It is tempting to counter such a thought with the rebuttal that a great many people did oppose the Nazi party and their heinous crimes and that this may be evidence that not everyone has this inner darkness which seems implicit in Garrard and McNaughton’s conception of human nature. This is certainly an interesting point. It does not, however act as a successful objection to the argument Garrard and McNaughton make for unconditional forgiveness. Whilst they do espouse a view of human nature that suggests a propensity to do wrong (the dreadful condition), to object to their argument by putting forward a competing conception of human nature would be a misstep. Their argument based on commonality isn’t the simple claim that we are all of vicious character, rather it is the claim that those of us who do wrong do so in large part due to factors beyond our control which play a central role in character formation and present the circumstances in which this character can carry out immoral acts. Conversely those of us who behave morally do so because we have been fortunate enough to have had a positive upbringing and early environment and have had luck in our circumstances that we don’t have the need (or perhaps temptation /opportunity) to commit immoral acts. Thus, the commonality argument wouldn’t struggle to respond to the objection that not everyone supported the Nazi party. Rather, using the commonality argument we could in fact argue that those who did oppose the cruelty were no more responsible for their character than those who supported the Nazi’s. Thus, resentment in the case of the wrongdoers would be inappropriate so we ought to unconditionally forgive them, and similarly praise of those who opposed the wrongdoers would be inappropriate. The pertinent question, then, becomes whether we can simultaneously grant that our character and circumstance are, to a large degree, beyond our control, and yet adhere to the position that forgiveness is only appropriate in the presence of appropriate moral grounds. I think we can. The possible avenues of objection seem to be either denying that moral luck is as prevalent as Garrard and McNaughton claim, or accepting the role of moral luck in both upbringing and circumstance but denying that this is sufficient justification for unconditional forgiveness. Furthermore, there may remain, amongst those with more consequentialist leanings, the temptation to argue that all things-considered it may be morally beneficial to withhold forgiveness - even whilst granting that Garrard and McNaughton’s argument is sound - on the basis that it would act as a more effective deterrent against further wrongdoing. I will object to Garrard and McNaughton’s defence of unconditional forgiveness on the second of the aforementioned grounds, namely accepting the role of moral luck in wrongdoing and character formation yet denying that this is sufficient for a justification of unconditional forgiveness. This objection arises from the emphasis which Murphy places on the communicative aspect of wrongdoing and disrespect and once again I will lean on his conceptual analysis of resentment throughout this section. This objection to Garrard and McNaughton’s justification for unconditional forgiveness then contends that the role of luck in circumstance and/or character formation is not the most relevant aspect morally. Referring back to the Nazi supporter, it may well be the case that had circumstances been different and/or had the Nazi party not gained power he may not have gone on to carry out such heinous acts. Nonetheless these things did happen, and irrespective of whether he, as a moral agent was responsible for the formation of his character, or the circumstances in which he acted so heinously, it is undeniable that in so doing these acts he endorsed a disrespectful message (at the very least). The symbolic message(s) endorsed by such individuals are of such a nature that it is morally reasonable that the victim feel resentment in order to protect their own self-respect and assert their own self-worth. This resentment is not rendered unreasonable because the wrongdoer lacked control over, and thus responsibility, for their character and/or circumstance. It is consistent for the victim to feel resentment in light of the message of disrespect they receive whilst conceding the role of luck in bringing about the wrongful act. The difference between Garrard and McNaughton’s defence of unconditional forgiveness and Murphy’s communicative account of resentment and forgiveness seemingly arises from a difference in the focus of both accounts. Whereas Murphy is concerned with the victim and the appropriateness of resentment as a response to a message of disrespect, Garrard and McNaughton centre their investigation on the wrongdoer and how it came to be that they committed a wrongful act or became morally vicious in character. Both are interesting, morally important questions. However, when judging whether resentment is an appropriate emotion to feel in response to receiving an non-excusable moral wrong, I judge that the role played by luck in the wrongdoer’s character and circumstance is a secondary issue to the immediate concern of the defence of the self-respect, and self-worth of the victim. 4.The Role of ‘Moral Reasons’ in Conditional ForgivenessChapter Two provided an argument for certain forms of anger being judged defensible as a response to wrongdoing in certain circumstances. This justification focused on both (a) defensive function of anger, specifically that it is defensive of an agent’s own self-worth, the rules of morality, and respectful of the wrongdoer as a responsible moral agent and (b) the special communicative power of the punishment these forms of anger call for as educating the wrongdoer of the fact that their previous conduct was wrongful and, thus facilitating their moral growth. In what follows then I will consider forgiveness within the circumstance in which the wrongdoer has committed a wrong against another, who responds with well-grounded, proportionate anger of the sort described in Chapter Two. We must theorise whether from this position there is a circumstance in which the victim ought to forgive the wrongdoer and what role moral reasons play in grounding such an instance of forgiveness as appropriate. Throughout this section I draw upon the literature on forgiveness to present an account of the common moral reasons upon which the appropriateness of forgiveness is often seen to rest. I conclude by endorsing Griswold’s model of ideal forgiveness in which sincere repentance is seen as the strongest reason for forgiving the wrongdoer whilst admitting that there may be circumstances in which we can bestow forgiveness on another for competing moral reasons so long as features of these reasons (and the circumstance) are consistent with both (a) the forgiver respecting oneself, the wrongdoer, and morality and (b) the forgiver refusing to condone the wrongful conduct.4.1 Common Moral Reasons upon which to base the appropriateness of forgivenessGood Motives: This form of reasoning for the appropriateness of forgiveness holds that even though the other person’s conduct has displayed a lack of respect for our wishes or our high standing, the person did not intend to convey such a meaning in their actions. We can think of any number of examples in which one acts in good faith and with good intentions towards another only to unintentionally (in the eyes of the recipient) demean or diminish them. One can imagine the mother who disapproves of her son’s friendship group based on (unknown to her) false rumours about the friends, and forbids her son from seeing them. Now, she undoubtedly causes harm to her son here in the form of ostracising him from his social group and conveys the message ‘mother knows best’ in a way that the son rightly takes to be condescending or demeaning yet is doing so from a position of concern for her son; any disrespect conveyed by her conduct is beyond her gaze which is focused solely on the welfare of her son. The son, however, growing frustrated at his mother’s interference in his social life, and feeling smothered may naturally come to resent her overbearing parenting style and refusal to acknowledge his wishes. Importantly, the motive behind the disrespectful conduct here is markedly different than, say, the parents who refuse to take an interest in their children’s interests because they don’t value the happiness of their children. In contrast the overprotective mother perhaps cares to such a degree that her disrespectful conduct is a by-product of this, and at first glance it seems intuitively feasible that we can forgive such discretions whilst retaining our self-respect given that the other agent did not seek to intentionally disrespect us.Enough Suffering: Building upon the idea that suffering is redemptive, Murphy posits the notion of the suffering of the wrongdoer as resulting in the lowering of them in some sense relative to the victim such that forgiveness can be bestowed whilst retaining self-respect. He rightly notes that forgiveness is both difficult and inappropriate whilst the wrongdoer occupies the position of relative superiority to the victim as a result of the harmful conduct itself. They key thought here is that suffering ‘humbles’ people and so the wrongdoer no longer believes themselves to be occupying a position of superiority over the victim and forgiveness can be bestowed on equal relative standing. Murphy summarises this thought neatly, writing:“Given the hurt and sadness that may come to be present in a person’s life, it may be difficult and improper to retain, as one’s primary view of that person, the sense that he is essentially “the one who has wronged me.” Perhaps he does and should become in one’s mind simply “that poor bastard”.Apology: As with the idea of enough suffering, the appropriateness of forgiveness bestowed following the wrongdoer apologising to the victim rests upon the notion that relative equality is restored within the relationship. Here the apology fulfils the same function of suffering; the wrongdoer is lowered to the level of the victim and on our (and Murphy’s) account of forgiveness the victim can grant forgiveness to the wrongdoer without accepting a position beneath them. This is because, Murphy claims, apology is a way for the wrongdoer to voluntarily lower themselves or raise the victim up, relatively within the relationship. Importantly Murphy notes that on many occasions apology will amount to the manifestation of the wrongdoer’s feelings of repentance and as such the appropriateness of granting forgiveness will rest on the presence of repentance, yet apology without repentance may have equilibrium restoring effects just considered, in the sense of the apologiser being seen as voluntarily lowering themselves relative to the wrongdoer in the eyes of onlookers; granting of course that such apology is not obviously flippant. In cases whereby apology is obviously not sincere this will not be the case of course. Pettigrove gives the example of how a forced apology from a school-pupil to their classmate under duress from their teacher will ‘ring hollow’ in the ears of the victim and their classmates. Similarly, he presents the case of the hypothetical cheating husband who is sincerely apologetic for his actions and commits to avoid repeating his mistakes in the future but who presumes to continue the marital relationship as if the wrongdoing never occurred (perhaps making jokes or flippant remarks about his previous conduct) it would seem to fall short of an ideal case of apology indicative of repentance. Pettigrove writes of such cases: “While such an individual's apology has not misfired in the way the schoolboy's did, his subsequent actions and attitudes suggest that he fails to appreciate fully the nature of his wrongdoing and the seriousness of its effects”. These examples back up Murphy’s claim that although apologies are usually, and ideally, indicative of repentance, all apologies are not equal and thus are more than the mere speech act. In the case of the schoolboy for instance he does not accept responsibility for the wrongdoing nor commit to adapting his behaviour in future, the adulterous partner by contrast seems to grasp the wrongfulness of his action yet fails to acknowledge the effect the wrongdoing has on the dynamics of the ongoing relationship with his wife. Ideally, then apology will take place as part of the process of repentance (to be discussed within this section). However, clearly there are reasons to assume that this isn’t necessarily so.On Murphy’s account forgiveness founded upon any of the previous moral reasons can be seen as permissible because it is not inconsistent with the victim’s self-respect remaining intact. For him, central to each of the preceding reasons for forgiveness is that they separate the agent from the immoral act. The good motives of the wrongdoer serve as evidence of good intentions as opposed to a belief that the victim is unworthy of equal treatment, relevant suffering of the wrongdoer facilitates the wrongdoer to humble themselves following their previous wrongful conduct (similar to the communicative role of punishment in Duff’s account discussed throughout Chapter Two), and apology signals the wrongdoer recognising that their conduct was indeed wrongful and deserving of apology. The framework within which this thesis operates has taken the aspect of the wrong which moral anger and resentment protest against as the symbolic messages the wrongdoer sends through wrongdoing. As such we are consigned to the view that to forgive the wrongdoer without this separation between act and agent would amount to a deficiency in self-respect as in such instances the forgiver is seemingly endorsing the lowly position the wrongdoing ascribes to them. Should we come to separate the conduct from the person however, on account of any of the aforementioned reasons we can forgive the person without ceding to the disrespectful message contained within their previous conduct. In the following sub-section I consider some objections to my implicit claim here that to forgive in the absence of relevant moral reasons amounts to a deficiency in self-respect.Finally, then, we come to sincere repentance. I judge that the presence of sincere repentance on the part of the wrongdoer provides the strongest reason for forgiveness since it is the strongest indication possible that the wrongdoer has made an effort to distance themselves from their wrongful act and no longer endorses it or the disrespectful message contained within. First, we must ask what repentance amounts to. On Murphy’s account the repentant offender undergoes radical moral change in, “having a sincere change of heart … withdrawing his endorsement from his own immoral past behaviour”, this passage gives insight into how apology is only contingently indicative of repentance in that one can coherently express apology without undergoing this genuine inner change in attitudes. Pettigrove’s account of the moral force of apologies seems to gain weight from his notion that genuine apology goes beyond mere speech acts and aims at appropriate attitudes and these attitudes informing apologetic behaviour in future thus displaying a degree of repentance for the wrongful act. On Pettigrove’s account the repentance such apologies are indicative of contains three main elements. First, the wrongdoer must show that they take the victim of the wrong seriously, they must feel (and convey that they feel) badly about committing the wrong, and finally the wrongdoer must not intend to engage in similar wrongful conduct toward the victim in future. The importance on the wrongdoer conveying their bad feelings and remorse about their previous conduct points towards apology being present within sincere repentance; it is not merely an internal change of feeling, rather it is a change in feeling made public to the victim. As we have noted throughout, I judge the narrative of forgiveness (in all of its steps from wrong to possible forgiveness) to be a communicative endeavour in which symbolic messages of genuine moral import are conveyed. Following Murphy then we can hold that when such repentance is present the wrongdoer can no longer be said to be sending, or endorsing, a negative message towards the victim. Rather, the symbolic message contained within repentance is a public distancing of the wrongdoer from their own past wrongful conduct and character. Such change in the attitudes and character of the wrongdoer renders any lingering resentment inappropriate as the wrongdoer no longer holds the same morally vicious beliefs. The victim may of course still alter their behaviour such that the relationship never fully returns to its previous ‘pre-wrongdoing’ state, but this is compatible with overcoming the angry feeling and motivation for revenge central to resentment. Importantly, the victim will still retain the judgement that they were dealt an unjustified moral injury – it is not the judgement itself that is overcome in an act of forgiveness – it is rather the attitude towards the object of this judgement that changes. The wrongdoer, following sincere repentance, is no longer the sort of person who endorses such immoral treatment as they once did and because of this, it is reasonable for the victim to put feelings of resentment aside and view the judgement of wrongdoing as they would any other non-emotional judgement or belief. This neat separation between wrongdoer and wrongful act/attitude not only in the mind of the forgiver who seeks to forgive at all costs but, importantly, on the part of the wrongdoer who sincerely repents, lends a special weight to the value of repentance. This value elevates repentance beyond competing moral grounds upon which to justify forgiveness. Furthermore, sincere repentance and the willingness of the wrongdoer to disavow of their previous actions and beliefs also ensures that in the act of forgiving one does not unintentionally condone immoral behaviour. It is widely accepted in the literature on forgiveness that if forgiveness is appropriate it is judged so on account of the compassion it shows towards the wrongdoer and not solely because of therapeutic or selfish reasons concerned with the victim overcoming their feelings of resentment. The special value of repentance argued for throughout may seemingly be at odds with this thought and possibly implies that we forgive the repentant wrongdoer not because we feel compassion for them but because they deserve it thus advocating an account of the act of forgiveness founded upon notions of justice rather than compassion and generosity. It would be a mistake, however, to say that forgiving because of a public show of repentance on the part of the wrongdoer is inconsistent with forgiving compassionately. When we forgive because of repentance we respect that the wrongdoer has disowned their previous behaviour and distanced themselves from the disrespectful message conveyed within. This form of respect towards to the wrongdoer is compatible with treating the wrongdoer compassionately. It respects the potential for moral growth within bad characters and does not view them as a lost cause. If we forgive unconditionally or forgive as a means to encourage repentance this could equally be seen as failing to respect the wrongdoer as an autonomous moral agent with the capacity to change. Of course, this is not always the case however, as it has been argued that to forgive in the absence of an admission on the part of the wrongdoer that their action was wrongful may open up a dialogue towards reconciliation when both parties are aware of the moral complexity of the situation. In summary, and returning to three areas briefly mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, when the wrongdoer sincerely repents for their previous conduct and communicates that they now share the view that it was wrongful, there is no question of the forgiver being seen to be: (1) Lacking in self-respect: as the wrongdoer no longer holds the views that communicated symbolically that the victim was undeserving of respect, (2) Failing to take wrongdoing seriously: again, because the wrongdoer has disavowed of their previous immoral views and actions the forgiver can resume a relationship with them whilst still maintaining the importance of moral behaviour, or; (3) Failing to respect the wrongdoer: in cases of genuine repentance we forgive precisely because the wrongdoer deserves to be forgiven. They no longer endorse their previous wrongful actions or beliefs. It would thus be unreasonable not to forgive him if we refuse to do so because of previous actions he is repentant of, and/or views he no longer holds for to do so would fail to respect their moral growth and the person they now are. If we insist upon sincere repentance as providing the strongest reasons upon which to appropriately overcome the negative feelings occasioned by the wrongful conduct we do not demand too much or lose the compassionate nature of forgiveness, rather we respect the wrongdoer by ceding to his moral growth and disavowal of his previous actions and character. Thus, in the presence of repentance there is no fear of being weak-willed, lacking in adequate self-respect or accepting treatment beneath that which you ought to demand if the victim overcomes what was once appropriate resentment and forgives the wrongdoer. As Murphy writes, “our self-respect is, at least partly, social. If the wrongdoer truly repents from their previous act and message within, we may be able to coherently forgive the wrongdoer whilst retaining our self-respect”.5.A Consideration of Objections to my Account 5.1 Conditional Forgiveness as Dominating and DemeaningWithin contemporary literature one line of objection raised against the appropriateness of conditional forgiveness is that it involves the would-be forgiver assuming a position of relevant dominance over the wrongdoer until such times as they fulfil the relevant moral conditions for forgiveness. Those who are uneasy about these unequal power relations also express concern with the nature of apology and repentance in holding that they involve self-abasement of the wrongdoer and humbling oneself before the victim in the hope that they forgive. In what follows I consider Nussbaum’s genealogical critique of forgiveness. She argues that the inequalities in power between forgiver and wrongdoer, as well as the rituals of humbling oneself, are relics from forgiveness within the Judeo-Christian framework. We shall see that she judges these to have remained, unquestioned, within secular accounts and are rendered incoherent once removed from their original framework.Nussbaum’s objection takes aim, not only at views such as that endorsed thus far, which stresses the importance of repentance, but any account of forgiveness whether it be conditional or unconditional in nature. For present purposes, however, I focus narrowly on her attack on accounts of conditional forgiveness such as my own. She considers conditional forgiveness, and its onus on the wrongdoer humbling themselves before their victim, as “perfectionistic and intolerant”. In responding to such a position, I defend conditional forgiveness as a morally defensible endeavour, the nature of which is subtly distinct from its religious counterpart. As we shall see, I hold that, on occasion, it is appropriate that we place a degree of importance upon relative rank and status. Furthermore, the act of the wrongdoer voluntarily lowing one’s rank and status relative to the victim is a commendable act, importantly distinct from the power dynamics at play between forgiver and forgiven in the practice of asking for divine forgiveness.Nussbaum’s critique of conditional forgiveness is grounded on the thought that the bestowment of forgiveness by the victim is simply the misguided payback wish (discussed in relation to anger throughout Chapter Two) in another guise. The payback here is taken as the pleasure felt by the would-be forgiver who takes joy in withholding forgiveness until such times as the wrongdoer fulfils the specified moral reasons which render forgiveness appropriate. Given the depth of Nussbaum’s genealogical approach to forgiveness it is difficult to do justice to her work here. Hence, it is worth quoting her at some length as she summarises her position. She writes,“Transactional forgiveness, far from providing an alternative to the two errors in anger… actually involves both. The payback error turns up in ideas of cosmic balance or fittingness that frequently inhabit the process… Equally ubiquitous is the error of narrow status-focus. Because the whole process is modelled on God’s relationship to erring mortals, and God is not vulnerable to any injury but a status-injury, the forgiveness process between humans also focuses unduly on status, suggesting that lowness and abasement compensate for a lowering or status-offence that the offender has inflicted”.Here, Nussbaum captures the different elements of her opposition to the moral worth of conditional – or as she terms it, ‘transactional’ - forgiveness. Essentially, she holds that forgiveness, like anger, is both unduly concerned with payback and focused on status. The precise nature of these linkages come to light throughout her use of a genealogical method of analysis of the concepts at play here. Throughout her analysis she claims our contemporary secular notions of conditional forgiveness are lifted largely from religious accounts without major modification.Nussbaum begins her genealogy of forgiveness by analysing the Jewish tradition of Teshuvah. Within Teshuvah repentance takes centre stage. Teshuvah takes place entirely within the context of the relationship between the wrongdoer and God. This is the case whether the transgression is committed against God or against another person as Judaism holds that every bad act towards another person is also a wrongdoing towards God. Nussbaum notes importantly that such is the multitude of sins waiting for the careless it is imperative to be in a state of constant vigilance lest one find themselves asking for God’s forgiveness. Human-human Teshuvah, whilst taking place within the wider context of a relationship with God, has a certain degree of distinction by virtue of the fact that if someone transgresses against another person there are forms of repentance distinct from that which must be carried out solely for transgressions against God. Thus, this conception of forgiveness within the Jewish tradition is perhaps closest in form to the notions of conditional forgiveness endorsed throughout this chapter.Human-human Teshuvah dictates that the wrongdoer must approach the person, confess their fault publicly, express regret, a commitment to change and not repeat this sort of wrongful act again, and finally the victim, in the presence of these conditions, must accept the apology. Such acts are chosen, Nussbaum writes, because “compensation and restitution do not reach the victim’s shame and distress: only an appeal for forgiveness can do this”. This thought is in line with the account of forgiveness I have endorsed thus far in my work in which I place special value on the wrongdoer’s sincere repentance, or other competing moral reasons such as apology should they be indicative of moral growth on the part of the wrongdoer. Key to my account, as we have seen, is the thought that only when the wrongdoer disavows of their previous action and makes a commitment to change can the victim allow themselves to forgive without still judging themselves to be beneath the wrongdoer, or merely condoning their wrongful conduct towards them. It is worth noting here that the Jewish tradition places an obligation on the victim to forgive when presented with these conditions. In this sense it places the onus on the victim more than most secular accounts, very few of which would hold that forgiveness is a strict obligation even when these conditions are fulfilled, rather that forgiveness has simply been made reasonable or permissible.Notably however, within Teshuvah, this willingness to forgive, Nussbaum notes, should very much depend on the actions of the wrongdoer. The victim is obligated to wait for the wrongdoer to apologise, to express sincere regret, and make a commitment not to repeat such wrongs in the future. Only when such conditions are met does forgiveness become appropriate - indeed, an obligation - for the victim. Were the victim to forgive in the absence of such conditions they disrespect the process of Teshuvah. Nussbaum is critical of this thought as it leaves no room for generosity or an attitude of ‘loving playfulness’ by strictly forbidding the victim any scope for discretion or spontaneity. Rather, they must adhere to the rigid guidelines laid out by the tradition of Teshuvah. She considers this process harmful to the participants in two ways. Firstly, it encourages people to constantly be on their guard and preoccupied with possible transgressions against God, and secondly the demands of the public Teshuvah process within interpersonal relationships coupled with the multitude of possible wrongs which one could commit leads to constant anxiety in social relations. Nussbaum finds a degree of continuity between the Jewish tradition and Christianity with regards to forgiveness. She writes that the role of conditional forgiveness in the Gospels is relatively minor although it has developed into the favoured view of the church. On her account, Luke’s verse, “if your brother wrongs you seven times a day, and seven times a day he turns to you saying ‘I repent’ you shall forgive him” captures the current ethos of the organised church on forgiveness. Once again, then, repentance takes centre stage within this account of forgiveness. Nussbaum notes that the Christian tradition is one steeped in retribution and requiring that we implore God to forgive us for our transgressions. It is within the Dies Irae which Nussbaum identifies the parallels with Jewish Teshuvah and Christian notions of repentance. The poem describes many of the conditions which Teshuvah is based upon – “confession, apology, pleas, contrition, a chronicle of one’s bad acts”. This continuity is only strengthened when considered alongside the Christian sacrament of Penance which Nussbaum finds to have, “precise analogues to each stage of the Teshuvah process”. Penance requires verbal confession, contrition, penance is void if the repentance is not sincere, and if sincere absolution is granted pending certain deeds to be carried out to either God, victim, or the community. There are important unique aspects of Christian penance not found within secular accounts of forgiveness, however. Firstly, forgiveness, even in cases of wrongdoing against another person, may only be granted by God and “if you square your relationship with God, then the other person is by definition satisfied, and you do not need to engage in separate negotiations with that person”. The priest, in confessional and as part of the penance ritual, can instruct the wrongdoer to carry out certain deeds which may involve apologising to the victim, however it is not up to the victim whether forgiveness is granted. Nussbaum captures this thought, writing that, “unlike Teshuvah, Christian forgiveness is essentially a God-directed process… humans do not face humans (apart from clergy) directly; they turn to God”. Secondly, drawing on Foucault’s account of the confessional and penance Nussbaum notes that he correctly identifies the position of power the listener exerts over the speaker who is seen as lower relatively as they confess a neverending list of transgressions which can never be completely made clear (to confess to every hidden sin would be an insurmountable task, not least because the speaker may be unaware of many sins they have committed). This is seen by Foucault, and Nussbaum, as a ritual of “self-abasement, self-obliteration, and shaming”. Furthermore, she notes how Christianity’s inclusion of wishes and desires within the scope of sin creates ever more possibilities to err, only amplifying the place of anxiety and worry within daily life. Nussbaum also stresses how Christianity and its tradition of penance places even greater emphasis on the lowness of humanity and especially the flesh. Indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that from the Christian perspective humility and lowness are built-in features of the human condition. One gets a sense that this emphasis on lowness within the Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish) tradition is a cause of great concern for Nussbaum. In sum, then, Nussbaum writes of Christian forgiveness that, “as in Judaism, then, we have forgiveness, but at the end of a process involving abasement, confession, contrition, and penance. In contrast to Judaism, the process requires acknowledging that one is fundamentally low and of little worth”. She argues that to remove conditional forgiveness from its original religious framework it is rendered is uncoherent at best and dominating at worst. We would be better served – she argues – to adopt an attitude of unconditional love towards others regardless of their conduct towards us.At first glance it may seem uncontentious to claim, as Nussbaum does, that cases of secular contemporary conditional forgiveness contain the different elements contained within the religious strands of Teshuvah and penance. I am struck however that in pursuing a genealogical method of analysis of these concepts she may be overemphasising problematic elements that don’t seem to fit neatly within both frameworks (religious and secular). One upshot of the genealogical method undertaken by Nussbaum to analyse forgiveness is that it focuses predominantly on similarities between the two frameworks yet overlooks instances within which these come apart.When we look at Griswold’s account of the conditions required of the wrongdoer, we see that Nussbaum is surely correct to identify parallels with such secular accounts. Indeed, many of the conditions I endorse above such as apology, enough suffering, and most pertinently, repentance all have direct analogues within Judeo-Christian notions of forgiveness as we have seen throughout the previous discussion of Nussbaum’s genealogical approach to forgiveness. As indicated above however, I oppose the claim that because many of these conditions are shared across both frameworks, they are problematic when removed from their religious origins.An example may illustrate how these seemingly connected conditions are, in fact, markedly different in nature within each distinct framework. If we cast our minds back to my example presented earlier in the thesis, within which we considered resentment in the circumstances of a noisy group of students displaying a lack of regard toward others trying to work quietly within the silent study area of a university library we can see how this is so. Were the noisy students to be made aware of their wrongful conduct and apologise here for instance, I propose that the nature of such an interaction would be importantly different from those Nussbaum draws upon when considering Teshuvah and forgiveness within the Gospels. Of course, in apologising for their conduct, the noisy students are voluntarily lowering themselves in the hope that their victims will bestow forgiveness upon them, however this need not (and most likely would not) be painful or humiliating for the wrongdoers in such an instance. Rather, they would recognise their failure to treat the other students with due measure of respect and, one imagines, voluntarily offer their apologies. Nor, do I imagine the would-be forgiver in such an instance taking pleasure in their relative position of superiority in granting forgiveness.Of course, such an example merely gives us reason to assume that the secular and religious notions can be judged as importantly distinct in an instance of somewhat trivial wrongdoing. It would, of course, be much too flippant to claim that the discussion ends here. We must ask also whether secular conditional forgiveness in response to serious wrongdoing has more in common with Teshuvah and Christian forgiveness. The lines become blurred here somewhat as the power dynamics in such an instance would surely be importantly skewed to such a degree as causes Nussbaum concern within the religious picture. Victims of such abhorrent acts as rape or domestic abuse, to give two such examples, would surely think themselves as occupying a position of moral superiority in comparison to those who subjected them to such conduct and would undoubtedly take a degree of satisfaction in the wrongdoer in such cases coming to a position of repentance, apologising, or going through suffering or humiliation as a result of their conduct. We must ask then, are these cases problematic in such a way; does the would-be forgiver in such instances unjustifiably assume the judgmental role attributed to God in the Judeo-Christian framework?I judge that such cases of conditional forgiveness in the context of severe wrongs are not necessarily imbued with the residual power dynamics at play in religious accounts, or, at least, the power dynamics and relative ranking within the relationship are importantly distinct from those between sinner and God. The victim who waits for the wrongdoer to meet such conditions before granting forgiveness does not assume an innate moral superiority over the wrongdoer. Rather – as I hope is clear from my preceding discussion throughout this work – the unequal power relations arise within social relationships post-wrongdoing on account of the wrongful conduct and message of disrespect communicated therein. Given my discussion of the interplay between wrongful treatment, self-respect and relative ranking within social relationships throughout the preceding chapters, I judge the asymmetry in ranking that develops when the wrongdoer comes to a position of repentance or offering apology to be justifiable on these grounds and thus not merely a relic of the asymmetry between the sinner and God in Judeo-Christian conceptions of forgiveness. To conflate the distinct nature of the relationships within both accounts is a by-product of the genealogical method in this instance.Griswold pursues a similar line of response to Garrard and McNaughton’s critique of the role of apology within conditional forgiveness. Whilst I place repentance at the heart of my account of praiseworthy conditional forgiveness, this discussion is worthy of inclusion given that I hold apology to be an acceptable method of communicating repentance in ideal instances. Furthermore, as we shall see, Garrard and McNaughton’s concerns with the role of apology are just as relevant to my account of repentance given that both involve the wrongdoer voluntarily lowering themselves in the hope that their victim will forgive. Garrard and McNaughton write, of apologies:“To insist on an apology is to insist that the wrongdoer humble himself before one, and this implies that there is still some residual resentment. Any relishing of the wrongdoer’s lowered standing in relation to the forgiver impugns the genuineness of the forgiveness”.So, whilst not genealogical in method, Garrard and McNaughton arrive at broadly the same conclusion as Nussbaum with regards to apologies and share the same unease at the lengths the wrongdoer must go to in order to humble themselves before the victim prior to forgiveness being bestowed. They also assume, as did Nussbaum, that the forgiver takes pleasure, or ‘relishes’ the act of the wrongdoer having to go through such rituals of humbling. Much like my response to the genealogical critique I simply judge Garrard and McNaughton to be mistaken to characterise apologies in this manner. Griswold pursues a similar line of response. He writes:“Garrard and McNaughton paint apology in quite unacceptable term; for it is not the case that it requires either that the offender humbles herself in a way that is demeaning, or that the victim engages in ‘relishing’ the offenders subservience”.I agree with Griswold’s assertion here. The link between humbling oneself and being demeaned does not seem to be necessary. Should the apology be sincere it would most likely be indicative of a change in the inner attitudes of the wrongdoer who now stands with the victim in disavowing his previous conduct. In such cases it seems mistaken to assume that the apology itself is demeaning. It may, of course, be the case that the act of apologising, accepting accountability for wrongful conduct and facing the victim, is in some way painful for the wrongdoer, however this seems importantly distinct from being demeaned. Rather, it seems to be closest in nature to a voluntarily form of diminishment to draw upon Hampton’s distinction between being demeaned and diminished outlined in Chapter One. I concede, however, that it may be contingently true that apologies occasionally are of the grim nature applied to them by Garrard and McNaughton. Nonetheless, given that this is a contingent fact, I retain my judgement that to judge conditional forgiveness which focuses on wrongdoer-focused reasons as dominating and demeaning would be unjustified.5.2 The Immediately Repentant WrongdoerOne further objection to consider is based around the hypothetical case of the immediately repentant wrongdoer. As we have seen, in basing the appropriateness of forgiveness on the sincere repentance of the wrongdoer I have stressed the possibility that in forgiving in the absence of this conditional the victim either condones the wrongful conduct they have been subjected to, and/or acquiesces to the lowly position such conduct ascribes to them. However, the possibility that, hypothetically speaking, a wrongdoer may immediately sincerely repent for their wrongful conduct seems to be problematic for my view. It is worth briefly spelling out how exactly such a hypothetical is seen to cause issues here. As should be clear from the preceding discussion throughout this chapter, much of the value placed on sincere repentance arises from the notion that it is indicative of the wrongdoer undergoing real moral growth. Recall that wrongdoing communicates the ill-will or intentions of the wrongdoer and that sincere repentance involves the wrongdoer disavowing their previous conduct and the attitudes which occasioned it. This disavowal encapsulates the moral growth undergone. Were the wrongdoer to immediately arrive at a position of sincere repentance in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing this prima facie causes a problem for my account as it would suggest that the wrongdoer in such an instance either (a) didn’t intend to inflict injury upon the victim or truly appreciate the degree to which their actions would harm the victim, or (b) underwent genuine moral growth immediately. Furthermore, I have argued that both forgiveness and repentance are both best understood as processes, and not merely acts, and that resentment should be overcome involving a substantial degree of agent-effort thus ensuring the value of the process of forgiveness itself. Concluding this objection then, it would seem then that the hypothetical case of the immediately sincerely repentant wrongdoer risks negating the value of the process of overcoming resentment by collapsing recipient-focused reasons for forgiving into those of good motives (if (a) above), or calling for the immediate bestowment of forgiveness in such cases (if (b) above).I will tackle each of these objections in turn, starting with (a) above: The wrongdoer immediately repents having come to realise that his conduct had a more profound negative effect than they had foreseen prior to committing the act. As noted above, such a case has parallels to that of ‘good motives’ considered in section 4 of this chapter. Perhaps the best characterisation here would be ‘neutral motives’; in such cases we aren’t necessarily saying that the ‘wrongdoer’ in these instances knew they were harming the victim but did so for what they judged to be good reasons, rather they were unaware of the wrongfulness of the conduct itself. I judge my account capable of meeting such an objection as this appears to be a matter of the attribution of responsibility for the wrong as opposed to judging whether immediate forgiveness is appropriate in this instance. Recall that, on the account I endorse, resentment is a response to the ill-will or intentions of the wrongdoer as symbolically communicated by their wrongful conduct. As I link forgiveness and resentment to a strong degree within the framework of the thesis the question then becomes, ‘does such conduct make the author a suitable candidate for the reactive attitude of resentment?’. If the interaction takes place in the manner outlined above under the broad term ‘neutral motives’, resentment in response to such conduct would appear to be unnecessary. This holds because no message of disrespect was communicated within the actions of the ‘wrongdoer’. Thus, the recipient of such conduct was never in danger of being truly demeaned or diminished. In such cases as (a), then, the question of forgiveness remains outside the scope of the discussion as the circumstances for appropriate anger or resentment do not arise.Turning our attention to (b) then, we now consider whether the account of conditional forgiveness I endorse can respond to such cases as when the wrongdoer immediately repents having seemingly undergone weighty moral growth. Pertinently, we ought to ask whether such a scenario fulfils the recipient-focused reasons such that forgiveness ought to be bestowed immediately also. We can ask here whether the immediacy of repentance, and possible forgiveness, undermines the real moral worth of the notion that both arriving at a position of repentance, and overcoming resentment such that one is in a position to forgive, ought to be the culmination of agent-effort.I hold that the account of conditional forgiveness I have endorsed thus far can rise to meet this final objection owing to how forgiveness has been conceived of as a process, rather than an act, throughout this piece of work. I concede that, whilst rare, cases in which repentance is reached immediately is certainly hypothetically possible and no doubt occurs in actuality. One can imagine an offender, being confronted with the consequences of their conduct, undergoing a change of heart in the immediate aftermath of the conduct. In addition to the question of whether such cases undermine the value of the process of repentance, one further query here would be the fear that such repentance is not sincere. With regards to the latter concern, the question of sincerity, we can judge this by way of the wrongdoer’s continual commitment to modify their behaviour as evidence of their sincere repentance. So, whilst they may immediately reach a position whereby they sincerely disavow their conduct, importantly repentance also involves the ongoing change in behaviour reflective of the moral transformation undergone. I’m remined here of Pettigrove’s treatment of the nature of apologies outlined previously, in which I highlighted his assertion that genuine apologies will inform apologetic attitudes and behaviours in future. Sincere repentance also contains such a commitment to modify future behaviour even if the initial change in attitudes is instantaneous. One further consideration that helps us to accommodate the possibility that the immediacy of repentance casts doubt on its sincerity is the notion that forgiveness, once granted, can be withdrawn. Indeed, Scarre, despite remaining, on balance, opposed to the thought that forgiveness can be withdrawn, grants that one such condition for the withdrawal of forgiveness once bestowed is the realisation that the wrongdoer’s repentance was insincere. One form of evidence of the insincerity of repentance is repeated offences of the same nature as that which was originally committed against the victim. With regards to the question of sincerity then, I judge this account of forgiveness well-equipped to deal with these concerns given that sincere repentance will be evidenced by a change in ongoing behaviour and, in the absence of this, forgiveness, if granted previously, can coherently be said to be withdrawn in such circumstances.What, then, of the charge that the case of the wrongdoing who sincere repents in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing devalues the process and agent-effort that often accompany repentance and forgiveness? Firstly, regarding repentance specifically, we have granted throughout this section that it usually involves a large degree of effort and introspection on the part of the wrongdoer in confronting their past behaviour and character before arriving at the position whereby they denounce what they once were and make a commitment to change. Now, we can grant that this process, and the agent-effort it involves, is both valuable and psychologically necessary for the vast majority of people. Should a wrongdoer – perhaps owing to the unique nature of the offence, or relationship with the victim – reach repentance in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing it need not devalue the effort required in the majority of cases. Rather, the possibility of the existence of such cases would be the exception that proves the rule as it were. If the immediate repentance meets the conditions for sincerity above, then it is certainly no less valuable than repentance arrived at through struggle. The relevant moral concerns being the sincerity of the repentance, and the protection of the victim’s self-respect.The latter of these moral concerns brings us to our final consideration: is the process of forgiveness, or the victim’s self-respect, undermined or threatened in such cases? I think not. Once again, recall that forgiveness – the overcoming of resentment and related emotions – is a process, not merely an act. Given this, the immediate sincere repentance of the wrongdoer does not oblige the victim to immediately forswear all resentment resulting from the offence. Rather, on the account considered throughout this chapter the immediate repentance of the wrongdoer would signal to the victim that they ought to consider beginning the process of overcoming resentment felt in response to the wrong. So, whilst the repentance is immediate (and sincere), the victim reaching the end of forgiveness (the complete forswearing of resentment) need not necessarily be so. Certainly, with regards to severe offences it may well be a psychological impossibility that resentment be overcome immediately, or even that the victim commences this process immediately. Whilst, I have stressed the importance of appropriate attitudes throughout the thesis the matter of whether arriving at such attitudes is psychologically possible cannot be overlooked; thus, in response to these instances, conceiving of forgiveness as a process allows the victim the necessary time for reflection to begin to overcome the residual resentment felt, even in instances where the wrongdoer sincerely repents in the immediate aftermath of wrongdoing.Summary:Conditional Forgiveness Grounded on the Repentance of the Wrongdoer as Consistent with the Victim’s Self-RespectThroughout this closing chapter on forgiveness I have attempted to provide a condensed discussion on the topic which mirrors the structure of the previous two chapters on anger and resentment. The explanatory opening sought to draw upon the contemporary literature in order to both differentiate forgiveness from related concepts and position it firmly within the realm of possible responses to wrongfulness.The majority of this discussion was devoted to both, noting how forgiveness is granted for moral reasons and considering whether forgiveness ought to be linked strictly to the overcoming of resentment, or should be expanded to include overcoming of all negative emotions. As we have seen, I judge Hughes correct in adopting a position that straddles the line between these two accounts and allows for forgiveness to consist in the overcoming of those emotions which are indicative of resentment i.e. those reactive emotions that arise as a result of the victim being wronged in some manner. He terms such emotions as ‘moral anger’, as noted throughout. Importantly, I also agree with Griswold’s characterisation of forgiveness as a process, rather than an act, throughout this conceptual analysis. The process in question involves the victim working to overcome the resentment felt in response to the wrong they were subjected to in coming to judge the wrongdoer as consisting of more than simply their wrongful conduct.In beginning my argumentation then, I considered Garrard and McNaughton’s argument that we ought to unconditionally forgive those who wrong us based on their notion of shared humanity. As we have seen, I consider their account to be unconvincing owing to my judgement that the need to acknowledge and respond to symbolic message of disrespect contained within wrongdoing takes precedence over notions of shared humanity or circumstantial luck. Following this, the central concern of the chapter shifted to the question of what moral grounds are appropriate upon which to ground conditional forgiveness.Whilst I concede that there are several recipient-focused reasons which can render the bestowment of forgiveness appropriate, I maintain throughout that sincere repentance on the part of the wrongdoer grants the strongest reason for the victim to overcome their moral anger and forgive the wrongdoer. As argued throughout, I base this claim on the assertion that sincere repentance creates, and communicates, the conditions by which the victim can forgive whilst retaining their self-respect and avoid condoning wrongful conduct. Alternative moral reasons judged to be appropriate are largely taken so insofar as they are indicative of the inner change of character associated with sincere repentance.In closing, I responded to possible objections to the account of conditional forgiveness I endorse throughout the thesis. In considering both whether conditional forgiveness is demeaning in nature and whether the hypothetical case of an immediately repentant wrongdoer is problematic for my account, I draw upon my earlier explanatory work in stressing that forgiveness is a process rather than immediate act. Furthermore, as argued throughout this section, when forgiveness is seen as conditional upon repentance-centred, recipient-focused moral grounds, it ensures the victim can coherently forgive the wrongdoer whilst retaining their self-respect and avoid condoning wrongful conduct.BIBLIOGRAPHYAllais, L., ‘Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness’ in Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 1, 2008: pp.33-68Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson. Penguin Books, 1976Butler, J., Fifteen Sermons. MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1913 Damasio, A., Descartes Error. 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