Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context (...) of a wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence. Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here. (shrink)

Resentment, as it is currently understood in the philosophical literature, is individual. That is, it is anger about a moral injury done to oneself. But in some cases, resentment responds to systemic harms and injustices rather than direct moral injuries. The purpose of this paper is to move beyond individualistic conceptions of resentment to develop an account of collective resentment that better captures the character and effects of the emotion in these cases. I use the example (...) of indigenous and settler Canadians’ reciprocal resentments in response to the Indian Residential Schools and continuing political disagreements as an example of a context in which understanding collective resentment is important. (shrink)

Most current talk of forgiveness and reconciliation in the aftermath of collective violence proceeds from an assumption that forgiveness is always superior to resentment and refusal to forgive. Victims who demonstrate a willingness to forgive are often celebrated as virtuous moral models, while those who refuse to forgive are frequently seen as suffering from a pathology. Resentment is viewed as a negative state, held by victims who are not "ready" or "capable" of forgiving and healing. Resentment's Virtue (...) offers a new, more nuanced view. Building on the writings of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry and the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Thomas Brudholm argues that the preservation of resentment can be the reflex of a moral protest that might be as permissible, humane or honorable as the willingness to forgive. Taking into account the experiences of victims, the findings of truth commissions, and studies of mass atrocities, Brudholm seeks to enrich the philosophical understanding of resentment. (shrink)

How ought we to evaluate and respond to expressions of anger and resentment? Can philosophical analysis of resentment as the emotional expression of a moral claim help us to distinguish which resentments ought to be taken seriously? Philosophers have tended to focus on what I call ‘reasonable’ resentments, presenting a technical, narrow account that limits resentment to the expression of recognizable moral claims. In the following paper, I defend three claims about the ethics and politics of (...) class='Hi'>resentment. First, if we care about socially just processes of reconciliation, we have good reason to pay attention to the logic of resentments. Second, the account philosophers offer of resentment – its distinctive features, aims, rationality, and gratification – will affect the conclusions we draw about which actual resentments to take seriously, which aspects of resentful claims need addressing, and what it means to address and repair them. In contesting definitions of resentment, I argue, we do more than simply perform housekeeping in philosophical taxonomies of emotion. Restricting our understanding to essentially ‘moral’ cases may cause us to lose sight of expressly political resentments. Instead, I argue, a plausible account of resentment must acknowledge that we resent violations and threats that are not necessarily self-pertaining, may not be expressible as individual, discrete injuries, and cannot always be construed as moral threats. Second, given the dependence of moral judgments on a broader horizon of moral possibility, philosophical standards of ‘reasonable’ or ‘appropriate’ resentment cannot avoid being politically charged. Thus, the widely accepted account of ‘reasonable’ resentment cannot make philosophical sense of the most interesting and perplexing cases. Ironically, a theoretical measure designed to revalue emotional expressions of moral protest may result in the exclusion and silencing of those with the most reasons to protest. (shrink)

One of the most widely made claims about resentment and indignation is the “communication claim”: that resentment and indignation have a communicative nature. Many who endorse this claim take it one step further and unpack the communicative nature of resentment and indignation in terms of a specific form of address: demands. Resentment and indignation are often described as addressing, expressing, making, or issuing a demand. In this paper, I argue that while it is apt to characterize (...) resentment and indignation as communicative entities, it is a mistake to characterize them as demands. I sketch an alternative account of blame’s communicative nature, what I call the “mere address” view. (shrink)

This paper develops two related theses concerning resentment. The first, which I label the ‘prior norm requirement’, holds that feelings of resentment are grounded in the resenter’s conviction that some portion of their existing normative expectations has been violated. The second holds that resentments can make a rational contribution to the development of new normative expectations, transforming the resenter’s existing normative outlook. Certain expressions of the prior norm requirement in recent theory clash with the notion of norm-creative resentments, (...) portraying resentment as essentially conservative of existing norms. Against this, I develop the notion of ‘emotional articulation’, according to which emotions like resentment can involve cognitively complex processes of working through the meaning of experiences of wrongdoing, in ways that give rise to genuinely new normative commitments. I develop this through critical comparison with Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive-evaluative theory of emotion and by drawing from Charles Taylor’s notion of articulation. (shrink)

Many philosophers have defended the value of resentment to moral and political life. Resentment is thought to be a valuable expression of self-respect that stands up against moral wrongdoing and injustice. Although I have defended this conception of resentment in my own work, I’ve come to think that the emotion’s value has been overstated. Strong claims about the supposedly ‘close connection’ between resentment and self-respect can feel empowering for those of us whose lives have been marked (...) by injustice. But they can also feel alienating to the moral agent who experiences resentment more as a destructive force in their lives than a motivating force for justice. This chapter explores how we might make space for the self-respecting moral agent who does not feel resentful about wrongful acts and injustices done to them. I argue that people can have very good reasons to take a more sympathetic than resentful perspective on why people do what they do, interpreting wrongdoers’ acts to mean much more about the wrongdoers’ attitudes toward themselves and the circumstances of their own lives than the moral worth of the people whom their actions affect. (shrink)

We typically think of resentment as an unjustifiable and volatile emotion, responsible for fostering the worst political divisions. Recognizing Resentment argues instead that sympathy with the resentment of victims of injustice is vital for upholding justice in liberal societies, as it entails recognition of the equal moral and political status of those with whom we sympathize. Sympathizing with the resentment of others makes us alive to injustice in a way no rational recognition of wrongs alone can, (...) and it motivates us to demand justice on others' behalves. This book rehabilitates arguments for the moral and political worth of resentment developed by three influential thinkers in the early liberal tradition - Joseph Butler, David Hume, and Adam Smith - and uses these to advance a theory of spectatorial resentment, discussing why we should be indignant about the injustice others face, and how such a shared sentiment can actually bring liberal citizens closer together. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of the ‘moralization’ of resentment in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. By moralization, I do not refer to the complex process by which resentment is transformed by the machinations of sympathy, but a prior change in how the ‘raw material’ of the emotion itself is presented. In just over fifty pages, not only Smith’s attitude toward the passion of resentment, but also his very conception of the term, appears to shift dramatically. (...) What is an unpleasant, unsocial and relatively amoral passion of anger in general metamorphoses into a morally and psychologically rich account of a cognitively sharpened, normatively laden attitude, an attitude that contains both the judgment that the injury done to me was unjust and wrongful, and the demand that the offender acknowledge its wrongfulness. Two very different readings of ‘Smithean resentment’ are thus available from the text. Indeed, the notion of two distinct forms of resentment – an instinctive, amoral version and a rich, rationally appraising attitude – would bring Smith into line with an earlier account of resentment, found in Bishop Joseph Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at Rolls Chapel, first published in 1726. Ultimately, I argue, the differences in their theories are to Smith’s credit. It is precisely because the ‘thin’ or generic retaliatory passion described in Part I can be reconciled with the rich, normative attitude in Part II, that Smith is able to accomplish his meta-ethical goal of grounding moral judgments in naturally occurring emotions. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of the passions in Hume’s moral philosophy by focusing on resentment, its nature, and its contribution to justice. Drawing on the Treatise of Human Nature and the second Enquiry, I first argue that Hume offers a nuanced and plausible account of this passion, illuminating key aspects of our moral psychology and everyday evaluative practices. Building on this account, I then show how resentment shapes Hume’s theory of justice in two ways: first, by playing (...) a central role in the moralization of justice, and second, by acting as a stabilizing force that sustains moral sentiments once justice is moralized. This second task requires explaining why violations of property are experienced as injuries, which I address through the connection between property and a particular class of virtues—helping to clarify why disruptions of property relations are morally significant. (shrink)

Nearly sixty years after its publication, P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” continues to inspire important work. Its main legacy has been the notion of “reactive attitudes.” Surprisingly, Strawson’s central argument—an argument to the conclusion that no general thesis (such as the thesis of determinism) could provide us reason to abandon these attitudes—has received little attention. When the argument is considered, it is often interpreted as relying on a claim about our psychological capacities: we are simply not capable of (...) abandoning the reactive attitudes, across the board, in something like the way we are simply not capable of remembering everything we are told. A different line interprets Strawson as relying on something like a conceptual point: you can neither support nor call into question the whole of a practice using notions that are, themselves, constituted by that practice. Neither interpretation would lead to you to expect what you will find, looking at the central text: Strawson twice accuses his opponent of being caught in some kind of contradiction. So neither interpretation, on its own, is correct. By providing a close reading of the central text, I do my best to articulate Strawson’s more interesting, and more powerful, argument. The argument depends on an underlying picture of the nature of moral demands and moral relationships—a picture that has gone largely unnoticed, that is naturalistic without being reductionistic, and that is, I think, worthy of serious consideration. (shrink)

It is widely accepted among Mencius scholars that for Mencius, the junzi 君子 is the kind of person who accepts Heaven’s will and never resents Heaven. There are, however, several passages where resentment seems to be presented as a quality that the junzi possesses. In particular, Mencius 2B13 has been the subject of much contention. In Section 1, I will discuss various interpretations of 2B13, building on and updating Philip Ivanhoe’s helpful 1988 survey. In Section 2, I will present (...) an argument for resentment against Heaven in the Mencius. I argue from passages in the Mencius and its relationship with the Shijing 詩經 that we have good reason to think that, under certain circumstances, the junzi ought to resent Heaven. In Section 3, I will develop a theory of resentment from the Mencius and demonstrate how 2B13 can be understood in the larger context of this theory. (shrink)

Our current era of crisis and neo-fascist revanches (see Lawtoo 2019) is rife with desires-driven mimesis, and more specifically, mimetic resentment or conflictual copycat behaviour. Traditionally conceptualised in relation to ressentiment, mimetic resentment (see Nietzsche [1887]2006; Girard [1961]1965, [1977]1992, and [1978]1987) is seldom analysed as a somatechnical phenomenon that meshes the corporeal and the technological (Sullivan 2005; Pugliese and Stryker 2009; Sullivan and Murray 2011), involving pre-personal and affective micropolitics, as well as social and environmental macropolitical characteristics. This (...) article therefore seeks to map out resentment's contemporary somatechnics by attending to its violence-engendering micropolitics in addition to the macrolevels of the permacrisis times it is said to be operating in. The burgeoning environmental crisis that is currently unfolding against the backdrop of these permacrisis times furthermore indicates that such a mapping exercise must consider both the micro- and macropolitical nuances of how zoē/bios classifications and resultant gaps between non/human actors are created and sustained. Finding such a nuanced eco-focused framework in Deleuzoguattarian philosophy (see Deleuze [1969]1990; Deleuze and Guattari [1980]2005; Guattari [1989]2000 and [1992]2002), as well as contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Cooper 2008; Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016; and Yusoff 2018), we first examine these permacrisis times before presenting a critical cartography (Braidotti [1994]2011; Deleuze and Guattari [1980]2005) of the contours of mimetic resentment's violent micro- and macropolitical somatechnics, to then explore several eco-focused Deleuzoguattarian and critical new materialist pathways that could lead us out of the spiralling vortex of violence that characterises this time of planetary trouble. (shrink)

We use Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality as a touchstone for comprehending Trump’s appeal and victory. Following Nietzsche’s concerns, the most noteworthy puzzle is that of Trump’s peculiar popularity, especially given his impolitic statements and policy proposals that often appear in tension with the interests of his voter base. While Nietzsche’s discussions of power and resentment would seem obvious starting points to examine the success of Trump and Trumpism, we contend that these provide largely superficial and, at best, (...) incomplete explanations. Instead, informed by Nietzsche’s moral psychology, we analyze Trump’s strategy in the context of the instinctual need for self-preservation. Trump’s amplification of this need through his rhetoric and cultivation of negative emotions, including resentment, has led to a revaluation that diminishes humanity. We conclude by drawing out the implications of Nietzsche’s view, revealing a forceful Nietzschean critique of Trump’s methods and values. (shrink)

In “Freedom and Resentment” P.F. Strawson distinguishes between the participant reactive attitudes like resentment and the moral reactive attitudes like indignation described by Strawson as their “vicarious analogues,” where we are not the injured party and it is not our own personal relationships at stake. Through naturalistic description of the participant reactive attitudes a set of conditions for moral responsibility can be discovered that, moreover, are held to be immune to any external review or to require external justification. (...) Except for pathological cases Strawson deems to amount to solipsism, these participant attitudes and their vicarious analogues are deemed to go together and the same arguments to apply equally to each: resentment and indignation are supposed to have the same conditions for being appropriately held or withheld. I find it to be not obvious that these conditions must be the same, but even if they are, the case for immunity that Strawson presents initially for the participant reactive attitudes does not transfer as unproblematically as he seems to assume to the moral reactive attitudes. The aim of this paper is not to analyse Strawson’s arguments, but more simply to identify a number of ways in which we may be resentful without being indignant, and indignant without being resentful. (shrink)

Advice-giving is an important means of supporting others to act well. It inspires gratitude, indifference and resentment in equal measure. Although we can often predict a resentful reception for advice, its normative implications may be unclear. Should advice that is likely to be resented be withheld or modified because of its resentability, or delivered despite it? The norms that underwrite advice-giving, and which inform justified resentment, have thus far evaded systematic philosophical analysis. Using a case proposed by Edward (...) Hinchman, the first part of this paper develops three lines of reasoning that explain why advice might be resented. The second part explores three norms of advice suggested by the case. Together they cast light upon the role of advice in our moral and social lives, and offer a starting point for practical reasoning about when to give resentable advice, and how to be a good advisor. (shrink)

Oatley's discussion of “resentment” in Othello works with an unfortunately impoverished notion of resentment, and the narrative of emergence and unfolding that he offers suffers from it. As explicated by Bishop Butler, John Rawls, and other philosophers, resentment rests on moral claims and is to be distinguished on that basis from envy and Nietzschean ressentiment. W. H. Auden, in “The Joker in the Pack,” provides more persuasive insight into the dark destructive malicious envy that motivates Iago. Such (...) destructive aims are as characteristic of humans as “relational goals,” and must be attended to if we are to learn from literature about ourselves. (shrink)

_ Freedom, Resentment and the Metaphysics of Morals _, by HieronymiPamela. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 145.

The reactive attitude of ‘resentment’ has been gaining increasing attention within contemporary philosophical literature. However, little attention has been given to the conceptions of resentment in Asian philosophy. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that there is a positive account of resentment in Confucian philosophy. This paper brings a recent Mencian account of resentment in conversation with contemporary philosophical discussions. The conversations revolve around aspects of resentment such as exculpatory conditions, payback, transition, and moral (...) cultivation. The conversation not only adds clarity to the Mencian account, it also demonstrates potential contributions this account has to contemporary discussions on resentment. (shrink)

This essay suggests a coherent reading of Mengzi 孟子 2B13 where Mengzi appears to at once resent Heaven for the current social disorder and also deny his resentment. Some scholars opt to argue that Mengzi resents Heaven either briefly in the beginning or throughout the whole passage, presupposing that Mengzi considers Heaven as an agent that can be responsible for social disorder. The present essay opposes such view, suggesting that Mengzi cannot resent Heaven in a strict sense, but only (...) figuratively. During the pre-Qin 秦 period, resentment was understood to consist of hatred toward the intentional object and belief that the agent is ultimately responsible for the undesirable event or action. Therefore, to resent Heaven requires one to hold Heaven morally accountable for certain events. However, there are good reasons to believe that Mengzi might not hold such a belief. In 2B13, what Mengzi is expressing is not his resentment against Heaven, but rather displeasure over the social disorder. At the same time, he is showing his pleasure at his virtues themselves or their potential good results. His displeasure and pleasure are compatible, since their intentional objects are not identical. (shrink)

By the time of his death in 2006, Sir Peter Strawson was regarded as one of the world's most distinguished philosophers. First published thirty years ago but long since unavailable, _Freedom and Resentment_ collects some of Strawson's most important work and is an ideal introduction to his thinking on such topics as the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics. Beginning with the title essay _Freedom and Resentment_, this invaluable collection is testament to the astonishing range of Strawson's thought as (...) he discusses free will, ethics and morality, logic, the mind-body problem and aesthetics. The book is perhaps best-known for its three interrelated chapters on perception and the imagination, subjects now at the very forefront of philosophical research. This reissue includes a substantial new foreword by Paul Snowdon and a fascinating intellectual autobiography by Strawson. (shrink)

This essay explores the positive aspects of resentment in early Confucian thought. Specifically, it argues that from an early Confucian perspective, resentment is a frustration or anger that occurs when those close to us withhold their care or when they otherwise injure us. Stated succinctly, resentment is a result of frustrated desire for affection. It is a sign that we require the care of significant others, and that we are vulnerable to their concern or neglect. When understood (...) appropriately, resentment signals genuine recognition of meaningful relationships; it is a sign that we are affected by those that ought to matter to us. Importantly, resentment has a creative dimension in that it can lead to the production of literature aimed to channel frustrated desire toward realizing the Confucian dao 道. These texts work to connect the author’s resentment with the reader’s possibility of remaking the world in a way desired by the author. (shrink)

According to Kantian ethics, immoral actions convey disrespect. This negative attitude makes injuries inflicted by other persons worse than injuries caused by nature, ceteris paribus. As Strawson would later put it, the perpetrator’s attitude of disregard prompts in the victim the reactive attitude of resentment. But, I point out, we harbour and display plenty of other negative attitudes toward people aside from disrespect. What, if any, reactive attitudes are natural and appropriate in response to these? In unrequited love, for (...) example, the beloved denies the lover a certain kind of recognition that she desires. I claim that this often prompts resentment in the lover, despite the fact that she has suffered no moral wrongdoing—that her injury is, as I term it, ‘tragic’. If this is so, we must reconceive the meaning of resentment, distinguishing it sharply from indignation. After offering such a reinterpretation of resentment and indignation, I show how ‘tragic resentment’ might be warranted despite lacking a moral claim. If the beloved bears a deep responsibility for not reciprocating the love, then he is subject to negative reactive attitudes for it, despite the fact that he cannot choose whom to love and has no obligation to love. (shrink)

I examine the role played by the emotions of envy and resentment in interpersonal online dynamics during the COVID19 pandemic. I start by reviewing what we know about the interplay of social media use, social comparison and well-being, and by applying this knowledge to current circumstances. Then, I introduce some philosophical distinctions that complicate the already complex empirical evidence, differentiating, in particular, between envy and resentment, and between different kinds of envy. I argue that we can use the (...) knowledge of these distinctions to better cope with these painful, but sometimes productive and always informative, emotions. (shrink)

Nietzsche's remarks about women and femininity have generated a great deal of debate among philosophers, some seeing them as ineradicably misogynist, others interpreting them more favorably as ironic and potentially useful for modern feminism. In this study, Kay Picart uses a genealogical approach to track the way Nietzsche's initial use of "feminine" mythological figures as symbols for modernity's regenerative powers gradually gives way to an increasingly misogynistic politics, resulting in the silencing and emasculation of his earlier configurations of the "feminine." (...) While other scholars have focused on classifying the degree of offensiveness of Nietzsche's ambivalent and developing misogyny, Picart examines what this misogyny means for his political philosophy as a whole. Picart successfully shows how Nietzsche's increasingly derogatory treatment of the "feminine" in his post-Zarathustran works is closely tied to his growing resentment over his inability to revive a decadent modernity. (shrink)

In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Martha C. Nussbaum provides a bracing new view that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals.

In Self-Knowledge and Resentment, Akeel Bilgrami argues that self-knowledge of our intentional states is special among all the knowledges we have because it is not an epistemological notion in the standard sense of that term, but instead is a fallout of the radically normative nature of thought and agency. Four themes or questions are brought together into an integrated philosophical position: What makes self-knowledge different from other forms of knowledge? What makes for freedom and agency in a deterministic universe? (...) What makes intentional states of a subject irreducible to its physical and functional states? And what makes values irreducible to the states of nature as the natural sciences study them? This integration of themes into a single and systematic picture of thought, value, agency, and self-knowledge is essential to the book's aspiration and argument. Once this integrated position is fully in place, the book closes with a postscript on how one might fruitfully view the kind of self-knowledge that is pursued in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This paper discusses the moral responsibility of psychopaths for their anti-social actions. Starting from P. F. Strawson's discussion of our participant reactive attitudes, which stresses their indispensability for meaningful human relations, the paper contrasts a variety of "normal" wrongdoers with psychopaths. It suggests that the latter are often seriously deficient in their capacity to entertain these attitudes, and that their resulting lack of proper self-evaluation may explain both their callousness and their imprudence. It is then argued that only creatures able (...) to entertain participant reactive attitudes can be proper objects of those attitudes, since these reactions have a communicative core whose expression has a point only in a shared moral world. For this reason, if psychopaths are incapable of moral understanding, they may not be proper targets of anger and resentment. This, however, may have an illiberal implication, in possibly excluding psychopaths from possessing certain rights. (shrink)

Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By (...) attending to Strawson’s account of parenting and the development of moral agents from children to adults, I’ll clarify and defend the following account: For Strawson, the appropriateness conditions for holding responsible change by degrees, over time, based on an agent’s susceptibility to empathy and quality of will, and this shows us that determinism is irrelevant to responsibility. (shrink)

That the world is awash with resentment poses a genuine question for educators. Here, we will suggest that resentment can be better harnessed for good if we stop focusing on people and tribes and, instead, focus on systems: those invisible norms that often produce locked-in structures of social interaction. A “systems lens” is vast, so fixes will have to be an iterative process of reflection, and revision toward a more just system. Nonetheless, resentment toward the status quo (...) may be an important element in keeping that otherwise tedious process going, with the caveat that resentment is only productive when it is combined with reason, and that, therefore, educators, rather than privileging participant reactive attitudes, ought, instead, to promote participant reactive reasoning, as the latter can be a genuine force for both personal and interpersonal growth, while the former might very well do the reverse. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a general theory of algorithmic fairness. Drawing on Johnson King and Babic’s work on moral encroachment, on Gary Becker’s work on labor market discrimination, and on Strawson’s idea of resentment and indignation as responses to violations of the demand for goodwill toward oneself and others, we locate attitudes to fairness in an agent’s utility function. In particular, we first argue that fairness is a matter of a decision-maker’s relative concern for the plight of people (...) from different groups, rather than of the outcomes produced for different groups. We then show how an agent’s preferences, including in particular their attitudes to error, give rise to their decision thresholds. Tying these points together, we argue that the agent’s relative degrees of concern for different groups manifest in a difference in decision thresholds applied to these groups. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of justified resentment and its importance in preserving human dignity. I situate the argument in the context of Martha Nussbaum's recent work against anger and resentment. Drawing on Enlightenment thinkers, I show the importance of resentment in deterring injury, in creating greater solidarity and humanity, and in preserving human dignity. The paper also offers a preliminary analysis of the norms that help to ensure appropriately expressed resentment.

This chapter introduces the concept of resentment by delineating the two most influential and significant models of it as a practice—resentment as a moral impetus to justice and resentment as a disabling spitefulness and envy. After first examining how resentment has been employed as a concept in contemporary philosophy after Strawson elucidated it as an exemplary “reactive attitude,” the chapter discerns how it has been represented in two literary works—one from the classical world, Sophocles’ _Philoctetes_, and (...) one from nineteenth-century Europe, Dostoevsky’s _Notes from Underground_—to show the dynamic features of resentment, which can be understood not only as an individual ailment but also as a social disease. (shrink)

Forgiveness is a highly personal act. Only a moral agent can forgive and the only proper object of forgiveness is a moral agent. One trait that is particularly characteristic of moral agents is selfevaluation. It is precisely this activity that is involved in a genuine act of forgiveness. According to Bishop Butler and several other contemporary philosophers, forgiveness involves foreswearing one’s resentment towards another person. Successful forgiveness, for these accounts, essentially involves overcoming oneself. An important part of this self-overcoming (...) involves dissolving resentment. I argue that disowning resentment is a key step along the way towards successful forgiveness. In order to dissolve resentment, an individual must engage in self-reflection and selfevaluation. Frankfurt’s hierarchical theory of intentional agency provides a helpful conceptual apparatus for analyzing the act of forgiveness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article develops an Arendtian conception of resentment and shows that resentment as a response to injustice is in fact only possible within a community of persons engaged in moral and recognitive relations. While Arendt is better known for her work on forgiveness—characterized as a creative rather than vindictive response to injury—this article suggests that Arendt provides a unique way of thinking about resentment as essentially a response to another human's subjectivity. But when injury is massive, (...) so beyond the pale that the possibility of face-to-face human interaction is annihilated, the space for resentment is thereby destroyed. Ironically, while the absence of resentment might at first seem to be an unproblematically good thing, Arendt shows us that the loss of resentment actually signals the loss of the properly human realm. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson in “Freedom and Resentment” argues that it is self-contradictory for abnormality to be the universal condition. This argument is claimed by Paul Russell to be faulty because conflating abnormality and incapacity, there being no contradiction involved in incapacity being a universal condition. Russell’s critique has become the mainstream view, but it will be shown that from the first-person point of view, universal incapacity could not be any basis on which we could in practice modify our attitudes.

In his seminal essay “Freedom and Resentment,” Strawson drew attention to the role of such emotions as resentment, moral indignation, and guilt in our moral and personal lives. According to Strawson, these reactive attitudes are at once constitutive of moral blame and inseparable from ordinary interpersonal relationships. On this basis, he concluded that relinquishing moral blame isn’t a real possibility for us, given our commitment to personal relationships. If well founded, this conclusion puts the traditional free-will debate in (...) a new light. In particular, in so far as incompatibilists believe that we can or should forgo moral blame if determinism is true, their stance may seem out of touch with our emotional reality. Here I examine Strawson’s claim that the reactive attitudes are inseparable from ordinary interpersonal relationships. Strawson says surprisingly little to support this intriguing claim, and thus far no argument for it has emerged in the literature. My aim is to remedy this. Specifically, I set out an argument for a suitably formulated version of the inseparability claim, an argument that appeals to the relationship between the reactive attitudes and other elements of our emotional lives. I then show how this argument helps to answer an important recent challenge to Strawson’s position. If I am right, there is good reason to doubt that the reforms envisaged by some incompatibilists, reforms to our blame-related practices, are a real possibility for us. (shrink)

There are two kinds of resentment relevant to the politics of multiculturalism today. 1 The first, which is basically Nietzsche’s conception of ressentiment, occurs under conditions in which people are subject to systematic and structural deprivation of things they want (and need), combined with a sense of powerlessness about being able to do anything about it. It manifests itself in terms of a focused anger or hatred towards that group of people who seem to have everything they want, and (...) yet also symbolize their powerlessness to get it. For Nietzsche, of course, it was out of this set of emotions and psychological state of mind that the ‘slave revolt’ that gave birth to modern morality emerged, supplanting the aristocratic values oriented around good and bad with the reactive and slavish values of those oriented around good and evil (Nietzsche 1989: 36- 39). The desire to lash out or take revenge against those who you perceive as keeping you down, keeping you from enjoying all the benefits and advantages others enjoy and that you want or feel you deserve, for Nietzsche, is a basic emotional orientation that can – in combination with other complex forces - reshape an entire culture. A second form of resentment is of a more moralized kind; a reactive sentiment bound up with holding another morally accountable for their actions. I resent your curtailment of my liberty, for example, just because I believe we share certain moral commitments – for example, a.. (shrink)

Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems. It requires that we find a way of maintaining the following claim, which I call Negative Orientation: although you (...) claim to value X, you are more accurately described as disvaluing Y. I argue that we cannot make sense of Negative Orientation at the level of evaluative judgments, for nothing about the etiology, content, or justification of evaluative judgments will support the Negative Orientation claim. But we can make sense of it by attending to the psychology of valuing. Using spiteful hatred as a paradigm case, I explain how certain outlooks and ideologies induce and sustain spiteful hatred in their adherents and thereby render the Negative Orientation claim true. (shrink)

Envy and resentment are generally thought to be unpleasant and unethical emotions which ought to be condemned. I argue that both envy and resentment, in some important forms, are moral emotions connected with concern for justice, understood in terms of desert and entitlement. They enable us to recognise injustice, work as a spur to acting against it and connect us to others. Thus, we should accept these emotions as part of the ethical life.

A critical review of Martha Nussbaum's 2016 book, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice.

There is an important distinction between two different kinds of expressions of gratitude: propositional expressions of gratitude and prepositional expressions of gratitude. I argue that there is a corresponding distinction between two different kinds of expression of resentment: propositional expressions of resentment and prepositional expressions of resentment. I then argue that theists should suppose neither that propositional expressions of gratitude are prepositional expressions of gratitude to God, nor that propositional expressions of resentment are prepositional expressions of (...) resentment of God. (shrink)

In this essay I reflect on fear and cultural exhaustion and their effect on our language, as possible causes, among many others, of the rise of nationalist and chauvinist feeling across Europe today. By fear I mean the fear of not understanding and of not being understood by the other, which may affect us in various ways; by exhaustion I refer to our modern work life with its permanent accessibility and the uncontrolled flood of pictures and information we are exposed (...) to by digitization, as well as to the more general cultural exhaustion when it comes to discussing “values” or “ideas,” which more and more people see as empty words. This pervasive sense of fear and exhaustion has a substantial effect on our language, for the use of readymade phrases, as in the German “Phrasendreschen”, tends to see them as identity markers and thus to induce resentment against those who do not belong to the same in-group. But language, once it is reduced to a mere instrument for transmitting information, generates the sense that everything has already been said, and in feeding our cultural exhaustion and boredom, leads us to abandon the notions of utopia, irony and poetry, all of which thrive on the creative inexhaustibility of language. Fear and exhaustion ultimately lead us to abandon any dialogue with others. What we need is a new way of listening, “new ears” with which to listen to what we initially perceive as “unheard” words, for without the ability to listen to “strange” words, the words of the “stranger,” no society can survive for long. (shrink)

I argue that fitting resentment tracks unacceptable ‘ecological’ imbalances in relative social strength between victims and perpetrators that arise from violations of legitimate moral expectations. It does not respond purely, or even primarily, to offenders’ attitudes, and its proper targets need not be fully developed moral agents. It characteristically involves a wish for the restoration of social equilibrium rather than a demand for moral recognition or good will. To illuminate these contentions, I focus on cases that I believe demonstrate (...) a corollary thesis, namely, that strength, broadly construed, is a necessary condition of resentment-worthiness. I argue that weakness can make resentment unfitting in two ways. First, weakness may prevent a wrongdoer from shifting the balance of social power. Second, a weak wrongdoer may do social damage but be so lowly that resentment, which would represent him as excessively strong, would be inapt. Finally, I consider how accepting the ecological view might affect our theorizing about moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. (shrink)

Responsibility, blameworthiness in particular, has been characterized in a number of ways in a literature in which participants appear to be talking about the same thing much of the time. More specifically, blameworthiness has been characterized in terms of what sorts of responses are fair, appropriate, and deserved in a basic way, where the responses in question range over blame, sanctions, alterations to interpersonal relationships, and the reactive attitudes, such as resentment and indignation. In this paper, I explore the (...) relationships between three particular theses: (i) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is fair to impose sanctions, (ii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that one deserves sanctions, and (iii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is appropriate to respond with reactive attitudes. Appealing to the way in which luck in the outcome of an action can justifiably affect the degree of sanctions received, I argue that (i) is false and that fairness and desert come apart. I then argue that the relationship between the reactive attitudes and sanction is not as straightforward as has sometimes been assumed, but that (ii) and (iii) might both be true and closely linked. I conclude by exploring various claims about desert, including ones that link it to the intrinsic goodness of receiving what is deserved and to the permissibility or rightness of inflicting suffering. (shrink)