Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  with it better.

  One of these future- directed projects may well involve the punish-

  ment of O. But notice that, insofar as Angela is thinking sanely and ratio-

  nally about what will make the world a better place for rape victims, she

  will view the punishment of O very differently from the way she viewed

  it in Case 4. There she saw punishment as “payback” or retribution— or

  perhaps, more specifically, as a down- ranking or humiliation of O, which

  effected a reversal of positions between her and O: women (and Angela

  above all) on top, bad men (and O in particular) on the bottom. Now,

  however, she is likely to view the punishment of O in the light of the

  future good that could actually be achieved by punishment. This can

  take several forms: specific deterrence, incapacitation, general deterrence

  (including deterrence through public expression of important values),

  and, possibly, instead or in addition, the reform of O. But her pursuit of

  future good might also take the form of creating a better society with bet-

  ter educational institutions and less poverty, thus deterring crime ex ante.

  All this remains to be discussed in chapter 6.

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  V. The Three Roads: The Transition

  In short, an Angela who is really angry, seeking to strike back, soon

  arrives, I claim, at a fork in the road. Three alternatives lie before her.

  Either she goes down what may be called the road of status, seeing the event as all about her and her rank, or she takes the road of payback and imagines that the offender’s suffering would actually make things better,

  a thought that doesn’t make sense. Or, if she is rational, after exploring

  and rejecting these two roads, she will notice that a third road is open to

  her, which is the best of all: she can focus on doing whatever would make

  sense, in the situation, and be really helpful going forward. This may well

  include the punishment of O, but in a spirit that is ameliorative and/ or

  deterrent rather than retaliatory.44

  What is really wrong with the road of status? Many societies do

  encourage people to think of all injuries as essentially about them and

  their own relative ranking. Life involves perpetual status- anxiety, and

  more or less everything that happens either raises one’s rank or lowers

  it. Aristotle’s society, as he depicts it, was to a large extent like this, and he was very critical of this tendency, on the grounds that obsessive focus

  on honor impedes the pursuit of intrinsic goods. The error involved in

  the first road is not silly or easily dismissed. Still, the tendency to see

  everything that happens as about oneself and one’s own rank seems very

  narcissistic, and ill suited to a society in which reciprocity and justice

  are important values. It loses the sense that actions have intrinsic moral

  worth: that rape is bad because of the suffering it inflicts, and not because of the way it humiliates the friends of the victim. (Remember that we are

  talking about a pure status- injury, not one in which status is an incidental concomitant of some more substantial attribute.) If wrongful injuries

  were primarily down- rankings, they could be rectified by the humiliation

  of the offender, and many people, certainly, believe something like this.

  But isn’t this thought a red herring, diverting us from the reality of the

  victim’s pain and trauma, which needs to be constructively addressed?

  All sorts of bad acts— murder, assault, theft— need to be addressed as

  the specific acts they are, and their victims (or the victims’ families) need constructive attention; none of this will be likely to happen if one thinks

  of the offense as all about relative status rather than injury and pain.

  An apparent exception proves instructive. Discrimination on grounds

  of race or gender is often imagined as an injury that really does consist in

  down- ranking, so there is a tendency to think it can be rectified by bring-

  ing the injurer low. But this idea is a false lure. What is wanted, as we’ve

  already said, is equal respect for human dignity. What is wrong with dis-

  crimination is its denial of equality, as well as its many harms to well-

  being and opportunity. Reversing positions through down- ranking does

  Anger

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  not create equality. It just substitutes one inequality for another. As we

  shall see, Dr. King wisely eschewed this way of framing the racial issue.

  So the road of status, which makes “payback” intelligible and after a

  fashion rational, is morally flawed. It converts all injuries into problems

  of relative position, thus making the world revolve around the desire of

  vulnerable selves for domination and control. Because this wish is at the

  heart of infantile narcissism, I think of this as a narcissistic error, but we can also ignore that label and just call it the status error. If Angela takes the first road, then, her anger makes sense, but she commits a (ubiquitous)

  moral error.

  If Angela chooses the second road, by contrast, the road of payback,

  she does not embrace narrow and defective values; she values things that

  are really valuable. But she engages in magical thinking, which is norma-

  tively objectionable in a different way, since we all want to make sense to

  ourselves and to be rational. The idea that payback makes sense, coun-

  terbalancing the injury, is ubiquitous and very likely evolutionary. Still,

  what else may make people cling to it? One factor is surely an unwill-

  ingness to grieve or to accept helplessness. Most of us are helpless with

  respect to many things, including the life and safety of those we love. It

  feels a lot better if we can form a payback project and get busy execut-

  ing it (suing the bad doctor, depriving one’s ex of child custody) than to

  accept loss and the real condition of helplessness in which life has left us.

  Payback, thus, often has a psychic function. If people are culturally

  sold on the idea that payback is good, they will feel real satisfaction when

  they get it. Often this satisfaction is called “closure.”45 But of course the fact that a cultural teaching constructs patterns of sentiment that become

  real should not make us embrace a deception— especially when life will

  soon disabuse us of our error. Malpractice litigation does not resurrect

  the dead, nor does a punitive divorce settlement restore love. Indeed,

  in both cases the payback project likely jeopardizes future happiness

  rather than advancing it. And even if people feel overwhelming delight

  when they have retaliated against the aggressor, that pleasure gives us

  no reason to endorse or make law around such sadistic and malicious

  preferences.46 People can learn to feel pleased by many bad things (racial

  discrimination, domestic violence, child abuse) and by many silly fanta-

  sies (the thought that their cat channels the spirit of a beloved ancestor).

  These pleasures should be neither here nor there when we perform a nor-

  mative evaluation.

  So, if Angela cares about rationality, she will soon see little point in

  payback, and she will shift, very likely, to the third road, focusing on

  creating future welfare. This will be so whether she focuses on the par-

  ticular offense and offe
nder or whether, as often happens, she focuses

  on the class of similar offenses. For a corollary of taking the third road is

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  likely to be a tendency to focus on the general rather than the particular.

  If one is thinking about Rebecca and what will really be helpful to her,

  it is natural to focus not only on therapy for her and specific deterrence,

  incapacitation, and perhaps reform for her rapist, but also on preventing

  future offenses of this sort, both for her and for others.

  Followers of the road of status, too, can generalize: for people can

  come to attach status- importance to general causes. A person full of

  status- focused rage because her child has been raped may form a group

  to prevent sex offenders from living in neighborhoods where families

  live, seeing this cause as a way of lowering the status of sex offenders and raising the status of good people like herself. How exactly is this symbolic retaliatory “lowering” different from what the person who takes the third

  road would imagine and attempt? The status- focused person zeroes in on

  rank and lowering: thus it is very important to her that sex offenders suf-

  fer humiliation and that she and her sort are seen as virtuous and good.

  The non- status- focused person will consider what actually promotes

  social welfare— and this will lead her, once again, to a different approach

  to punishment, which may combine deterrence (specific and general)

  with incapacitation and reform. It all depends on what helps people.47 It

  is clear that sex offender registries serve the interests of narcissistic rage.

  It is much less clear that they serve any of the three goals of punishment

  that the non- status- focused person prefers. So, even though both become

  attached to general causes as ways of carrying out their future- directed

  projects, they will approach these causes in a different spirit, and very

  likely choose different causes as a result.

  The third road, which I recommend, seems, and is, welfarist, and

  this may be surprising to readers, given my criticisms of some forms of

  Utilitarianism elsewhere. But the errors that I have elsewhere imputed to

  Utilitarianism need not be made by the person who takes this road: she

  does not need to hold that all goods are commensurable; she does not

  need to ignore the boundaries between persons; and she does not need to

  deny that some good things are so much more important than others that

  they should enjoy a special protected status. She can, that is to say, be Mill rather than Bentham (see chapter 6). And welfarist ideas about the correct response to wrongdoing (already supported by Smith and endorsed

  by Butler independently of the Utilitarians)48 grew out of a justified cri-

  tique of a culture suffused with status- consciousness and a virulent pay-

  back mentality. The topic of punishment will occupy us in chapter 6, and

  I describe there the form of welfarism I endorse; for now the idea of pro-

  moting social welfare appears in a general form, as the natural outgrowth

  of Angela’s rational deliberation.

  I am saying something very radical: that in a sane and not exces-

  sively anxious and status- focused person, anger’s idea of retribution or

  Anger

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  payback is a brief dream or cloud, soon dispelled by saner thoughts of

  personal and social welfare. So anger (if we understand it to involve,

  internally, a wish for retributive suffering) quickly puts itself out of

  business, in that even the residual focus on punishing the offender is

  soon seen as part of a set of projects for improving both offenders and

  society— and the emotion that has this goal is not so easy to see as anger.

  It looks more like compassionate hope. When anger does not put itself

  out of business in this way— and we all know that in a multitude of

  cases it does not— its persistence and power, I claim, owes much, even

  perhaps everything, to one of two pernicious errors: either to a fruitless

  focus on magical ideas of payback, or to an underlying obsession with

  relative status, which is the only thing that really makes sense of retalia-

  tion as ordinarily conceived.

  So, to put my radical claim succinctly: when anger makes sense, it

  is normatively problematic (focused narrowly on status); when it is nor-

  matively reasonable (focused on the injury), it doesn’t make good sense,

  and is normatively problematic in that different way. In a rational person,

  anger, realizing that, soon laughs at itself and goes away. From now on,

  I shall call this healthy49 segue into forward- looking thoughts of welfare,

  and, accordingly, from anger into compassionate hope, the Transition.

  I have imagined the Transition in personal terms, and these cases

  remain to be further examined in chapters 4 and 5, where I discuss

  betrayal and harm in intimate relationships and in the Middle Realm.

  But to clarify further what I mean by the Transition, let us consider a case

  in which it takes a political form. For it has often been thought (including

  by me, in many earlier writings) that anger provides an essential moti-

  vation for work to correct social injustice. So let us look carefully at just one case, the sequence of emotions in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a

  dream” speech.50 King begins, indeed, with an Aristotelian summons to

  anger: he points to the wrongful injuries of racism, which have failed to

  fulfill the nation’s implicit promises of equality. One hundred years after

  the Emancipation Proclamation, “the life of the Negro is still sadly crip-

  pled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”

  The next move King makes is significant: for instead of demonizing

  white Americans, or portraying their behavior in terms apt to elicit mur-

  derous rage, he calmly compares them to people who have defaulted on a

  financial obligation: “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a

  check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ” This begins the

  Transition: for it makes us think ahead in non- retributive ways: the essen-

  tial question is not how whites can be humiliated, but how can this debt

  be paid, and in the financial metaphor the thought of humiliating the

  debtor is not likely to be central. (Indeed it looks counterproductive: for

  how will such a debtor be in a position to pay?)

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  The Transition then gets under way in earnest, as King focuses on a

  future in which all may join together in pursuing justice and honoring

  obligations: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

  We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults

  of opportunity of this nation.” No mention, again, of torment or pay-

  back, only of determination to ensure payment of what is owed, at last.

  King reminds his audience that the moment is urgent, and that there is a

  danger of rage spilling over: but he repudiates that behavior in advance.

  “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of

  wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drink-

  ing from the cup of bitterness and hatred… . Again and
again, we must

  rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

  So the “payback” is reconceived as the paying of a debt, a process

  that unites black and white in a quest for freedom and justice. Everyone

  benefits: as many white people already recognize, “their freedom is

  inextricably bound to our freedom.”

  King next repudiates a despair that could lead either to violence

  or to the abandonment of effort. It is at this point that the most famous

  section of the speech, “I have a dream,” takes flight. And of course, this

  dream is one not of torment or retributive punishment but of equality,

  liberty, and brotherhood. In pointed terms, King invites the African-

  American members of his audience to imagine brotherhood even with

  their former tormentors:

  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons

  of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able

  to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a

  state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the

  heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom

  and justice. . . .

  I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its

  vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with

  the words “interposition” and “nullification”— one day right

  there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to

  join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and

  brothers.

  We have only to contrast this speech with the vision of payback in

  the Dies Irae (ch. 3) or the book of Revelation to see the magnitude of King’s departure from one standard trajectory of anger in the Christian

  tradition— albeit following another strand in that same tradition.

  There is indeed anger in this speech, initially, and the anger summons

  up a vision of rectification, which naturally takes, initially, a retributive

  Anger

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  form. But King gets busy right away reshaping retributivism into work

  and hope. For how, sanely and really, could injustice be made good by

  retributive payback? The oppressor’s pain and lowering do not make the