Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice
Martha Craven Nussbaum - Oxford University Press, 2016
We
live in a culture of apology and forgiveness. But while there are a few
thinkers who criticize forgiveness in favor of retribution, philosopher
and intellectual Martha C. Nussbaum is unique in criticizing the
supposed virtue from the other side: forgiveness, Nussbaum asserts, is
at itsheart inquisitorial and disciplinary. In this book based on her
2014 Locke Lectures, Nussbaum hones in first on anger and then on
forgiveness, so vigorously championed today as a replacement emotion.
Arguing that anger includes not only the idea of a serious wrong but
also the idea that it would be a good thing if the wrongdoer
sufferedsome bad consequence, Nussbaum asserts that anger, so
understood, is always normatively problematic in one or the other of two
possible ways. One way makes the mistake of thinking that the suffering
of the wrongdoer restores the thing that was damaged. The other
requires the victim to see the injuryas about relative status and only
about that. While anger is sometimes useful as a signal that things have
gone wrong, as a motive to address them, and as a deterrent to
wrongdoing, its core ideas are profoundly flawed: either incoherent in
the first case, or normatively ugly in the second. Neitheris anger as
useful as it is often taken to be.Nussbaum goes on to strip the notion
of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where the primary
moral relationship is that between an omniscient score-keeping God and
erring, penitent mortals. The relationship between a wronged human and
another is, she says, based on this primary God-humanrelationship.
Nussbaum agrees with Nietzsche in seeing in Judeo-Christian forgiveness a
displaced vindictiveness and a concealed resentment that are ungenerous
and unhelpful in human relations. The process of forgiveness can
bolster a narcissistic resentment better eschewed in favor of a
newparadigm based on generosity, justice, and truth.
