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Morality and the Retributive Emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

Just as the pleasant experience differs from the non-pleasant or unpleasant, and (according to many at least) the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic, internally or qualitatively, and not merely in degree, or externally or relationally, so, it is natural to expect, a moment of moral living differs from a moral or immoral moment. Indeed, from many quarters, and most emphatically from the Stoic and Christian, we have been wont to hear that if we but leave our sinful or indifferent lives and put on righteousness or goodness, we shall become new men or men reborn, even creatures of a different species. But according to many (perhaps most) analyses of morality these promises of transfiguration or translation are nonsensical lies: for the moral experience, as exhibited in these analyses, differs from the non-moral or immoral only in respect of external relations, or at the most in degree. Whether the truth resides in the promises or in the analyses is, obviously, a question of no mean import. It is also a vast one, while the time and space that can be given up to an article are brief; hence the following will be barely more than a raising of the question, or a provocation, by means of rough statements, some dogmatic, others hypothetical.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1935

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References

page 441 Note 1 Seneca (quoted by Westermarck) says in De ira, II, 32: “The most contemptuous form of revenge is not to deem one's adversary worth taking vengeance upon.”

page 442 Note 1 Ethical Relativity, 1932.

page 442 Note 2 Ibid., p. 63.

page 442 Note 3 Ibid., Ch. V.

page 442 Note 4 Ibid., p. 114.

page 442 Note 5 Ibid., p. 62.

page 442 Note 6 Ibid., pp. 89–93.

page 443 Note 1 Ethical Relativity, p. 172.

page 443 Note 2 Ibid., Ch. VI.

page 443 Note 3 Ibid., p. 231.

page 443 Note 4 Ibid., pp. 114, 115.

page 443 Note 5 Ibid., p. 85.

page 444 Note 1 Ethical Relativity, pp. 162 ff.

page 445 Note 1 My use is, I believe, actually that of a good many so-called hedonists. If I differ at all from Westermarck (see Ethical Relativity, pp. 259–61), the difference is not material to the argument.

page 445 Note 2 Ibid., p. 69.

page 445 Note 3 For the present purpose self-feeling may be understood as that which develops into the feeling of inferiority and superiority.

page 445 Note 4 In some anger, though not in revenge, it may be little developed. Such anger is very like mere annoyance and leads to the phenomena the consideration of which induces Westermarck to use “resentment” for the reaction to inflicted pain as such.

page 446 Note 1 The Republic.

page 446 Note 2 Ethical Relativity, p. 72.

page 446 Note 3 Ibid., p. 69; cf. p. 83.

page 446 Note 4 Nascent intelligence is supposed to distinguish, growing intelligence to confuse, means and end.

page 446 Note 5 “Exclusively,” according to me.

page 447 Note 1 To say that the vengeful man desires to inflict the pain of humiliation is merely to flee from the real problem to words. For “humiliation” is the denning term of the phrase and is therefore the term to be defined.

page 447 Note 2 It is impossible to exaggerate the importance for Ethics of the fact, most often neglected, that there are desires, both moral and non-moral, not only for pleasure, processes, experiences or states of mind, but also for position, form, structure, relations; and that position, etc., can no more be reduced to process (or pleasure or experience) than a square can be described as an event.

page 448 Note 1 Social Psychology (21st. ed.), pp. 121–122.

page 448 Note 2 Op. cit., p. 67

page 449 Note 1 Above all, reformation is not the aim of moral indignation or resentment. The ideal of the latter is a Hell of the eternally damned to act as a foil to the Heaven of the elect.

page 449 Note 2 Op. cit., pp. 104–105.

page 450 Note 1 On the Sublime, VII.

page 450 Note 2 Even in self-condemnation, wherein we approve our “higher self” and are proud because the condemnation, after all, comes from our own self.

page 451 Note 1 Op. cit., pp. 213–221.

page 451 Note 2 Ethical Relativity, pp. 68–69, 95 ff.

page 451 Note 3 I have attempted it in a forthcoming book, The Ethics of Power (Allen & Unwin).

page 452 Note 1 The word is used in Professor Alexander's sense.

page 452 Note 2 I have so worded the article as to avoid the question whether approval or disapproval is a judgment or merely an emotion or sentiment, for the simple reason that for my purpose I needed to examine only the affective-conative aspects of these attitudes, aspects which, most people agree, are essential to them. I have also avoided the question of objectivity and universality. But I have indicated that the denotation of “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong” (i.e. “high” and “low,” or in general, “position-making") in customary morality is strangely variable: the only possible account of it is a historical one, such as none has better given than Westermarck.