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re those who can do as they wish powerful? For Socrates, acting on your own whim, killing whomever you please or obtaining great wealth does not make you powerful, if you act unjustly you are acting against your own good. It does not matter how extreme or sophisticated your ability to be unjust if this is all you can accomplish. Callicles offered Socrates a different view, that the tyrants of their day – though unjust – had real power, and indeed, that this power should be held by the strong and privileged against the weak.
Today this question might be posed from within the feminist movement: Are the privileged powerful? When a person, who materially benefits from oppression, acts in a way that oppresses, what is the appropriate response? Are they abusing their power for their own benefit? Or is any unjust action ultimately against their own good?
In the Christian West, and amongst capitalist states in particular, personal responsibility, choice, and blame form the backbone of the cultural sense of justice. It is against this background that those who act for their own material benefit at the expense of others are vilified. And when we discover our own flaws or we act unjustly, we feel guilt. Thus, bound up in the West's rational engagement with justice is a psychological dialectic of anger and guilt: anger at the failure of others to be moral, and guilt for our own failure.
However, this emotional structure to justice in the West sits in deep tension with feminist critical analysis, which very rarely blames any particular individual for their cultural inheritance. Yet despite this intellectual basis of feminism, and its structural conception of justice, some feminists have been reluctant to reform their emotional foundations.
And a reformation is very difficult. Blame and the axis of anger and guilt run deeply into western legal and moral systems. The punishment of a criminal is often enjoyed--from historical spectacles to the modern retributive lust at the torture of criminals (stripping them of space, of books and television, for calls for their total confinement) we regularly enjoy anger and its resolution, the punishment of another. The psychological cycle underpinning media spectacles then runs over and over as feeding this addiction--outrage and punishment, outrage and punishment, with the petite mort of apology to unify the experience.
Enjoyment of “justice” is then regulated by emotions deeply contrary to structural critique. The spectacle of anger and guilt is that of the individual – and the media cycle reflects this.
The Eastern, and Buddhist in particular, psychology of justice is radically different. Here compassion runs deep and fundamental, as that emotion “one feels in response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help." Compassion, which might be taken as the double-negative of anger-guilt, is the unpalatable third option facing the machines of outrage today.
When faced with a rapist (or even, perhaps, a person wearing a t-shirt) the question is immediately formulated against the old dialectic. If you aren’t angry at him then you're forgiving him; if he isn’t guilty then he's shirking responsibility. That is, there is only blame-forgiveness and anger-guilt. If there's no anger-guilt then there must be forgiveness and if there is then there must be blame. Compassion (as the absence of anger) feels like forgiveness on this view. Thus to criticize a person's outrage is to defend the person who outrages them, and to refrain from anger is to forgive: and the horror at forgiving rape! It escapes those caught up in this cycle of enjoying their anger, that neither blame nor forgiveness are concerns.
I here chose rape as an example as it surely one of the most difficult acts to see from outside the horizon of anger and guilt: What is it to say that a rapist has no power? What is it to say that a rapist should be treated with compassion? Here we might see why it is that Socrates would not attribute power to those who merely do what they wish.
Deep at the heart of feminism, and any universal program for liberation, is a conception of the good society in which just relations between people are better for everyone. What is an act of rape then? It is a symptom of both the oppression of men and women and tied deeply to cultural forces of oppression. In particular, consider those which structure the rapist's mentality: that women must be pursed regardless of their professed objections (cf. many fantasy story lines), that women are passive and men are active, that men are owed sex and that women are merely the vehicles of it, that virginity is failure, that women are the fuel of the male sex-machine and the double-objectification and inescapable injunctions of this view. The rapist is as much caught up in a system of his own oppression as the person he has raped.
Here something must be again made clear: This has nothing to do with blame. It is only a reformulation of power. An act of rape is not one expressing the power of the rapist over another, but powerlessness of them both. This may be difficult to understand because our emotional connection to rape is often deeply individualist: we connect ourselves to the injustice of the act by its traumatizing of a person, of an individual. We should therefore consider another example.
In the early 20th century we would surely label aristocrats as privileged, we would see their actions as oppressive and the system they sustained as benefiting them and hurting others. Yet, the life of an aristocrat was deeply regulated. Before the sexual revolution and class revolutions of the mid-20th century an aristocrat could not marry who they loved, they could not express themselves for fear of 'scandal' and many other oppressions besides. Every oppressive act of an aristocrat was thus, in the same instant it made them 'responsible' for harming another, preserving a system of great harm to themselves. The society they were depriving themselves of through their oppression was one in which they were freer too. In all the apparent power of the aristocracy, we find, just underneath, their powerlessness.
We thus find powerlessness under the surface of sexism, of rape, and of every act of oppression which creates a person who is blamed and a person who is forgiven. The powerlessness of the perpetrator who thinks that their desires will make them happy, when they deprive them of a system in which they could be happy. And the powerlessness of the victim who suffers the other half of this loss.
Oppression is not the actions of one group against another but a state of powerlessness in which all our acts deprive us from flourishing. The first question we must ask when confronted with injustice is: What has led to this? And our first feeling must be compassion, to understand the suffering within oppression. It should never be: On whose behalf should I be outraged? At whom should I be angry?
These questions will destroy a movement. What happens when its adherents fail to live up to their principles? When women fail to live a “perfectly feminist” lifestyle - too often have I seen anger and blame directed toward them, rather than compassion. What happens when you yourself fail? Should you spiral into self-hatred, guilt, and the enjoyment of your own hopelessness? What happens when those who, unaware of the oppressive dimension of their actions, are confronted with such overt hostility? Wide-eyed shouting and invective has rarely reformed a person, has rarely encouraged understanding and solidarity, has rarely succeeded.
Compassion is the appropriate emotion of structural analysis. Compassion finds oppression in both those we blame and those we forgive. Compassion is the difficult striving to set aside our anger and do what we must. It is not forgiveness: if there were a serial rapist whose view of the world were so corrupted so as never to be redeemable, that was forever damned to hurt others, then killing this person would be a compassionate act: They will never flourish. Their death, however, is not to serve for our enjoyment and corruption. Their death should be an act of pure compassion: to see them as a total victim of oppression, as a horrible consequence of our history. And the act of killing them should cause a corollary to compassion--grief. Grief at what was lost – a life, the potential for the expression of goodness.
Compassion often requires courage, and the fuel of courage may be momentary rage. But today, as I look around at some professing to fight against oppression, the spectacle of outrage is not a conduit for compassion. It is a corrosive cycle of obsession, degrading to the character and toxic to the movement. Alienating and hostile, fracturing and harming. Activists seek out marginalization and oppression to get their outrage-fix, and are moved to shout-down and attack rather than lead or help. This addiction to anger is anti-liberation. There is no justice in the spectacle of punishment, and no progress in division and hostility.
This is the most wonderful sort of nonsense
I’d be most interested to know why.
The argument and attending view of culture fail to admit of a pluralism of views about Justice within western society. They’re based on unsupportable theories of mass psychology, and I’m not convinced that the framing of compassion as an alternative choice to forgiveness or anger is actually a meaningful one (i.e. that there exists a trinity of possible emotions that individuals can choose between, rather than a quadrality or 5-ality or so on, and that it’s actually a choice at all).
However, the sentiment is fantastic and I think sorely needed in our current cultural climate.
I also think it speaks to feminism as a movement and why many sympathetic to its ends still refuse to identify with that movement (as I do)
First you say ” They’re based on unsupportable theories of mass psychology, ” and then I successfully “speak to a movement” – which is it? Can I not “speak to culture in the west”? Incidentally there are very many surveys which characterise our feelings about various hypothetical situations, and recurrent in western answers are the importance of blame/punishment/anger/guilt.
There need be no “mass psychology” for there to be a culture. After all, what’s language if not an example of mass psychology? Pluralism is consistent with my argument, but im trying to “speak past” the to a cultural background against which minority positions are minority.
> that there exists a trinity of possible emotions that individuals can choose between,
I kinda glossed over this point. But compassion is occupying a third position not being one itself. In otherwords the claim is the “second postion” – ie. the first ‘no’ to anger, is forgiveness. That is, if you say you’re not angry with a person the first reaction would be that you forgive them. To deny this is to say you’re both not angry with them and you do not forgive them. What you actually feel in this position could be one of several things (including rage if you pay attention to the final paragraph, and hence “righteous indignation”), I was advocating that we move to the third position and we do so through compassion.
So there are two claims: say no twice (no to anger, and no to the implication of forgiveness); be compassionate. The second is weaker – and i do actually think rage is sometimes justified (eg. when taking a baseball bat to a rapist in the act).
> However, the sentiment is fantastic and I think sorely needed in our current cultural climate.
I agree. I happen, also, to think that there is some tension in being angry at people and saying they are momentary confluences of oppressive (, cultural, etc.) forces. Perhaps this tension should be spelled out differently, this was my attempt.
I’m surprised you haven’t come across Martha Nussbaum in this topic. Her John Locke Lectures at Oxford last year (http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/lectures/john_locke_lectures) were on the topic of forming a dialectic around anger and justice. Her argument focused around analysis why anger in the public sphere is not useful, its consequences with respect to justice, and how it ought to be avoided.
Some good points, but this poses a lot of questions for me.
1. To what extent are people’s actions determined by the systems oppressing them, and does this morally “excuse” their behavior?
2. How does this “oppressive systems” determinism relate to ordinary philosophical determinism? (If people are already not responsible at all for their actions, its impossible to be even less responsible)
3. Regardless of whether moral outrage is morally justifiable or not, how efficacious is it in countering systems of oppression in practical terms – and are there scenarios where one’s outrage may be morally justifiable but practically countereffective (such as promoting division, hostility and also diverting attention from the system to the individual perpetrator)?
4. To what extent is moral outrage even something under our control – is it a purely physical reaction or is it fueled by the belief that the outrage is morally justified and that its object “deserves” it? (See 1 and 2)
5. Is compassion an alternative to moral outrage or can they coexist?
My preliminary answer is that moral outrage is to some extent hardwired in us (seems false that its only a western thing) but it is amplified by adherence to ideological systems which promote and justify it. Moral outrage in its common form is logically inconsistent with philosophical determinism and probably logically inconsistent with “oppressive systems” determinism as well, but its also probably true that we are determined to feel it anyway, so we have to be okay with a little inconsistency. But if anything keeping in mind that the object of our moral outrage doesn’t *really* deserve it can encourage compassion and maybe do a lot to change hearts and minds.
Also I take issue with this: “if there were a serial rapist whose view of the world were so corrupted so as never to be redeemable, that was forever damned to hurt others, then killing this person would be a compassionate act: They will never flourish.”
Hmm, compassion justifying murder? Not sure about that.
> compassion justifying murder
It’s a well established principle in buddhism. Indeed this strain of moral psychology can be very unethical, but I do think it’s sound. Euthanasia is a good example. You just have to broaden your understanding of ‘suffering’, so that it isnt merely the immediate and psychology – but also what is lost by your actions.
> My preliminary answer is that moral outrage is to some extent hardwired in us (seems false that its only a western thing) but it is amplified by adherence to ideological systems which promote and justify it
This is my position too. As I say, compassion is a “difficult striving” – I dont think its just a default setting for some people, but something that can be encouraged or discouraged by your culture.
> 1: More or less fully in my estimation. And I dont bother at all with blame or the question of moral responsibility. I dont think it has any use. You do what you can to help, and helping can be “punishment” in the traditional sense. “Unjust people” are properly helped by certain kinds of punishment.
> 2: In the way that atoms relate to thoughts.
> 3: It can be justified in a kind of “noble rage” (cf. righteous indignation and jesus christ). I didnt want to be too side tracked with that however. because the circumstances are fairly limited and its too easy just to call your own anger noble.
> 4: It’s about discipline. Insofar as you can control any reaction, you can do so by forming habits.
> 5: see (3) – they can coexist.
Opressors get some false goods and some true goods. For example, having more money and power gets you better medical care and buys you better education: those are true goods. It gives you more possibility of living in a less noisy neighborhood and silence is a true good, especially at 2AM. A list of the true goods that oppressing others can bring you is too long for me to type here.
I think that the idea that both the oppressor and the oppressed are victims of oppression is a myth that the oppressors sell the oppressed in order to keep them from rebeling.
Excellent, Michael. Actually, the need to replace justice by compassion, and getting rid of moral outrage, has been a pet idea of mine for some time. Your last paragraph is not only spot-on; it is inspiring.
You should expand on that intuition, perhaps into an essay or article. It is worth a lot more than a blog post.