Episode 144: Guest Martha Nussbaum on Anger

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 144 is something like, should anger be accommodated by our political institutions? And we read Anger and Forgiveness, Resentment, Generosity, justice by Martha C. Nussbaum and are talking with her in studio today. This is Mark Lintonmeier cultivating my bare moral relations in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:37 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.

0:40 Martha: And this is Martha no Spelm at the University of Chicago.

0:44 Mark: We are beyond thrilled to be talking to you and I've really enjoyed this book, I gotta say.

0:49 Martha: Oh, I'm so glad. It's. It's funny because it's a painful emotion, but I'm glad the book was pleasurable.

0:55 Mark: Yes, it's very conversational, a lot of nice anecdotes and deep down analysis it takes as its. Well, it has a few launching points, but one of them that I especially appreciate was, yes, Nietzsche says a lot of things about how guilt, for instance, is how a lot of what we consider the foundations of morality are in some way psychologically negative. But he just throws these things out. It doesn't have a lot of accountability.

1:20 Martha: Yeah, absolutely.

1:21 Mark: You're actually being systematic about this stuff. So, Wes, Dylan, initial impressions, initial questions. How do we want to start?

1:28 Dylan: Well, I thought we would start and maybe just talk a little bit about anger from the second chapter.

1:34 Mark: Wes, do you want to give us the quick version since Martha doesn't want to have to talk everything and we should know this stuff too.

1:40 Wes: Okay, well, I just want to hear Wesley, Martha can correct me, correct what I'm inevitably going to get wrong, but I take the thesis of this to be you define anger. And conceptually anger involves some concept of payback, which is a little bit different from revenge in that payback involves seeing someone who's done something wrong to some person or something else's significance, seeing them suck, suffer. But it doesn't necessarily mean being directly involved in inflicting that suffering. So it could be, for instance, the state that does that.

2:12 Martha: Yeah, that's good. Can I start back a little bit further though? Because I want to get the first part out on the table, the part of anger that I actually think is useful, namely the anger. Following Aristotle here contains the thought that a serious wrong has taken place, that it was wrongfully inflicted, so it wasn't just accidental or inadvertent. And then there's this other part that's more problematic, namely that some sort of payback would be a good thing. And this is why Aristotle says that it's a painful emotion, because there's pain in thinking about the wrongful damage to something that you really care about, but there's pleasure looking ahead to the payback and. Exactly. It doesn't have to be you taking revenge. It could just be that you want the law to do it, or you want God to do it, or even that you just hope that that wrongdoer's life would go really badly in future. Like the second marriage of your betraying spouse turns out to be a dismal failure. So that's the payback idea. It doesn't have to be you doing it. So that was good.

3:21 Wes: Yeah. I think also useful is your idea of target and focus, because these help distinguish anger from something like grief. So for instance, the target of anger is usually a person and the focus is on the act, the wrongful act itself. Whereas grief would be on the damage, the focus would be on the damage done.

3:42 Martha: So you're angry at a person, but really the focus of that anger is the wrongful act. And that's very important in thinking about how we might move beyond anger in a legal system or also in personal relations. But of course, with grief, it's just the person who's gone. But I think another difference between anger and grief that's very important is that grief doesn't include a thought of wrongdoing. And so you can have grief and mourning even without being capable of causal thinking. We now believe that a lot of non human animals have grief. And there's a whole book I was just reading recently about animals and grief. And you know, they do exhibit mourning behavior and they seem to have the thought someone or something really dear to me is forever gone. That's true of elephants, it's true of dogs, it's true of many, many species. But it's less likely that those species will have anger because anger requires complicated causal thinking. You have to think so, and so did that, and they did it wrongfully, not just accidentally. So usually you would not think that young children have full fledged anger. They might have a kind of inchoate rage, but they wouldn't have anger unless they were capable of that kind of causal thinking.

5:02 Dylan: And so you're distinguishing abstract anger or anger directed at an institution from personal anger.

5:11 Martha: I think there's always a thought of sort of agent or quasi agent who's inflicted the damage. But of course you often think, oh, it's that lousy system that's caused me to be in the miserable position I'm in. And then when you're fighting a revolution, you often do personify the evil apartheid system is what I'm struggling against.

5:33 Dylan: Yeah, I was just thinking of some of the times when I get terribly angry. And it reminded me of the fourth chapter of the book. Had to do with a sense of not being able to control what was happening and being in the midst of, like, a bureaucratic nightmare. And so it's not even that the person who's the bureaucrat is the person that I'm exactly angry with. In fact, I have the experience of not being mad at them, but being mad at the situation that I'm in that I cannot get you, meaning some amorphous entity to understand this simple thing that I need to have done.

6:08 Martha: Yeah, well, very often I think that's extremely perceptive of you. People feel helpless in a situation, and anger is a kind of deflection of that helplessness. It's not easy to feel helpless, but it's a lot easier if I can say, oh, someone's to blame and I'll go get them, or smash the system. You could also say, but I mean, suppose your parent has just died in the hospital. How many people say, I'm going to sue the doctors? And they do that often just because it makes them feel they have something to take charge of, something to be in control of. So that's a real political problem, that when people feel helpless, what they should be doing is trying to solve the problem. But what they all too often do is just think, oh, if I blame and harm somebody, then that will discharge the anger that I'm feeling. And often that's very irrational.

7:03 Dylan: But you're making a point that it may not be rational, but an understandable aspect of it is the way in which it provides agency that you feel like you're doing something. And that in some ways, especially the kinds of discussion you have about dealing with overcoming anger seems like it involves a little bit of that not controlling.

7:23 Martha: I mean, sometimes, whether it's the end of a marriage or any situation that where you're really helpless, I think you just have to mourn and then move on. Now, in the political case, what you really need to do is look to the future, try to figure out how to make the situation better. But that's usually very complicated. It involves economic planning, it involves legal change. And so it's much easier to go out in the streets and riot and throw things because you feel like you're doing something.

7:53 Mark: Can we just back up and give a little bit of the philosophical context of the project, what you're trying to do here and the underlying theory of emotions that enables this critique to be possible?

8:03 Martha: The project really is a continuation of projects that I've been doing for many years. And this is one emotion that I hadn't spent much time on. I've written a book on disgust. I've written a book that foregrounds compassion and love. I've written another book that's largely about fear. So, you know, this is a part of a long term project and there is an overall theory of the emotions, but I don't rely on absolutely every part of it here I have an appendix where I talk about that. My overall theory of the emotions says first of all, and I think this is the non controversial part, that emotions always involve some kind of evaluative appraisal. That is, you're looking at a situation and you size it up, whether through thought or through perception as good or bad in some important way for you. And I think that's true of animal emotions as well as of human emotions. So it doesn't have to be elaborate, high level thinking. The part that's more controversial is that the other aspects of emotions, such as physical feelings, physical movements, subjective feels, that those are inconstant and not well correlated with a particular emotion type to be put into the definition of a particular emotion. So when people say that you ought to define fear, let's say, in terms of not just the thought of danger, but also some kind of trembling or shaking, my answer to that in the theory is that, well, you know, often that's there, but sometimes it isn't. We're all afraid of death. We go around every day pretty much throughout our whole adult life being afraid of death. And yet we're not trembling in our boots because we're not aware of that fear in a conscious way. But it is motivating what we do. And then I also want to say that people are very variable. Some people experience anger in connection with boiling feelings and some experience it in connection with a headache the next day. So for those two reasons, I don't plug the feeling into the definition, but I leave that part out for the present book. I don't care whether you adopt my stronger view of the kind of appraisal theory or whether you adopt a weaker view, according to which some feelings and physical movements are also part of the definition.

10:30 Mark: Right. But the important part is that there's cognitive content to an emotion and that is the point that is open to critique. I mean, if you're Plato, you could just say emotions are these bestial things and reason has to control them. And that would be one way, you know, if you have a very simple view of emotion as feeling like that and you could talk about different therapeutic techniques.

10:48 Martha: Yeah, but actually Plato didn't think that. Plato thought that the emotions, fear and the other shame and anger, were what he called the allies of reason because they responded to rational arguments and they were to a large extent, extent constructed by the literary works that you hear. And so we were in that way importantly different from appetitive desires. So I don't think you can find anyone who really holds a pure non cognitive theory. I teach this every year and I keep trying to find somebody. I think Hume officially has a pure non cognitive theory where he says that a passion is just an original existence, a feeling that you identify by the way it feels. But the minute he gets to talking about particular passions such as pride and so on, it becomes altogether different. Donald Davidson famously argued that Hume's theory of pride is a cognitive view, and I think he's basically correct. William James might have more of a pure non cognitive view, but it's complicated and I don't want to go into it here. When you get to contemporary people, Jesse Prince is the most salient of the non cognitivists. But it turns out that he and I don't disagree very much because what he means by cognitive, he has a very narrow definition of the cognitive, according to which something is cognitive only if it's a part of autonomous agency and in the control of the will. So I mean, of course I think cognition just means processing information. So if we adopted my broader, more inclusive definition of cognition, I think in the end his theory is very similar to mine. Anyhow, I wanted to turn my attention to anger for two reasons. Both because I hadn't talked about it much, but also because I really was not sure what to think about it. I had written some things that actually said, well, anger could be misguided if it gets the facts wrong or if you get the values wrong. Let's say if you get angry because somebody steals your toothbrush, that's pretty stupid because it's not that important. But I did think that in the big important cases it was actually not only well grounded, but it was productive. But I had not really analyzed it. I hadn't sat down to focus on the role of payback and on the role of this wish for payback inside anger itself. So When I ended up just sitting for weeks at my desk thinking about this and just thinking, is it really correct what Aristotle and all these other philosophers, all through the Western tradition and also the Indian tradition, say, namely that the payback wish is a conceptual part of what anger is? If that's true, then that changes what we want to say about anger, I think, because that payback wish, however evolutionarily programmed and therefore useful, at some stage in our prehistory, it might have been, it's really stupid to, you know, kill somebody doesn't bring the dead back to life. And to visit a painful punishment on the wrongdoer. Well, if it does good, that remains to be demonstrated. Sometimes painful punishments do deter future wrongdoing. Sometimes they reform the wrongdoer. Sometimes, at the very least, they incapacitate the wrongdoer. But we have to show that, and it isn't just in and of itself, that proportional payback makes sense. So here I was agreeing with most of the Greek and Roman philosophers. Plato thought retributivism was a very silly position. He was in favor of a deterrent conception of punishment, even before him, Aeschylus and the Eumenides. So the Eumenides, to be part of the city, they have to listen to the voice of persuasion and become rational. And that means stopping this mindless search for payback in favor of a search for what will promote general welfare. So, anyway, that's what led me to feel that I really wanted to write a whole book on anger and that it would be a book where I would be eating my words, because I really do have to take back quite a few things that I said not at great length, but did say in other books.

15:07 Wes: Should we say something also about the role of status? Because your argument is that this idea of payback doesn't make sense. And one way of looking at anger, the payback wish, is this sort of irrational idea that payback will cosmically balance things out, or that it could restore what's been lost when, of course, someone has died, or what's been lost can't really be restored. But there is, you say there's a sense of payback that actually does make sense, even though it turns out to be normatively problematic, as you put it. And that's status.

15:38 Martha: Yes, yes. Okay, great. Now, Aristotle has one part of his definition that no subsequent philosopher picks up on. I think they're right to reject it as part of the general definition, but it's still quite an interesting insight, and that is that he thinks that anger is always a response, not to any kind of wrongful damage, but only to the kind that he calls a down ranking. In other words, that it's always about relative status. And as I say, I think that can't be be right. We get angry at things that don't involve that kind of humiliation or diminution. We get angry even at violations of principles of justice. But what's interesting about that case, and psychologists who study anger empirically show that it's a really very common case in lots and lots of societies, and certainly in America. The interesting thing about that case is it seems to me that that's the one case where payback gets you what you want. If all you care about is relative status, then by pushing the wrongdoer relatively lower, you automatically do push yourself up relatively higher. And if that's all you care about, you don't really have to worry that the real issues caused by the murder or whatever have not been solved. However, what kind of person really thinks that way? Well, unfortunately, a lot of people do think that way, that everything that happens is about their relative status. And I don't think we can kind of push it off onto those distant societies that we call honor cultures. And we like to think that this obsession with status is someplace on the map of the world, someplace in the Middle east or something. But of course, in the US that's very ubiquitous. And I have to say, in the academic life, perhaps even more than other places, people are scanning the Internet for something that disses them. And so they're obsessed with their relative status. And, you know, to insult somebody who gives your book a bad review solves the problem only if it's a problem of relative status only. But it doesn't, of course, remove any real flaws your book had or make your work any better than it was before. So it's a very narrow set of values.

17:58 Wes: Can we say more what we mean by relative status? Just because it seems to me it's not just relative status in the view of others or in the view of the public. Status could involve, for instance, one's sense of efficacy or power. So, for instance, if you feel humiliated by, and I think this actually goes to this idea and that sort of related idea of narcissistic injury and psychoanalysis actually goes to the core of what makes us angry. We're not angry at the loss per se. We're angry at its implications for status, broadly conceived. So the way Nietzsche put, and I thought a lot of the Genealogy of Morals and reading your book, but the way Nietzsche puts it is that Political superiority always resolves itself in the psychological superiority. So in other words, when we are victims, when we are damaged by others, there's a sense in which we feel it's our fault. We feel some sense of shame. We feel that we're actually bad people because on some really fundamental scale of values, we see our own power and efficacy as good things. And so the role of retaliation is to prove if in some sense the person who's damaged us has sort of offered proof of our own powerlessness and lack of efficacy, then we have to prove it again. And it doesn't have to be in the eyes of other members of the public. We, in a sense, have to prove it in our own eyes. I don't know how well that aligns with your point of view, but that's. Yeah.

19:21 Martha: Well, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I tried to define it pretty narrowly, focusing on something more external, because I wanted to say there, if you're just thinking that society has this grade list, then by putting the person down from a C to a C minus, you relatively put yourself up. Is the idea that if society is like grading on the curve, the way we do here in the law school. And so that was my picture. Now, of course, you're right that there is a much more interesting, complicated form of that that is inner and requires looking for what the person is trying to achieve. I mean, I don't dwell on that in the book. It would have been interesting to do that. And I think you're right that it gives a different kind of deeper take on where the narcissism comes from. But it's also quite possible for people to be obsessed with status just because that's the way their society is. And I think when I'm thinking of these people in the academy who see everything in terms of who gets more salary and who gets more mentions, who gets citation index and so on. I don't think it's necessarily the case that those people are like Nietzsche's people who are moved by a profound sense of loss of agency. I think they're just conformists.

20:37 Wes: But their sense of their value of themselves has to be tied to this. Like, if their sense of value weren't tied to it, they would have no reason to jump from the point of view of others to anger, I think. Is that right?

20:49 Martha: No, that's certainly true. So it's only if you've put all of yourself into that basket that it becomes at all productive to engage in payback. That's what I wanted to say. But of Course, to put all of yourself into that narrow basket. That seems very deficient and very narcissistic.

21:06 Mark: So, clearly, a lot of what you're doing here is kind of informed psychological deliberation. And you mentioned psychoanalysts like Winnicott, a guy that we'll probably cover at some point. And some of this comes from. We've had a couple episodes on stoicism and the way we've been talking about anger being generally a negative thing. All this pettiness of arguing about your status. And so it seems like the solution would be something that a psychologist should be talking about. How do I, in a efficacious manner, lessen anger within myself? But a lot of the work of this book is a conceptual analysis that happens before we actually get down to, you know, what you're going to do therapeutically every night. And just this division into these different spheres that you've got a chapter here just to explain to the audience. Once we set up what your analysis of anger, what generally is wrong with it, and forgiveness that we haven't yet talked about, it ends up that sort of the solution. The way that we evaluate what is legitimate and what is not in anger is going to vary a lot in the different areas of intimate relationships, on the one hand. And then what you call. Call the middle realm, which is really people that you don't have a personal relationship with, but you have to deal with, whether at the workplace or on the Internet or whatever, and then in the political realm. And each of those ends up having a very different take on how legitimate, you know, are apologies necessary? Are apologies helpful? To what extent could it be a deterrent? Is there any place in anger at all? Should we give a sort of a brief outline of how those break down?

22:25 Martha: Well, I think let's first say that in all three, okay, what I say is you get to a threefold fork in the road. You can go down this road of payback, in which case you're trying to achieve something that doesn't make sense. You're really deluding yourself with this fantasy of cosmic balance. Let's say killing the murderer will bring back or balance the death of the one you love. Or you go down the road of status, in which case you may possibly get what you are seeking, but it's a singularly narrow and unworthy objective. Or the third possibility is you turn to the future and you think in some intelligent way of what do we got to do to make things better? And that's what I call the transition with a capital T. And so I illustrate it in both personal and political ways. And so in the personal life, it would mean stop obsessing about the wrongs your ex did to you and try to figure out how to make a good life for yourself, which of course isn't always what therapists are directing you to do. So that's a problem. But anyway, in the middle realm, of course in the workplace, there are many things that are irritating, but to make somebody stew for the insult they inflicted is probably going to make things worse in the long run. So what you have to figure out is what is your relationship with that person going to be in the future? How could we actually make things better? And just thinking of payback doesn't really help that. But then in the political case, of course, that's where I spend most time. It's very, very important to turn away from the thought that just lowering and smashing the people who have wronged you is the way to get things done. And so I then focus on Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. And Mandela as examples of people who made this transition to forward looking, constructive thought and work. And they got their followers to do that too. So turning to the future is what all these realms have in common. And then of course, you have to do that differently in the different realms.

24:23 Wes: Yeah. So for instance, for intimate relationships, I think you emphasize the importance of grief or mourning.

24:30 Martha: I am not a stoic. The reason it's important to distinguish the realms is that I don't think that a lot of these casual relationships are worthy of serious concern. So when somebody makes me mad on an airplane, and I do include many stories of my own irascibility on airplanes, you know, it's just not worth getting upset about, period. But in intimate relationships, I think it's very worth getting upset because these are deep parts of your well being. You've invested trust and personal shared plans and you've shared goals with this other person. And so of course, a betrayal or a death, of course those are quite different, would be a very profound loss. And you do have to deal with that and you have to mourn. But all too often instead of doing that, people get preoccupied with the backward looking payback project. So divorce litigation, child custody litigation, prolonged therapy that focuses on my history with the ex and dealing with my angry feelings at the ex. And this could go on for 20 years and it could make you no better off in your actual present and future. Because if somebody's been together with somebody for 30 years, it's really tough to construct a new life. You've Got to figure out how to go out by yourself, not as part of a couple. How to meet new people, how to take up new activities. If you're a woman who hasn't had a career, then it's worst of all because there's very little continuity. Saw everything through the lens of the couple. So you have to find a new life and that's hard. And so thinking about the ex all the time, getting a lawyer to punish the ex all the time, these things are easy. And if you live in the past for 20 years, you haven't really accomplished anything. But you kind of have this easy slide into feeling irrationally that you've accomplished something. So that's the intimate realm in the workplace. I just think you just have to blow off a lot of this and just not get upset, period. And there I am much more of a stoic. I just think when some colleague makes some rude remark, you could go crazy. If you paid attention to every rude remark somebody makes. Seneca says that at one point that if the wise man got angry at every violation of social rules, he would indeed go crazy.

26:47 Dylan: You mentioned several times that there are of course classes of things that are genuinely objectionable. And you started off saying that there are real legitimate wrongs that people get angry at. And what we've been talking about now it seems to me pretty easy to say, well, there's something wrong with my own attitude. They're not worthy of being so concerned with to raise my anger. So there's a kind of self training that would be involved with it. And even for something that might even be a betrayal or something like that, seems like yeah, it's going to be harder to do, but it involves a kind of self work. But so I've been thinking about questions that give rise to anger that might just involve fairness and maybe that falls into the realm of justice. But within a community or a neighborhood, you have economic wrongs that could be genuine economic wrongs or they could be economic imbalances that result in anger. Maybe it has its root in jealousy, but it's not so clear to me that they are remedied by self defense work.

27:48 Martha: No, certainly not. And this is where the Eumenides are a really helpful image because what they basically say is we turn these important things over to the law, we don't have to follow them up in our own psyches because we invent legal systems that have the job of dealing with those important wrongs and they should do so in a spirit of forward looking welfare. They should, that is take up whatever Attitude toward punishment is dictated by general forward looking concerns trying to really make a difference. So we might punish for reasons of incapacitation, we might punish for reasons of specific deterrence, general deterrence, or where that's possible, reform. But there's no point in the just the pure payback doesn't get you anything. So we turn things over to the law. And that means that if I have a student, let's say, who's been sexually harassed in the workplace, and that often unfortunately happens, I will right away, in fact I am required to do so, report it to the Title IX coordinator. The Title IX coordinator will deal with the complaint and with the person and with the accused and somehow or other achieve a fair result. But of course that should be in a spirit of what is the way of dealing with that very serious violation. That's going to do good going forward. I happen to think that sexual harassment is among the most deterrable of crimes. I think that most men, once they understand what the rule is and they understand what's wrong with their behavior, if they're not psychopaths, they will conform their behavior to the rule. So having a rule and making sure that you mean it, that there's real accountability, is good mostly for reasons of deterrence. And we can see that while laws against underage drinking do absolutely no good and no one is deterred, laws against sexual harassment have done a lot of good. Because the people who are now charged rightly with that are usually very troubled people who are probably, for psychological reasons, not so deterrable. But in any case, we turn things over to the law. And I think that's very important because these problems are hard to solve. And you don't solve it just by taking personal retaliation. And indeed you don't solve it only by punishing either. Because if a society waits around for men to harass women and then whaps them when they do, that would be very stupid. Because you want to educate beforehand. You want to try to do whatever is possible to prevent the crime from taking place. And that's true of all sorts of crimes. So one group that I admire is the Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Because instead of just thinking, I'm going to go out and kill all these drunk drivers or try to get the toughest sentence in court for each of them to inflict maximum suffering, they did this very intelligent thing. They want now cars to be equipped with breathalyzer devices, so you can't start your car. If you have, let's say, one drunk driving conviction, you now have to have one of These devices, before you can start your car, you have to blow into a tube. So, of course, ex antide is much better than ex post deterrence, because now that car doesn't start and person isn't going to be killed. And more generally, if a society is really serious about crime, what it would do is think, what is it that causes people to commit various crimes? Is it lack of education? Is it lack of employment opportunities? Is it poverty? Is it bad nutrition? And then they would put in place a complicated program of education and social welfare aimed at making less crime ex ante. Now, then, of course, some crime will still occur, and then you deal with it in the way that I said. But the most important thing is that you don't just wait around for somebody to inflict suffering on you. Try to figure out what to do about the whole problem.

31:34 Wes: A lot of people take it for granted that you see an injustice and the proper response is outrage. And in many cases, public declarations of outrage. And that sort of seems to more and more dominate public discourse. You know, you start a Twitter hashtag or you write some sort of screed on, well, outrage.

31:50 Martha: I want to stop here because that word is a little bit slippery. And there's a sense of outrage in which I think outrage is perfectly rational. That is where you're saying, this is really, really wrong, really, really bad. Let's commit ourselves to making sure that doesn't happen again. And we could even be quite emotional about that. That's a special kind of emotion, and I think it's on the borderline of anger. I don't really care whether we call it a species of anger or not, but it's kind of quasi anger, and I call it transition anger because it's anger that's already focused on solving the problem in the future. So it doesn't say, let's pay back the offender, it drops that part. But instead it says, let's make sure this doesn't happen again. I think some outrage that you see in public life today is like that, but it's very hard to disentangle it from the payback kind. I think if you looked at followers of Bernie Sanders, you'd find many people of goodwill who really want to solve our society's problems, and they're using outrage to promote a rethinking of our economic policies and so forth. But then there are many who just want to take revenge. They want to pay back the bankers, smash the system. And growing up in just such a revolution, revolutionary movement at the time of the SDS and the anti war movement, I saw the double face because indeed there were some people in that who really had this forward looking, constructive view, but then there were others who just really wanted to smash the system.

33:21 Wes: And I think you point this out in your book. Even in cases where we think we're engaged in sort of transitional anger towards something constructive, there's a large capacity for self deception in that. And you know, this made me think of Nietzschean Rezante ma, sort of unconscious desire for revenge underlying some seemingly moral comportment to the world.

33:42 Martha: Yeah, unfortunately. And indeed that, I think means that you really should deliberate and examine yourself a lot. Nelson Mandela says he used 27 years in prison on Robben island to examine himself and get rid of his desire for payback. Well, we don't, oh, thank God, have that kind of solitude. But King thought that we just engage in a kind of group process that he called self purification. And that just meant, you know, let's talk about what we're really feeling, talk about why we're doing what we're doing, and let's drop the payback thing and move toward constructive work. And so it doesn't have to take 27 years.

34:19 Dylan: Did you follow the Stanford rape case at all?

34:21 Martha: Yeah, yeah, I did.

34:23 Dylan: And so just because it happened so recently, I'm thinking of that in this discussion because the case was part of the judicial system went through and then the response by the victim to basically complain about the verdict. I just wondered if you had any thoughts about that in the context of anger and political justice and outrage, the way you were just talking about it. One interpretation might be, well, look, she expressed outrage at a systematic miscarriage of justice.

34:55 Wes: It was also a victim statement at the trial.

34:57 Martha: Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, those things in our culture are very, very valuable because there's still a deficiency of accountability. I wrote a piece on Huffington Post, I don't know if you saw it, about actors and athletes being above the law. And I described an incident from my own past with a well known actor where it was perfectly clear that that person, I mean, I didn't pursue criminal charges just because I knew at that time and place especially that that person would have just walked all over me and no one would care and no one would believe me. But anyway, so whenever people regard themselves as above the law and think that they can do whatever they want to do, and I'm afraid that's particularly true right now of athletes and actors, but particularly athletes like Bill Cosby has made the actors a little more like normal, normal people. You know, it's not true anymore of politicians. Politicians used to be above the law, but they're not above the law now. But so we're creeping ahead, but where we have these people in whose talents a lot of money has been invested, somebody like Jameis Winston, for example, and they twist the judicial process. And so not because I think that there's any notion of the right proportional punishment, but rather for reasons of forward looking deterrence. I think the sentence given in that case was very, very unfortunate. And it would be right to protest that because we want the message sent to young men that even if you're a star athlete, you're not above the law. You have to treat women with respect. And if you come upon a woman who's drunk, it's not okay to go ahead. So the signal that that judge was sending was this horribly corrupt signal saying, whoa, if your talents are worth a lot of money to big investors, then you just are above everyone else. And that I think is the real problem in that case.

36:46 Mark: Could we maybe clarify the relation between the normal justice case and the revolutionary justice case, since you have two different chapters on them that we've sort of been blurring them together as we've been talking about them here, that, you know, if something serious enough is done to you, you've talked about two ways to deflect, to remove yourself from personal anger. One is just deal with the loss, deal with the grief, but turn the retribution or, you know, what's going to happen next over to the state. But then, well, what if the state's laws aren't just, what if you live in a fundamentally unjust society or even just one like we're talking about here, that there are gaps in it? Well, then you could, instead of just leaving it to the state, you have to enter into some political activism, maybe find other people that have been in a similar situation, get some sort of, you know, raise consciousness, get some sort of movement going, try to change the law. You want to say more about the relationship between those two enterprises?

37:34 Martha: Well, I think, yeah, it's very tricky because of course there's always the question, what are you doing with your life? And I mean, just to stick with the ordinary justice with gaps for a minute, I think that somebody who's in a situation of being a victim always has a lot of choices. And I end up counseling students who have been victims of sexual assault or sexual harassment. And the question for them always is, how do I want to spend the next three years of my life? Do I really want to get Wrapped up in the system, which is, of course, good for other women. It's good for society going forward, but maybe for me, it's not so good. And I have to finish my papers by the deadline.

38:14 Mark: Now.

38:15 Martha: What I thought back in 1968 when this event that I described in Huffington Post happened to me was I would accomplish nothing by going to the police. They would not believe me. They would believe the powerful actor, and I would, you know, work and work. And I might have ruined my graduate school career because I was about to go to graduate school. I would have wasted large chunks of my life. So you have to weigh the costs and benefits. And if the benefits are likely so low, as in that case, they clearly were, then you just don't want to get into that now. I also had another choice much later when that same actor was running for important political office, and that was much, much later. It was like 19. It was in the middle 90s anyway. And again, I thought, well, you know, enough is enough. It's fine for him to go about his business in Hollywood, but to actually be an important political elected official, that seems too much. But then everyone said to me, well, you know, people will think you're doing it in order to extort money. That was certainly true. A lot of people will think that. And of course, it's sometimes true. And that's why it's so tricky. And they will just not believe you. After so many years, all the evidence is gone and so on, and you will end up being charged and no doubt sued for defamation. You will end up again wasting a couple of years of your life and a lot of your social capital. So in the end, I decided not to say anything even then. Now, note that I did finally say something, because I do think things like that should be stated, and women should be able to know that this bad behavior happens and that we need to hold these famous people accountable. But I did it after the guy was dead. And you could call me a coward, okay, Because I waited that long. On the other hand, I think for me, I did the right thing. I would not have stood up to, like, three years of being sued for defamation by this guy and so on. You know, so there are those choices now. Then there's the larger question of how we're going to fix the system. I do think that that requires the help of many people, not just the victims, that all women should stand up and protest when sexual harassment is going on and sexual violence is going on. I'm now a signer of an open letter that has been posted publicly about an individual in the profession who seems to have violated key norms of sexual harassment. And, you know, several hundred philosophers sign this in order to say, we object to that conduct and we want a profession in which that doesn't happen. And so it's not so much about wanting to penalize that guy or make him suffer. I really don't care whether he suffers or not. I think he's probably a very troubled individual who's suffering a lot already. But it's about making a statement. We don't want to have that kind of world. And I think that's what you do when there are big gaps. But when the whole society is corrupt, then you need much more. You need a whole social movement. And I think that's true of the civil rights movement, even though we didn't exactly topple the U.S. constitution. But the civil rights movement made a huge difference in the way that our laws and institutions were interpreted by the courts. And also, of course, it led to the passing of new statutes that otherwise would not have passed. So that's what you do when something of the society is sound, but a lot of it is rotten. You have a huge social movement that needs the investment of millions of people in order to get that done. So we move from there to the cases of India and South Africa where. Where we really had to change the whole society in a very sweeping way. Now, South Africa, a lot of the same people stayed, but you got to have a new constitution, a whole new set of political institutions. So Mandela's movement was trying to bring about social change of a very radical sort that involved getting included the 90% of people who had been politically excluded. Gandhi's movement was even more radical. It meant like, throwing out the rulers who had been ruling India for close to 200 years. So you have to have, in those cases, mass movements also. I would say both are interesting because they invest a lot of their energy in political theater that brings their movement to the attention of the world. I think that was true with King, too, some degree. But it's much more true of Gandhi and Mandela because they thought their own country wasn't enough. But it was the attention they could get on the world stage that would really propel their movement forward. And so they devoted a lot of attention to how shall we present Indian people, Indian men, Indian masculinity, so that the world will see that we're not brutish savages, as I'm afraid the great John Stuart Mill tended to believe, but that actually rational people who are more self Controlled and more rational than the British. And in the case of Mandela, it's very similar. How do we show that black men are not savages so that the world will support us and trust us and join in the movement for genuine democracy?

43:40 Mark: The role of rage in this sort of change has been a central issue in American civil rights. You had mentioned Martin Luther King. Well, maybe one of the ways of interpreting the Malcolm X response to that is, or even just thinking about the way that this comes up in political speech today on the Internet, et cetera, is that one of the ways of calling attention to it, the concern is not so much. Minorities that are being discriminated against or being insulted need to demonstrate in a what Booker T. Washington manner that they are civilized and worthy of respect in the way that you were just talking about Gandhi and the Indians, but that actually expressing rage, expressing anger, making that a force in political organization. Unless you're angry about what's going on, then things stop happening, then you end up complacent.

44:27 Dylan: And in fact, isn't one function of anger, at least the display of anger there just signaling what your values are? So the fact that you're angry indicates that you take it seriously and it matters a lot. And if you're not angry, or at least not displaying anger, you talk a little bit about the difference between these two things, but that at the very least the display of anger would indicate that you are taking this seriously and you mean it. And in fact, on the other side, if you're not angry, you either are cold or unresponsive or you aren't properly sensitive. And in fact, being too rational in such a situation or not plainly emotional can significantly undermine the political effectiveness of what you were saying.

45:14 Martha: Yeah, well, that's what some people think. But just look at those cases. Now the behavior of people who go out in the street and riot is not committed behavior aiming at justice. It's ungovernable adolescents behavior. So that's what anger looks like. It looks very ungoverned, very non goal oriented. By contrast, the civil rights movement was certainly not hyper self protective. People were risking their lives, they did risk their lives, they risked every day their physical safety. But they did it in a way that expressed a commitment to, to constructive work and hope on the other side. So the message that was being sent to white Americans was we don't want to just tear you limb from limb. What good would that do? We want to make a better world and we're determined to do that. And we show you our determination by the quality of the risk that we're willing to run. Now, King did think that strategically non anger was the right thing. And he says this. He says even when violence and anger would be justified, maybe in self defense, he's not going to do that because it will send the wrong message to white Americans. But that was not the main thing for him. The main thing is you don't create the future by kind of spurting off in all directions. You do it by an intelligent effort to create, as he says very movingly, a world where men and women can live together. And if you listen to his speeches, you see that sometimes he allows that people are brought to the movement by their anger. Okay, that's fine. Maybe for some of them that was a good step because they might not have gotten out of their houses if they hadn't been angry in the first. But then they have to enter what I call the transition. They have to turn away from their personal peak and they have to stop just wanting to smash. And they have to turn to the future and think, what is this world that we're making? And pointedly, he certainly drew on some aspects of the Christian tradition and not on others. There's nothing from the book of Revelations in his speeches where, you know, sure, the Christians are very Nietzsche and in that book they're trying to just envisage the horrible torment of the past oppressor. But he goes to the images of hope and of peace and of coexistence. And it's very, very moving. So I think, as I do say, there are some limited instrumental roles for anger. Like it might motivate you to go to a movement in the first place. It might even be a wake up call to you that something is badly wrong. But I think in general, it's not even a good signal to society at large that something's badly wrong. A much better signal is your committed choice to risk your life and your safety for the sake of a valuable end. You can't really demonstrate that by rioting in the streets. But something like the march, and it doesn't seem too emotionless. King was not Gandhi. Now Gandhi, I do feel that there's something quite problematic about Gandhi because he's a true stoic. Richard Sorabji wrote an excellent book called Gandhi and the Stoics where he does show that Gandhi, like the Stoics, repudiates all the major emotions, including personal love, including grief and so on. I don't like that. But King was not like that grief. He embraced. And so when those little girls in Birmingham died. His speech of mourning is haunting and indelible and there's no doubt of the depth of the sorrow and the pain that had been inflicted there. But that doesn't mean he's going to go the road of payback. It just didn't mean that. And it's also true of Mandela. Mandela is certainly not a stoic. His letters to Winnie show a person who's very capable of profound longing, of love, of sorrow, of loneliness, of grief. But again, it's the spirit of payback that they both renounce. And I think that's what won them the world's admiration and that it should be regarded as a kind of mere cowards recourse. That seems ridiculous because they were not just facing prison death themselves, but asking their followers to take that same risk. So I guess I think if people do think the way you're describing, and I imagine Malcolm X, under the influence of Fanon and so on, did have some such view, but I think it's just a mistaken view, both strategically and really. One thing that you mentioned, the performance of anger, I guess I think that in some limited low stakes cases there is room for a performance of anger, mostly in the middle realm. I talk about these Utku Eskimos who are very like the stoics in that they think that anger is never a good thing and you should never have anger, you should always cooperate very closely. And the spirit of anger poisoned cooperation. But they do sometimes think that a performance of anger might make sense. And here's the case. So this anthropologist, Jean Briggs, who's studying them, wanted to find out whether they think that it was just angry behavior that was bad, or is it the feeling, the subjective experience of anger that's bad. So she asked them about Jesus getting angry at the money changers and throwing them out of the temple. And they said, oh, well, of course he wouldn't really be angry because he was perfect. But in that culture that was a kind of behavior that got people's attention, that they understood. So they were validating the performance, but in a relatively low stakes case. And I say the same thing, there's an example that I give where at the hairdresser, I was having my hairdresser and I was hit in the forehead by a bottle falling out of a cabinet way up high. And I thought, oh, this is really dangerous. And the women who work there said, oh yes, we've been trying to get management to fix that for months, but they just haven't done it. Well, I wasn't hurt because the bottle had Nothing in it. It was a plastic bottle. But I thought somebody else might get hurt. So I did perform anger to the management because I know very well but what gets people's attention is the possibility of a lawsuit. And so I thought that if they thought I might sue them, then they would fix the lock. And they did. I think it's hard to know whether that's manipulative. I've just been presenting this material in the university in Germany and all the students were very critical of me. They said, you're lying and you're manipulating other people. So I think the Kantian spirit of the German students made them think that there was always something a little bit wrong with that behavior. But anyway, I think you would not want to do it in a major political movement. No, because you don't want to send the signal that you're in favor of this kind of ungovernable spurting out and looting and rioting and so on. People are all too ready to do that.

52:46 Dylan: Anyway, you talked about emotion earlier as not always associated with. With feeling that you could have. Depending on the person, depending on the circumstances, you could have emotions that were so makes me think that one could in fact be terribly angry without being rageful. And that is probably the form in which I've heard most talked about it. Maybe this you mentioned, I think this associated with Aristotle as being a kind of machine of a source of motion, a source of motion for your own self, maybe even towards getting justice.

53:22 Martha: I don't think that was ever solved. But anyway, see, look, I think what I was trying to say is that when you have the emotion without the feeling, that's because the emotion itself is non conscious. So the case of the daily fear of death is my central case. Now I think there are anger cases like that. Like if you walk around in some way angry at your partner and you don't want to own up to it and you think, why do I have a headache all the time? And then eventually you realize, but I don't think that's very likely in the political movements that it would be so non conscious. But then once it's conscious, I think you typically do have all the subjective experience associated with it.

54:05 Mark: Well, just to connect up the middle realm back with this, the social justice stuff. We've already said generally, the perceived insults that you get on a daily basis, whether inadvertent or deliberate, are things that you would take the stoic tack on. They're not worth getting upset about. But you also address in the book you're in traffic you cut somebody else off and they call you a jerk, they give you the finger, whatever. Like, that's not worth getting mad at them about for their perceived slight against you. However, if they call you a racist slurpee or a sexist slur, it seems like, again, from the social justice standpoint, that there needs to be at least a display. Maybe this is not the best particular example of I've just cut somebody off, but, you know, some way of saying that language is not acceptable under any circumstances. What you're doing is exhibiting the symptom of a larger problem that I need to say something to address.

54:56 Martha: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I do think that you've picked up some. Something very important that I think we should spend time on, and that is that there's one status that I think is of such moment, that we should always think of it as a central social good, and that is equal human dignity. And so when somebody wrongs you with respect to your equal human dignity, we shouldn't just let that go. By now, what we should do is complicated. Some people think hate speech laws are a good idea. Group libel. I'm not in favor of that for complicated reasons. But, I mean, I agree with you entirely that we shouldn't just let that go. And so we should pause. We should underline that. We should say, this is outrageous and it shouldn't happen again. We should try to figure out why it happened and how to not make that happen again. And in an academic institution, I think we could certainly make rules against that kind of speed. It's very tricky. Free speech in the academy, I don't think we should get enmeshed in because there are so many different views of how wide the latitude for uncivil and damaging speech should be in the academy. But I think no one would disagree that racist and sexist speech is a problem, that we should all flag it, draw it to people's attention, say, this is really bad. It's not creating the kind of community that we want. I don't know whether performing anger is a good idea, though. I don't see any reason why it would be. See, I think anger, because it's so associated with payback, motivates people who are like those managers in the hairdresser, that is, that they're worried about a very specific kind of payback, namely the lawsuit. If you say to people, no, race is speech, I think what's more important is to communicate that norm, to just say, this is the kind of community we want to have. And I think performing anger Makes people personalize it too much. It wouldn't get the right message across. At least that's what I'm inclined to think right now.

57:01 Dylan: Yeah, I guess I'm just restating what you've said before, which is that this very limited function of anger, even to the extent that it motivates or gets you out of the house, is the word used transitional. It's that from there the motivation of the action is not based upon anger, because as you've analyzed it, anger is understood in terms of payback.

57:25 Martha: Yeah. In a person who's acting well, it will be at most this temporary phase. Now, of course, not everyone is acting well. And there's a third role that I said anger could play instrumental. Namely, it could scare people and make them treat you well because they're afraid of an explosion. Now, there's certainly people in every university, every workplace, anywhere. There are people that we know are likely to explode and people tiptoe around them. They don't want to upset them. But, you know, is that the best way of getting good treatment? Probably not. And if people are like that, I think in the end they just get isolation rather than the good treatment they want, because people just don't want to talk to them. They're just too afraid of what will happen.

58:15 Mark: All right. The social critique of anger has been fairly straightforward. That there's a couple of central irrational parts in the cognitive mechanism of anger, both the payback bit and the status bit. But forgiveness, you say the. The problems with this are much more subtle. I mean, it ends up being very much the same sort of Nietzschean critique that you might have thought that your anger was righteous or that your demand for forgiveness was righteous, but underlyingly it's a lot more hostile and has more negative consequences than you might have thought. But you feel the need to go and give a very Nietzschean genealogical account in the book.

58:51 Martha: Yes. I mean, it was here that I really felt I had to do something more. More genealogical. Because forgiveness is an artifact of a religious system or systems that people don't always hold today. Some do, some don't, but they have appropriated the kind of cut off trunk of this system without actually appropriating the whole system. So we have to look at what the system was like when it was whole. And then we have to ask, do we want this little bit of it today? So of course, forgiveness was mainly the job of an almighty and unerring God. And so mortals are way below when they commit sins. They have to beg and grovel and they have to promise not to do it again. So I go through both Jewish and Christian texts on this and look at what I call transactional forgiveness, which is really the most common type of. It's what philosophers today say is the central type of forgiveness. Charles Griswold has an excellent book on forgiveness, and that's his account of what the main type of forgiveness is. Namely, the wronged party agrees to waive the angry feelings in return for a certain humility, a confession of wrongdoing, a promise not to do it again, etc. Etc. Etc. Now, translation, transfer that to the realm of human relations, and it looks pretty hostile because it's basically not saying, okay, I'll let this go. It's saying something much more complicated. It's saying, I will let my anger go only if you perform this kind of humiliating performance. And we see, I think, all the time when people are getting divorced, when people say, politicians who have cheated on their spouses or on tv, there's this very unseemly performance that people go through which is very humiliating, which is a oh, please, please forgive me. And then the other one says, oh, yes, I will forgive you if you promise to be a different kind of person, etc. Etc. Now, of course, that's not the only thing that we call forgiveness. So that's why it gets complicated. If you look at the Gospels, there are really, I think, three different things that Jesus says. One of them is certainly that. That is, you should forgive your enemies only if they engage in this renunciation of sin. And that part is what the organized church has taken up in large part. And it's not surprising because the organized church wants to have a powerful role in forgiving sin. But there's another type that's unconditional, that it says I forgive you without attaching to it any particular condition. And Jesus says that kind of thing, too. Well, that's a lot better, except why were you angry in the first place? So it's better if we admit that it was okay for you to be angry. Well, then that looks a little bit better for you to forgive unconditionally. But on the other hand, it still adopts a position of moral superiority. We notice that leaders, particularly, I would say Mandela, he never used the word forgive because it did have these connotations of the other party being below you or groveling, even if you don't say so. And indeed, Desmond Tutu understands the Truth and Reconciliation Commission theoretically. I mean, his kind of summary chapter says that it's this form of transactional forgiveness. So anyway, unconditional forgiveness is better than transactional forgiveness, but it has problems. But then there's something else, namely love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. And the parable of the prodigal son, I think expresses that attitude. Namely, the father just has this unconditional love for his son. The son is coming back. We don't have any idea. The father certainly doesn't have any idea whether the son is going to apologize, whether he's going to change his life. But he was lost and now he's found. And so the father sees him coming a long way off and the text says his guts were heaved up, he had the, this very powerful surge of emotion and he runs to embrace his child. Now of course that's not incompatible with saying, you know, you did some bad things and you better change your life and so on. But the first impulse is one of love, unconditional love. So that's what I prefer is a kind of generosity that gets ahead of the moral blame and the moral advice. And I do think that that's what certainly Mandela and I would say also King exemplified. It's just a very generous spirit that says we're not going to do bean counting of wrongs. We're going to move ahead in a spirit of brotherhood. King was very clear that it doesn't mean you have to like those people or make them your bosom buddies. It just means love in the biblical sense of agape, the kind of will love that's the opposite of hate. Mandela was even maybe a little further because he liked to actually form relationships of friendship with the former dominating Afrikaners. And he was so good at doing it. He was very funny, he was very endearing, and he inspired a kind of relaxation and ease that made it possible for him to form personal friendships even with the former leaders of South African security, even with the captain of the rugby team and so forth. But anyway, all I'm talking about is love in the more will oriented sense and a kind of generosity. We're not going to engage in constant retributive bean counting. We're just going to move ahead. So those are the three attitudes. And I think if we're thinking about a world that we're in, that is a world where we're not modeling our behavior on some particular God. I mean, some of us are theists and some are not. And some among the theists might think of God as that kind of retributive God. I certainly, I'm a proud reformed Jew. And I don't think that the Retributive God is the right picture of God. I think the right picture of God would be a much more loving God. So anyway, if we were theists, we might have this view or that view. But since we live together in a multi religious and partly secular society, we better not base our moral attitudes on any one religious picture and we better try to find one that doesn't express. And I think here Nietzsche was absolutely brilliant. This concealed species spirit of revenge that comes from the desire to play God toward other people.

1:05:56 Mark: So again, as with anger, we're looking at if there is a role for some form of forgiveness, then it has to be forward looking. And this is going to play out differently in the three different realms, right?

1:06:07 Wes: Yeah.

1:06:08 Mark: That if you've got a personal betrayal, for instance, you can't simply let him off the hook. If a continued betrayal along the same lines will mean that it's not going to be a real relationship anymore. You need some sort of hoop jumping. You can't simply say unconditional love. That's being doormat, right?

1:06:26 Martha: Well, I think, you know, it doesn't mean you're going to stay in that same relationship. You might decide this relationship isn't working and I'm just going to change it. But that doesn't mean payback. And I think a lot of people think that it does. And it's often because they feel weakened, helpless. And I think that's particularly true, as I said before, of women who have no strong independent career, whose only life was as part of a couple. And so now they can't imagine what life could be without that relationship. But if you've been betrayed, well then you might think, does this relationship make sense going forward? Is there a way of making it better? But if not, that doesn't mean you have to pay the person back. And actually I have to say from my own experience that the relationship with an ex husband or an ex lover can actually be a wonderful relationship because very often you can remake, you can make a new friendship with somebody which isn't plagued by whatever problems made the relationship difficult in the first place. You know, you can avoid those things and then you can have the good without the bad. But politically what it really means is that you going forward, you need people's cooperation. And this is true whether you're king trying to make a more just America. He needed white Americans to be on his side. It also means if you're Nelson Mandela, Even if you're 90%, let's face it, a lot of technical knowledge, a lot of legal Knowledge, a lot of variant, important social capital was wrapped up in the Afrikaner community. So if you just banish them to outer darkness, that would be very stupid. And Mandela was not the wisest chooser of his own cabinet in every respect, but he certainly understood that point that if you alienate the people who, let's say, control the security services, the people who control the police, the people who control the army, that's a stupid thing to do because they have knowledge and expertise that you need. The day that he died, well, the day of his funeral, I was watching CNN International and there was this policeman, by now a leading officer, and he was remembering that on that day in 1994 when Mandela was being inaugurated president and the procession was moving through the streets, Mandela stopped before a group of young police recruits and he got down from his presidential car and he shook everyone's hand and he said, our trust depends on you. And he was expressing to these young men who of course were not fixed, that he wanted their cooperation, he respected them, he wanted their expertise, he wanted their friendship. And this, by now, much older man was openly weeping at the memory of Mandela. So, you know, people can change, but they're certainly not going to change if you first act as to say, bad, bad, bad. It's like being a parent. You don't bring up children. At least most people today know that you don't bring up children by constantly rubbing their nose in the bad things they've done. You don't even train animals that way, for heaven's sake. We now know that positive reinforcement is much more effective in training all kinds of animals, from elephants to dolphins, than negative reinforcement. So what you want to do is to form friendship. And you do that much more through the kind of unconditional generosity that Mandela showed so beautifully.

1:10:07 Mark: Wes or Dylan, do you have any follow ups about forgiveness?

1:10:09 Dylan: I thought Martha summarized very well an

1:10:12 Martha: additional point, how you want something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to go. And I've just been asked this morning to write a statement about the process in Colombia. I was just there in December, and so I have some good friends there and they want me to write something about the reconciliation process there. So I have to think what I'm going to say. But I guess I think it's very important going forward to have accountability of some sort. Now, sometimes that involves criminal trials and there might be cases in which the legal system is operating well and you think the perpetrators, it's only bringing them into court. That's going to give you the kind of accountability you need that might have been the case with Nuremberg, only the problem with Nuremberg was that it was so one sided. It was really a case of Victor's justice. But anyhow, you need to create a record of accountability in order to say our society or our international society stands for certain values and we don't accept transgressions of that. And going forward, we commit ourselves to saying we don't want that kind of stuff. Now, sometimes having a criminal trial is stupid. And that's what the people in South Africa decided, because they realized that the people who were guilty of all these wrongs were mostly wealthy and middle class and they would retain powerful lawyers who would argue their case well, and then we would never know who did what. So the reason that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered amnesty in exchange for truth was a very simple contextual reason. Namely, we really need the truth because only a historical record of who did what will help us to move forward and give us the accountability we need. But we won't get truth if we have trials. Okay, but that's not always the case. And sometimes you do want criminal trials. Now, I think, though, sometimes people think they can leap over the truth part of it and just move to the future without that. And, and Northern Ireland is, I'm afraid, it's sort of like that, where there are all kinds of essential facts about what happened that are not part of the public record. And not only that, but they are known. So there's this sealed archive at Boston College which has in it all this testimony about what happened is not going to be released until everyone is dead. Who is even mentioned in the tapes. Well, that seems to me the worst of both worlds. That is the truth is there and everyone knows it's there, but they can't get it. And so whether indeed Jerry Adams was an accomplice in the kidnapping and death of Gene McConnell, we don't know. And we know that we might know in like 30 years, but it's only after Jerry Adams is dead. So of course people hate that. And it makes it much harder to have reconciliation. And I've heard people there say, you know, Martin McGinnis, we know what he did, he killed Mountbatten, relatives and so on. And it would have been understandable, it was understandable when Prince Philip refused to shake his hand, but it's also maybe more generous for Queen Elizabeth to shake his hand, and she did, and so on. Now with Jerry Adams, the problem is we don't even know how to move beyond what he did because we don't know what he did. So I think that's a good example to ponder for countries that are thinking of going through this, at least you don't want to do that sealed archive thing. If there is testimony, we need to have it on the table or we need to have it become accessible so that the world can deal with it and then move on, as they did with Martin McGinnis. So I think every country has to make its decisions contextually and in terms of its own resources, its own particular problems. But accountability and then moving on in a spirit of generosity, those are the two things that I would say are

1:14:22 Dylan: important and central to the accountability is the transparency of truth.

1:14:27 Martha: Yeah, I mean, I think I see why they did that, because Jerry Adams was a crucial political player. And I think probably people know. I mean, this is the problem. Everyone sort of thinks that he was probably guilty. Well, I guess I think they made the wrong gamble because if they had just let it be out on the table, as with Martin McGinnis, then, okay, he was guilty. We move on. Mandela was a violent revolutionary, and everyone knew that. And then we move on. And Jerry Adams, like Mandela, used violent tactics for a time and then moved to a period of reconciliation. So I guess I think they were excessively nervous and fearful that knowing what he did would just torpedo the whole. Reconciliation is probably not the case. And better to have the truth there.

1:15:20 Dylan: Well, in fact, it seems like you're arguing that. That the absence of that truth undermines trust, which is the fundamental piece for going forward. So the piece of forgiveness that you hold on to that seems to lack the payback part and lack the humiliation part is. You say the word accountability, but you mean that not in the sense of balancing accounts, but in the sense of establishing what was done, laying out the transparency of it. And. And the word we would normally use would be confess. But you also don't like that word as well because it involves too much notion of humiliation or self frustration. And so you described the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and I had a hard time imagining going through that on either side and it not feeling like a confession. It made sense to me on the one hand, that what was central to it working was the transparency of it, and that the fundamental piece of going forward was acknowledgement of what was done and people acknowledging that they had done it. And I guess the mechanism for removing the humiliation from it was to involve the amnesty.

1:16:37 Martha: Well, I think there were several things. The first was like the amnesty certainly played a part. You're not going to be thrown in some terrible prison. The way they threw Mandela. Second part is the way they behaved. They behaved with respect. They were careful, I think, or at least they tried to be, to treat everyone fairly and equally. But more important even than that was that they were not partisan in the sense that when crimes were committed by the black Africans, they too came before the commission. Winnie Mandela came before the commission. And that, I mean not just any old black African, but Winnie Mandela, that inspired a lot of public trust because we're just not playing favorites. We're not exercising Victor's justice. See, I think what everyone sees, Nuremberg from the American point of view at least, even German I think because they're so guilty, they have such spurious pseudo guilt that they kind of think, oh, Nuremberg was great because we were able to be convicted and our guilt was pinned on us and so on. But actually I think there was a lot wrong with Nuremberg because they did not think about how the Allies had committed war crimes, which they certainly did. They did not try them for the bombing of Dresden and all kinds of things. So I think the evenhandedness of the whole thing is really important.

1:18:04 Mark: So we've brought up guilt a few times and I'm thinking this maybe should be our final topic here. We've been talking so far, whether as a society or as individuals to become, well, maybe better stoics in some cases, but emotionally more mature individuals. It'd be great if we could abandon anger, at least the pointless, self destructive, irrational kinds of anger. It'd be great if we could not require prostration of people before forgiving them. Or even you suggest, just abandon the notion of forgiveness altogether and just unconditional love. And the common thing is of course looking forward rather than dwelling on the past, but switching this to the perspective of the person that has done wrong. So there's a section on this anger at oneself in the intimate relationships section. And you say, well, give can be well grounded. Obviously if these people have committed war crimes or personal affronts. Thinking of Raskolnikov crime and punishment here it seems if you want to be consistent, you'd have to say, well the best thing that such a person can do, of course they're going to suffer lots of, I was going to say hopefully if they're well functioning they will suffer a lot of ill feeling about how things have gone done. You want them of course to recognize not to be self deceiving about what they've done, but, but ideally they too should be forward looking. How can I make myself into a kind of person that won't do this kind of thing again. How can I make the world a better place so other people don't look at why I committed this thing, what circumstances drove me to that. Can I work socially to keep other people out of that sort of trap that I was in that brought me to that? I mean, is that the solution here or is there?

1:19:36 Martha: Yeah, I mean, I think you put it very nicely. Guilt, like anger, can have this good cousin, which we could call transition guilt, which is as you described. That is to say, I'm pained at what I did, but now I'm going to turn forward and ask, how could that not happen again? And of course, it would be even better if it could not happen on the part of other people too, if I could do something for society in general. But often the distinction between the actor and the deed is lost sight of. And people think, oh, I've done that bad thing. I am bad, I am sullied. And then they inflict payback on themselves. This is encouraged by a lot of our religious upbringing. If we're Christian or Jewish, the idea that sin is lodged inside of you and the only thing you can do is continually flagellate yourself, I think it's particularly encouraged, and I talk about this in the third chapter on forgiveness by the common Christian, particularly Christian thought, that our sexual nature itself is a site of sin. Because then that makes it just. That's who I am. I can't get rid of it. I can't be anything different. And so then you feel, well, the thing I did is part of who I am and I better just flagellate myself unendurably. Do you know George Orwell's essay about his English boarding school experience? Such were the joys.

1:21:05 Dylan: I was introduced to it by your book.

1:21:08 Martha: Well, so poor little Orwell, 8 years old, goes off to boarding school and he wets the bed, and he does so repeatedly. Well, that's a part of his body. He doesn't know how to help it. And so the teachers, the authorities, say, you did this bad thing, and that means that you are bad. And poor little Orwell felt that he was just unredeemably bad because he had absolutely no way of changing this. So that's the bad kind of guilt. Now, of course, in this case, it's not about a wrong at all. That makes it even worse. But even when it is a genuine wrong, to feel that there's this indelible mark of badness in you, and that often is what we tend to do as communities, we make people, we brand them as a certain type of bad person. But the best kind of guilt toward oneself would be like the best kind of reformatory criminal justice. I described John Braithwaite's work with juvenile justice, where he takes these teenage offenders and he has this group. The whole community talks to them and they say, you know, you did that bad thing. But if anyone says, oh, Johnny's a bad boy, Braithwaite always says, no, he's not. He's a good person. But he made a bad mistake, and he had better not do that again. So separating the doer from the deed with the self, too, that's the key. But it's really, really hard. And of course, it's harder still if you're brought up on these religious fictions of original badness and so on.

1:22:49 Dylan: Some kinds of deeds seem to be amenable to that. They seem to be easier to separate out the deed from the doer, petty theft or circumstances. Other deeds seem to be tied to being more and more and sort of the underlying features of your account really understands the malleability of the human being and that we're really becoming creatures rather than being creatures. And do you think that that's the focus of organized religion, on our beingness as opposed to our becomingness, is the root of this?

1:23:34 Martha: Well, look, organized religion comes in many different types. And as I said, I belong. I'm a proud member of a temple that thinks that what we should be doing most of the time is working for social justice. So there are many kinds of religion. And I particularly admired that church in Charleston, South Carolina, where the people were wronged in the most horrendous way. But what they all said is, well, they either said, I am ready to get rid of my anger, or one woman said, well, I feel very angry, but I know that I'm a work in progress and I'm trying to surmount that. So the idea of struggling against the things in oneself that are really damaging. So I think we all have struggles. And sure, some things are perhaps easier not to do than others. I don't even know which ones those are. Actually. I think we think, for example, that pedophilia is absolutely not remediable. But actually the evidence is that's not the case. And so I don't like anything like the sex offender registry that suggests that for the rest of your life, you are this dangerous person, and you've now served your sentence, which we assigned to you for reasons of perhaps incapacitation or specific deterrence. But now we're going to punish you for life because we think you're still this bad kind of person. So I don't like that. And I think for most sex crimes it's really, really stupid because a lot of people who are on it are just on it for things that are eminently deterrable and controllable, such as not having sex with an underage girl, statutory rape, or things like exposing yourself in public, public urination. But even with pedophilia, where there's a lot of dispute about how much recidivism there is, but they actually accent should be on saying these deeds are bad. So you are on notice that you better not engage in those deeds. But the person is not the same thing as the deeds.

1:25:36 Dylan: The real reform that you point to would seem to point to a whole other book on how it's so contrary to the way our penal system works in this country and the way in which we even think about the interaction of political life and economic life along with education, nutrition. And as you point out, it's so contrary.

1:26:04 Martha: Well, I see movement. I mean, mass incarceration. Now, both Republicans and Democrats believe that that's really stupid. And it's so fascinating that with drugs where we used to to think, oh, those are evil characters, the drug addict, and then just think that throwing those people in jail for as long as possible was a good idea. Now when the addicts are white, it has changed. And I mean, I don't like the fact that there's this epidemic of opiate addiction in the poor white community. But what it is bringing about is a re examination of our whole attitude toward drug offenses. Should these things even be illegal at all? Shouldn't the main thing be treatment and prevention rather than this punitive attitude? And I think it is happening very rapidly that all of a sudden we want police to carry antidotes to heroin overdose. We want them to help people rather than throwing them out as useless refuse. So I mean, it's too bad it took something that happened to the white community for that change to happen, but I hope that the benefits of it will be felt by everyone.

1:27:14 Mark: Well, I think we are about out of time, so. Geez, I knew you would not have any trouble talking right up until the last minute.

1:27:20 Martha: Well, this is so much fun and your questions were so great. So it is really a lot of fun. So tell me a little more about what happens next. So you'll post it and if people want to ask me something further, they'll just email me. Is that what happens?

1:27:34 Mark: There will be a blog post that is the way that we Deliver the actual podcast episode that people can comment on. We'll also post it to Facebook and often people respond to that. So certainly there will be locations that we can give you the links to.

1:27:47 Martha: Well, I'm not on Facebook. I'm one of these anti diluvian people who doesn't belong to any social media. So they will have to email me if they get me. But they can talk to each other on Facebook.

1:27:58 Dylan: Yes.

1:27:59 Martha: So thank you very much. I enjoyed this a great deal.

1:28:02 Wes: Thanks for coming on.

1:28:03 Mark: Thank you. And I trust Dylan did not break any of the elephants.

1:28:05 Martha: No, no, no, no, no. They loved him and they're looking at him with great friendliness. And in fact there's one who's sleeping and resting and so I guess he had a very sort of restful effect.

1:28:20 Mark: So that was a great interview, though. It was an interview and not a discussion so much. Though she did eventually let us let our questions go on for as long as we wanted them to, whereas at the beginning she would just jump in after a sentence. So what are the questions that you all want to make sure that we cover here? For me, there were two elements that I felt like we needed to weigh in on. One was we all read this chapter six on the political realm, everyday justice. But we didn't really talk about those as policy proposals. What does this dedication to non anger mean in terms of constructing policies about punishment or really just how to do with wrongdoing? What do we think of that? She kind of wades into a really broad debate and brings up a bunch of other figures that we're. I'm sure not going to really go into. It'd be nice to give a little outline to that. And then the other thing was just what do we think of this as a self improvement practice? Sort of following up on our discussion of Seneca and other folks like that. So those were my two. Do you have other things to add, Mark?

1:29:24 Dylan: I think those are two good places. I think the second one might be leavened by a little bit of talking about the theoretical underpinnings that is in the picture of the self and the self's relationship with the community. We talked a little bit about it during the interview.

1:29:43 Wes: I have some ideas about the importance of this notion of status injury. And I think there's a weak spot in the argument there.

1:29:51 Mark: I guess a third possible issue that I just want to point at is just what do we think about her project as a way of analyzing emotions? What is her theory of emotions? Is this the kind of thing a philosopher should be doing?

1:30:05 Dylan: Well, of course, it's something a philosopher should be doing. Right. It's something a philosopher should be doing. Because a philosopher is interested about understanding the world.

1:30:11 Wes: Yeah, she should. But I think in this case there should have been more psychology, I think, in order to really get at what anger is. And that's where the porthole into the psychology of it is this whole idea of status injury, which she doesn't really, as far as I can tell, adequately define status in the book. And she's referring, when she talks about status injury to something that Aristotle actually calls slighting. I mean, she uses the word sliding as well, or downranking. She uses all these as synonyms. And Aristotle and the rhetoric does precisely define sliding as basically demonstrating to someone else that something that they think is important is not in fact important. But I think status is a little misleading because when we think of social status, we think of our sort of ranking by social reputation, whether it's professional standing or social standing or wealth or power, things like that. But this idea of being slighted, it doesn't depend on anyone knowing about it. If I go into a store and the shopkeeper is rude to me and I feel slighted by that, it doesn't matter if anyone else finds out about that. It's not about reputation, it's about self esteem. It is exactly about self esteem. And she mentions that. And then she sort of. I think it's Hampton, another philosopher, who sort of points in that direction and then dismisses that without saying why. And I understand that's not really what she wanted to focus on, but I

1:31:38 Dylan: think that she meant to have that definition there.

1:31:42 Mark: Right.

1:31:42 Dylan: And the normal status, in the sense of the status that other people would pick up on or that would be public, would be included under there. And she certainly meant the kind of anger that you would get, as you say, from being slighted or disrespected, or in the fact like you're sitting in your car by yourself and someone cuts you off. Part of what the origin of road rage would be exactly that kind of sliding or status injury. That again, is not. I agree with you, it's not public. I'm not sure that though it's the same thing as self esteem, it certainly has something to do with one's self understanding. And I guess it's however respect works that you get angry when somebody disrespects you.

1:32:29 Wes: Words should disrespect something that you actually value.

1:32:32 Dylan: Yes, both those things.

1:32:33 Wes: Yes, she disagrees with Aristotle in that she doesn't think that sliding is sort of an essential part of the concept of anger. It's one form of it. And I agree with Aristotle. I think sliding is actually at the essence of anger. There is no anger without sliding. There is no anger without disrespect. Okay, so psychoanalysts would, I think, call this narcissistic injury, that if you really want to explore anger, that's the direction you have to go. That's my point. There are other things here as well. I mean, it really changes some of the analysis. So, for instance, when she talked about the rape of. Oh, and Angela's friend feels slighted by it, she sort of analyzed that in terms of Angela's irrational fantasy that the perpetrator must believe that Angela wasn't capable of defending her friend and that there's an ego wound from that. But really your ego can be wounded just directly by someone harming the things that you value, because those things, and this is the telling use of Aristotle of our own, do we see those things as extensions of ourselves? We don't need this other sort of explanation to understand why someone can feel slighted by a friend being raped. The slight is in someone treating something that you value as if it has no value. And then there's a deeper psychology to, well, why would our self esteem be affected by one person doing one thing? And I think there's a deep psychology to that. And not to get into that today, I don't want to derail our conversation, but that's the direction that I think needs a lot of exploration. And it changes. Although I agree with most of her political conclusions, I think it changes a little bit how we think about those things, how we think of the role of anger in justice and politics. Politics. Anyway, that's the only agenda that I had.

1:34:21 Mark: So she thinks that anger inevitably involves attribution of ill intent against someone else, which makes me immediately think, well, what about frustration? Just like we were talking in the Simone de Beauvoir episode about can obstacles oppress you? Like when it feels like your computer is oppressing you because it's not behaving well, I get angry at my computer. Computer in kind of the same way. In fact, more freely, because I know the computer does not have an actual ill will. Because kind of, as you're saying, it's a matter of when I'm involved in a project, I'm just trying to send this damn email out and something jumps in the way and interferes with that. That is an attack on something that at that moment at least is a Part of myself is something that I'm placing value. I'm placing my effort into it. And so it actually does feel like a personal slight. Feel like the world is against me, you know, all this kind of crap.

1:35:17 Wes: It does, yeah. And I think in this case, Nussbaum has an analysis that's correct, which is that we treat those objects as if they were people. We sort of have an irrational and maybe unconscious idea, a sort of primitive animism which we never grow out of on some level, that there's intentionality in these things and that when they are obstacles to us. Like a person who doesn't value what we value.

1:35:42 Dylan: But this makes me wonder if the not valuing what we value is quite right.

1:35:47 Wes: Sorry, that's actually the wrong way to put it because they don't have to value what we value. They just have to respect the fact that we value something and not treat it as if it were of no value. For instance, they don't have to feel fondly. Perpetrator doesn't have to feel fondly about Angela's friend. Oh. Doesn't have to care about her and doesn't even have to refrain from having, like, violent fantasies towards her. But he does have to have that state of mind, that respect, that implies that she has a value which prohibits him from raping her.

1:36:16 Dylan: So the case of inanimate objects, which it seems like we're analyzing. Right. But makes me think of the question of. In the phenomenology and source of anger is different as being related to power and to things doing what you want them to do or behaving in the way you want or expect them to do. And there's clearly a relationship in that with seeing the world as I see it, or the world being in alignment with the way I'm imagining it or I expect it to be. But. But that's different to me than self esteem. I'm being thwarted in a different way than being downranked, except insofar as that I have lost my power over the world or over another person as a result of it. And especially I've lost that power unwillingly. Yeah.

1:37:16 Mark: It is kind of a stretch to say, well, the self is expandable to include anything that I value. And then anything that's an attack on something in that sphere is an attack on the self. Well, yes, by the definition of self that you just gave. But interpreting all that as narcissism or

1:37:33 Wes: something, I don't think you get anger unless you get this imperilment of the ego. Let's Say, unless you have this ego wounding, what is the real object of our anger? In the case of rape or murdered, someone dies from a mudslide. And we're not angry about that unless we can find someone to blame. Because we don't get angry at mud because it doesn't have any intentions, the real focus.

1:38:00 Dylan: But we do get angry.

1:38:02 Wes: Well, yeah, but only insofar as we have. We're thinking of the mud as like a per. In some irrational way. And generally I don't, you know, if I read about a mudslide in the paper, I'm not angry at the mudslide. If I read about a murder, I might get angry. So the focus is really on this type of intention, the mind of the murderer and them not valuing something that is inherently valuable and that is threatening to us. Because think of Hegel, our self awareness, our self is intimately tied to the recognition of others. We are sort of constituted through the recognition. And developmentally this is pretty obvious, right? To become aware of myself and love myself, I have to internalize the love and awareness of an early caretaker. And I remain connected in general to people in that way. These sorts of slights are actually at a deeper level, threats to psychic existence. And I know that needs more justification. I'm not going to give it in the podcast, but that is the basic

1:39:03 Dylan: idea and we can move on. I just. The question that I have about that is the question of power seems to be different than the sense of self understanding there.

1:39:12 Wes: How do you mean?

1:39:13 Dylan: Well, I mean my wanting to exert my understanding upon the world, the way you're phrasing it, and there's part of that that sounds quite right, that being disrespected has to do with not having your own values, your own self understanding validated, right? It's why being utterly ignored is so painful and anger producing. And on that analysis then we would say, well, the reason why Mark gets so angry at his computer and eventually throws it through the window is because the computer is not acknowledging him. And the way it's not acknowledging him is that it's not doing what he says and it's that step that it's not behaving in a way that's in alignment with what you want to have happen. That to me muddies the waters a bit, that it's certainly that alignment, but it also has to do with what you're trying to get out of it, your power on it. And so when your kids make you so angry, or when the person at the checkout counter or on the phone with the phone company makes you so angry, it's often not even because they don't understand what you need. It's because they're not doing what you want them to do. And it's not that they're ignoring the fact that you exist. No, you exist, and they're interacting with you, but they're just not doing what you want them to do.

1:40:36 Wes: So Nussbaum gives the example of the store clerk who ignores you. They're on the phone, and you get angry because you feel disrespected. But if you know there's something important behind that or that they're not doing it intentionally, you don't get angry. So I think it's true that at some level, you really have to think of someone as intentionally doing something wrong in order to get angry at them. I think Nussbaum is also right about that. She sort of captures some of this in the idea of wrongdoing. But I see respect and sliding as sort of the moral psychology of wrongdoing. So as part of her concept of anger, we have to see something as doing something wrong. But we know from Kant and other philosophers that respect and wrongdoing and what we ought to do are intimately connected. Right. Respecting other people as ends and themselves is intimately connected to what it means to do something wrong. So there is this. She sort of does capture it. But I think if you really want to analyze the moral psychology of all that, you have to go in the direction of respect and sliding and all that.

1:41:34 Dylan: Okay, one thing. Mark posed the question of wanting to delve more into what's the underlying theory of emotions and stuff like that. And we did a little bit of talking about that just now as far as anger was concerned. But it's worth pointing out that this is one book among a number on specific emotions. And then she has a whole analysis of emotion called Upheaval of Thought. So in some sense, answering that question requires reading a different book. There's a section in this book that summarizes that, and she talked a little bit about that during the interview and sort of what parts of that theoretical analysis of emotion that she is working with. But she points out that the anger book doesn't rely deeply on all of the points of her analysis of emotion.

1:42:24 Mark: Just looking at her theory of emotions, it's not supposed to be a psychological theory. It's supposed to be a theory. This is sort of what the role of the philosopher is of analyzing the underlying internal logic of the emotion. So as we said, it's not Non cognitive. There are judgments involved and some of these are factual judgments. I'm angry at this person because they did such and such. She's saying there is an attribution of some agency to me on a daily basis. Anger is connected with frustration. So like I'm just as likely and more likely to get angry at my computer or at Traffic or whatever and generalize it so that I'm more angry at the world thwarting me than at individual people who I really, for the most part, am good about giving the benefit of the doubt for and not demonizing. Still, I'll just grant her that the kind of anger she's talking about involves blaming someone and frustration would be a different but related thing. She discusses other things like contempt, you know, so she has a mapping. So for instance, anger focuses on an act that a person commits, whereas contempt might have a similar desire to downrank but be focused on an enduring trait of a person. That's the kind of analysis that she gives. So there's matters of fact. Did not this person actually commit a crime? And then there are values that are built into the normative assessments that are in emotion, this person deserves payback. So it's those latter things that she feels like as a species of moral philosophy, this is what the analysis of emotions is supposed to do. Unless you are a foundationalist about ethics and think, oh, we can just, from the categorical imperative, we can get everything or some other sort of basic from what they. But the Bible says we can get anything. If you're a secularist, you have to believe that when we're figuring out moral theory, we've got just all these intuitions floating around. Yeah, some of them are personal. All of them are to some extent probably come from a particular cultural background. Some might have a biological basis. And we just have to juggle these and figure out like, well, which of these. So she says, just moving our discussion to the political realm. You know, a lot of our political institutions and our deep intuitions about punishment say, rely on this idea of payback. But the fact that it's such a deep and pervasive intuition does not mean it's something we should normatively respect, something that we actually want to enshrine as policy, something that we should respect and think is useful as a personal emotion.

1:44:41 Dylan: Yes, that's exactly what she says.

1:44:43 Mark: So she gives a lot of pretty specific recommendations in the political realm.

1:44:49 Dylan: There were some recommendations in the political realm, but I thought that she acknowledged in many places that once you take the rethinking of punishment, especially taking seriously the notion that it's rightly not payback, takes you very quickly down the road of thinking about broader social good and how to engineer that in society. And that gets you thinking about what are the contributing factors to why individuals or groups of individuals commit crimes are socially problematic? And that has to do with trying to address those at the beginning. That is essentially to make the conditions of living in the community broadly understood as supporting the flourishing of as many people as possible. And that's why she talks about things like she just brings them up as well. You rethink education and social support for families and nutrition and all kinds of things that would go towards creating an environment for people's flourishing. Because on her analysis, a tremendous amount of the criminality and deviancy has to do with people just not becoming who they can be.

1:46:05 Mark: So on page 180, she has this comparison of the focus on punishment as a way of addressing human misbehavior. Let us consider elevators. A traveler to a distant country finds that elevators are very unreliable.

1:46:17 Dylan: Exactly.

1:46:18 Mark: They are often badly constructed and maintained, and they break down often. There are no laws about elevators, no mandatory inspections, no licensing or certification. Never mind. Her hosts inform her, we don't spend money on such things, but we do spend a great deal of money tracking down the offenders, and we give them long prisoners sentences at state expense to show them what we think their bad behavior deserves. In other words, the elevator manufacturers.

1:46:40 Wes: Oh, really? I thought it was the elevators themselves.

1:46:44 Dylan: No, no, it's the elevator manufacturers and the people who operate and maintain the elevators.

1:46:50 Mark: We will travel and look at all the floors and see where that elevator has disappeared to to catch it. Our traveler would be justified in thinking, making this a very odd and irrational society, and one that at some level did not take the whole issue of human safety seriously. And she says that's really how societies treat most crimes.

1:47:09 Wes: Yep.

1:47:09 Mark: The neglect is even stranger in that criminals, unlike elevators, are equal citizens among those whose welfare society is committed to protect and advance.

1:47:17 Wes: I think she really does mean the elevators when she's talking about tracking down and for the whole metaphor to work. I mean, it's an absurd example, but it's supposed to get at this difference between because they're inanimate objects, we think of them purely constructively. Okay, how do we fix this?

1:47:32 Dylan: That might be right, and it might make the analogy even sweeter in its absurdity, But I think that it's not so hard to make a slightly different twist of that analogy and say, well, the way you're going to ensure elevator safety or car safety is that every time there is a failure, you're going to go out and take the engineer and you're going to tie them to a stake and flog them until they make it so it works. We don't do that.

1:48:02 Wes: So as a matter of deterrence and that sort of thing, that probably helps, right? To punish if someone does something wrong at a car company where they obscure some defect and people die because of

1:48:13 Dylan: that, we deter through crime the things where they lie about what they said they did. And that's just how companies work all the time. So for instance, with safety belts on cars, you know, people weren't thrown in jail for not having safety belts. What they said is they said all those people are dying in cars. And you say it's because the cars are unsafe and they ought to have safety belts. And you're saying that we should do that. But that's not part of policy. We don't have to have those safety belts. It's up to people to drive correctly until there's a policy policy put in place that requires that there be certain standards of safety involved. Same thing's true with osha. Same thing's true with all kinds of environmental regulations or manufacturing regulations. Is that the way the company operates? Is that as long as they say what they're doing, then they are doing something? Honestly, all the punishments involved involve things like vw. We said we're going to be emitting low values of toxic chemicals out of our cars. But you know what? We tricked the test and so we actually lied to you. That part is punished all the time.

1:49:19 Wes: There is this borderline area of gross negligence and all that which is punished. But my point is that bringing in the engineers muddies the water on this example. Because what we're really talking about is we don't think it's a constructive way to deal with elevators. Right? To punish them. We want to fix them. And we ought to think the same way about human beings who need fixing. Right? We should just fix them. That the whole idea of punishing them is completely irrelevant to the well being of society.

1:49:44 Martha: Yeah.

1:49:45 Mark: So she doesn't say this explicitly in this book, but it did occur to me this is in line with exactly what you're talking about. So one of the first people she picks on in the book brings up is Peter Strossen and his reactive attitude. So I'll just point people back to our free will episode. And so I couldn't help but think of this chapter as trying to come up with. With a fair system of punishment that does not wrongly assume that people have free wills. Right. The whole current emphasis on retributive punishment is you chose to do that bad thing and so now we're gonna punish you and so other people will know if they choose. It's all focused on choice and sort of having to live with your choice. Some of the things she says makes it sound like maybe it's better to think that she wants to respect the fundamental ambiguity. Putting Simone de Beauvoir's picture into Nussbaum's head here.

1:50:37 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Because we can be compatibilists here, which most philosophers today are. We can see people as the products of their circumstances. And yet in some certain sense, this limited sense that you get reason responsive and free in that sense.

1:50:53 Mark: Yes. So of course we're trying to make you into somebody who. Who is better able to reason calmly.

1:50:58 Wes: To reason. Exactly. You can become freer, in other words.

1:51:02 Dylan: Yeah, and that's one feature of the book. She's not universalist in this respect. It's not either you either have a completely free will or no free will at all, or that the anger that you feel towards society or towards the bank clerk ought to be controlled and understood in exactly the same way as the anger you feel in intimate betrayal or something like that. There may be something that connects all of them, but it's not deeply universalist.

1:51:34 Mark: So just looking at some of the specific things she recommends, it's like you were saying, it has to be forward looking, of course. So we're thinking about reforming the person, we're thinking about reintegrating them into society. We don't want to humiliate them. That doesn't help. Basically comes down to actually looking at evidence, looking at what works. So if you think that something is a deterrent, well, do studies and see whether that actually deters. If you think something will reform someone, do studies. So the way you determine whether something is cruel and unusual, or at least cruel, is looking at the effects. So she thinks just garden variety incarceration, which has never been really raised as that's cruel and unusual, that that in fact might be. Certainly not. She doesn't really make a strong point for this, but raises it as a significant question. Maybe you can justify this on the grounds of separating the person from doing future harm to other people, but don't think this is going to reform them, don't think this is going to help them.

1:52:32 Dylan: Well, she's like Foucault in that respect. Right. In his. We read Discipline and Punish. Right. And the notion that punishment for punishment's sake, punishment for payback, does nothing to change the person, reform the person. And I think you're right to reiterate her emphasis on being forward looking and that payback is all about looking backwards. And most incarceration, to the extent that it is a punishment meant to, you get your just desserts, you're deprived of your freedom because you were a bad person, as opposed to, you can't be part of society right now because you're not integrating with it. Right. And so we're going to try to sort that out. Those are two vastly different understandings of what incarceration does. Solitary confinement, and the prevalence of solitary confinement is just a perfect example of an abomination, of the way we would interact with other human beings and expect them to live. It's just an abomination.

1:53:31 Wes: It is totally torture. Yes. But do you guys remember Anders Brevik, this Norwegian guy who killed 77 kids on the island? You know, and so there's occasional news reports. He's given what we would consider very light sentence, 21 years in prison, which is the maximum in Norway. And the prisons there are very nice. They're like apartments. And he complains about things like not having the latest Xbox or something like that. He's outraged by these human rights violations, that his apartment's not nice enough and that all these amenities that he has are not up to date. I bring this up because Norway sort of has this model of incapacitation and reform focusing on those things. You could say there's some deterrent effect. Right. Because no one likes to be lose their freedom, even if the settings are nice. But it's hard, I think, for Americans to sort of wrap their. And probably a lot of Norwegians as well, to wrap their heads around that. Someone kills 77 kids and then he's sort of pampered. How do we deal with that uncomfortableness of that intuition? Or maybe it isn't uncomfortable to you guys.

1:54:34 Dylan: Well, that gets us back to the real question of payback. Right. So the reason that it's uncomfortable is we feel like he should have to pay. So it comes down to the question, how are we dealing with that kind of thing? And is Martha Nussbaum right that payback ought not be any part of our justice system? So she extrapolates from saying that in the analysis of anger that insofar as it involves payback, that is a true part of anger, but it is normally dysfunctional.

1:55:05 Mark: Well, and it's confused and it's Confused.

1:55:07 Dylan: It doesn't make sense. Yes, exactly right.

1:55:09 Mark: She thinks that payback inevitably involves an imagined reparation for the damage that was done.

1:55:17 Wes: Except in the case of status, where it's not confused.

1:55:20 Mark: So you think that we want more for the mass killer, More harsh conditions, because we want to lower his status? How could his status be any lower? He's known as this huge.

1:55:29 Wes: No, but that's why I think the word status is misleading. Think of it in this way. Right. We make certain demands on the psyches of others for respect and for empathy. And what does empathy mean? It means that someone proactively feels. If they imagine harming us, they feel pain at that. And when we get payback from someone, we enforce empathy after the fact. We make them feel the pain related to the pain that they caused.

1:55:55 Dylan: How's that empathy? That's not empathy.

1:55:57 Wes: No, it's not empathy, but it's a bastardized kind of form of it. And the sense in which it's a reversal. Status is a misleading word. The reason why Nussbaum argues that in the cases of status, we actually do gain something by retaliating is that we restore our self esteem. So by. Although she's not using the word self esteem, but we restore our status in some sense. So we show Brevik that he can't do this and get away with it, or we show him that the thing that we thought important actually is important. We somehow prove it.

1:56:32 Dylan: And then this is where the power thing that I was talking about comes in. Right. We prove it by showing that we have more power over him than he has over us.

1:56:39 Wes: We prove it by making him feel things. We're making demands on the thoughts and feelings of other people, and we're trying to control those thoughts and feelings. We want to enforce that. If he doesn't have them of his own accord, we want to make him have them. That's really the significant thing here. That's the status reversal.

1:56:57 Dylan: A little less extreme example, and when I was walking back to my car, I wish I had brought up to her is very related to this, that I play soccer with a bunch of over 40 guys and it's remarkable how angry they can get at a little rec league game playing here in Madison, Wisconsin. But you'd swear sometimes it was the stakes were the World cup and the glory was equivalent. And one time I was playing and I was going hard after a ball and the goalie was going hard after it as well, and we ran into each other and you get a little bit angry about the situation. And we shook it off. And then later on, like, I don't know, 10 minutes later, I was going down in the box again and I had the ball and the goalie came up and ran at me and put his shoulder down and body checked me in the chest. Purpose. So I was so pissed. So he did that to me because at the very least his anger was such that he thought that I somehow had run into him on purpose before.

1:58:06 Wes: Or at least out of negligence or carelessness, which is also relevant.

1:58:09 Dylan: Yes. And so. And then he purposely does this to me. I got up, I was very, very angry, and I just walked off the field. And then afterwards, for days, I felt utterly self shameful that I had not gone up and just clocked him. And I would have felt better if I had done that because of exactly what you just said, Wes, that I would have made him understand that I am not a fucking pushover. And that mattered to me. And that is a different kind of payback, right. It's not a payback of. Of getting back what happened to me before. It's a pay forward.

1:58:52 Martha: Right.

1:58:53 Dylan: It's an assertion of power, an assertion of self, where I think you might be right, Wes, that I am trying to force that person to understand me and my position.

1:59:08 Wes: You want to prove your own value as a human being.

1:59:11 Dylan: But the part where I want to say is that, that. That act of me, say I went over and clocked him, right? I think I agree that I would be making an act to try to prove my own value as a human being. And maybe this all get tied up in manliness too. But what I wouldn't be doing is I wouldn't get his acknowledgement out of that, except insofar as he didn't get back up. And in fact, I wouldn't really care if he acknowledged in any way, even if in himself. Right. And that's one of the reasons why I was so angry myself is I felt in that dynamic that he had won because I had simply walked off. And this is like the nub of why these things escalate, Right. I'm still pissed about it.

1:59:55 Wes: Yeah. Although if you had done it right, you would have felt, assuming there wasn't legal consequences, you would have felt kind of guilty and ashamed maybe of having done it. So it's sort of a catch 22 in that sense. And I've been there. I think the idea behind revenge though is that you do get some sort of acknowledgment. He thought you were lesser than him and now you prove that he's lesser than you in some domain because you put him on the ground.

2:00:20 Dylan: So I found myself just wildly thinking about, well, what could I have done that would have made me assert myself in a way that didn't feel like it had the implication of being so cowardly? That's part of what bothered me about it. I knew that the proper thing in that game was to not take it to the next level. It only hurt my team. It only hurt the situation. It wasn't going to do any good to go and do what he did. Right.

2:00:48 Wes: Or there's a way to work it out as well. Right. You could start by saying him, did I do something to make you angry?

2:00:53 Dylan: Yeah, I guess we could have talked

2:00:54 Wes: him, you can sort of work people towards into a state of remorse that gives you the same sort of satisfaction. It would have been very satisfying if you got him to realize that he harmed you and you got him to feel sorry about that. That would have been just as good a satisfaction as getting revenge.

2:01:12 Dylan: You know what? You're right about that. You've studied psychology, haven't you?

2:01:16 Mark: See, I was gonna try to figure out what Martha's response, and the only thing I was coming up with was playfulness. That's her in the intimate realm at least is the substitution, which in this would mean saying something snide instead of reacting physically, which is probably, if I had the guts to do anything, would be what I would do. But, yeah, that's probably not any more constructive. And certainly her verdict on the whole thing is just that even though these things might feel good in the moment, like you were saying, it's kind of a catch 22, that de escalation is the only sustainable way to solve these things. And so, yeah, I mean, you're already kind of getting at the second issue that I wanted to bring up in terms of what about this as a self improvement practice? And she addresses this in the conclusion a little. It's kind of the same thing we were discussing when we were getting at the Stoics. Is it really psychologically possible to turn off anger to do what she's recommending? For one thing, she has a much less strenuous set of recommendations than the Stoics. We don't, in a Jedi manner, withdraw from all personal involvement. She thinks that stoicism in the personal realm just has no place at all. And she is not afraid of feeling grief. It's really simply these kinds of anger and in fact, you know, transition anger that gets you toward looking at the future and doing something about being outraged that something has happened and wanting to do something about the general situation, not about correcting just your. So it's kind of like involves getting out of this trap of the ego to try to push things forward to a overall better situation.

2:02:44 Dylan: Well, that's the future orientedness, Right? I think that's right.

2:02:47 Mark: Is that.

2:02:47 Dylan: I think you understand what is meant by transition anger if you understand that it's always oriented towards the future.

2:02:53 Mark: The way both of you have been talking, Wes is kind of giving this psychoanalytic which was Freud's disciple, that was Adler, that, you know, everything came down to esteem rank as opposed to Dylan is giving this kind of Nietzschean will to power. Both of these, if taken simply, are thoroughly determinist, saying we have to in some way get rid of this and become more peaceful. Like, well, no, that's what human nature is according to the strong versions of these two theories.

2:03:20 Wes: Yeah, you don't get rid of anger. Also, anger is not in and of itself normatively problematic. Feelings aren't normatively problematic. I could say from a virtue ethic standpoint that having a certain disposition to be angry all the time and at the wrong thing would be a character flaw. Right. There's a normative implication there. But a specific instance of anger cannot itself be normatively problematic. It's what I do with that. Do I punch someone in the face? Do I write an unconstructive screed and post it online? Does the pattern of getting angry so often cause heart disease or fuck up my relationships or things like that? So those are the normatively problematic parts. But I don't think the having of a feeling per se can. Can be normatively problematic. So that's one thing that a psychoanalyst would deny.

2:04:06 Mark: Where normativity really comes in is not when you're talking about at the individual level, but when you're talking about making it into a rule, making it into a moral or by extension legal rule.

2:04:16 Wes: Yeah, like taking your anger and making a policy that's motivated by it. Yeah, like retribution.

2:04:21 Mark: Yes. Yeah, like, yeah, forgiving honor based killings. Like, you know, I was angry that my wife cheated on me, so I had to kill her. And the guy like, no, that's not. And that, you know, is a legitimate thing to claim in some legal systems. And we don't buy that because we have followed her recommendation to that extent that we do not allow these things to be enshrined. And some other specific things that she brings up are victim statements at sentencing. She says, well, we already allow Statements by the victims or victims families that might mitigate the punishment. And she seems to think that's okay, although she doesn't really go on about that at all. She kind of just brings it up. But she goes on quite a bit about what would be the possible forward looking function of allowing the relative of a murdered person to speak at the trial or sentencing of the person. They've already taken into account how awful this is and how this affects people around the murdered person in determining sentencing guidelines in the first place. And how harshly someone is sentenced shouldn't depend on how loved the victim was. Like it's still, even if it was a loser, loner, irascible bastard that was murdered, you shouldn't give a lighter sentence to the person because of that. So why would you? Possibly the only possible good effect would be maybe allowing the person to vent. And so she suggests, well, what about after the sentencing you require? Or allow the victim to sound off to the wrongdoer? Does that make you feel better if you make the person cry or try to reach out to them and make them realize what they've done? Like maybe there could be some value even to the wrongdoer, him or herself, and arguably to the victim or victim's relatives. But she says no, really, the victims just want to affect sentencing. They probably wouldn't be that interested in, you know.

2:06:10 Wes: But also the point of justice isn't to give something to victims properly conceived. I mean if it's retributionist then it's definitely designed that way. But properly conceived it has all those other functions. So reform or deterrence or whatever.

2:06:25 Dylan: But isn't that exactly at the heart of a lot of victims advocacy? I mean on the one hand there is what seems to be not such a bad thing. The idea that part of the process of the justice system would be to provide an outlet for victims to speak. But to the extent that you want victims rights to be taken into account, that is, it's hard to not understand that as being the retributive part of it. Because in principle, right, isn't the justice system itself that is acting on behalf of the victims?

2:07:02 Wes: I don't think so. I think properly conceived, it's acting on behalf of, of society as a whole. It's not acting on behalf of specific victims.

2:07:09 Dylan: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I guess that's the thing that a lot of victims rights folks, especially in extreme ways, they have just a hard time saying that, well, it's about on balance society. So that means taking into account the rights and needs of the offenders.

2:07:26 Martha: Right.

2:07:26 Wes: They would have to make an argument that there is some place for retribution. And there probably are some interesting and strong arguments that are retributionist. She doesn't really.

2:07:35 Dylan: She does. She.

2:07:36 Wes: She does a little bit, you know, she gives a little bit of a summary of a few different.

2:07:39 Dylan: Yeah, she tries to refute them. Obviously their analyses are probably half a dozen different analyses.

2:07:44 Mark: Right. That even if you don't have the revenge fantasy that somehow the murdered person is going to be restored, the idea that there's a cosmic balance that needs to be leveled out, she just thinks is an obvious fantasy like that. That's not something that you have to give an argument against.

2:07:59 Wes: Yeah, I think the cosmic balance is derivative of all the status stuff. So that's my problem with that. In other words, there may actually be something that's so genuinely psychologically satisfying about revenge or retribution that it's worthy of our consideration. It doesn't have to be rational. Right. Hunger is not rational, but it doesn't mean that it's irrational to satisfy hunger. It could be rational to satisfy hunger, revenge fantasies. Now, I don't think it is. I just think we have to say why.

2:08:27 Mark: Right. She has apparently another whole book where she gives her theory of justice. And so she kind of sums it up by saying, look, I'm basically some sort of utilitarian. But built into her concept of the good, that she's a million utilitarian as opposed to a Bentham utilitarian in that there's a whole lot of distinct things that are built into the end state that is supposed to be maximized. And a lot of them are inviolable rights and issues of autonomy and dignity in things. So those all get built into what you're trying to maximize. So what you're suggesting, Wes, is she seems to have a pretty flexible we need to maximize opportunity. It ends up being a pretty extensive welfare Y list such that to really address it, you'd have to eradicate poverty. That we've been sitting back in all these. Just like we were saying at the beginning, to really make the elevators work properly, to make the people work properly, you have to fix these systemic problems. Which doesn't necessarily mean communists make everybody equal, but it does mean having adequate funding for lots and lots of things aren't taken seriously.

2:09:34 Dylan: The idea that that's the object of society, not necessarily to make people better, but to provide for their flourishing, which is not the way we've set things up.

2:09:42 Mark: But. So maybe you think that one of the things that needs to be respected Is this satisfactory feeling we get out of revenge? If you think that that is not itself a vice, then it could be that maybe it's even necessary to the good life to have that satisfied in certain circumstances.

2:10:00 Wes: Suppose we are just so constituted that when someone does wrong to us that there's no way for us to recover. That we really can't recover as people. You know, we talk about the trauma of victims that there's really no way for us to recover unless we get this retribution. And it doesn't matter if there's a cosmic underpinning to this or not. It's just basic psychology. Maybe that's just the way we're wired. In which case then I think you have to think harder about that. And in the end it's probably the case that even if that's true, the larger constructive goals of society outweigh that. And that's really the way societies sort of trend. Right. Their punishments get less harsh as they develop over time. It's sort of a matter of self restraint, as Nietzsche describes it in the Genealogy of Morals and the Strength of a Society. Or the less harsh the punishments are then the stronger the society is and so on. But in general we probably don't want to whitewash what we're doing. We're giving up something. Right. It costs us something. If we are so constituted that we really need that on some level, then we're giving up something important and it changes the account.

2:11:05 Mark: So her main I think concession to the retributiveists is that we're not simply forward looking and treating the actions of people who have done serious wrong like you would a tiger who just happened to tear into a victim. It's not merely unfortunate that this thing happens. She thinks it's essential to make a statement that this kind of action is wrong. A shared understanding of what is wrongful and what is not. That that's sort of a necessary to the bonds of trust that she thinks is one of the things that is necessary for a good society. Right. To have faith in your public institutions

2:11:41 Dylan: and for moving forward. Right.

2:11:43 Mark: Uh huh. So there are a number of ways that you could express that. And maybe the problem with the mass murderer example that you gave Wes is that it does not clearly enough with the person bitching about not having the most recent Xbox that is not sufficiently making a social statement that this was wrong.

2:12:04 Dylan: Yeah. And you probably also have to come to the point of understanding that you might not get that out of everybody. I mean he could just be a sociopath in which he would Never admit that it was wrong.

2:12:15 Wes: And then we also have to ask the question of why. And I think she does this a little bit, but what's the relationship between treating him in a certain way and making the statement that something is wrong? Is there really a link there? You know, so.

2:12:27 Dylan: And also, how much does it being made clear that it's wrong require the acknowledgment of the perpetrator? In some cases, you can see, especially these intimate relations and stuff like that move moving forward does. But in these big, broad social justice cases like apartheid, that seems like there's something like that that needs to be done. But in this case, it's pretty clear to me, at least, that even if he doesn't think that what he did was wrong, there's plenty of people that think what he did was wrong. Right. It's not like there's not a normative question there.

2:12:59 Mark: Right. It's already agreed on the society. So in this case, that's not really necessary. The case where. Where it's really more necessary to think about stuff like that is like emerging things like sexual harassment or hate crimes. In particular, we want to say. She's saying that we're kind of. It's a political action to be saying, hey, we're acknowledging this. This thing you might not have even thought was wrong. Bill Cosby. But in retrospect, like, we really got to establish that you can't just do that for as long as you did and get away with that. That would be establishing a bad president.

2:13:33 Dylan: I think she would even say it stronger, which was that even if it's the case that our justice system has gone a long road for being able to figure out how to deal with such things, the fact that things that you keep under wraps like that generally aren't the kinds of things that you're doing because you think they're a good idea or that you don't. Well, actually, I take this back, that you don't understand that lots of people think that they're wrong. It's hard to imagine that he or anybody else who drugs somebody and then force themselves on them sexually doesn't understand what they're doing, would be at least judged as wrong by most people. Even if they somehow torture themselves into thinking that it's okay, which is not clear to me, that they would even be able to do that.

2:14:12 Wes: Well, they have to convince themselves they're entitled to it for some reason or other.

2:14:17 Dylan: Yeah.

2:14:17 Martha: Well, no.

2:14:18 Wes: Unknowingly does evil.

2:14:20 Mark: So the shape of her argument, though, is to say yes, we have to acknowledge that something that we have decided as a society that this is wrong. But then the rest of the argument is saying why particular punishments, humiliations, why those things do not do the job, they are not necessary, they are not sufficient for showing that the thing is wrong. I don't know, I'm always just suspicious in general of we need to, as a unified society, convey this message, you know, that this thing is wrong. Like just fix the problem, just do the forward looking stuff that you're talking about. Why the society through governmental action should be having to make announcements about moral issues in this way. I just don't think that's necessary. I think that's something the culture takes care of. It's something that those kind of feed into what we make a law in the first place. It is not. Then if you end up displaying mercy in some particular case, I would look at the concrete effects of a particular decision along those lines.

2:15:18 Wes: Yeah. And if there were a pill that cured people of their criminality. Right. And for each whatever category of criminality, the right thing would just be, you know, when someone murders someone, you give them that pill and there's an acknowledgment of the wrongness of the act there. Because when you correct someone, when you transform them into something better, acknowledging that the thing that they were, was, was

2:15:39 Mark: not good, or maybe give them booster shots in advance, they don't have to

2:15:44 Wes: kill somebody vaccinated when you're a child,

2:15:49 Mark: preemptive lobotomies for everyone. No one will be violent. That's probably not true. I don't know enough about lobotomies.

2:15:58 Wes: Well, you lose all motivation. It can be helpful in refraining from murder.

2:16:03 Mark: It could be helpful. Other people who want to kill you

2:16:07 Dylan: could just strap them into a chair and force their eyeballs open and expose them to incredibly horrible things until they, their minds change.

2:16:16 Wes: You could be a murderer's right hand

2:16:17 Mark: vegetable, can make them watch all of Trump's speeches. Speaking of bringing rage and the whole thing that Martha is arguing against, enshrining it in public policy. All right, I think we have hit everything. This is, it's a big book and every single, every single chapter wades into a big minefield of stuff. I mean, we didn't even talk about her intimate relations chapter much, where she really gets all psychology and relationship psychology. So I could see a lot of places where if we narrowed in on some particular thing, we would learn some interesting things or have things to debate about. And likewise in the Revolutionary justice chapter, the one after the one we've been mostly discussing today, just the relative status of. She actually is not entirely in favor of non violence. Like of course you can defend yourself if somebody is behaving violently toward you. It's the non anger part that she is really insistent on that that's the main thing. So she kind of compares Gandhi and MLK and Nelson Mandela and the things they thought about the relative status of those two things. But she was kind of irritated by the Gandhi. Oh, just let the soldiers cut you down. Anyway, all that deserves a lot more discussion. It's just a very rich book, so I definitely recommend it for folks and it's just so conversational. And if you found Plato's Sophist or Hegel's Logic to be too nitpicky or difficult to get through, this is a great alternative.

2:17:50 Wes: I love the Sophist. Anyway, that's not relevant.

2:17:54 Dylan: But the book is really well written and easy to read, but not trivial in any way. It's well worth reading.

2:18:03 Mark: Unless you're Wes and then you think it sucks.

2:18:06 Wes: No, it doesn't suck. It's not my. It's not my cup of tea.

2:18:08 Dylan: I thought you liked the book. But there's more stuff to do on it. You don't have to think it's the whole answer to everything.

2:18:13 Wes: I mean, I'm not saying it's a bad book. I have my own particular interests.

2:18:17 Dylan: We know that you're particular, Wes.

2:18:20 Mark: Yes, I'm not to me, in terms of the content. It just has to be thought provoking and draw me into these discussions in an entertaining way. That's why I would, as a modern philosophy book, regard this as something I would recommend. So almost a lot of it is on stylistic basis rather than content. There's a lot of rich content to it. Whether you would get better accounts of the emotions or of many of these things from other sources, I don't know. I don't. I don't see myself personally though I'm definitely open to reading more of her stuff. But racing out right now to get her book on justice and her book on the emotions and let's have three more episodes on her. I was not excited to that extent. Despite her being a charming and wonderful interview.

2:19:02 Wes: This really is a book for public consumption and it does a really good job of communicating difficult ideas to the general public. So I recommend it as well.

2:19:12 Mark: Next time we're going to read some Levinas. Speaking of over the top difficult language philosophy. At least one of the essays we're going to read is Ethics as First Philosophy. For an accurate list of everything that we read in advance of it coming out, you can look at our harshlyexaminedlife.com

2:19:28 Wes: upcoming Happy August Pel Citizens. Ryan Wilson here to let you know about some upcoming seminars to help you ponder the existential issues of August, such as what is Truth? What is Virtue? Or Can I Get Away with With Liking Bud Light Lime? Our next introductory readings and Philosophy Series seminar will be Monday, August 8th at 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Led by your humble narrator on Albert Camus the Myth of Sisyphus. We also have four more seminars scheduled for the fall listed in our Nut School Forum. We want to remind you of pel's partnership with Adam Rose and the terrific folks over at Great Discourses. PEL citizens receive 20% off@Great Discourses.com lastly, we want to let you know that PEL has partnered with Dr. Greg Sadler at Reason I.O. to offer not school seminars. Dr. Sadler's first seminar series will be on Hegel's Master Slave Dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me@brianartiallyexaminedlife.com Hope to see you at a seminar soon.

2:20:28 Mark: I really want to thank everybody that has become a partially examined life citizen or or otherwise donated money to us or used our Amazon link to do their Amazon shopping, which is a way of giving us a cut of everything you purchase without any cost to you or signing up for our Patreon page or any of this stuff. I will say that we've gotten so many members that I've just found it overwhelming to read the names every time. So I'm not gonna do it. I'm done. I can't do it. And in fact the fact that that we were excluding the $5 a month people, there have been people that signed up for $5 a month for two years. So those people have given way more than somebody that gave $10 or $15 on one occasion whose name I did read. So because of the injustice and overwhelming work involved in this, I hope that not hearing your name on the air does not make you less likely to contribute. In reparation for this loss of recognition, we're going to periodically have drawings among the citizenry for free stuff. In this case a copy of Martha's book. About two weeks from now, before the third installment of this is released to the general public, we will draw some names among the citizenry to get free copies of the book. You citizens are already entered. You don't have to do anything. However, one additional copy is going to be given away in a drawing among the people that go to our Facebook page, who like the page and who like the particular post for this episode. So if you want an extra chance to win a copy, go do that. But you're all entered. Thank you. Take a Look at the partiallyexaminedlife.com blog for details and to respond to Tell us what you thought of this episode. We'd love to hear from you on there. Or we've got a Facebook group that all the postings for this episode get posted to that you can comment there on how much you liked it or didn't and engage with with other listeners and perhaps with us about it. We would love to hear from all of you. Unless you're really irascible, then keep it to yourself. Hey, one last thing. The song you're about to hear is some lyrics crafted directly in response to this episode and I put them over a pre existing track that had been created for a disco video game by Sean Beeson, a great composer that I interviewed for my Nakedly Examined Music podcast. His episode is not yet posted, but look for that in a few weeks and look@seanbeason.com to check out his music. Good night everybody. Thanks.

2:22:49 Dylan: Good night.

2:23:07 Mark: I don't need your forgiveness transactional forgiveness I won't pony up a place in my heart I don't need you to trap me, to butter up and slap me Cause anger has no place in the hearts that I love I know that I've left a malfusion mess but anger has no place in this conversation

2:23:34 Martha: Rage release is still rage

2:23:42 Mark: Rest in peace until we surpass our age.

2:23:56 Martha: Don't don't don't you dare forgiveness I

2:23:58 Mark: don't need your forgiveness your arrogant forgiveness

2:24:01 Martha: I don't need you to tell me that I'm good enough go wrong I

2:24:06 Mark: don't need you to judge me even if you love me Love should preclude all this need to be strong I don't need you to be big enough because even that's not big enough to smother rage before it starts to burn between us should look have to let me off because you've never be set off you were the type that could

2:24:29 Wes: learn

2:24:32 Martha: great release is the great UN

2:24:40 Mark: Rest in peace till our age is replaced with peace sa.