1 Introduction

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “hatred” (and, similarly, the verb “to hate”) as “a feeling of hostility or strong aversion towards a person or thing; active and violent dislike.” Lexical definitions capture the meaning of a term in common usage and therefore should be regarded with a pinch of salt in philosophical and other scientific investigations. This is especially true when it comes to terms of affective phenomena, which are often used differently by different people and in different linguistic communities. Yet, dictionary definitions can also be useful. By identifying the core meanings a term bears in common parlance, they give us some initial coordinates to navigate its semantic space. In the case of “hatred,” the OED definition suggests that the term is customarily used with at least two different meanings. Accordingly, when Pam says “I hate John,” Pam might mean two quite different things, which indicates that the psychological verb “to hate” requires disambiguation. As we will see, this paper investigates “hate” or “hatred” only in one sense of this term. But what may Pam mean when she says “I hate John”?

First, she might mean that she dislikes John with a certain level of intensity, which goes from mild to intense. When “dislikes” are at stake, subjects might not make a big secret of their attitude and could even communicate them to their target (subtly or overtly). If Pam hates John in this sense, she is biased against John and she proactively avoids to meet or have to do with him. The attitude of “disliking” has vague experiential contours: in addition to its fluctuating intensity, it is often hard to identify its motives (is this simply because of John’s character or appearance? Is this because John acted or had been acting in a disrespectful way towards Pam?). Interestingly, dislikes might be directed at quite variegated phenomena: when Pam says that she “hates” baseball (boring), football fans (fools), Dublin (expensive, chaotic, rainy), but also opulence, arrogance, self-indulgence, etc., she means that she dislikes all that.

Second, Pam’s expression “I hate John” might not refer to mere dislike, but rather to hatred proper (here Pam hates John’s guts, as it is sometimes said). If the expression is to be understood this way, chances are that Pam will not report her experience to others. Many cultures consider hatred to be a morally problematic attitude,Footnote 1 which might be why the attitude is usually entertained in secret (but, as we will see, there could be another possible reason for hiding one’s hatred, see Section 3). Whereas “dislikings” are just as frequent as likings in our affective life, hatred in the sense at stake here is fairly rare.Footnote 2 Part of the reason why it is so rare lies in the extreme desires that accompany the attitude: as we saw, if Pam dislikes John, she will be biased against him and perhaps she will even rejoice in his misfortune. If Pam hates John, Pam desires a world in which John does not exist (or even, if malice is added, where he exists to suffer), period. And if the right occasion emerges, she would contribute to the creation of that world.Footnote 3 Therefore, it may be conjectured that developing an attitude of this kind will not only take the subject by surprise,Footnote 4 but it will also disturb the subject, whereas no such reactions are to be expected in disliking. Another element of contrast between the two attitudes is that hatred presupposes the attribution of moral agency to its targetFootnote 5: Pam won’t hate football, Dublin, or opulence in the same sense in which she hates John, for none of these objects can display moral agency.

Against the backdrop of this distinction,Footnote 6 the present paper is exclusively concerned with the second meaning of the term “hatred.” Its main aim is to identify its essential traits. To put these in a nutshell, the paper claims that an individual hates another when she targets this person qua – or: in her very status as – an individual person, aiming at his or her destruction or (in presence of malice) sheer sufferance. By defending this “singularist” view about hatred, I will argue against a “generalist” view about hatred according to which it is essential of this attitude that its subject targets another individual qua (or: in her very status as) representative or member of a certain class, social group, or category. The generalist view is defended, among others, by Thomas Szanto who, in a recent article (2019), describes hatred as an attitude that overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is infused by a commitment to adhere to the hating attitude.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 1 introduces Szanto’s view. One of the main merits of Szanto’s paper is to approach hatred by looking into its intentional structure, which is a route I shall also take here. Section 2 extensively dwells on a single example of hatred. Section 3 elaborates on the example by pinpointing hatred’s core phenomenological features and, in particular, the fact that hatred targets individuals qua individuals. It is claimed that, since this example of hatred fulfils none of the conditions formulated by Szanto, it has a simpler intentional structure. Therefore, the form of hatred exemplified by the example should be considered as paradigmatic: this is the main idea of the singularist account of hatred, which is defended in this paper.Footnote 7 If the singularist account is correct, it shows that, while Szanto’s theory enhances our understanding of important forms of hatred, it ultimately fails to accommodate its paradigmatic instances and, consequently, does not offer an account of hatred as such. In the conclusion, I discuss the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances (and kinds) of an attitude by highlighting its general significance for emotion theory.

2 Hate: The generalist view

In a passage of the Rhetoric, which has informed theorising about hatred for centuries, Aristotle distinguishes between anger and hatred this way: “Anger […] derives from what happens to oneself, whereas enmity arises also [καί] without [the offence] being directed at oneself. For if we believe that someone is a certain kind of person, we hate him. Also, anger is always about individuals, for example Callias or Socrates, whereas hatred is also [καί] felt towards types: for everyone hates a thief and an informer.” (Rhet, 1382a1-1382a16, my emphasis). Note that, in that passage, Aristotle was careful not to exclude the possibility of hatred directed towards individuals qua individuals. Call this form of hatred “person-” or “individual-focused” hatred” (Hadreas 2007: 68f, Szanto 2019). Aristotle’s point, it appears, was that hatred—differently from anger—can also be directed towards stereotyped individuals. Call this second form of hatred “general hatred:” in general hatred, the target is not hated as this very singular individual, but as an exemplar of a given class or social category (as an exemplar of the class of thieves or of sexual molesters, for instance) or of a given social group (the Jews, e.g.). Aristotle does not express an opinion on which of these two forms of hatred (person-focused or general) is core, most pregnant, or paradigmatic, which is an issue that is very much at the centre of this paper (on Aristotle’s understanding of hatred, see Fussi forthcoming). Another way to formulate this issue is by asking which form of hate one should understand first in order to make sense of the other form.

The idea that general hatred is the core form of hatred is not uncommon. For instance, Roberts writes: “The abused wife may give a long list of reasons for hating her husband, but they come to trait ascriptions: He is a nasty, inconsiderate, selfish person. And so may the Palestinian, or the Nazi, for hating the Jew; the offenses, if they were there at all, have by now been compiled into a trait: being a Jew” (Roberts 2003: 251). The point here is that, since traits are general, the attitude will range over all the individuals exemplifying those traits. Gaylin emphasises the fact that, often, these traits are group traits, which the hater is obsessed with: “A bigot may feel malevolence whenever he thinks of the despised group, but he is not obsessively preoccupied with them. When he becomes so, he crosses the border into hatred. Hatred requires both passion and a preoccupation with the disdained group.” (Gaylin 2003: 28). Ben-Ze’ev builds on the same assumption, when he elaborates: “The particular details of the object of hate are often unknown to us. To a certain extent, hate involves depersonalization. As in prejudice, hate often feeds on partial or distorted information, which ignores the object’s real character. […] Although the object of hate is more general than that of anger, it has to have some degree of specificity and closeness in order to maintain a high level of emotional intensity. Thus, terrorist groups begin their activities by adopting a unifying general ideal as the basis for their hatred.” (Ben-Ze’ev 2000: 381).

Of course, the existence of person-focused hatred is acknowledged in the debate surrounding this attitude, but it usually is depicted as a marginal or peripheral phenomenon: often, its occurrence is described as an intermediate step in the path that leads to general hatred (the full-fledged form of hatred, as it were). For instance, Hadreas contends that person-focused hatred essentially entails a tendency to generalization, which is fully realized only in general hatred: “[…] individual-focused hatred has not yet settled upon a group. This involves the extension of a logical underpinning that is inchoate in simpler forms of hatred, that is, generalization. The odious trait of an individual shifts to a class that embodies those traits” (Hadreas 2007: 70, my emph., see also 2007: 75). This idea implies that the most paradigmatic cases of hatred are those in which this tendency is actualised, which is a point made explicit by Szanto: “Mysogyny, racism, vendetta-cultures or genocides are the paradigmatic realizations of hatred” (Szanto 2019: 3) and further: “paradigmatic instances of hatred don’t concern interpersonal relations, but rather have a collectivizing tendency […]” (2019: 16). To further underpin this idea, Szanto also raises additional considerations about the frequency of the attitude according to which cases of “collectivizing” (Szanto’s term for “general”) hatred largely outnumber cases of person-focused hatred: “[…] the most prevalent cases of hatred […] are precisely instances of collectivizing hatred […]” (2019: 3).

This way of thinking about hatred thus suggests that general hatred is the place to start if we are to understand hatred as such. In a passage that anticipates some of the details of Szanto’s theory to be discussed below, one can read: “[…] we can only properly understand the […] global character of the formal object of hatred if we get a firm grip on the overgeneralizing […] intentionality regarding its target” (2019: 11). The claim here is that the specific “global” way in which hatred puts its target under negative evaluation (the scope of which embraces the “essence” of the person, Kolnai 2007: 104, and neglects single—potentially positive—aspects of the hated person, Ben Ze’ev 1992: 89) can only be explained on the basis of general hatred. All this invites the question as to how general hatred should be described.

Szanto develops a particularly sophisticated account on this matter, which predominantly relies on four elements that, he contends, essentially qualify a given attitude as an instance of hate. These elements relate to the idea that affective attitudes are intentional and involve an evaluation of their intentional object. My reconstruction of Szanto’s account (as well as the development of my own position in Section 3) mainly focuses on the intentional structure of hatred, leaving aside the debate on whether hatred is an episodic emotion.Footnote 8

The first of these elements specifies the intentional object of the attitude. According to Szanto, it is typical of the intentional object, or target, of hatred that its “status is oscillating between (overgeneralised) individuals and (stereotyped) social categories, social groups or types […],” which eventually results in the fact that “[t]argets of hatred are […] replaceable by any other individual exemplifying the same stereotyped negative properties” (2019: 11, see also 14). So, the individual is always hated qua member of a certain social group (“the Jews”) or qua representative of a class of objects exemplifying a certain property (“the thief”)—the target is hated for “what she or he is regarded to be—rather than for who she or he is” (Brudholm 2010: 296).

The target of the attitude exemplifies value properties (also called “formal objects,” Kenny 2003), which affective attitudes respond to. The value property that instigates hatred is characterised by Szanto as hateworthiness or odiousness.Footnote 9 However, this property per se is not yet sufficient to prompt hatred in a subject. Szanto endorses a view extensively developed by Helm (2001), according to which the emotional response is elicited only against the background of certain concerns (“affective focus”) of the subject. It is because you care for your well-being that an emotion of fear is elicited when a dog attacks you. It is because I care for my daughter that I get angry when a pupil in her school bullies her. Now, the second element of Szanto’s account is this: the reason why the target of hatred is “fungible” (replaceable with any other exemplar belonging to the same class or group, that is) is because hatred’s focus of concern and the value-properties to which the focus assigns salience for the hater are “blurred,” “underdeterminate,” or “uninformative” (2019: 14). An example may help here: when it comes to hatred towards refugees, “the focus is typically ‘blurred’. The focal background of the attitude will […] be, say, the allegedly endangered ethnic or sociocultural homogeneity of the host country. But the focus here seems uninformative as to how the targets (individual refugees or refugee-groups) are related to the formal object (hateworthiness)” (2019: 11).Footnote 10 Not only is it opaque to the subjects where their concerns lie, also this blurred focus does not help specify the value-properties tracked by hatred: “[t]he person is overgeneralized and hence can be substituted by any other who […] simply is such-and-such, where ‘such-and-such’ is essentially indeterminate or underdetermined” (2019: 14, my emph.).

Thirdly, ingroup/outgroup demarcation is considered to be a “constitutive feature of paradigmatic instances of hatred” (2019: 17). The claim is not simply that hate presupposes the demarcation, but rather that it (is one of the elements that) draws that very demarcation. The claim is supported by the idea of a blurred affective focus just discussed. Because the concern at stake in the attitude is not sufficiently informative for the subject, the hostile attitude against the target(s) marks a distinction between them (the hateworthy) and us (those who are threatened by the targets): when hating somebody, and because of hating somebody, the subject opens up an ingroup/outgroup gap (which also contributes to a specification of the focus of concern). “To put it in a formula,” Szanto formulates the point concisely, “we hate (them), therefore we are (distinct from them)” (2019: 17f). This point is related to the fourth essential feature of hatred: the attitude is sustained by a commitment to hate (see also Kolnai 2004: 107). One might wonder what motivates this commitment and Szanto, convincingly, argues: “We are committed to (maintaining) hatred because it establishes or reinforces our identity as distinct from others, i.e., our social identity.” (Szanto 2019: 20).

Thanks to Szanto’s insightful account, one has a conceptual framework for understanding a large number of emotional phenomena that qualify as hate. The question I would like to raise is whether Szanto is correct in considering these cases as paradigmatic instances of hate. Szanto does not extensively elaborates on the notion of “paradigmatic,” but he gives the reader some important hints on what he means by that. General hatred is paradigmatic because we first need to understand this emotional kind in order to understand other forms of hatred. The idea thus seems to be that an understanding of general hatred is required for appreciating all other forms of hatred (and, most notably, person-focused hatred). To quote an anonymous reviewer of this paper: “to understand hatred (as such, in all its forms), we need to understand how the (over)generalization of the attitude works,” and hence we need to look at what I have called “general” (and Szanto “collectivizing”) hatred.

In the next two sections, I question the allegedly paradigmatic nature of general hatred by claiming that general hatred is more complex than singular hatred. General hatred is more complex in the specific sense that it is constituted by properties that are not essential to hatred. I use the term “essential” in the (minimal)Footnote 11 sense according to which a property is essential if all instances of the corresponding kind instantiate it. Accordingly, a property is non-essential if some instances of the kind do not instantiate it. General hatred exemplifies non-essential properties because some instances of the kind “hatred” (and, especially, person-focused hatred) do not exemplify those properties, or so I will claim in the following sections. My argument, roughly, runs as follows: Since an understanding of complex kinds presupposes an understanding of simpler kinds, and since person-focused hatred is simpler than general hatred, understanding general hatred presupposes understanding of person-focused hatred and not the other way around. Thus, so the conclusion, person-focused hatred is the paradigmatic form of hatred, pace Szanto.Footnote 12

But how can one show that general hatred exemplifies non-essential properties? Affective attitudes, it has been contended (Elster 1998: 404), are a difficult topic of scientific research because they are hardly amenable to investigations under controlled conditions. Even when an experimental approach to affective attitudes is possible, such investigations raise all sorts of moral and ethical qualms (especially when they concern morally relevant phenomena like love, envy, or even hate). That is why first-personal experiences, but also fictional examples taken from literature or other artistic forms are so relevant to emotion theory. Taking onboard this suggestion, the next section is entirely devoted to what is presented as a fictional example of hatred that does not exemplify the properties of general hatred. The example is particularly elaborated, but the attention to the details is not pursued for its own sake: details are rather necessary in this context. As already suggested, hatred is a particularly rare attitude in light of the extreme hostility that animates this attitude. Therefore, one can plausibly conjecture that the conditions that lead a subject to elicit an episode of hatred will be correspondingly complex. Normal circumstances will not induce hatred, but extreme circumstances do (where “extreme” shouldn’t be understood as “otherworldly,” but just as what makes our everyday lives unique, interesting, diverse and, ultimately, worthy). So, the more details one has available, the easier will become to put oneself in the shoes of the emoter and, thus, to fully appreciate the core features of this sort of emotive response.

3 Pam hates John

Meet Pam. Pam is a single mother in her thirties. Her life had all the typical ups and downs one could expect to find in the biography of a woman (or man, for that matter) of that age: a couple of romantic relationships, an unexpected loss in the family, a small—but supportive—circle of friends, the difficult start of a career. She immensely loves her son and is passionate about her job. Her colleagues like her, she strikes them as a responsible and friendly person… perhaps a little bit introverted, yes, but her pleasant aura does not assign salience to that character trait. She has never been particularly prone to hostile emotions. Of course, episodes of resentment, contempt, envy, scorn, disgust, anger, wrath, indignation, Schadenfreude, jealousy, revulsion, rancour, disappointment, etc. have made their appearance here and there in the past, but none of them has really marked her emotional life in an indelible way.

When she took up her first permanent job, she was required to move to a different country. It was quite difficult for her to find accommodation: high demand and limited supply have pushed rental prices to the sky all over the country. She ended in an old (and cold) two bedroom apartment for which she paid rent that was disproportionally high in comparison to her salary. However, the location was ideal and, all in all, she considered herself to be lucky: the school for her son was just around the corner, the neighbourhood was decent, and she could bike to her office (she didn’t have a driving license). Pam decided to rent the place because she had a plan to make ends meet. She thought the yearly increase in her salary combined with a few private Latin lessons she would have been able to teach as a side job in the weekends might do for that purpose. Purchasing a property was a no go for Pam: prices were simply unaffordable and she didn’t have enough savings. Yet, she is hard-working and hoped that a promotion might arrive in a few years, which could finally give her enough financial stability for making that further step in her life.

For the first year, things developed for Pam just as she planned. During this period, she also secured some information about her landlord—let’s call him John—for the city is small and everybody knows everybody and likes to talk about everybody. John lives with his family in a gorgeous period house in front of Pam’s apartment. He is a successful lawyer. Rumour has it that he has inherited the apartment Pam lives in from a relative a few years before Pam moved in, but that remains unconfirmed. Pam and John developed what could be called a cordial relationship.

At the end of this first year, this relationship abruptly changed, however. When Pam asked to renew her lease agreement, John demanded a rent increase of 10%. This was far beyond what Pam expected partly because she knew that landlords are not at complete liberty to raise their rent. She promptly replied to John that the increase landlords are allowed to exact is of 5% max. John, appearing nonplussed by the information (which is why Pam suspected that he knew of the legal restriction all along), said that he won’t go below 6%, no matter what. The prospect of engaging in legal action being so unwelcome, the end of the lease so imminent, the chances of finding another flat in such a short period of time so limited, but more importantly: certain assurances she got from her firm of getting promoted within the year so credible, she decided to agree on that. Her new plan was to buy the nice small terrace house, she already identified a few blocks away from her current place, right after receiving the promotion—expected within the end of the year.

And yet, Pam was angry—intensely angry—at John. She perceived herself to be the victim of an injustice. Also, she knew well that she had been an impeccable tenant and she also knew that John was aware of her financial situation (she made that clear to him when she signed the lease agreement the first time)… at the end of their conversation, she mentions to John that she had been advised to have the new conditions put on writing. It was the only form of protest or punishment she could think of in that moment. “Did you get legal advice on this? If there is something that counts is my word on something!” John protested. However, he eventually did as Pam told him.

The intense emotion of anger she felt was familiar to her. A few years back, one of her colleagues—somebody she didn’t really hold in high esteem—got a promotion that she felt she deserved more. More importantly, she knew that the main reason for those assignments was the close relation this colleague had with the head of the company. On that occasion, too, she sensed an emotional episode of the same kind: intense anger supported by the belief of being victim of an injustice. Even in that case, the chances for protesting were limited and the only thing she could do was to punish the colleague by damaging his reputation. Yet, Pam would have soon experienced an attitude of a completely different kind.

By the end of the second year, the prospect of a promotion suddenly vanished because of factors not under Pam’s control. Not only was this a huge disappointment for Pam, but it also had another important consequence to her immediate life: she lost time in searching for a new flat, which put her back to square one. Unwillingly, she had to meet John again to ask for another renewal. The meeting unfolded in ways that she didn’t expect. For one, John asked again for another rent increase (this time within the legal limit). Pam should understand the increase, John said to her: he is not a bad person, but there are expenses—he must refurbish his own house and he has a mortgage on Pam’s flat. (The last reason did not cohere with the rumours about inheritance she heard. “Is he lying to me?” wondered Pam.) In addition, he also required Pam to stop giving private lessons during the weekends. The adduced reason was that the house insurance didn’t allow to run business on the premises. While the first demand was hard to swallow for Pam, the second infuriated her. Pam was sure that John knew of her activities from her very first year and the fact that he pressed that point, at that very time, left her completely at loss. The only way she could make sense of John’s demand was in terms of a retaliatory action: because Pam forced John to play by the rules when insisting that he put things on writing the year before, so now John maliciously enforced the same practice. Nevertheless, she was forced to accept the conditions.

That discussion put Pam’s emotional life in turmoil. The intensity of the attitude was comparable to the one that characterised the episode of anger she felt in the previous year. Yet, its phenomenological core features were entirely different. Her attitude was focused on John, not so much on John’s unjust actions. As a matter of fact, the sense of injustice was not any longer prominent (Pam knew that this time John acted according to the rules). Rather, the attitude was sustained by the beliefs that John was a mean, treacherous, perverse, selfish, inconsiderate person, with no concern for the others and, especially, those in a weaker position. The attitude was suffocating and unpleasant. Pam felt to be literally trapped in it: for instance, she couldn’t help but staring from her window at John, his relatives, and their activities with a spiteful gaze. She despised his display of wealth, his manner, his accent, his clothes. Also, she found herself imagining to write anonymous threat letters, to burn his car or house, or even to kill his cat. She execrated him, cursed him, and wished him ill and misfortune. A simple thought association to John was sufficient to elicit that bundle of negative feelings, desires, and thoughts.

It took a while for Pam to understand that her attitude did not qualify any longer as anger. What triggered self-reflection was the fact that the attitude, and especially its moral implications, took her by surprise as it contradicted the self-image she had of herself as a usually controlled, in principle moderate, and—at her core—moral person. Pam learned to feel an attitude, which was entirely new to her. Pam learned to feel hatred, or so I claim in the next section.

4 The singularist account of hatred

How to describe Pam’s second emotive response? In this section, I first establish that Pam’s attitude is not anger. I then develop my singularist account by claiming that this case exemplifies the paradigmatic kind of hatred: person-focused hatred.

If one shares the common assumption that anger tracks injustice (especially against the emotion’s subject), then Pam’s second attitude—while having anger as one of its contributory causesFootnote 13—does not seem to qualify as anger. To begin with, the attitude is not (at least not primarily) concerned with John’s unjust action, but rather with John (whereas anger entirely gravitates around the other’s unjust actions: insults, slights, wrongdoing, etc.Footnote 14). One could claim that the respect under which Pam evaluated John’s action in anger has shifted and now “globally” applies to John: rather than being about John’s unjust action, Pam’s attitude is about John as an altogether unjust person (who, therefore, becomes target of anger). However, Pam is aware that John has acted in a rightful way (morally, but also legally) and that she can’t blame John for having unjustly imposed those demands on her.Footnote 15 Legally, Pam knew that she was in a position neither to raise claims for capping the rent, nor for continuing her private lessons. Morally, Pam knew that John has legitimately preserved his interests in acting the way he did, although it just so happens that those interests conflict with Pam’s (but this per se doesn’t make John’s action immoral).

Furthermore, although the second attitude is thematically directed towards John, persons and objects related to John becomes instrumental for the discharge of the attitude’s antagonism: being hostile towards those persons and objects is a way to be hostile towards John, as it were. To put this differently, these persons and objects, while not properly targeted by the attitude, enter in the attitude’s aversive spotlight because of the attitude’s target. Anger does not work this way: outburst of anger may involve vandalizing things or even harming others, but no connection needs here to exist between the target and those things or persons. Anger, that is, is rigidly tied to its target (or, at least, more rigidly than hatred).

Finally, anger is accompanied by a communicative aim, which is often spelled out in terms of a vengeful or corrective intention (the idea goes back to Aristotle): those, who have wronged us, should be punished—and should know that they are punished by us (but see Srinivisan 2017 for an understanding of anger’s punishment, which does not involve harm). No such intention (at least: necessarily) goes together with Pam’s second attitude: first, the harm Pam would see inflicted to John is not considered by her as a punishment proper (because, strictly speaking, there is no injustice to be repaired). Second, Pam would be satisfied if the harm simply occurred to John—regardless of who has inflicted it, how this has been inflicted, and whether John becomes aware of being the victim of intentional harm: John’s being hit by lighting, e.g., would satisfy Pam’s ill-will.

All this is not to deny that hatred is infused by an intention of punishing the target. As a matter of fact, Pam’s aggressive ideations and action tendencies are sustained by the idea that John deserves to be punished, to the effect that she would be ready to harm him (while, at the same time, considering any misfortune to John as an equally rightful punishment). However, the example makes clear, as we saw, that Pam does not consider that John has acted unjustly. This raises the important question as to what, then, John should be punished for in Pam’s eyes. I come to back to this question below, when I positively describe the attitude in the example.

So far, a negative conclusion has been established: Pam’s attitude does not look like anger. But then, how can this be positively described? I now explore the hypothesis of it being an instance of hatred. Start with the intentional object. As suggested above, this is John qua John. As it should be clear from the example, being the target of Pam’s attitude is being the target of intense and gripping ill-will, which aims at the target’s elimination or sheer sufferance. It is also important to highlight that John is not targeted under a certain description of John. For instance, John is not targeted insofar as he is a landlord. Wishing Pam all the best for the future, if she will find a new place to rent, she will be particularly careful in looking through the appearances at the character of her new landlord, but it is not to be expected that she will invest them with the very same attitude merely in virtue of them being landlords. Perhaps, she will develop an inclination to dislike landlords (and in particular mean landlords), but hate is not dislike, as discussed in the introduction. So, neither is the attitude directed at a representative of a group, class, or social category, nor can a tendency in generalising the target be observed in this example (unless further factors are added, see below).

But then, what is the value property that, if exemplified by John, makes Pam’s attitude warranted? The straightforward answer to this question is: John is evaluated as evil (and therefore is hateworthy). In the example, the evaluation is the result of Pam’s personal engagement with the target (in particular, it does not derive from the social or political processes described by Szanto, see below). What is typical about hatred’s assessment of the target is that, by evaluating them as evil, it disregards all other (potentially positive) traits of the person and thereby extends the scope of the predicate ‘evil’ to the entire person. Of course, evil and its characterisation in this context can be made the topic of an entire research programme. This can certainly not be pursued here, but probably there is no need for that. Take Pam’s perspective: she thinks that John is wealthy and the value of the rent increase is marginal for him, while substantial for her. She also suspects he lied to her to justify the rent increase: the alleged lie was entirely spontaneous for Pam didn’t even ask about the reasons of the increase (which induced in her the impression of John being a vain person who aims at hiding his true nature behind lies). And, finally, she perceives his demand to stop giving private lessons as a malicious action (an action, which is almost effortless for him, but bears momentous consequences for her). Of course, one could dispute that all that is sufficient for John to be qualified as evil: for John cannot be entirely deprived of any positive feature, which would block the drastic verdict of him being irredeemably evil. One might even question whether “evil” is a contentful concept at all: no doubt that settling on these questions is urgently required to appreciate the moral status of the attitude (see Schmid forthcoming). However, the questions whether John is indeed evil or whether anything can ever exemplify evil are orthogonal to the phenomenological considerations conducted here. What matters is that Pam’s attitude is intentionally directed towards John’s (all things considered) evil nature, and nothing in the singularist account precludes the possibility for her intentional attitude to misfire. This means: even if John were not evil (or even if “evil” were an empty term), the phenomenology and intentional structure of Pam’s attitude would remain unaffected.Footnote 16

At this stage, it is possible to give an answer to the question I left open above: Why does John, in Pam’s eyes, deserve to be punished? Since a sense of injustice is not at the forefront of Pam’s attitude, I contend that crucial to her attitude is the idea that punishment is due to John not primarily because of what he has done, but mainly because of who he is. Put another way, John is taken by Pam to be responsible for the very person he is or, more precisely, she considers him to be responsible for the evil person he is. That, I maintain, is the very reason that supports hatred’s punishing intention: by revealing his evil nature to the subject, the target is now deemed culpable for having become the person he is instead of somebody else (John is a malicious, selfish, deceptive person, rather than a generous, warm-hearted, kind individual).Footnote 17

Now, I submit that to aversively or hostilely target a person, while appraising them as evil, in the way just described is to hate this person. No better psychological kind comes at hand to qualify the attitude that Pam felt towards John. This interim conclusion should now enable us to further explore the tenability of other features that have been claimed to be essential to hatred esp. by Szanto (see Section 2).

Start with the target and its appraisal. As we have seen, John is hated by Pam as John and not under any description of John. The target, that is, is not “fungible” and is not susceptible to a generalising tendency. None of these properties – highlighted by Szanto as contradistinguishing traits of general hatred – apply to singular hatred. Furthermore, John is evaluated as evil. This is what Szanto qualifies as “global” evaluation of the target. The singularist and the generalist account of hatred converge on the global nature of the evaluation in hatred, but their explanation of this evaluation diverge: the singularist account trace this evaluation back to the character or nature of the individual (Kolnai’s “essence”), which is assessed as evil. The generalist account invokes “overgeneralization and stereotypic social categorization of the targets” (Szanto 2019: 13), which is an explanation that, from the outset, is not applicable to person-focused hatred (precisely because the target of this attitude is not fungible).

Let us now turn to the focus of concern. Is Pam’s focus undetermined or blurred? Just as the value property at stake in the attitude is determined (or at least sufficiently determined for Pam’s affective psychology to be activated), so is the attitude’s focus of concern. Pam’s concern is about her and her family’s well-being which is threatened by, e.g., limited financial resources. It is because John is perceived as a malevolent threat to the well-being of her person and her closest relatives that she elicits that particular attitude (of hatred) in relation to that particular value property (evil).Footnote 18

Does the attitude further an in-group/out-group distinction, say, between tenants and landlords? To answer this question, one should first distinguish between what has been called “subjective” and “objective” group memberships (Zahavi 2015: 244). In an objective sense, an in-group/out-group distinction has been there from the very first encounter between Pam and John: Pam is a tenant and John is a landlord. But this is a trivial distinction, which has no bearing on the issue: such distinction did not impact the actions or attitudes of the parties involved in the scenario. What about subjective group memberships (which is what Szanto, building on social psychology, predominantly has in mind, see Salice and Miyazono 2020)? It seems that no social identity has been activated by Pam in the circumstances described in Section 2: Pam did not emote as a group member or, to put this differently, the explanation of her attitude does not require appeal to the notion of a group. Of course, this is not to deny that, in future, Pam may activate her social identity as a tenant, given what has happened to her. For instance, it seems possible to imagine that she will decide to join the social protests against the scarce, weak, and ineffective policies implemented by the government about the rental market and/or that she will try to influence these policies by becoming member of a tenant association. Or suppose future experiences will convince her that the very role of landlord is intrinsically evil, then she will be disposed to emote accordingly. Yet, all this appears to occur in subsequent steps and contingent on further conditions which are not present in the scenario depicted in Section 2.

Now, remember that the in-group/out-group demarcation is theoretically employed by Szanto to justify what generates the commitment to stick to the attitude. One is committed to hate others, on this account, to preserve one’s social identity. I think that the idea of a commitment inherent in hate is after an important aspect of this attitude. One could say that Pam’s feeling of being trapped in the attitude is just another facet of the commitment Szanto is describing. Pam would prefer to steer away from the unpleasant attitude, but she feels forced to feel it. Yet, the motive for Pam’s commitment cannot be the preservation of her social identity given that, as we have seen, she has not activated any such identity in the course of the events that lead to her hate. The question thus remains as to what motivates the commitment. The suggestion is that there might be many elements able to sustain that commitment (the preservation of one’s social identity being one of them), but in what follow I will focus on one single motive which seems to play a prominent role in the example of Section 2.

To address this motive, it might be important to refer to an observation made by Kolnai: “Hatred presupposes a ‘taking seriously [Vollnehmen]’ of its object: this must be somehow objectively important, significant, dangerous, powerful; even if not always according to the actual situation (as, e.g., [in the case of] the beaten, deeply humiliated enemy), nevertheless according to his general role [or according to] a claim which accrues to him” (Kolnai 2007: 102). Conceiving the target this way may be seen as a psychological counterpart of the subject’s feelings of powerlessness, which psychological research has evidenced as an important factor fuelling hatred (Fischer et al. 2018; Sternberg 2005; Fitness and Fletcher 1993). The subject, in hatred, feels powerless vis-à-vis the target’s importance, significance, danger, or power. The sense of powerlessness thus is one—but also only one—possible motive underpinning the sense of commitment that animates cases of hatred like the one depicted in Section 2. In fact, this seems to adequately describe what contradistinguishes Pam’s situation. Although her desire is to be liberated by hatred as soon as possible rather than to indefinitely adhere to it, she feels trapped in her attitude—forced to re-enact it at any given moment. Why? Remember that, by lacking any element of leverage in the negotiation with John, she is in a weaker position and compelled to accept the conditions imposed on her by John. One can therefore plausibly hypothesize that the situation generates feelings of powerlessness in her, which sustain the commitment to the attitude. Are those feelings of powerlessness gone, the commitment will also go (and thereby one psychological underpinning of the attitude).

These feelings of powerlessness may also explain why hatred is often not reported. There is a sense in which Pam, although she hates John, evaluates herself as powerless in comparison to him, thereby assigning superior importance and relevance to him. This may be particularly difficult to swallow for Pam and may be an additional reason as to why she will entertain her attitude in secret. Accordingly, she is not disposed to report the attitude because that would make public the fact that she feels powerless or inferior towards her enemy. A fact only a few haters, I submit, would be willing to admit, let alone to report.Footnote 19

It should not go unmentioned that the sense of powerlessness that may infuse person-focused hatred is one of the acutest dangers that hatred poses to morality. Hatred—like envy or humiliation, but in contrast to love, enthusiasm, curiosity, gratitude—is an affective reaction. Affective reactions should not be equated with Strawson’s “reactive attitudes” (1962): although it exceeds the purposes of this paper to exhaustively clarify what an affective reaction exactly is, the general idea is that an attitude qualifies as an affective reaction when certain facts in the world, which are taken by the subject to be immutable, do not leave any other possibility to this subject, but to affectively react in a particular way (given his or her character traits, cultural background and other relevant factors). The action tendencies constituting the attitudes are therefore to ignore, escape, or entirely remove (viz. destroy) the facts at stake, rather than exploring, questioning, or changing them (as in those attitudes that, to mark a contradistinction, could be qualified as “affective actions”). When emoting in a “reactive” way, subjects uncover their dependence particularly on others and on their actions, their opinions or emotions, and even possessions. By trapping, subjugating, and oppressing their subjects, these attitudes nourish affective and epistemic vices including Ressentiment, hypocrisy, self-deception, self-abatement, which poison the mind and hamper its ability to exert autonomous agency (Scheler 1994: 40).

Let us take stock. This section developed a singularist account of hatred, which (i) dismisses the essentiality of three features of hatred identified by Szanto (fungible target, blurred focus, ingroup/outgroup distinction), (ii) reconsiders one of Szanto’s features (the attitude’s commitment), and (iii) endorses the idea of a “global evaluation” of the hated target (while offering a different explanation). Hatred, on the singularist account, is a affective reaction that targets the other as an individual person, responds to evil, puts the focus of concern on the subject and its closest relatives, and self-commits. Does this imply that Szanto’s conceptual framework is intrinsically faulty? No. This framework remains useful and fit for the purpose of understanding certain significant occurrences of hatred. However, these occurrences are not typical or paradigmatic instances of hatred; they are marginal instances.Footnote 20 Yet, to fully understand this claim, a clarification of the “paradigmatic” vs “marginal” instances of an affective attitude is called for. The conclusion develops some consideration to that effect.

5 Conclusion

I consider an emotional episode as paradigmatic if its understanding solely invokes the features specified in the emotional kind, to which it belongs. Call these features the “core features” of an affective token. By contrast, an affective token counts as peripheral if its understanding does not solely invoke the features specified in the kind, to which it belongs, but in addition requires appeal to features that are not specified in the kind. Call these features “marginal”: they are marginal because they are attached to other (that is, to core) features.Footnote 21 It follows from this that peripheral forms of an attitude are more complex than paradigmatic because they involve more features. It also follows that understanding the core features of an attitude (and, thus, understanding the paradigmatic cases of an attitude) is prior to an understanding of the peripheral episodes of that attitude.

Let me now apply these considerations to hatred. If the conclusions of Section 3 stand, Pam’s hatred against John is paradigmatic because, in order to understand that episode, one needs to merely resort to core features. By contrast, Pam’s hatred against, say, child molesters is marginal. The latter is marginal because, in order to understand it, one must resort to core features (as these are exemplified by Pam’s hatred against John) plus parasitic features (which could be spelled out along the lines of Szanto’s account, e.g.). Understanding person-focused hatred, therefore, is prior to an understanding of general hatred.

Szanto may counter this conclusion by claiming that cases of general hatred are more frequent than cases of person-focused hatred. As we have seen in Section 1, this consideration is used to further underpin the idea that general hatred is paradigmatic. A potential objection to my conclusion could thus revolve around the following question: How could paradigmatic cases of an emotion be less frequent than marginal cases?

As a reply, I submit the following thoughts. On the one hand, this is an empirical observation which, I believe, would be very hard to find solid evidence for. One the other, let us assume that the observation is correct and question whether it would indeed count as a counterargument to the conclusion inferred above.

Consider water. Let us assume, not uncontroversially, that water is H2O. Now, it might well be that, in our world, pure water is (or has become) extremely rare—partly also because we have been so successful in polluting water. So, more often than not, water, in our world, is adulterated as it comes mixed with other substances. Does this justify us to revise our beliefs about water? Hardly so: in order to make sense of the idea of adulterated or polluted water, it still remains the case that we first need to have a grip on the nature of water. But then, this shows that the frequency of a given phenomenon does not give us reliable information about its nature. The same, it seems to me, can be said about the nature of affective attitudes. This gives us reason to believe that person-focused hatred is the paradigmatic kind of hatred, regardless of how frequent it is.