Abstract
The article has two objectives. First, I argue that the claim that revenge and retaliation have no place in our culture, and that with the ability to forgive we have even overcome the economy of guilt, is both true and false: True insofar as we understand revenge in the sense it had in classical vengeance cultures: namely, as a legal form of justice. But wrong insofar as there is some evidence that revenge, under names such as social sanction or punishment, plays no less a role in our culture than it does elsewhere—but a hidden role, which obscures from us an understanding of our ethical practices. I claim that processes of moral repair cannot be built on pure forgiveness, but must contain carefully measured elements of revenge insofar as they aim to restore respect among equals.
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Notes
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Starting with Peter Strawson’s (1974) rehabilitation of reactive moral feelings such as resentment, some philosophers like Robert Solomon (1994, 1999), Jeffrie Murphy (2000, 2003), and Thomas Brudholm (2008), in recent decades have rediscovered the positive sides of “negative” emotions such as resentment and anger. Others, like Viktor Jankelevitch and Jean Amery, have pointed out that forgiveness can also be an inappropriate form of self-sacrifice. Myisha Cherry (2018), Alice MacLachlan (2009), and others have also drawn attention to the gendered significance of forgiveness discourses, noting that negative reactions and refusal to forgive may be a necessary response to regain self-respect in many contexts. However, while, after all these discussions, it seems to be rather accepted among philosophers today that “negative” emotions such as anger can be justified and appropriate in some situations, this is less true for revenge. Notable Exceptions are: Jeffrie Murphy (2000, 2003), Alice McLachlan, Kaufmann, Fabian Bernhardt (2017, 2020).
- 3.
That the formal justice of the Talion law is universally intelligible does not mean that retribution everywhere followed the strict rule of proportionality. For example, Gehrke points out that the duty of revenge in ancient Greece still had a competitive side, which had its seat in the specifically agonal thinking of the Greeks. Thus one endeavored to return the benefit with an even greater one, or to return evil not with evil, but with even more evil (Gehrke, 133).
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As one of the few philosophers who can find something positive in vengeance, Alice MacLachlan has also drawn attention to this communicative dimension of the deed as a communication about desert and authority: “Revenge aims to adress rather than use its target […] for the revenger to be satisfied. It is plausibly described as a kind of forcible persuasion, in which the revenger aims to convince her target of the target’s moral desert and the revenger’s moral authority” (MacLachlan 2016, 129).
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Arendt’s considerations in The Denktagebuch are not in conflict with the positive value she puts on forgiveness in The Human Condition. In this book she limits the scope of forgiveness to ordinary human weaknesses, which one excuses out of respect for the other and oneself in the awareness of a common human frailty. This concept of forgiveness, then, does not refer to deep culpability, and it is closer to the Greek concept of apology than to Christian and modern forgiveness.
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There are exceptions. Thus Whitley Kaufman claims that at the end of the day revenge and retribution have the same purpose, the same motivation, and the same moral justification (Kaufman 2016, 318). He even interprets the purpose of punishment in the modern state as the restoration of honor.
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There are some indications that not only retaliation, but excessive revenge sometimes finds its way into criminal law. As Jeffrie Murphy observes, “much of American society pays at least lip service to the idea that forgiveness is an important moral value. And yet Americans generally seem to support unusually harsh mechanisms of criminal punishment.”
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The desire to punish seems to develop as soon as one realizes that certain persons have gained an unfair advantage for themselves at the expense of others, even when it is neither oneself, nor close persons who have been harmed or disadvantaged. The tendency of “third parties” to punish without their own benefit has therefore also been called “altruistic” (Fehr and Fischbacher 2003).
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Lotter, MS. (2022). On Revenge: The Other of Forgiveness. In: Lotter, MS., Fischer, S. (eds) Guilt, Forgiveness, and Moral Repair. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84610-7_10
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