Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Emily Dupree, postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of Philosophy and in the College of the University of Chicago, and longtime co-host of this very podcast.
She is here to discuss the rationality of revenge. Emily Dupree, welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here. Great to have you in the guest's chair. Yeah, the other side of the table. So whenever I teach a class, I like to start with examples of things. So maybe let's do that here. What would be just like a boring textbook example of taking revenge? A very classic case of taking revenge would be, let's say...
After a long time of suffering abuse at the hands of somebody, this victim of abuse decides to take matters into their own hands and kill the person who had wronged them. Like a kidnapping victim, maybe, or something like that. Some extreme form of violence, and it's like you're retaliating.
Yeah, although again, we'll have to untangle a lot of the different concepts at play here. But yeah, typically, a classic case of revenge will be one that doesn't aim at anything outside of the action itself. So in your case of kidnapping, my worry is that perhaps the killing would be in order to escape or something like that.
Revenge, on the other hand, is something that we want to narrow the scope of possible justifications for such that it starts to be just about the act itself. Okay, right. So we're using maybe the term revenge in a little bit more of a restricted sense here where it only gets to count as revenge if getting back at the person is the goal rather than like subordinate to some other goal, for example, escaping.
Yeah, I think that's right. And as philosophers, we always have to make decisions about how much we're willing to depart from the ordinary use of the particular terms we're investigating. And so I don't want to depart too far and have a too narrow definition. But I think you're right. A good starting point for revenge would be behavior that seeks to impose a harm on a wrongdoer,
because that person has harmed the Avenger and for the sake of making up for the wrong in some way rather than achieving some goal apart from that.
Okay, nice. Are there any other examples of things we might ordinarily talk about revenge, which we should try to exclude from this discussion from the outset? Yes, absolutely. A lot of times when we speak of revenge, a lot of different parties to a wrongdoing might be involved. Very classic cases are somebody avenging the death of someone close to them. So sort of making up for what they couldn't have done themselves.
This can be thought of in a very loose way as third-party revenge, although sometimes I don't even want to call it revenge. But just for the sake of this conversation, I want to exclude any type of third party on behalf of another justice-seeking. For our purposes today, I just want to focus on cases where
There's a two-party relationship, the wrongdoer and the person who was wronged, who then gets back at the wrongdoer in some way because of that prior wrong. Okay, good. So we're excluding all cases of revenge where I exact my vengeance on behalf of someone other than me that was wronged.
That's right. And that's not to say that those cases aren't interesting. I myself find them fascinating. But for the purposes of my own research, I've tried to start in what I take to be the most straightforward cases and see what we can discover there before branching out to the more mediated cases that involve third parties. Okay, good. Right. That's for the next episode we do. Exactly.
Can an act of revenge be a response to any kind of harm done against the Avenger? Or does it have to be a specific type of harm in order for it to count as revenge? Yeah, that's a very good question. And it brings up, I think, again, some obstacles that any philosopher encounters when they're trying to delimit a particular concept. So one challenge is...
As I said before, how far do we want to depart from ordinary usage? The second is, are we trying to merely describe cases that count as revenge in an empirical sense? Or are we trying to
come up with criteria that we're going to use to exclude cases that aren't proper revenge. So that would be an introduction of some sort of normative dimension in trying to sort among all the behaviors we see. And so I bring this up because that's a challenge itself in answering your question. Because
Sometimes we say, oh, you know, my office mate keeps leaving their papers on our shared desk. And so I'm going to take revenge and steal their pen. Okay, that would be a very, I mean, it barely amounts to a harm if that. It's like really low stakes. Yeah, it's extremely low stakes. But, you know, sometimes in ordinary usage, we would say, oh, my God, she took revenge on her office mate.
Other cases that we tend to think of and which come up in cinematic and literary depictions are ones that are much more egregious. So, you know, a parent avenging the wrongful death of their child. That would be a very substantial harm, the response to which we also call revenge. Do they have to be the same? Like, does like the original harm and then the harm done back against the person in revenge...
Do they have to both be at the same high level to rise to the level of revenge? Or is there a difference there? Yeah, I think this question brings up the difference between revenge and retaliation. I take retaliation to be a concept that is, of course, cousins with revenge in the sense that it
seeks to impose a harm on somebody in response to a prior harm. It does seem like a good word for that roommate squabble case. Right, right, exactly. And maybe it's a good one for the roommate squabble case because that case is such a low stakes one. It seems like the word petty goes well with the word retaliation. Right. Maybe it goes with revenge. I'm not sure, but it especially goes with retaliation.
Yeah, I think, again, it all depends on the cases. Sometimes I think retaliation is straightforwardly rational in a way that revenge isn't often, at least on the surface. So if I'm retaliating by imposing a harm on somebody in order to impose a deterrent effect on their behavior, that would be very rational. We see that in maybe international relations. We see that in prisoner's dilemma type games, things like that.
And I think what this reveals is that the notion of proportionality is at home in thoughts about retaliation in ways it's not at home in thoughts about revenge. So you asked a moment ago, does the response harm have to match the original harm?
Yeah, I mean, like, it seems weird to say that I could avenge someone who kidnapped me by stealing their pen. Right, so that would be the inverse of what I was imagining. Okay, yeah.
Yeah, you know, I think in that case, perhaps all we would need to say is that this person is misguided as to either the severity of the original harm or the severity of what they've chosen to impose back on them. But it does feel like less likely somehow than the other way around. Absolutely. Right. It seems like these have a tendency to escalate. And also, I think the point I want to draw out in the end is that
Proportionality, I think, just sits uneasily with talk of revenge in general. So I think it sounds weird to say they committed an act of revenge, but they went too far. It seems like if we're already in the territory of revenge, we've kind of let go of this desire for equality of harms that might
still exist in thoughts about retaliation. Maybe it's because everything's turned up to 11. So it's like the original harm was turned up to 11 and the harm in response is also turned up to 11. So if everything is just as much of a harm as it can be, it seems a little bit weird to try exactly measuring them. That could be the case. And I think that also brings up the fact that when I speak about the rationality of revenge,
Often I'm only thinking about the very egregious wrongdoing cases because, as you say, they're turned up to the max. And so I think certain things are lost in those very egregious types of moral harms and certain things are possible in those cases as well that are neither lost nor possible in the really tame cases. Right.
So the topic of this episode is the rationality of revenge. What does rational mean for philosophers exactly?
So, I mean, there are so many different ways to answer this question. I'll just give a very loose answer because I think that's all we need for purposes of this discussion. Yeah. The bar of rationality, we want revenge to meet this discussion is like pretty straightforward and simple. It's quite straightforward and also non-technical. Yeah. All I want to be able to say is that revenge can be an intelligible object of rational pursuit.
the kinds of beings we are, which are rational beings. Okay. So in other words, if someone commits an act of revenge, that doesn't mean that they're like...
they've lost command of their mental faculties, that they're not tracking what's real and what's fake, that they're not understanding cause and effect, they're not understanding logic. We have a sort of intuition. There's this constellation of bare minimum stuff that needs to be up and running for your mind to be in touch with reality and working. And what you want to argue is that just because someone committed an act of revenge, it doesn't mean that their mental faculties aren't working at that bare minimum level. Absolutely. And
For example, if somebody says to me, "I want to go outside right now,"
and then they go lock the door and sit back down on the sofa, there's something kind of unintelligible about their actions. We want to explain it. We want to be like, oh, did they get distracted? Did something come up? Right. We want to ask them a question. Wait a minute. How come you didn't just leave? Exactly. We're looking for an explanation because the behavior on its face appears to be inconsistent with reason. And then if they answer the question,
And so I want to argue for a conception of revenge on which it's not a mystery when people choose to pursue it.
That's not to say that I am arguing for the rationality of revenge all things considered. You know, perhaps it's the case that when weighed against many other interests a person has, they decide not to pursue it. Or pursuing it would be not in their interest and therefore irrational from like a behavioral choice perspective. All I'm trying to say is that
It's not the trying to go outside and sitting on the sofa case. That there's something intelligible about what avengers seek that the existing accounts of revenge don't capture. What's the standard position that moral philosophers take on the rationality of revenge? So in general, in the history of philosophy, revenge is considered to be
irrational on its face, and different philosophers give different reasons for this. I think the philosopher John Elster's description of revenge captures it well. He says, "The very definition of revenge shows that it involves only costs and risks, no benefits. Rational individuals follow the principles of letting bygones be bygones, cutting their losses and ignoring sunk costs.
whereas the avenger typically refuses to forget an affront or harm to which he has been exposed. That's a very standard account of revenge, that there are no benefits to be had. Another philosopher, Joseph Butler, thinks that revenge is just the magnification of harm. He calls it a painful remedy.
and that it's an abuse of anger, which we find in a lot of philosophical accounts, that there's a relationship between anger and revenge such that once you've reached vengeful
motives or behavior, then you've exceeded the bounds of perhaps permissible anger. So it seems like these figures are trying to elaborate on the, you know, saying two wrongs don't make a right, basically. Yeah, I think that's right. They think, you know, the sensible, rational person will look at what's in front of them. They'll say, something bad happened to me. Nothing I do now will change the past. Yeah.
There's no other reason to harm this person. So again, as I said at the beginning of this conversation, revenge is not concerned with the deterrent effect of killing a wrongdoer or something. And so if there's no instrumental purpose to the imposition of a harm, and there's no way that such an imposition could change the past, could rewrite your history, then there's simply no reason to do it.
Right, exactly. And, you know, if we go back to our, like, earlier kidnapping example, like, I can't un-kidnap myself. Well, you know, no matter what I do with the rest of my life, having moved past this situation...
it will always be the case that I was kidnapped. So it's impossible to change that. Therefore, why do anything? Seems to be kind of the intuition here. That's right. And in addition, there's good reason to do all sorts of other things. Perhaps you go to therapy. Perhaps, you know, you... Donate to a law enforcement charity. Right. You know, whatever. There are lots of things that are reasonable to do in the aftermath of wrongdoing.
The traditional view is that revenge is not one of them. And there's also a suspicion that what's really happening is a retributive impulse is being unchecked. That in the absence of good reason to pursue it, people become deceived by their own kind of inflamed anger and retributive desires. That it clouds their judgment in a sense. Right.
You know, it's like the end of Return of the Jedi. Luke, don't let your hate fill you. Exactly. My position is, you know, sometimes there's reason to do that. It's intelligible why someone would yield to that desire. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, you know, when we started off, I sort of felt like, yeah, you know, the victim of a wrongdoing should get back at the person that feels really intuitive. Yeah.
On the other hand, now that we've heard this argument from Elster that, well, just sit down and take a cold shower and sit down and think about it. Like, what are you actually going to accomplish? Once I do that, now I feel like I'm not going to accomplish anything. So I really feel like I'm pulled in two directions now about whether revenge can be the right thing to do. Where do we go from there? I think where we go from there is first identify that there are, in fact, two questions in front of us. The first is the question we've been discussing so far, which is, can revenge be rational?
The second question is the one you just said, which is, can revenge be morally permissible? Of course, there's a relationship between those two questions, but they're different. And in my research, I'm focusing on answering the first question of rationality because I think that answering that is going to be a stepping stone to ultimately trying to say more about the second moral question. So the question...
Is taking revenge the right thing to do is a different question from can we even just like make sense of taking revenge? And when we see somebody do it, does that seem like something that would make sense to do? And for now, we're just talking about the doesn't make sense question. Maybe as a stepping stone to eventually getting at the juicier, like should we ever do it question. Okay, so I'm in the headspace now where I'm just asking the doesn't make sense question.
But I'm feeling the force now of the Elster argument. I'm feeling the force of, look, you're not going to accomplish anything. How could you accomplish anything? You'd have to have a time machine or I don't know what or be a god and undo things that have already happened to undo the original act to like restore the balance. So how can it ever really make sense to do it if you sit down and think carefully about what you're trying to do? Yes. Okay. So Elster says revenge involves only costs, no benefits.
I'm arguing that in some cases of revenge, there is in fact one very unique benefit that can come from it. I will elaborate on this obviously going forward, but I'll just state it simply right now. I think that in some cases of revenge, it can restore somebody's moral personhood that was eroded by the prior wrongdoing to which they're responding.
Okay, so your position is, in fact, there is a benefit. The benefit is you get the moral personhood that was wrested from you by the original harm. You know, it's not like it's all costs and no benefits. There's at least this one benefit, and it's a very unique and special benefit. You get your moral personhood back. So the next thing to think about, obviously, is what exactly moral personhood is. Good. So one way to understand moral personhood is to think of
What distinguishes us, for example, from inanimate objects such that it's okay for me to use my laptop for my own means, but it would not be okay for me to use a friend for my own means, right? Why is it the case that we are the kinds of beings who shouldn't be used as instruments for another, right?
There's a specialness about us and beings like us that we refer to as moral personhood. We can think of it as a moral boundary that others can't cross. And what would be an example of using a person as a means or merely as a means? So one ordinary case of using someone merely as a means would be lying to them in order to get what you want. So you misrepresent the facts about
what organization you're collecting money for. They're excited, they give you money for this fraudulent organization, and then you pocket it. So that would be not respecting the fact that as a rational being, they have the ability and therefore the right to rationally assess the truth of whatever organization
the state of affairs is and decide if they're going to part with their money on their own free will. What would be an example of something that's okay to do with your laptop, but not okay to do with another person precisely because there's no such thing as, am I being fair to my laptop? I can throw my laptop in the trash if I want to. It'd be unwise. It's very expensive. At a certain point though, right? When it doesn't work anymore, maybe. Right. I can't do that to a person.
It's not the beginning of a never-ending story. We don't just take people, we don't throw them in dumpsters. That's right. Yeah. Non-consensually.
Okay, so moral personhood is a term we're using for the general sense that we have that people aren't just to be sort of like used and then discarded. They're, you know, people to whom we owe something. Maybe they have rights. They're people that we care about and we want to think about their welfare when we do stuff and factor that into what we do. Correct. And just to add to that, thinking about their welfare when we are
deciding on our own behavior isn't something good that we're doing. That's not an act of charity on my part. But instead, it's a matter of right. There's an obligation that I have to others just in virtue of the kinds of beings we are. Is that the kind of harm that we're interested in when we're looking at what we're calling cases of revenge? The kind of harm where one person treats another person just straight up as if they don't matter?
That's correct. So the cases of revenge that I think are rational are ones that stem from not just mere wrongdoing, which is, you know, lying to a friend, but then apologizing for it, etc. But wrongdoing that is so egregious that it amounts to treating someone as a mere means.
Cases of oppression are often like this, where there's systemic subordination or abuse. You know, chattel slavery is an excellent example of this kind of systemic degradation of moral personhood because of how pervasive the wrongdoing is. On, for example, a Kantian account, moral personhood is grounded in some feature of the individual, let's say rationality.
If you have that threshold criteria, then you are the kind of thing that matters from a moral perspective. On my account of moral personhood, there is one additional element, which is there's the feature of the individual. So the individual criteria, which would be rationality in the Kantian case, but it could be other things like the capacity for pleasure or pain, all sorts of other things. Plus, some people
feature of how that individual is taken up in interpersonal context. And so we can think of this as the collective meaning that is made of that individual having the relevant individual feature. Okay, nice. So moral personhood isn't just about your cognitive state dissociated from the rest of humanity. It isn't part about that, perhaps.
but it's also in part a matter of how other people treat you and what kind of status as a person they confer on you by way of the way they treat you. That's correct. That full moral personhood requires two things to be up and running. One, the individual element about the kind of being you are. And then second, the interpersonal element about how the kind of being you are is taken up
in your society or communal setting. The flip side of this is that when we see moral personhood as having these two distinct elements, it reveals that there's what I call a contingency to moral personhood that is not acknowledged on these traditional views. So because of the interpersonal element, because I have to be taken up in the right way
there's now the possibility that that doesn't happen in, for example, cases of oppression. And so in that case, though I have the requisite individual capacity like rationality, if I'm living in a situation where nobody treats me as a full moral person,
then I'm arguing that I am in fact not a full moral person. Not just that I have low self-esteem or that, you know, I'm confused about my moral ontological status, but that the actual moral ontology has not been actualized in the way that it could be. So I guess there's two new ideas here, you could say. One new idea is that
It's possible for people to differ in whether they are fully fledged moral persons. And the other idea is that since moral personhood can differ and indeed be in flux, it's also possible for someone to try to get it back after it was taken away. And therefore, that is a potential benefit to carrying out an act of revenge. That's exactly right. So let's imagine a case.
Some cases that I find extremely interesting are the cases of revenge that were taken by some Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. As I would describe it, they're coming out of a situation where dehumanization was rampant and thus the erosion of their moral personhood was rampant.
In response to that, and I think this is substantiated by reading personal accounts of revenge during that time, some Jews decided to devote their lives to killing Nazis. Kind of like a non-fictional version of Inglourious Bastards. Absolutely. And my interpretation of these real historical events is that
What they achieved by successfully carrying out various revenge plots was the restoration of their moral personhood that was severed by the prior conduct of the Nazis that were targeted. Okay, so we have the case of Jewish people who were formerly imprisoned by Nazis taking their revenge out on former Nazis by killing them. How does killing someone restore my moral personhood? So here's how I think this can happen.
As we said at the outset of this conversation, revenge is a type of behavior that involves imposing a harm on somebody because of a prior wrong that has occurred. So for example, it's because the Nazi concentration camp guards tortured Jewish inmates that one of the Jews might dedicate their life to hunting these guards down after the war. But notice that
When we endorse this causal story, there's a prior commitment that also has to be endorsed, which is that that prior conduct was wrong. Suddenly there's this emergence of a moral concept. Wrong. Again, so we're now revealing a chain of kind of background preconditions. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to, like, get back at somebody for doing something great. That's really weird. Exactly. And so...
If I'm getting back at somebody for doing something wrong, that requires that I also have to view the prior conduct as occurring between two moral beings. That itself is kind of a moral cognitive achievement for somebody who's in a position of not being a full moral being.
So there is a shift in somebody's self-regarding moral attitude once they start contemplating avenging the past. They begin to view themselves as the kind of person who did not deserve that conduct, which is in tension with their actual degraded moral status. And so what I'm arguing is that
This cognitive self-regard isn't a sufficient condition to re-becoming a moral person, right? We have to do something interpersonally because moral personhood is an interpersonal phenomenon as well as an individual one. And so when somebody asserts their will on a wrongdoer,
they've, in a sense, pulled themselves up by the moral bootstraps and kind of reinserted them into the interpersonal community through the assertion of their will on another. Now, it might be the case, again, this is a question for another day, it might be the case that this conduct is wrong. That asserting your will on another person treats them as a mere means just like they treated you as a mere means. That might be the case.
What I want to just flag is that being able to commit a wrong, or put differently, becoming a candidate for moral evaluation is itself a moral achievement for somebody whose moral personhood was degraded. Okay, so what the Avenger is trying to do is to start thinking of themselves once again as a person to whom things are owed.
And the ability to think of themselves in that way was taken from them by the harm that was done against them. So the kind of motivation for this act of revenge is I need this in order to be able to think of myself in that way again. That's correct. I want to add, though, that it's not only something changing in their interior life, in their interior self-regard. Presumably the act of revenge can often be public and other people can know about it too. That's right. Yeah.
What I want to emphasize, though, is that it's a moral ontological transformation via the act of revenge and not just a transformation in how one sees oneself. Okay, right. And not just moral ontological, perhaps we could say is fancy speak for revenge.
We want to say this really is a change in the human being themselves, which we can even think about it like sort of third-personally. This is objectively something that changes in the person, not just a matter of how they look at the world or how they feel or how they see things. Absolutely. It's becoming the kind of being that you have the potential to become under the right interpersonal conditions. So taking a step back, why wouldn't the vengeance seeker...
take a cold shower and then conclude, well, hold on, we have a whole like criminal court system and law enforcement and like, why not just let them restore my moral personhood? Yeah, I think that's a good question. So my first thing I want to say is that that would also be a rational choice in the aftermath of wrongdoing to decide to devote yourself to better forms of accountability. I think what's important to note though, is that
types of cases of revenge that I'm talking about are ones that are, I believe, by definition indicative of a certain state failure. So, for example, the Holocaust. You know, even the possibility that there could be such a systemic atrocity suggests that the state has failed and that normal mechanisms of accountability are not available.
So too for any of the cases of harms that are so egregious as to erode moral personhood. And I think this is a familiar concept. So revenge has a kind of DIY attitude just in our ordinary understanding of the concept. Yeah, it's like the vengeance seeker steps in where they're in some sort of anarchic
you know, lawless situation, at least in media. Yes, it's intelligible for us to imagine someone saying, I guess I'll do it myself, right? And so the conditions that generate cause for revenge are often ones that prevent people from pursuing the other rational strategy that you recommended, or at least raised, which is, you know, pursuing things through the proper channels.
Emily Dupree, you can be sure that I will exact my vengeance upon you by having you back on the show at a later time to continue talking about this. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. The elucidations blog has moved. We are now located at elucidations.now.sh. On the blog, you can find our full back catalog of previous episodes. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out on Twitter at at elucidations pod. Thanks again for listening.
Thank you.