1 HIT ME  WITH YOUR BEST SHOT

AN ANATOMY OF THE ANTAGONISTIC EMOTIONS

Personal hatred can overtake us so completely that it crowds out reason, drains our deepest reservoirs of self-control, and morphs us into murderous marionettes moved by invisible strings. This is the grisly lesson of the ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ Medea. Medea is a former princess of the kingdom of Colchis who plots revenge on her husband, Jason, after her painful realization that he is making arrangements to marry Glauce, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Overtaken by hatred, she sends her children off to Glauce, her husband’s wife-to-be, with some poisoned robes. Vain as she is, Glauce immediately puts them on. The fast-acting poison consumes the legs of the princess, and she falls to the floor and soon dies in excruciating pain. Trying to save her, her father gets poisoned and died as well. In the play’s most chilling scene, Medea wrestles with herself over whether she can bring herself to kill her own children. Convinced that depriving Jason of his progeny will cause him unbearable suffering and propelled by her obsessive thirst for revenge, she resolves to stab her own children to death.

There could hardly be a better illustration of hatred run amok. Medea’s rancor is so ravenous that not even her own kin gets spared. She is the very personification of all-consuming devilish hatred.

Personal hate is not always so theatrical in its manifestations. Many of us hate in silence. Either way, however, most of us are intimately familiar with personal hate. It’s built into our cultural heritage, the theme of immortal plays, poems, novels, speeches, songs, and sayings. But what exactly is it?

Historically, many scholars have emphasized hate’s elusive nature, its resistance to analysis or definition. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume argued that hatred is “altogether impossible to define.”1 Similar sentiments were voiced by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the British evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin.2

I am more optimistic about the possibility of a definition of hate. In this chapter, I argue that hate is a complex emotion, built out of the negative emotions: resentment, condemnation, and reprehension. I further argue that disrespect is the component that unites antagonistic emotions such as anger, resentment, indignation, envy, blame, contempt, and hate. But first let’s have a closer look at the nature of the human emotions.

The Human Emotions

Our emotions are among the most culturally celebrated aspects of our mental lives. Countless movies, songs, books, and plays have been named after them, for instance, Gregory Hoblit’s 1996 movie Primal Fear starring Richard Gere; Aretha Franklin’s 1967 signature song “Respect”; Jane Austen’s 1813 romantic novel Pride and Prejudice; and Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—to mention just a few.

Judging by the number of results yielded in a Google search I ran in August 2018, sadness, pride, trust, hate, and love are the most discussed among the human emotions.3 Runners-up include anger, fear, jealousy, grief, regret, and envy. Yet the human emotions encompass such incredibly diverse mental phenomena as enthusiasm, nostalgia, tenderness, homesickness, despair, frustration, heartbreak, boredom, relief, and sympathy.

There are also quite mundane emotions that don’t have a name in English. To be able to talk about them, we need to borrow words from other languages, such as “Schadenfreude,” the German word for the feeling of pleasure directed at someone else’s misfortune; “malu,” the Indonesian word for the feeling of awkwardness around people of higher status; “kaukokaipuu,” the Finnish word for the feeling of longing for a place you have never been to; and “hygge,” the Danish word for the self-reflective feeling of mindfully enjoying yourself in a relaxing moment.4 But even with the help of loan words, countless emotions remain nameless in English and some in all known languages. As the product-scientist character Chase (played by Alan Aisenberg) puts it in the 2018 movie Second Act when asked about his rival: “Look, there are millions of words in the English language but there is no combination that accurately describes the feeling I have of wanting to beat his ass with a chair.”

It’s not just the language of emotions that’s specific to specific cultures, the emotions themselves are also partially constrained and defined by culture. Just as your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t be able to recognize a computational device left behind by a time traveler as a MacBook Pro, so you would not be able to experience jealousy, say, if we humans weren’t in the habit of entering into relationships in which we feel entitled to other people’s love, time, and attention. Without that feeling of entitlement, we wouldn’t experience the threat of loss that defines jealousy.

Our emotions, while often despised, are our most efficient free tool for monitoring and safeguarding our personal or social concerns.5 Although they can, and often do, misfire, they can also guide us in the right direction; they can help us avoid real danger, stand up to bullies, finish an education, restore social imbalance, cut ties with toxic people, make up for past wrongs, heal broken relationships, and recover from the losses of loved ones.

Emotions are not simply bodily feelings, like headaches and back itches. They are special ways of mentally relating to people, events, and objects in the external world. In trade parlance, our mental relations to things outside the mind are also known as “attitudes.” Perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotions are prime examples of attitudes. But only desires and emotional attitudes, or emotions for short, have a significant tie to bodily feelings. We sometimes refer collectively to our emotions as “our feelings,” and when aiming for precision in our portrayal of them, we instinctively enlist the language of touch and bodily sensations, as in this powerful quote from Sarah Addison Allen’s novel The Sugar Queen: “Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation.”6

Emotions do indeed routinely surface as feelings. But the word “feeling” has a plethora of meanings. A friend of mine once related this anecdote to me. During his philosophy of art class, philosophy professor Robert Kraut had asked the class what art is, to which a student responded: “Art is when you feel something.” Kraut instinctively replied, “I feel something when my double chin gets caught in a waffle iron. That doesn’t make it art!”

The pain in your double chin, the feeling of your heart banging against your ribcage, and the sensation of a lump in your throat are bodily feelings, not emotions. You can feel your heart banging against your ribcage if you run really fast, and you can feel a lump in the throat when you have a sore throat.

Attributing your bodily feelings to an external happenstance does not magically transform them into emotions, either. Suppose your throat feels thick, your nose stuffy, and your eyes teary. You initially attribute these bodily feelings to the fact that your kid just spilled bleach on your leather couch, completely ruining it. But you soon realize that you are not upset. You always hated that couch, and now you have an excuse to get rid of it. The bodily feelings—the irritated throat, the stuffy nose, and the tears—are not emotional reactions to your couch being ruined. Rather, they are physical reactions to the strong fumes from the bleach.

For your bodily sensations—the irritated throat, the stuffy nose, and the tears—to have been the embodied aspect of sadness, your brain would have had to interpret the ruined couch as a loss that impacted you negatively, even if only in a small way. Sadness’s tight inverse connection to well-being, or flourishing, is one of its hallmarks. It is this inverse relationship that explains why sadness, as we typically experience it, is an unpleasant emotion. Owing to its ordinary unpleasant character, it’s also said to have a “negative valence.” We can think of an emotion’s negative valence as an embodied protest of what the emotion is about; for example, the negative valence of grief can be seen as an embodied protest of a traumatic loss.

But sadness and grief are not unique in this regard. Other negative emotions work the same way. So do positive emotions, such as joy, excitement, or enthusiasm. Because joy ordinarily is a pleasurable emotion, it is also said to have a “positive valence,” which we can think of as an embodied celebration of the enrichment that brings it about, say the birth of your niece or granddaughter.

How an emotion feels is partially shaped by whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant and partially by its accompanying bodily feelings (if any). Which bodily feelings come to be associated with the different kinds of emotions varies considerably across people, times, and cultures. Sadness, for instance, can feel like a fist reaching inside your torso and brutally ripping out your heart, or it can feel like a tiny sting, as if you had been bitten by a gnat, or it can feel like nothing at all.

When you experience an emotion viscerally, bodily feelings alert you to its presence. For example, if you feel your muscles tense up, your knees become wobbly, and your heart drum against your chest, your brain may interpret this as fear.

Although emotions are closely associated in our minds with bodily feelings, emotions are about what goes on in our body. If you are afraid of contracting Covid-19, this may cause your knees to become wobbly, but surely your fear isn’t about your wobbly knees; it’s about a possible future event, namely that of contracting the novel coronavirus. All our emotions are about things or events that appear to be external to us or separate from us. Even when our emotions are about the mind or body (e.g., anxiety about a growth in your armpit, frustration about your recurrent headache, or happiness about your infant meeting the expected milestones, the things or events these emotions are about are typically experienced as separate from us.

The aboutness, or intentionality, of emotions plays a key role in their classification. Indeed, the different types of emotions are about different types of things or events. Anger is about an apparent wrongdoing or injustice, say, being a victim of identity theft or being paid less than your coworkers merely because of your gender or ethnicity. The thing or event that appears to have triggered the emotion is also known as the focus of concern, or focus for short.

There is a growing consensus among emotion researchers that while paradigm cases of emotions are couples with bodily feeling, emotions often occur in the absence of bodily feelings, especially purely intellectual emotions such as intellectual doubt sympathy (e.g., being sympathetic to a certain political theory), (e.g., doubt about the truth of a premise), endorsement (e.g., endorsing a particular philosophical view.)

But it’s not just intellectual emotions that may lack a bodily component. Your frustration when you realize you forgot your laptop as you are backing out of your driveway need not bring about any noticeable physiological response. Emotions that lack a bodily component are akin to evaluative perception, for instance, a diamond watch looking expensive, a rollercoaster ride sounding scary, or a soccer player’s stunt to secure a penalty kick seeming unfair.7

Emotions can also hide in the unconscious corners of the mind. This is another way in which emotions differ from bodily feelings: you can be angry yet not be consciously aware of it. But you cannot have a tummy ache, sore muscles, or an itchy mosquito bite without being consciously aware of it. If you are not aware that you are sore or itchy, then you are not sore or itchy. End of story.

Imagine otherwise:

“You’re in pain,” your doc says after examining the images from your brain scan.

“But I don’t feel any pain,” you reply, perplexed.

Your doc writes some mysterious symbols on a piece of paper and hands it to you. “Here is a script for morphine. Take two capsules twice a day until our next appointment.”

Bewildered, you grab the prescription but stealthily drop it in the trash can on your way out.

Although the brain can process information about physical and emotional damage in the absence of consciousness, the notion of unconscious pain is a contradiction in terms. The notion of an unconscious emotion is not. When we hold on to, say, sadness or anger for a long time, we are consciously aware of it only intermittently. For example, if you are angry at someone for a long time, your anger may be lurking mostly below the level of conscious awareness, and when it finally makes itself fully consciously present, it may no longer seize you with the visceral fervor it once did.

All emotions can go under the radar in this way, even those most closely associated in our minds with conscious feelings, such as love and grief. Even when an emotion operates mostly below the radar of consciousness, it can nonetheless pop up and say hello when you least expect it. Trauma, for example, remains mostly hidden below the surface until a trigger yanks it out of hiding. Even when old scars are hermetically sealed off from conscious awareness, they tend to leave a stain on how we behave. For example, trauma is often an automatic trigger of avoidance behavior.

Target versus Focus

As we have seen, emotions are directed at things or events we perceive to be external to us. This outward directedness of a mental state is also known as “intentionality.” It is their intentionality that sets emotions apart from moods. Unlike emotions, moods are not about a particular thing or event. If you are in a depressed mood, it may feel like the whole world is against you, but moods and mood disorders are not about anything in particular. This distinction between moods and emotions is not always reflected in the language we use to talk about them. If you say that you are depressed, you could mean that you have a depressed mood or that you are depressed about an unpleasable situation or event, for instance, graduating without a traditional graduation ceremony. When “depressed” is used in this latter sense, your depressed state is not a mood or mood disorder but an emotion.

An emotion’s focus—a notion we encountered earlier—should be kept distinct from its target.8 If you are angry at your neighbor for not trimming her side of the hedge, then the target of your anger is your neighbor. She is the one you are angry at. She is the one you hold responsible for the hedge being untrimmed to the point of tipping over.

But your anger is not about your neighbor; it’s about her failure to trim the hedge, which is your shared responsibility. It’s what the target has done, or rather hasn’t done, that’s the focus of concern of your anger. Your neighbor’s failure to trim the hedge is the focus of concern of your anger. It’s what concerns (or bothers) you. If we want to inform others that we are angry, several options are available to us: we can simply say that we are angry without revealing whom we are angry with or why we are angry. But we also have the option of explicitly mentioning the target of our anger but not the focus of concern, or vice versa. “I am so mad at you,” for example, explicitly names the target of the anger but not its focus of concern, and “Americans are angry about facemasks” explicitly mentions the focus of concern but not the target.

All instances of a given emotion type, be it anger, fear, or sadness, have the same type of focus of concern. This is what makes it an emotion of that particular type. For an emotion to be anger, its focus must be a perceived injustice or wrongdoing though not necessarily a moral wrongdoing, like cheating, lying, or stealing. Sometimes we get angry with people who transgress epistemic norms, aesthetic norms, or cultural norms like the norms governing professional soccer. If, for example, Cristiano Ronaldo deliberately threw himself to the ground to secure a penalty kick, this is almost guaranteed to anger members of the competing team.

All emotions have a focus. Some have two. For example, one focus of hate is the targeted person’s alleged misdeed; a second is their sinister, or evil, character. We return to hate later in this chapter.

While all emotions have a focus, not all have a target. The focus of sadness is a perceived loss. If you are sad because your best friend, Morgan, no longer lives close to you, the focus of your sadness is the loss of Morgan’s proximity to you. But your sadness doesn’t have a target who can (reasonably) be held accountable for your sadness. Even if you were to hold Morgan’s boyfriend Jake accountable for her move, he is not the target of your sadness.9

Complex Emotions

Emotion researchers commonly distinguish between basic and non-basic emotions. The distinction was coined by evolutionary psychologist Paul Ekman, who achieved international recognition for his “atlas of emotions,” a compendium of more than ten thousand emotion-induced facial expressions. Ekman’s basic emotions, which he took to be biologically “hard-wired,” encompass joy, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and contempt.10 Ekman labeled these seven emotions as basic because they are marked by unique facial expressions that can be found across almost all cultures. For example, when your eyes are wide open, causing wrinkles on the forehead, and your lips are stretched horizontally, people across different cultures will be able to recognize this as an expression of fear. Similarly, when one lip corner is curled upward, producing a distinctly derisive or sardonic smile or sneer, people across different cultures will be able to recognize this as an expression of contempt.

While the basic emotions have unique facial expressions that can be recognized by people pan-culturally, there are many other ways basic emotions can be expressed. The expressions of two distinct basic emotions can even be almost indistinguishable. For example, we sometimes cry when we are happy, smile when we are angry, and laugh when we are nervous. Psychologist Oriana Aragón and her colleagues found that when we are in the grip of an overwhelming emotion, dissonance in how it’s expressed can lower its intensity and help us regain control.11 Dissonant emotional expressions are not ubiquitous, however, but vary substantially cross-culturally, which lends support to the thesis that the culture we live in shape both our emotions and their expressions.12

Unlike basic emotions, non-basic emotions such as hate, envy, jealousy, grief, trust, nostalgia, and loneliness are not expressed in a unique or ubiquitous way. Grief is a paradigm example of a non-basic emotion that is conceptualized and expressed differently cross-culturally. As emotions are categorized on the basis of their focus, they have the same focus across all cultures, which in the case of grief is traumatic loss. In spite of the fact that traumatic loss is the focus of grief across all cultures, grief isn’t the same everywhere. Culture shapes what types of loss are perceived as traumatic, how people interpret the concept of a traumatic loss, and how they react to it. For example, in orthodox Islamic cultures, it is permissible for a man to request a divorce but according to orthodox teachings, divorce is the “most despised of permissible acts by God” and can therefore be more traumatic than death.13 Grief is also displayed differently cross-culturally.14 Grand emotional displays of grief, for example, are frowned upon in some cultures but encouraged in others. In European Catholic and Protestant traditions, it’s customary for people to grieve quietly and stoically, whereas African, Caribbean, and Islamic cultures encourage showing grief openly, for example, by crying loudly.15 Finally, the norms for the proper conduct of funerals and burials as well as for proper mourning and memorialization varies considerably cross different cultures.

Even within a single culture, grief is not associated with a unique facial or other bodily expression. According to the Kübler-Ross model of grief, also known as the “five stages of grief,” first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, grief involves five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance.16 After the loss of a loved one, for example, you may first deny that the person is gone, simply refuse to believe it. Once the truth dawns on you, you may feel outraged and attempt to convince your beloved to come back or beg God or the universe’s spirits to reverse their decision. Once you realize things are not going to change, sadness may set in. You may experience an unbearable visceral yearning for the absent person or the irretrievable relationship. Over time, you may finally accept the loss. These stages need not occur in this order, and each stage may occur several times or not at all. The different emotional stages can also overlap. After an unwanted breakup, you may both be angry at your ex and try to bargain with them, or you may both ferociously deny the loss of the relationship and still cry all day long. Because of the complexity and its cultural and individual variability, grief is not associated with a unique, let alone ubiquitous, facial or other bodily expression.

The basic emotions, in Ekman’s sense, should not be confused with what we can call the “simple emotions.” Simple emotions are not composed of other emotions. Complex emotions, by contrast, have other emotions and attitudes as parts. Resentment, disappointment, regret, jealousy, and grief are examples of complex emotions. Resentment, for example, is composed of blame and anger, and disappointment is thwarted expectations coupled with low levels of sadness.

Which emotions are simple is still up for debate. One suggestion is that all and only the basic emotions are simple. However, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. As philosopher Jesse Prinz has argued, at least some of Ekman’s basic, or “universally recognizable,” emotions are complex. Surprise, for example, can be divided into a positive sense of interest or wonder and a low level of panic, and anger can be analyzed as aggression combined with goal frustration.17

Contempt, which Ekman classified as a basic emotion some years after he created his original list, also fails to qualify as simple.18 Psychologists have argued that contempt is anger coupled with disgust, citing the evidence that contempt’s characteristic facial expression partially overlaps with the characteristic facial expressions of anger and disgust. 19 However, the cited evidence is lending equal support for contempt as a blend of disgust and condemnation. I develop this idea later in this chapter.

The Antagonistic Emotions

Let’s now turn to what I call the “antagonistic emotions.” They include emotions like blame, anger, resentment, indignation, envy, disrespect, disgust, contempt, and hatred. This list is not exhaustive. Emotions such as annoyance, vengefulness, and schadenfreude are also antagonistic. But the emotions on the former list are the ones that are most relevant to the analysis of hate.

The antagonistic emotions target people or groups. Not all forms of anger and disgust are antagonistic, but garden-variety anger and disgust are directed at people or groups. Most antagonistic emotions have a negative valence, which means that we associate them with displeasure.20 Anger, disgust, hate, and contempt are examples of unpleasant antagonistic emotions. But there are also pleasant ones, emotions with a positive valence. Schadenfreude, which is pleasure in response to another person’s misfortune, is a prime example.

Three key features set the unpleasant antagonistic emotions apart from other emotions (with one exception). One is that they are reactions to the target’s perceived offensive behavior or practices. For example, if you despise Gwyneth Paltrow for her pretentious health advice, you regard her advice as offensive, and your emotional state is a reaction to that.21

A second hallmark of the unpleasant antagonistic emotions is that, with the exception of disgust, they present their target as blameworthy, where blameworthiness requires accountability and the absence of a legitimate excuse. As we will see below, if we find person’s behavior or appearance appalling, this need not involve an attribution of blame. In fact, it need not even involve an attribution of accountability. But the other unpleasant antagonistic emotions attribute blame to the target. If, for example, you resent a school bully who calls you ugly names, your resentment involves an attribution of blame.

The third hallmark of the antagonistic emotions is that they all have disrespect as a component, which is tied to their inherently socially comparative nature. Contempt and hate stand out from anger and resentment by involving disrespect for the target for her character traits and not just her actions. For example, if you disrespect Bruce Willis for demanding over-the-top remuneration for a particular film role, then the focus of your disrespect is his action. If, on the other hand, you disrespect him for demanding over-the-top remuneration for all his film roles, then the focus of your disrespect may be his character traits rather than just his action.

Let’s now have a closer look at the subset of the antagonistic emotions that lie at the heart of the analysis of hate: anger, resentment, indignation, envy, blame, disrespect, and contempt.

Frustration versus Antagonistic Anger

While anger is perhaps the best example of an antagonistic emotion, anger need not be antagonistic. For example, you may feel angry about how things have turned out for you, yet not hold anyone responsible for your misfortune. Imagine you are incredibly busy at work when your child’s teacher calls you to request that you pick up your son who has come down with a fever. As you get off the call, you seethe with anger, yet you are not angry at the teacher. Nor are you angry at your son. You just feel angry. This is an example of targetless anger, or what we call “frustration.” It’s this kind of anger that causes children to throw temper tantrums in grocery stores and adults to kick vending machines that won’t deliver. (“Venting machine” may be a more fitting term.)

We also sometimes experience targetless anger when grieving a traumatic loss. For example, you may feel angry about the traumatic loss of your spouse without being angry at him or at anyone else. In the envisaged case, your anger is a kind of protest against the unfair turn of events.

Unlike targetless anger, antagonistic anger is tied to accountability and blame. If you are angry at someone for something they did, you hold them accountable for what they did and blame them accordingly. Imagine again that your son’s teacher calls you to tell you to pick up your feverish kid on an insanely busy day. You know rationally that it’s not the teacher’s fault. But you nonetheless lay it on her. In this case, your anger is antagonistic. By directing your anger at the teacher, you thereby hold her responsible and blame her for you falling even further behind.22 In its more sinister form, antagonistic anger is also known as “rage” or “wrath.”

Resentment, Indignation, and Envy

Resentment and indignation are species of simple anger. Like anger, they involve a presumed injustice. Resentment and indignation tend to last much longer than a brief fit of anger. They can linger for weeks or months on end, perhaps even years—staying mostly hidden under the flimsy veil of consciousness, but occasionally checking in with you.

In resentment and indignation, we react to a perceived injustice.23 In resentment, we perceive the injustice as personal, that is, it’s an injustice done to us. Indignation, or what is sometimes called “outrage,” is the vicarious analogue of resentment. When you are indignant, what concerns you is an injustice done to someone else—perhaps a social injustice. For example, you may feel indignation upon learning that the board of trustees of a company approved a fifty-percent raise for its CEO—despite recently letting two hundred of its workers go.

Resentment is closely related to envy. Envy is a reaction to feeling shortchanged. In envy, we resent the envied for a possession or advantage we wish we had. Suppose you envy your coworker for getting a promotion you hoped to get. Here, you resent your coworker for being promoted instead of you.

Philosophers sometimes distinguish between benign and malicious envy. Benign envy is said to be focused on the envier’s perceived disadvantage, whereas malicious envy is focused on the envied’s seeming advantage.24 Unlike malicious envy, benign envy is supposed to be morally praiseworthy, because it motivates the envier to take steps to get to where the envied is. However, I don’t think the comparative emotion that can motivate us to work harder is envy in its distilled form. Rather, it seems to be competitiveness or zeal. In any event, I will set aside the use of “envy” as a term denoting a positive emotion.

Envy implies that the envier perceives herself as at least as deserving of the advantage or possession as the envied. For example, if you envy your coworker for getting the promotion you were hoping to get, then you think you deserve it at least as much as he does. This aspect of envy is sometimes said to be based on the envier’s perception of similarity between the envier and the envied.25 There is a sense in which that is true. You are probably more inclined to envy a coworker who works the same job as you than you are to envy the CEO of the company. But you might envy the CEO of the company simply because you resent her for being able to afford a Lamborghini and live in a big mansion when you barely can make ends meet. Likewise, we are prone to envy celebrities and extraordinarily successful, wealthy, beautiful, or smart people. You may be more keenly aware of feeling delight at their downfall than feeling envious of them. But being delighted by someone else’s misfortune, or what is also known as schadenfreude, is an emotional reaction to the failings of someone we resent, envy, or hate. As philosopher Sara Protasi has pointed out, envy can occur even when it wouldn’t be possible for the envier to obtain the envied possession or advantage.26 For example, if you are infertile, you may well envy people who have their own biological children, even though you can’t obtain the envied good.

In common parlance, “jealousy” is often used synonymously with “envy.” But they are in fact distinct emotions.27 Whereas envy is a reaction to someone else’s perceived unfair advantage or possession, jealousy is a reaction to the perceived threat of losing someone you already “possess” in some sense—usually a person with whom you have a special relationship—to a third party. The two emotions are core themes in William Shakespeare’s play Othello. Envious of Othello’s possessions and success, Iago manipulates Othello into believing that his wife, Desdemona, is having an affair with his friend Cassio. When Othello finds out, he becomes sick with jealousy and murders Desdemona, and then kills himself.

Envy as portrayed in Othello is closely related to what philosophers call “ressentiment.” The term originates with the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, but it was made famous by the nineteenth-century literary philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.28 Sometimes translated as “resentment,” the term’s original French spelling is usually left intact to mark its distinctive meaning. As Nietzsche was using the term, ressentiment is an unpleasant reaction to a perceived lowly or declining social status that prompts a retaliatory attitude toward those perceived as more powerful. As we will see, resentment, ressentiment, envy, and hate are closely related. Resentment is a component of both envy and hate (although hate can also have indignation as a component). Retaliatory hatred is furthermore often fueled by envy, typically envy that motivates the envier to lash out at the envied by harming them in some way, for instance, by destroying the good that is “unfairly” in their possession. This is what Protasi calls “spiteful envy.” Philosopher Robert Solomon sums up the thoughts of the spiteful envier as: “If I can’t have it, no one will.”29 Spiteful envy is the kind of envy that most closely resembles ressentiment, and it’s envy of this kind that is thematized in Shakespeare’s Othello.

Envy is rarely a rational emotion. This is because envy’s target is not typically at fault for having what the envier wants. Envy is a kind of misplaced resentment. But it can be rational on the rare occasions where the envied is responsible for having the possession or advantage you wish you had. If you envy your coworker for getting the promotion you had hoped for, and you happen to know he was promoted because he slept with the boss, your envy is rational, as long as it’s not spiteful.30 We will revisit the question of the rationality of the antagonistic emotions in Chapter 3.

Emotional Blame

The word “blame” is commonly used to refer to the speech act of criticizing someone else, whether it’s done calmly or by screaming or shouting. But verbal criticism is merely a vehicle for expressing blame. When we verbally criticize others, we verbally express a negative emotional reaction to them. But we can blame a person without expressing it, as can be seen from the coherence of saying things like “I still blame my wife for her betrayal, even though I never told her that.”

Private, or unexpressed, blame can be directed toward people we are not in a position to verbally criticize because they are dead or too far away for us to do so, or because we don’t know them, such as when we blame Hitler or Stalin or point the finger of blame at the parents of obese children.

While we blame people who are incapable of feeling remorse, such as psychopaths. We sometimes use verbal criticism, or scolding, to correct the behavior of children, but this is a far cry from actually blaming them. The same goes for mentally disabled people who lack the concept of moral wrongdoing and people in the grip of a hallucination or delusion that causes them to regard their misconduct as an act of goodwill or self-defense.

When you blame someone, you hold them responsible, or accountable, for their actions or the foreseeable consequences of those actions. But blame is not merely an attribution of responsibility. You can hold people responsible for their actions or the foreseeable consequences of those actions and yet not blame them. If your child commits a crime, you may take her to be responsible for that crime, yet not have it in you to blame her.

But what is blame over and above a perception of someone’s guilt? Philosopher Thomas Scanlon has argued that to blame someone is to take her to manifest a relationship-impairing attitude and to acknowledge that this gives you reasons to adjust your attitudes toward the relationship in light of this impairment, above all your intentions and expectations. Scanlon recognizes that when we blame people, we might also feel resentment or indignation. But, he says, “this is not required for blame, in my view—I might just feel sad.”31

A commonly voiced objection to Scanlon’s account is that it doesn’t seem to apply to our fleeting relationships with strangers.32 If a stranger steals your purse while you are sightseeing in a foreign city, and you never see them again, no past, present, or future relationship is impaired. Yet you may still blame them for stealing your purse. Similarly, if your sister is murdered by a stranger who is never caught, the killer didn’t impair your relationship, as you never did and never will have any kind of relationship with the murderer. Yet you still blame them.

This is not a knock-down objection to Scanlon’s view, however. Although you don’t have a personal relationship with the thief or the killer, the two of you do have a social relationship. You are part of the same moral community, and therefore reasonably hold each other to certain expectations. For example, you can hold others to the expectation that we don’t steal from each other or kill each other. Because the thief and the killer violated those expectations, it is reasonable for you to take them to manifest a relationship-impairing attitude and to acknowledge that this gives you reasons to adjust your attitudes toward your relationship in light of this impairment. This is so regardless of your level of acquaintance with them. So, I don’t think this objection presents a real challenge for Scanlon’s account.

My concern with his account is that it doesn’t generalize to all forms of blame. For example, we routinely blame people for possessing attributes we happen to disfavor—attributes such as excessive pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth, jealousy, cowardice, emotional instability, grumpiness, pessimism, obesity, poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, procrastination, impatience, incompetence, impulsivity, gullibility, ignorance, and so on. The first seven of these even enjoy a special status as the seven deadly sins.

Despite blaming people for possessing features we disfavor, we far from always take them to manifest a relationship-impairing attitude by virtue of possessing these features. In many cases, it would be utterly absurd to do so. If, for example, you were to blame your friend for becoming obese, it is highly unlikely that you would take her obesity to reflect a friendship-impairing attitude. Even if you blame her for having gained weight, it would be ludicrous for you to take her to have done so out of a lack of concern for your friendship.

How then should we understand blame? An alternative to Scanlon’s proposal is to understand the emotion as a kind of inner protest. An account along those lines has been developed at length by philosopher Angela Smith. Blame, she argues, is inner protest of a moral imbalance the wrongdoer has created.33 If someone harms you intentionally or recklessly, they are acting arrogantly. Their act implicitly conveys that they think that they are morally superior to you, and that they therefore have the right to treat you as they wish without fear of repercussion or backlash. They are falsely claiming that you are “low” and therefore don’t deserve to be treated with decency and respect. Philosopher Pamela Hieronymi puts this latter point as follows:

I suggest that a past wrong against you, standing in your history without apology, atonement, retribution, punishment, restitution, condemnation, or anything else that might recognize it as a wrong, makes a claim. It says, in effect, that you can be treated in this way, and that such treatment is acceptable.34

The point is this. If someone harms you with specific intent or reckless disregard for your rights, then their action reflects that they falsely assume that your human rights don’t really matter in the circumstances. This false assumption, Smith argues, calls for a response that can help set things right. You can set things rights by blaming the perpetrator and thereby protesting their false assumption. If your blame is not outwardly expressed, the inner feeling of protest can nonetheless help correct the offender’s faulty assumption in your own mind. Even when there is no “true” justice to be had, at least there is the blame.

If you convey your blame to your assailant, this may inspire them to acknowledge that they made a false assumption about your rightful treatment. They can express their faux pas by apologizing. In less severe cases this may suffice to nullify the reason you initially had for blaming them. Even if they apologize, they are still responsible for what they did, but they may no longer be deserving of blame. In more serious cases, atonement or restitution may be needed to set things right. Perhaps there are also cases where nothing can make up for what has already gone down.

I am sympathetic to Smith’s proposal that protesting the aggressor’s false assumption about the victim’s rights can help set things right. However, her proposal fails for much the same reason that Scanlon’s does: it doesn’t generalize to all instances of blame. If you blame your obese friend for her weight gain, it would be ludicrous for you to regard the actions that led to her weight gain as conveying false information about your rightful treatment.

To be fair, neither Scanlon nor Smith is in the business of providing a general account of blame. But it is highly unlikely that “blame” expresses one concept when used to refer to a negative attitude toward a person who has injured you and another concept when used to refer to a negative attitude toward someone who is, say, obese, poor, or addicted to drugs. Fortunately, we don’t need to posit ambiguity. In the subsequent section I propose a unified account of blame based on the notion of disrespect, but first let’s have a closer look at the different meanings of “respect” and “disrespect.”

Blame as Disrespect

According to a poll conducted by Gallup in 1999, the three people who enjoyed the greatest respect in America in the twentieth century were Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy.35

What exactly do we mean by respect? In his 1977 seminal essay “Two Kinds of Respect” philosopher Stephen Darwall distinguishes between two kinds of respect: appraisal respect and recognition respect. Appraisal respect is so called because it involves a positive appraisal of a person for her moral excellence on the whole or her excellence as engaged in a specific pursuit (e.g., taking the SATs or serving as an eyewitness) or a type of pursuit (e.g., parenting, teaching, or cooking).36

The appraisal respect Americans had for Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy in 1999 is a positive appraisal of these public personas for their moral excellence overall. When appraisal respect is directed at someone for her overall moral excellence, our attitude can also be thought of as a kind of profound awe. Americans revere Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy.

While the appraisal respect we have for outstanding public personas tends to be based on their overall moral performance, whether we regard someone as worthy of appraisal respect typically depends on how they perform in a specific pursuit or type of pursuit, for example, as a commencement speaker at the University of Miami’s fall 2017 commencement ceremonies, a tennis player at the 2018 Summer Youth Olympic Games, or a leading actress in the 2019 Broadway play Moulin Rouge. When appraisal respect is directed at someone for her performance in a specific pursuit or type of pursuit, our attitude is not one of profound awe but rather one of admiration, or holding in high esteem.

The focus of appraisal respect is the target’s conduct on the whole or as engaged in a specific pursuit. What it takes to earn respect within a specific pursuit depends on whatever standards are held to be appropriate to that pursuit. Even in pursuits that depend heavily on the mastery of certain skills, the actions relevant to whether the person is deserving of respect often go beyond the mere display of mastery of the skill, as it does in the case of Darwall’s boisterous tennis player. While the player is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, he is not widely respected by his fellows, as he “constantly heckles his opponent, disputes every close call to throw off his opponent's concentration, [and] laughs when his opponent misses a shot.”37

Even when demonstrating mastery of a skill is necessary for earning people’s respect, displays of bad character during the pursuit can thus cancels out even perfect mastery of the skill. But appraisal respect in a specific pursuit typically doesn’t require excellence of character. A tennis player judged to one of the best players in the world can be a little bit out of line character-wise without thereby losing his fans’ respect for him as a tennis player.

Darwall contrasts appraisal respect with a rather different kind of respect, which he calls “recognition respect.” This is the kind of respect all people are owed, irrespective of their specific virtues, sentiments, attitudes, or choices. In other words, recognition respect does not involve an appraisal of a person on the basis of their achievements.38 As the label suggests, to have recognition respect for another person is to recognize their inherent worth, where recognizing a person’s inherent worth implies treating them with a minimum of decency. Because all people have inherent worth, all people are entitled to recognition respect, regardless of their normative standing.39

The idea that all people are entitled to be recognized as worthy of respect lies at the heart of Kant’s moral philosophy.40 According to Kant, it is morally wrong to treat people merely as a means to an end, because all people have dignity, where “dignity” is the word used as a translation of Kant’s term “die Würde” (the worth). Morality demands that we respect all people as dignified individuals, which requires respecting their fundamental human rights, such as the rights to self-govern, make autonomous decisions, and keep sensitive personal information private.41 It is respect in this sense that Darwall calls “recognition respect.”

Where appraisal respect is a matter of degree—you may respect both Eddy Murphy and Jerry Seinfeld as comedians but have greater respect for Murphy than Seinfeld—recognition respect is an on-or-off matter. In this regard, respecting others is like passing a driving test. You cannot pass it a little or a lot. You either pass, or you don’t. Similarly, you either treat a person with the respect owed to all people, or you don’t. There is no middle ground. This is not to say that depravity is not a matter of degree, but only that a withdrawal of some but not all of your recognition respect in response to “middle of the road” depravity isn’t an option.

There are other kinds of respect besides appraisal and recognition respect. In a short note of 1973, Joel Feinberg calls attention to a third kind of respect, which is the kind of respect we have in mind when we say things like “My fear of the sea turned into respect,” “My sister’s accident taught me to have respect for all guns, even BB guns,” or “Your class has given me a renewed respect for the dangers of binge drinking.”42 When making such statements, we are not saying that we are holding the sea, guns, or binge drinking in high esteem, or that we recognize their inherent dignity. Rather, the respect we have for, say, the sea is a watchful or apprehensive appreciation of its perceived power or danger. To emphasize the fear component, I shall refer to it as “apprehensive respect,” or just “apprehension.”

Apprehensive respect isn’t just directed at non-human entities, such as the sea, guns or viruses. We often have apprehensive respect for people we perceive to be powerful or dominant. In the words of Feinberg, we express our apprehensive respect for people “by trying to avoid arousing their enmity, or by attempting to placate them once they are aroused, or by arming ourselves and treading cautiously.”43 An illuminating example of how apprehensive respect comes apart from appraisal respect can be seen in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck Finn seems to respect his father out of fear but disrespect him for the drunken, weak man that he is.44 As we will see, apprehensive respect is a central component of hatred.

Let’s move on to disrespect, the component that unifies the antagonistic emotions. Disrespect is not simply an absence of respect. If you have never heard of a person, you don’t respect her, because you can’t. Nor do you disrespect her. But you may also lack both respect and disrespect for people you inadvertently take no notice of or don’t presently interact with. This is what the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith was alluding to when he wrote, “To be overlooked, and to be disapproved, are things entirely different.”45 If you overlook or unintentionally ignore a person, then you have neither respect nor disrespect for them. Disrespect is therefore not the absence of respect but an emotional attitude in its own right.

The three kinds of respect identified above correspond to three kinds of disrespect, which I will call “critical disrespect,” “dehumanizing disrespect,” and “hubris.” Critical disrespect is so called because it involves a negative appraisal of a person for their questionable conduct. Consonant with the definition of appraisal respect, we can define “critical disrespect” as an emotional disapproval of people who have revealed themselves as profoundly morally despicable or as unskilled or detestable participants in a specific pursuit or type of pursuit. The critical disrespect we have for Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, or Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd in May, 2020 is a negative appraisal of them for their profound moral despicability.

While the critical disrespect we have for despicable public personas can be based on their moral performance, whether we regard someone as deserving of critical disrespect is more likely to depend on how they perform in a specific pursuit or type of pursuit, for example, how they perform as a film producer, scientist, or participant in the 2019 Boston marathon. Marc Hauser, a former Harvard University psychologist who fabricated and falsified data and made false statements about experimental methods in six federally funded studies,46 is deserving of critical disrespect as an evolutionary biologist, though not necessarily as a father or a tennis player.

As for the case of appraisal respect, what it takes for a person to be deserving of critical disrespect within a specific pursuit or kind of pursuit depends on what standards are held to be appropriate to that pursuit. Even in pursuits that depend greatly on the mastery of certain practical skills, people may be deserving of critical disrespect despite mastering all relevant practical skills to perfection, as in the case of Darwall’s boisterous tennis player who falls short of meeting the standards of the profession. Poor mastery of a skill can, of course, also elicit critical disrespect, especially if the failing or mess up reflects partial responsibility for not mastering the skill on the part of the agent.

The second form of disrespect, dehumanizing disrespect, is an entirely different creature. To have dehumanizing disrespect for someone is to regard them as lacking the inherent worth that entitles them to be treated with respect. To disrespect a person in this sense is to treat them as subhuman, or a “nonentity,” whose sole purpose is to serve “real” people.

A “nonentity.” This is the term forty-four-year-old Sara Packer used to describe her fourteen-year-old daughter who became a pawn in Packer and her boyfriend’s rape-murder fantasy.47 In an emotionless tone of voice, Packer testified to the court in March 2019 that she had gazed into her daughter’s eyes while the girl was being choked to death, telling her “it was okay to go.” Packer didn’t merely hold her daughter in disesteem, she regarded her as a mere tool for satisfying her and her boyfriend’s sadistic sexual desires.

The third form of disrespect, hubris, is an act of fearless overconfidence that betrays a foolish lack of apprehensive respect, often found alongside contempt for the advice of others. If you hold professional fireworks in your hand and light them as a way of showing off to your buddies, then you are displaying a particularly foolish form of disrespect for the dangers of explosive objects, a paradigm example of hubris. In ancient Greek mythology, hubris was an act of arrogance before the Gods, which was avenged by Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution.48

Let’s turn now to the promised account of blame in terms of disrespect. To emotionally blame a person for an action is to hold her responsible for her conduct and convey (even if only to yourself) that you disrespect her for performing an action you disapprove of. If, for example, you blame your friend for becoming obese, you hold her responsible for the excessive weight gain and disrespect her for, say, eating too much and moving too little.

Although blame can involve dehumanizing disrespect, I suspect that when we blame people for what they have done rather than for who they are, the blame is more likely to be critical than dehumanizing. Conversely, when we blame people for who they are rather than for what they have done, the blame is more likely to be dehumanizing. I will refer to the blame we direct at people for their flawed character as “condemnation.” To condemn a person for their flawed character is to disrespect them for cultivating or failing to unlearn the corresponding bad “habits,” to borrow a term from Aristotle.

In his book In Praise of Blame philosopher George Sher argues that people don’t deserve blame for their bad traits because it makes no sense to hold them responsible for being the kind of person they are.49 Although this is probably true for some narrowly defined traits, I am doubtful that it is true in general. The reason that it makes sense to hold people responsible for their character traits is that character traits can be cultivated through practice, as Aristotle argued, that is, the degree to which we possess a particular virtue or vice depends on how we choose to act across a range of different circumstances. To illustrate, consider a trait like being funny, or what Aristotle called “wittiness” (eutrapelia). The sheer amount of online advice on how to be funny suggests that it is largely up to you whether or not you choose to cultivate wittiness, which is to say, it makes sense to hold you responsible for lacking wit. That said, we often blame people for traits or conditions that they are not responsible for. Fat shaming, which is fueled by blame and disgust, is a case in point. Obesity is probably rarely (if ever) the result of “deadly sins” like sloth and gluttony. Mounting evidence suggests that the culprit in obesity and comorbidities like insulin resistance and high blood glucose is chronic low-grade inflammation that has an environmental source.50 But if obesity is due to factors beyond our control, blame directed at obese people is misplaced, as it rests on a false assumption about the cause of obesity.

The proposed account of blame in terms of disrespect seems more readily applicable to both moral and non-moral blame than the theories advanced by Scanlon and Smith. Scanlon, recall, holds that to blame someone is to take them to manifest relationship-impairing attitudes and acknowledge that this gives you reasons to adjust your attitudes toward the relationship in light of this impairment. This account works well to explain what it means to blame, say, a friend for betraying you. By betraying you, your friend manifested friendship-impairing attitudes and this gives you reasons to adjust your attitudes toward the relationship, for example, by changing your willingness to trust your friend. But if you blame a friend for not being able to hold up a job due to her tendency to procrastinate, you are unlikely to take your friend’s procrastination on the job to be impairing your friendship. After all, they may not have any bearing on your interests. Similar remarks apply to Smith’s account of blame as a protest of the message conveyed by the target’s actions to the effect that you are inferior to him, and that his actions therefore were justified. This proposal works well for the case of moral blame. If a friend betrays you, her act of betrayal does indeed seem to convey that you mean “nothing” to her. But it would be ludicrous for you to take your friend’s inclination to procrastinate on the job to imply that you don’t mean much to her. So, Scanlon’s and Smith’s proposals both appear to be limited in their scope.

The proposed account of blame as disrespect seems better suited as a unified treatment of all the different varieties of blame. If your friend can’t hold down a job, you may blame her for underperforming on the job, even if her failures have no effect on your friendship. If, however, your friend’s poor job performance doesn’t change your friendship, then it would be ludicrous for you to take it to convey false information about your worth or to constitute evidence that your friend’s attitude toward your friendship is a destructive one. It is far more plausible that your blame of your friend for habitually procrastinating on the job is a form of disrespect. Disrespecting her in this regard is consistent with simultaneously respecting her for, say, her dependability and kindness as your friend.

This approach to blame has the advantage that it yields the same predictions as Scanlon and Smith’s accounts in the relevant scenarios. It implies that when you blame a friend for, say, betraying you, then you also have reasons to change your attitudes toward your relationship. In this sort of scenario, disrespecting your friend for betraying you is a way of objecting to her treatment of you. So, the blame helps to repudiate a false assumption about your relative status, as suggested by Smith.

As we will see, disrespect is not merely a central component of blame. It’s an integral part of antagonistic emotions like anger, resentment, indignation, contempt, and hate.

Primitive Disgust

Most of us naturally react with disgust to bodily excretions and skin growths, such as warts, cold sores, abscesses, urine, feces, saliva, pus, mucus, dandruff, phlegm, ear wax, vomit, snot, sweat, semen, and menstruation. Tears, a bodily excretion, are a peculiar exception. Tears can be delightful in a way that snot cannot. Seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, or tasting what we believe are bodily excretions typically triggers a distinctive visceral response that can be followed by vomiting, regurgitation, dry heaves, nausea, or a wrinkled nose.

Other common triggers of disgust include smelly, decaying, sticky, or slimy-looking entities such as cockroaches, slugs, maggots, lice, fungus, toxic green algae, open wounds, rotten meat, and corpses.

Our natural disgust reaction to bodily excretions and smelly, decaying, sticky, or slimy-looking entities is an involuntary reflex akin to a knee-jerk reaction in response to a doctor’s hammer. Call disgust that elicits a “yuck” reflex of this kind “primitive disgust.”

Primitive disgust is likely to have evolved as a biological mechanism that once assisted in keeping our ancestors away from pathogens and infections. But this picture is not an accurate description of primitive disgust in humans today.

Disgust in response to open wounds, warts, snot, vomit, and blood can be found across most cultures in the world. But the ubiquity of disgust is the exception, not the rule. In his classic book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin noted that what people find disgusting varies substantially from culture to culture. Recalling an incident on his expedition to South America, Darwin observed:

In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.51

What we find disgusting can vary tremendously from culture to culture, even when the cultures are not light years apart. I grew up in Denmark, a short boat ride away from Sweden. Yet I continue to be baffled by the Swedes’ love of decaying herring, or what they call surströmming. It smells like a cocktail of rotten eggs, sour milk, open sewer, and fish that has gone bad (with a twist of skunk). In other words, it stinks! Its stench, should you happen to get any of the brine on you, will linger for days, making you feel like your nose hairs are being pulled out with tweezers. Even dogs have been seen projectile-vomiting when exposed to its smell.52 There is a reason surströmming is banned in most apartment complexes and almost never is served at restaurants. Yet the Swedes consider it a delicacy.

The cultural variation in what we find disgusting suggests that disgust, even in its primitive form, need not be (or have been) evolutionarily advantageous. Rather, it’s probably to a large extent the result of cultural influence. This point lies at the center of political philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s writings.53 Fear and disgust, she argues, are both instinctual responses to things we take to carry a risk of harming us. They are not directly correlated with known risk, however.54 For example, most people will refuse to ingest a cockroach, even if it has been sterilized. This is the finding of psychological studies carried out by psychologist Paul Rozin and his collaborators.55

In one of their studies, the researchers asked the study participants to watch them sterilize a cockroach. The subjects denied seeing any danger in eating it. Yet they refused to consume it. The experimenters then sealed a sterilized cockroach inside a digestible plastic capsule guaranteed to come out intact in the feces. But to no avail. The volunteers refused to swallow the capsule.

In another study, also conducted by Rozin and collaborators, research participants were asked to sniff a box and then relate whether they found the smell disgusting. The researchers found that whether participants exposed to the same odor perceived it as disgusting depended on what they were told was in the box prior to smelling it. When told the box contained feces, the participants reported being utterly disgusted, but when told that it contained barrel-aged Italian cheese, they savored their sniff. As the odor was exactly the same in the two cases, the participants’ beliefs about the contents of the box thus altered their perception of the odor, which suggests that what we find disgusting is theory-laden.

As Nussbaum points out, in Western cultures, disgust is tied to fear of death and our own bodily decay as we get older. We associate things that remind us of our animal nature with contamination or impurity, such as corpses, rotting meat, and bodily fluids, because we fear and despise our mortal bodily humanity.

The idea of the body as contaminated or impure predates modern religion. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought of the body and the material world as imperfect transient existences compared to the soul. When we die, Plato argued, our body decays, and eventually none of our material existence is left. But the soul is immortal. After death, it enters the true realm of Platonic forms. It is eventually reborn, thus becoming trapped in a decaying material body, longing for the perfection of the Platonic heaven, until it once again escapes the imperfections of the material world.

What we find disgusting today is a reflection of Plato’s own aversion toward the decaying body and his worship of the eternal soul. Many of the things that elicit disgust in us today are those that remind of our imperfect material existence, our entrapment in our decadent and deteriorating bodies. As Nussbaum puts it, disgust is an escape mechanism, a way of turning “our aversion to death into a strange symbolic project of transcendence.”56

Social Disgust

Although our culture’s negative portrait of the body emerged as a way of regulating behavior, our primitive disgust reactions—such as our instinctive recoil at the sight or smell of cockroaches, vomit, or rotten meat—are not inherently regulatory or disciplinary; rather, they are a basic survival response that informs us that we are in too close proximity to material that could potentially kill us or make us sick.

At some point in the history of civilization, however, our primitive disgust system was co-opted by our value system as a tool for regulating the behavior of other people in our community or social group.57 For example, most Westerners regard culturally disvalued practices, such as cannibalism, incest, self-amputation, and body snatching, as repugnant. Cultivating disgust in each other in response to culturally disvalued practices is a convenient tool for discouraging each other from engaging in them.

Let’s refer to primitive disgust repurposed as a tool for regulating culturally disvalued practices as “social disgust.” The regulatory and disciplinary role of social disgust is so ingrained in us that we are prone to jump to the conclusion that the practices we abhor are morally wrong. Yet disgust is a notoriously unreliable guide to morality. Many of the practices we perceive as repulsive are just life as usual in other cultures. For example, the Ptolemaic people in ancient Egypt, the most famous of whom is Cleopatra, often married their brothers or sisters, or nieces or nephews. Melanesians of Papua New Guinea and the Wari people of Brazil used to honor their dead by eating them. The Dani people of West Papua used to expect the women and children of deceased family members to cut off chunks of their own fingers as a sacrifice to the spirits, and the Malagasy people of Madagascar are still regularly digging up the remains of their deceased relatives, so they can clean them, dress them in their favorite clothes, and take them on a walk around town.

Because we find such practices repulsive, we mistakenly leap to the conclusion that they are morally wrong.58 But when asked to provide a reason for their alleged wrongfulness, we are hard pressed to come up with one. A common reason against incest is it increases the risk of birth defects. However, this isn’t a good reason to think incest is morally wrong, as having intercourse with a sibling or parent doesn’t increase the risk of birth defects. The risk emerges only if you have children with them.

Not all practices that diverge from our own elicit social disgust. For example, we don’t find it repugnant that Greek kids don’t hide their baby teeth under their pillows and wait for them to be swapped for cash by a fairy but instead toss them onto the roof and make a wish for strong and healthy grown-up teeth. Strange, yes, but not disgusting. So, what’s special about the practices we find disgusting? The short answer is that we tend to feel repulsed by social practices we associate with our greatest fears: our own animal nature, our sexuality, our bodily excretions, our decadent and imperfect body, and its gradual decay and eventual demise.59 So the ancient image of the body as impure, unrefined, and transient and the soul as pure, noble and true also lies at the root of social disgust.

These fears continue to be exploited by conservative and religious groups around the globe to stigmatize and outlaw practices such as homosexuality, miscegenation, masturbation, and premarital sex—practices most people don’t naturally frown upon.

Interestingly, even though intellectual and artistic practices tend to be seen as finer and purer than bodily activities, they too can elicit social disgust. In the early twentieth century, the Danish physician and art critic Carl Julius Salomonsen started a critical movement against modern art. This was in the early days of modernism. Salomonsen found modern art repugnant. He was so appalled by it that he became convinced that the artists had contracted a contagious mental illness, which had caused them to become obsessed with “distorted” and “hideous” forms.60

Although repulsive practices are the primary focus of social disgust, people and groups can also become the focus when we associate them with practices that we find repulsive. The stronger our association between a given practice and sexual perversion, animal decay, or bodily destruction, the more likely we are to project our disgust toward the practice onto people we associate with that practice. This is the reason we commonly refer to perverts as “creepy.”

The 2009 BBC documentary “My Car Is My Lover,” which is part of the documentary series Strange Love, features so-called mechaphiles, men who have romantic or sexual relationships with their cars.61 One of the mechaphiles, Edward Smith, who lives in Yelm in Washington State, has never had a lasting relationship with another human. His only human sexual experience was a one-night stand with a woman in San Francisco. But he is sexually attracted to cars and regularly has sex with them. It’s the forms and curves of cars that turn him on, though he is also attracted to the orifices of cars. “The tailpipe represents the car’s anus in more ways than one. And it’s just like having anal sex with the car,” Smith tells the incredulous BBC reporter. “The final ecstasy is when you are about to explode in love, you just place it in there, maybe grease it up a little, with some lubricant, it’s fantastic, the sensation is unbelievable.” But it’s not just about the sex. Smith alleges that he has been in love with his 1974 VW Beetle named “Vanilla” since 1982.

The repulsive nature of Smith’s interactions with his car makes most of us view Smith as a creep. Regarding a person as creepy does not entail blaming him. Disgust is not essentially bound up with blame or condemnation. If we feel anything other than disgust for mechaphiles like Smith, it’s more likely to be pity, which the eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued was the basis of our compassion for others.62 But as philosopher Richard Boyd has pointed out, pity isn’t a purely positive emotion.63 To pity someone is to be aware of their unfortunate condition while at the same time deeming yourself lucky that their burden is not your own.

Contempt

In ordinary language, contempt is often subsumed under hate. When we speak of hate speech, group hate, hate groups, hate crimes, hate campaigns, and hate mail, this is the sense of “hate” we have in mind. This may also be the sense of “hate” that is most salient in the evergreen “I hate your face” memes.64 Call this the “wide sense of ‘hate.’ ” When not otherwise specified, I will use “hate” in its narrow sense.

It’s sometimes said that where hate (in its narrow sense) presents its target as powerful, contempt presents its target as “low,” or unworthy of respect. Disrespect, on this view, is a component of contempt but not hate. But that’s not right. We take the judgmental high road in both hate and contempt. To see this, consider this scenario: Beatrice contemns her next-door neighbor for his greed, but she hates Jason, the youth soccer coach who raped her 12-year old daughter.65 If disrespect were only a component of contempt but not of hate, then we should expect Beatrice to have more respect for the grown man who raped her child than for her greedy neighbor. But that’s ludicrous. Clearly, Beatrice doesn’t regard her child’s rapist as worthy of more respect than her pitiful neighbor. She disrespects both of them, but her disrespect for the miscreant who assaulted her daughter is indefinitely greater than her disrespect for her measly neighbor.

When we hate someone or have contempt for them, we judge, or condemn, them for their flawed character. Judging a person on account of their flawed character is a form of disrespect.66 If you hate your classmate Simone (in the narrow sense of “hate”), you condemn her for her perceived malevolent or evil character traits. If you have contempt for her, by contrast, then you condemn her for her perceived “lowly” character traits, for instance, her greed, cowardice, or lack of willpower.

Contempt is social disgust’s judgmental cousin. In contempt, we look down on a person for vices they possess—vices tied to repugnant practices, such as gluttony, sloth, lust, pride, envy, greed, and wrath. It should not come as a surprise that many of the vices that elicit contempt are thought of as “deadly sins” in Christianity and other religions.67 They are the motivating force behind practices that tends to elicit disgust in us, for example, binge eating, alcohol overconsumption, masturbation, promiscuity, prostitution, perversion, or whatever else reminds us of our own animal nature, sexuality, bodily excretions, or decadent body.

To condemn people for their vices is in part to disrespect them—we regard those we hold in contempt as inferior to ourselves.68 When the disrespect component of contempt is dehumanizing, so is the contempt. Likewise, contempt that has critical disrespect as a component is itself critical. Whereas dehumanizing contempt fails to recognize the inherent dignity of its target, critical contempt is not in the business of questioning people’s dignity.

Dehumanizing contempt is often the driving force behind rape, although—as we will see in Chapter 6—dehumanizing hatred is the basis of “corrective” rape. Because it robs the victim of her entitlement to the kind of respect owed to all people, dehumanizing contempt is never morally defensible.69 It was contempt of this ilk that Kant had in mind when he maintained that contempt is incompatible with the principle of respect:

The respect that I have for others or that another can require from me (observantia aliis praestanda) is therefore recognition of a dignity (dignitas) in other human beings, that is, of a worth that has no price, no equivalent for which the object evaluated (aestimii) could be exchanged—Judging someone to be worthless is contempt.70

But contempt need not deprive its target of the kind of respect owed to all people. Critical contempt, the less objectionable form, sees its target as “low” in a way that has no bearing on her entitlement to recognition respect. A literary critic, for example, might see you as inferior to other “finer” novelists on account of your perceived lack of sophistication and elite education and your breach of time-honored literary principles. Yet if she recognizes your inherent worth as a person, her contempt is critical, not dehumanizing. Elitism, however appalling, is therefore not inherently dehumanizing.

Critical contempt is often limited to only certain aspects of a person’s character. This is what philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev has in mind when he writes:

The inferiority associated with contempt does not have to be global: it can merely refer to a few aspects of the other person’s characteristics. I can feel contempt for another person’s accent or looks but still realize her general superior status.71

As we will see in Chapter 3, whereas dehumanizing contempt is never morally defensible, critical contempt can sometimes be morally appropriate.

Hate

Personal hate is bound up with actions that are seen as particularly wicked, as illustrated by this passage from Simon Hall’s novel Evil Valley:

Thank you so much for your email. It’s good to know that I’m not alone in what I’m suffering. He beat me again tonight. My hands are shaking and I can feel the bruises spreading across my ribs. I’m just about holding back the tears but they keep leaking and dripping onto the keyboard. I don’t know whether I want to cry, or scream and shout and hit out. I just don’t know what I’m going to do.

He has gone to sleep after another two bottles of red wine, and the kicking he’s just given me. He sounds really peaceful and content.

I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, I HATE HIM!!72

The main character’s hatred for her partner is fueled by his physical abuse. She hates him; she doesn’t merely resent him, because she realizes that his repeated abuse of her is rooted in his sinister character traits.73

Hate of this kind is backward-looking. One of its focal points is an assumed past evildoing. But hate can also be aimed at people who haven’t yet acted on their dark traits. Envisioning that they might well do so in the future can elicit hatred toward them. Hatred of this kind is forward-looking.

Regardless of whether it’s backward- or forward-looking, hate has a dual focus. One is the target’s envisioned past or future evildoing.74 The other is the target’s assumed malevolent or evil character. When we hate someone, we resent them (or have indignation for them) for their envisioned past or future evildoing, and we judge, or condemn, them for their assumed malevolence.

As we have seen, to judge, or condemn, a person for her vices is to disrespect her for possessing those vices, where the disrespect can be either dehumanizing or critical. But if we disrespect both the people we hate and those we hold in contempt, why then does it often feel as if we look down on the people we contemn but not the ones we hate?

The different “feels” of hate and contempt stem from a difference in the kinds of vices the two attitudes bring into focus. Malevolence, the vice that is central to hatred, is associated in our minds with power and danger, capacities that call for apprehensive respect and sometimes even full-out admiration.

Although apprehensive respect is not conceptually linked to critical or dehumanizing disrespect, the former can mask the effects of the latter when both are mentally present. This is because the character traits that elicit apprehensive respect very often are associated with admirable traits like ingenuity, imagination, and dexterity. We will look closer at this aspect of hate in the next three chapters.

There is more to the feeling of hate (when felt at all) than the sensation rooted in the intricate interplay between apprehensive respect and disrespect. When asked to describe hate, people often use adjectives like “heated,” “explosive,” “extreme,” “intense,” “obsessive,” and “all-consuming.”75

We need to be careful about how we interpret these ordinary-language descriptions, however. Hate can indeed be all-consuming. This correlates with an increase in norepinephrine and dopamine signaling in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. This is also what happens after a big hit of methamphetamine or cocaine. Like the stimulants, all-consuming love and hate can raise your self-confidence and motivate you to act impulsively, for instance, take drastic measures to alleviate the lingering pain of yearning or injustice. This rise in self-confidence and the drive toward action can, in turn, motivate you to overcome enormous obstacles to be near the other person, whether it’s in order to kiss and hug them, tell them off, fight them, or kill them.

It is also true that hate can feel painfully intense, as suggested by its popular depictions, but bear in mind that the felt intensity of an emotion is an unreliable indicator of its magnitude. Emotions differ from pain and pleasure in this respect. If the pain you experience in response to a particular stimulus is felt as more intense than the pain I experience in response to the same stimulus, then you are in greater pain than I am. But if we both hate our classmate Simone, but you feel the hatred more intensely than I do, that doesn’t entail that you hate Simone more than I do. My somewhat blunted hatred could present Simone as more malevolent, powerful and dangerous than your more intensely felt hatred.

Why is that? Well, we know that long-lasting emotions can go under the radar, especially when we have something more pressing on our mind. Say you just fell madly in love with Alice (while still hating Simone). You would likely be preoccupied with emotions and thoughts related to your infatuation, and this could well temporarily push your hatred of Simone down below the level of conscious awareness. But despite its lack of felt intensity, your hate hasn’t vanished, as if by magic. So felt intensity is not always a good indicator of magnitude.

But there is another reason that we shouldn’t treat felt intensity as a reliable guide to magnitude. Some people are naturally more prone to emotional arousal than others. One and the same emotional stimulus could induce the exact same physiological changes in you and me, and yet our brains could interpret the induced changes in radically different ways, perhaps owing to differences in our past experiences. As a result, you might go ballistic while I motionlessly watch you in utter bewilderment.

Emotions so intense that they nearly consume us are widely regarded as irrational, or pathological, because they are likely to interfere with our ability to function optimally.76

In my opinion, this common sentiment isn’t exactly right. Intense grief following a traumatic loss can put you out of commission, but that doesn’t make it irrational or pathological. In fact, allowing yourself to properly grieve a traumatic loss can spare you from a delayed, aggravated response down the road. Grief is not regarded as a clinical pathology unless it turns into complicated grief, which is grief that persists for years without appearing to wane in intensity over time.

While all-consuming emotions need not be irrational, emotions that continue to interfere with your ability to function optimally are irrational. But irrationality isn’t reserved for the antagonistic emotions. In fact, even emotions with a positive valence, such as compassion, love, gratitude, self-confidence, enthusiasm, pride, optimism, and cheerfulness can be irrational or pathological. So, let’s not leap to the conclusion that hate is inherently irrational because it can have corrosive effects on the hater’s well-being or ability to function optimally. As we will see in Chapter 3, hate can sometimes be a rational and morally defensible emotion.

The idea that hatred is sometimes rational and morally defensible is highly controversial. Hate is one of the least celebrated emotions today, and in cultures built on Christianity or traditional Eastern religions, it’s socially taboo. We see this in sayings like “Whatever the question, hate is never the answer,” “Haters are on the fast train to hell,” “Hate is the grisly mask of shame,” “Hate is a projection of a feeble mind,” “Holding on to hate is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

Hate is sometimes frowned upon because haters often become vengeful. Nussbaum has in several works argued that anger is never justified.77 Anger, as she uses the term, encompasses all the anger-type emotions: simple anger, resentment, indignation, outrage, envy, and hate. What she says about anger thus applies with equal force to hate. Outrage in response to social injustice is the exception that proves the rule, according to Nussbaum. This is also what she calls “transition anger.” She admits that the latter can be socially useful in mobilizing support for a worthwhile cause, and that it can be justified in ideal circumstances where we humans are much less prone to become vindictive. But circumstances are rarely, if ever, ideal, and she doubts that we can willfully prevent vengeance from impregnating our outrage when we are witnesses to social injustice in real life.

Nussbaum’s argument for this view rests on the assumption that anger-type emotions such as anger, resentment, and hate are conceptually tied to retaliation, which she argues serves no purpose other than multiplying suffering.

I am sympathetic to Nussbaum’s position that retaliatory responses to wrongdoing are pointless at best and deeply immoral at worst. I am also at one with Nussbaum in thinking that anger-type emotions often are tainted with retaliatory desires. But, as I will argue in Chapter 3, the anger-type emotions are not conceptually tied to retaliation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, when confined to the realm of intimate relationships, even hate can have worthwhile ends. But before drawing the contours of this argument, I will explore the norm-regulating function of hate in our personal relationships.