Forgiveness and Revenge

Trudy Govier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135199098
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Forgiveness and Revenge is a powerful exploration of our attitudes to serious wrongdoings and a careful examination of the values that underlie our thinking about revenge and forgiveness.
From adulterous spouses to terrorist factions, we are surrounded by wrongdoing, yet we rarely agree which response is appropriate. The problem of how to respond realistically and sensitively to the wrongs of the past remains a perplexing one. Trudy Govier clarifies our thinking on this subject by examining the moral and practical impact of revenge and forgiveness, both personal and political.
Forgiveness and Revenge offers much-needed clarity and reason where emotions often prevail. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the ethics of attitudes to wrongdoing.

1 Revenge and retribution

If everyone took an eye for an eye, the whole world would be blind.

Gandhi

In January 2000 a Pakistani man gave himself up to police, introducing himself by saying, “I am Javed Iqbal, killer of one hundred boys.” He had lured the boys to his apartment in Lahore, given them food and entertained them, taken snapshots, and then suffocated them, dissolving the bodies in large vats of acid which he poured into an alleyway sewer. Iqbal was proud that he had committed these killings after having made a pledge to himself that he would take the lives of one hundred children as an act of “revenge against the police.” He had two young servants who had beaten him badly. When he took a complaint to the police, they ignored him and instead accused him of sodomy, something he had been charged with before.

He decided that the killing of children would be his means of retribution. “In this way I would take revenge from the world I hated,” he said of his sixmonth homicidal binge. “My mother cried for me. I wanted 100 mothers to cry for their children.”

He succeeded. Early in December, as news of the crimes became public, parents lined up by the thousands to rummage through huge piles of rumpled clothes and old shoes that had been found in Mr. Iqbal’s apartment. Some found items that belonged to their missing sons. Others merely saw their children’s photos spread across wobbly wooden tables at the police station. Or they read the morbid details in Mr. Iqbal’s diaries.¹

In March 2000 Iqbal was sentenced to death by Judge Allah Baksh Ranja, who ordered that he should be strangled in front of his victims’ parents and his body cut into 100 pieces and dissolved in acid.This was taking to extremes the retributive idea that the punishment should fit the crime, because the state would be involved in the same level of barbarity as the criminal himself. Pakistani human rights advocates complained that the sentence was barbaric and intended to support its appeal.²

What is revenge?

When others hurt us, we suffer. Usually humiliation accompanies and aggravates that suffering, and in response, we feel rage. Seeking revenge is one way to reassert ourselves, to attempt to get relief from the hurt and humiliation of being wronged. If one person or group has wronged another, it is common for the victim, the injured party, to feel rage and resentment, leading to a desire to “get one’s own back,” or “get even.” When we seek revenge, we seek satisfaction by attempting to harm the other (or associated persons) as a retaliatory measure. We expect to feel better if we can somehow express our negative feelings in actions intended to “get back” at those who have harmed us.

Acting from revenge is not the same as acting in self-defense. The person who acts in self-defense is seeking to protect himself or herself from harm, whereas acting from revenge, a person acts after he or she has been harmed, in an attempt to harm the wrongdoer in retaliation. Nor is revenge a necessary corollary of victory. When we are victorious over our enemies, we may be tempted to seek revenge, but we need not do so. In South Africa, the African National Congress achieved victory in its struggle against the apartheid government and its supporters. It chose not to use its victorious position to seek revenge. Renouncing revenge, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Revenge is atavistic, the law of the jungle.”³

We may feel a desire for revenge without ever acting on it, suppressing that desire because we tell ourselves that acting on it would be nasty or imprudent. If we act on our desire for revenge, we try to bring harm to the person who wronged us. We set out on a course of action intended to express and relieve our rage and frustration and “even the score.” Consider a case less lurid than that of the serial murderer of children. Suppose that a man, Michael, does some harm to a co-worker, Ann. Ann may try to get her own back and settle accounts by doing something that will hurt Michael at least as much as Michael hurt her. Ann is then out for revenge, seeking revenge against Michael. If this is the case, Ann’s feelings and attitudes to the wrong Michael inflicted on her are vindictive. Ann seeks revenge and if she gets it, Michael will come to suffer too, as a result of something she does to “get even” or “get back” at him. For Ann to get revenge on Michael it will not suffice that he come to harm; what is required is that she must be the one who causes that harm, for it is in her own agency that she expects to find satisfaction. If, for example, Michael breaks his leg skiing, loses out on an important company training opportunity, and thereby fails to get an expected promotion, Ann may feel happy about that turn of events and gloat about Michael’s bad luck. But that will not amount to avenging herself or getting even, because it was not she who caused Michael to break his leg. Michael was hurt and it adversely affected his interests, but Ann played no role in bringing this about.

Suppose that Ann tries to harm Michael by telling his wife he is having an affair; unbeknownst to Ann, he really is having an affair. But he has for some time been looking for a way to tell his wife about it and end his marriage. In this case, Ann was the agent; she has tried to harm Michael in a quest for revenge, but she does not succeed in doing so because contrary to her intent, her gossip accomplishes something that Michael actually wanted and found helpful. She has not achieved revenge in this case either, for no harm was done. To satisfy our desire for revenge, we must be agents in bringing harm to others who have harmed us, and we must act with the intent to cause this harm in order to “get even” or restore a balance.

In defense of revenge

In a recent article, Jeffrie Murphy defends the moral appropriacy of revenge, and the related emotions of vindictiveness and hatred. Murphy’s case for revenge is in part grounded on his claim that people naturally approve of the quest for, and achievement of revenge. He cites responses to western movies as part of his argument.

I recently resaw [with some equally civilized and equally liberal friends] the movie Silverado. In this classy Western, we are presented with four honest and decent men [and their friends and families] being subjected to unspeakable injuries by thugs of unspeakable evil. When, in the closing moments of the movie, these men take—and, indeed, gleefully take—their violent revenge on those who have wronged them, all who watched cheered them on and found this outcome not only aesthetically pleasing but morally satisfying.

Murphy concludes, “I think that most typical, decent, mentally healthy people have a kind of commonsense approval of some righteous hatred and revenge,”⁴ assuming that these audience responses indicate moral approval. He goes on to argue from this apparent approval that there is something morally satisfying and right about heroes getting revenge on villains. In this essay, Murphy maintains that “common morality” deems the quest for revenge to be legitimate, and thereby establishes a prima facie moral case for revenge. Because this is so, he says, the onus of proof is on those who object to state their case and show their reasons. Anyone who in principle opposes hatred, vindictiveness, and the desire for revenge, must show that something is fundamentally wrong with these desires. Murphy argues that victims’ hatred and the desire for revenge should be respected and acknowledged—not de-legitimized—and they should be related in some important way to penal institutions and the administration of criminal justice. He points out that revenge is not to be identified with vigilante action or vendettas; it need not be sought by illegal means; and it need not be wildly and grossly excessive. Extreme cases, while of great dramatic interest and thus prominent in literature, can mislead us into thinking that revenge is by its nature obsessive and excessive—but to base our understanding on this kind of literature would be a mistake. Murphy claims that this basic approval of revenge is related to what he takes to be the correct justification of punishment: the retributive theory that punishment is justified because it gives to wrongdoers the suffering or hard treatment that they deserve.⁵

Murphy is not the only author to have taken up the moral cause of revenge. In Wild Justice, Susan Jacoby argues at length that Western cultures have gone too far in seeking to de-legitimize the desire for revenge, which she sees as deeply natural to human beings. She argues that in advising us to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” the Christian Sermon on the Mount sets forth an ideal which may be morally beautiful but is humanly unrealistic. Contrary to these Christain tenets, Jacoby maintains that the “vindictive impulse” should be accepted as natural and legitimate—and then it should be suitably restrained and contained within legal systems that provide for fair trial and justly administered punishment of convicted offenders.⁶

Robert Solomon takes a similar position, seeking to defend not only the human desire for vengeance but other “negative” emotions such as resentment and anger. Solomon argues that certain negative and “nasty” passions underlie our sense of justice and in this way play a fundamentally important role in morality and social institutions. We live in an unjust world: terrible things happen. According to Solomon, it is our anger, resentment, and desire for vengeance against the injustices that provide us with the insight that this world is unjust and something should be done about it.

Justice begins not with Socratic insights but with the promptings of some basic emotions, among them envy, jealousy, and resentment, a sense of being personally cheated or neglected, and the desire to get even.⁷

As Solomon understands it, the desire for vengeance is the desire to pay back the offender, thereby (somehow) putting the world back in balance. We need legal institutions to prevent rage, hatred, and vindictiveness from getting out of hand—but these and other negative passions are fundamental in establishing our sense of justice and supporting those very institutions. Rhetorically, Solomon asks:

Can one have a sense of justice without the capacity and willingness to be personally outraged? Can one fight evil without being motivated by hatred? Can one care without being protective? Can we, then, really understand distributive justice, without any appreciation of envy, jealousy, and resentment? Indeed, would there be any call for redistribution of goods [beyond basic, vital needs] if no one envied the rich, or felt cheated by life and resentful?

On this account, resentment has its place and “vengeance may be primitive, but it is still the conceptual core of justice.”⁸ Solomon believes that we have an almost instinctive sense that we should not be violated, and when we are violated, we naturally feel anger, rage, a conviction that this was wrong or unjust, and a desire to get even. From this personal resentment, we generalize, perceiving similar wrongs to others and gaining a sense of how things should be and the beginnings of a sense of justice.When bad things happen, our anger and resentment lead us to a sense of injustice and the desire to act to make things right, to get a kind of balance by bringing harm to the one who harmed us. So defined, justice requires retribution. Solomon defends the desire for revenge on moral grounds, arguing that the quest for revenge is never, as such, illegitimate. “Getting even is just an effective way of being angry, and getting angry typically includes a lively desire for revenge.”⁹ Furthermore, revenge is not necessarily violent and it does not necessarily lead to interminable cycles of violence, not even involve illegal means and pre-empting the role of the courts. Literary tales about revenge tend to be violent and lurid, but in real life, revenge does not always work this way. One might achieve revenge, Solomon suggests, by casting a negative vote at a meeting.¹⁰

But more questionable elements appear in Solomon’s account.

If resentment has a desire, it is in its extreme form the total annihilation, prefaced by the utter humiliation, of its target—though the vindictive imagination of resentment is such that even that might not be good enough.¹¹

For some, alarm bells will be ringing at this point.

A moral case for revenge?

Let us say that a victim sets out to get revenge against an offender, who brought serious harm to him. Suppose that the victim succeeds in this campaign.The other harmed him; now he has succeeded in retaliating and hurting back; he has harmed the other. He did something; he acted out his rage, personally making himself the agent of justice and achieving a kind of justice by “getting even.”

It might seem that there are some worthy effects. First, the villain has been harmed, punished in a sense. He did not simply get away with wrongdoing: the wicked one was made to suffer and “pay” for his wrongdoing. So apparently Justice has been done. Second, the victim has transcended passivity and suffering to assert some power; he has taken action and has “stood up for himself,” indicating that he is aware that what was done to him was wrong, and he deserved better. Thus, the victim has acted out his anger and demonstrated his own conviction of self-respect. He has acted to restore his honor and pride, communicating to others his ability to stand up for himself. Third, it appears that the victim has restored a kind of equality of agency and stature between himself and the villain. We might think of a victim who stands up and hurts the wrongdoer in retaliation as asserting in this way that he, the injured one, does count, that he is not one to be ill-treated. Contrary to what the offender implied, he is a proud and morally considerable being, and he has shown this by the fact that he has been able to impose pain on the offender. Fourth, the victim will have a certain feeling of satisfaction at having settled accounts and “got even,” “got his revenge.”

Are not these good effects—justice due to the suffering of the villain, improved self-respect, restored moral equality, and satisfaction for the victim? Is it not then quite appropriate if we feel a sense of moral satisfaction when revenge is accomplished?

One might add to the above an argument from deterrence. If people seek revenge and undertake to ensure that wrongdoers pay for their misdeeds, one might suppose that their doing so will serve as a deterrent to wrongdoing. Suppose, for example, rape victims were to rather frequently track down and castrate their rapists; if this were known, perhaps rapes would decrease in frequency because rapists would be fearful of the likely vindictiveness and retaliatory power of their victims.¹² Along such lines, one might seek to defend revenge by appealing to its prospective deterrent consequences, arguing that if prospective criminals came to regard prospective victims as vigilantes with the power and intent to get back at them, they would be deterred from committing crimes in the first place. The same sort of argument might be used to justify taking revenge against terrorist acts; the idea would be that prospective terrorists, having seen the terrible pain that victim groups had been able to inflict, would hold back from future acts of terrorism.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Revenge and retribution
• 2. Some political horrors
• 3. Resentment and forgiveness
• 4. One-sided forgiveness?
• 5. Can groups forgive?
• 6. The unforgivable
• 7. Monstrous deeds, not monstrous people
• 8. Forgiveness and reconciliation
• Appendix I. Religious traditions on forgiveness
• Appendix II. Respect for persons as an ethical foundation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index