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fellow travelers. Loyalty provides the basis for group cohesion without
which a commitment to justice cannot take social root.
Games children learn at school, like athletic competitions, promote
36 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
the psychological benefits of belonging to a particular group and of valu-
ing that group through opposition to other groups. Athletic competitions,
like wars, frequently employ combat metaphors urging the destruction of
opponents. Extreme versions of these metaphors portray opponents as
less than human, as animals to be abhorred. The modern-day jihad and
the medieval Crusade both illustrate the relevance of this mentality to
morality, or more precisely to the struggle to ensure that one version
of morality reigns supreme. The idea of competition among different
moralities increases the difficulty of following Augustine s exhortation to
hate the sin and love the sinner, for the allegiance to one system (or team,
if you will) can justify labeling opponents as  sinners. Competition,
whether religious/moral or economic, can pit people against one another;
in so doing, competition can diminish trust and dehumanize relationships.
To compete effectively, we must put aside some of our tender feelings.
To judge fairly, we must do the same. The way we overcome or ignore
compassion in such instances raises far-reaching moral questions. An ex-
cerpt from The Reader, by the German judge and novelist Bernhard
Schlink, sums up the difficulty of loving the sinner but hating the sin.
Michael, a young German, loses a lover in the 1940s only to find her
again in a German courtroom. Hanna, the lover who suddenly abandoned
him without explanation years earlier, stands trial for having worked as a
Nazi prison guard. Horrified at the new knowledge of his old lover,
Michael struggles to love Hanna while hating her sin:
I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna s crime and to con-
demn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand
it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be con-
demned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was
no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand
Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over
again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both
tasks  understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible
to do both.10
I do not wish to deny that it is impossible to do both, only to assert that it
can be extremely difficult to do so. Michael still loves the woman he
Explaining Schadenfreude 37
believes must have carried out her duties only because she feared death for
disobeying. Few among us will hesitate to condemn Nazi atrocities, yet
Michael s struggle may, in different contexts, nonetheless resonate with
many of us. It can be enormously difficult to forget ourselves, yet judging
others seems to require something like that.
Each of us lives within a broad and shifting network of relationships,
personal, professional, social, economic, and religious. Loyalty to one per-
son, group, or tenet may impede the benevolence we might otherwise feel
to an outsider who has been wronged by someone to whom we feel loyal.
Competition can breed visceral feelings of loyalty. We want to protect
those to whom we feel loyal; should a wrongdoer try to hurt our friend or
group and hurt himself or herself in the process, we may feel justified in
celebrating that pain. Even though we expect decision-makers across a
broad range of social institutions to put aside their personal loyalties and
act impartially, we often question whether they do so. A pessimistic view
of human motivation undermines a distinction between loyalty and jus-
tice. This is not to express skepticism about the idea of impartiality, but
rather to emphasize that impartiality does not come easily.
Most Western models of legal justice aim to transcend personal loyal-
ties. According to Rawls, the sense of justice bespeaks goodwill toward
humanity; it is a sentiment of the heart, one that grows out of the natural
sentiments of love and friendship (A Theory of Justice, pp. 453 512).
Even if we accept such a characterization, love for justice may still prompt
pleasure in the suffering of others no less than personal loyalties might.
This is so because of a sense of personal investment (resulting from self-es-
teem) which may accompany the endorsement of a moral or political
view. Of crucial importance is the question of whether such suffering sig-
nifies a means to an end (that is, whether the suffering instructs someone
whose worldview seems to require correction) or an end in itself (that is,
whether the suffering should come to the sort of person who deserves to
suffer). Once again, there is an important difference between enjoying
that someone suffers and enjoying actual suffering. The former case must
be held apart from Schadenfreude, for the attendant pleasure is not prop-
erly in seeing someone suffer, but in the hope that someone will learn a
valuable lesson from having suffered. Thus we take pleasure not in the
suffering of another, but in the hope that he or she will correct a mistake
38 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
(because we may take pleasure in both, this case is not entirely distinct
from Schadenfreude). The latter case, including as it does a notion of
desert, involves Schadenfreude. Ultimately, it is the notion of desert that
makes justice a more important and a more complicated consideration
than loyalty. By  justice I mean the fairly straightforward notion that
people receive their just deserts. As I have said, we generally believe that a
talented person who works hard deserves success, that an innocent person
harmed by wrongdoers deserves compensation, and, to a lesser extent,
that an arrogant person deserves his or her comeuppance. Such outcomes
strike us as morally appropriate.
Freud denied the relevance of desert to justice, or at least to one way of
understanding justice. He accounted for the egalitarian understanding of
the principle, in which justice requires (subject to important qualifications)
equality of net welfare for individuals, by attributing it to a psychology of
envy.11 Freud believed that the only reason we strive for social equality is
that the disadvantaged envy the advantaged. This is a ponderous claim.
Critics have pointed out that Freud s view of justice cannot, however,
readily explain why the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged figure
among lovers of equality. That persons are motivated by opposing inter-
ests, further, does not mean that they are motivated by envy or jealousy.
Religious convictions may decisively shape an understanding of desert
or justice. The conceptualization of hell as the paradigm and culmination
of suffering almost seems to beg comparisons of temporal suffering with
eternal suffering and, consequently, thoughts about day-to-day justice.
Contentious examples of religious justice may surprise us by their sheer
variety. Some of the best known illustrations involve claims to land, as we
find in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the West Bank of
Isreal. These examples suggest what is perhaps the most familiar objection
to religious ethics, that organized religions breed intolerance and
hypocrisy. In considering arguments as to how morality might depend on
loyalty to any religion, it is surely prudent to keep in mind at what and
whom the arguments are aimed.
In their introduction to the  Symposium on  God  recently featured
in a 1994 issue of Critical Inquiry, Françoise Meltzer and David Tracy re-
marked that the invocation of God currently seems to work as a point of
obstruction, or a limit, in most contemporary critical discourses. As they
Explaining Schadenfreude 39
put it,  the word God, in or outside of quotation marks, has become the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]