When Bad Things Happen to Other People (33 page)

The question of impunity of moral beliefs arises within a social framework here, as
Schadenfreude
does. It might be thought that Nietzsche or Freud saw little benefit in public life, but this would be wrong. Although Freud criticized what he took to be the excessive constraints of civilization, he freely acknowledged the import of social justice in holding communities together. We keep the species going at a price, Freud saw, but we have to pay that price. Indeed, he affirmed in 
Civilization and Its Discontents
 that human life in common is only made possible when the power of the community is set up in opposition to the power of the individual. Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (among others) all reached this same conclusion before Freud. Social justice, arbitrary and unstable as it may seem, stands as a precondition of sorts even for having a personal life. Our private
Schadenfreude
can reveal something telling about the communities we inhabit. For our thoughts about social justice precede
Schadenfreude.

I do not mean to suggest that since values collide there are no reasons for choosing one over another. There are doubtless better and worse reasons for espousing values. A real problem here is that religious believers insist on a kind of moral impunity for their beliefs in or about justice. The way in which Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, and Muslims treat women within their communities has enraged many, both from within these traditions and outside. (The treatment of women is only one case in point.) Plato’s point in the 
Crito
 was that a community faces danger and decay when its members are no longer sensitive to the need to criticize and revise the community’s form of life in the light of new experience and exigencies. That we do not include ourselves in a particular moral tradition should not in itself bar us from criticizing that tradition. I see nothing wrong with criticism, whether of our own communities or traditions or of others’.

Punishing an innocent person for a crime he or she did not commit is unjust even when those who punish believe in the person’s guilt. If we may do an injustice to people merely by falsely believing they deserve a misfortune, then that injustice is caused by our belief. Our beliefs are in some frustrating way inadequate, for believing that we possess the truth is not enough to avoid injustice. We may believe, for instance, that the earth is flat and that those who disagree do not deserve research grants. Similarly, we may believe that it is immoral for a woman to leave her children in a daycare center while she pursues a career. Our moral beliefs can result in injustice to others.

Schadenfreude
 offers us a double lesson: people whom we take to be cruel or unjust may believe themselves righteous and just, and our moral assessment of ourselves as good may anger or amaze others. Now, as ever, it is important to fight against systems of domination and repression. As Jaggar shows us, emotions can be an important instrument in this fight.

Knowing Limits

What separates Nietzsche from Alison Jaggar is not whether outlaw emotions, which are functions of disavowal, do or do not reveal hidden sources of morality (yes), but whether these hidden sources merit scrutiny. Through a discussion of two disavowal strategies, I have suggested that a (masculine) sense of cultural superiority, like an aversion to women, counts as a source of morality that holds significant explanatory power. Identifying this source of morality serves the same end as the repression of outlaw emotions: it exposes a moral theory’s blind spot.

The position I impute to Jaggar involves two claims: that the
Schadenfreude
of women is largely justified and that an examination of the circumstances responsible for its generation can make morality less oppressive. Were Jaggar to praise social impotence as an outlaw emotion, Nietzsche would surely dismiss her ethics as an example of 
ressentiment
, a baleful and originally religiously motivated inversion that he takes to corrupt Western morality. Jaggar makes no such recommendation, but she does claim the oppressed enjoy a certain “epistemological privilege.” The question whether this privilege is one worth having is a moral one, for it plays off of the tendency to value something or someone in terms of how that person or thing is 
known
. Nietzsche lacks what Alison Jaggar knows.

CONCLUSION:
The Moral Problem of 
Schadenfreude

For if justice goes, there is no longer any value to men’s living on the earth.

—Kant, 
The Metaphysics of Morals

See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief.

Hark in thine ear: change places: and handy-dandy,

which is the justice, which is the thief?

—King Lear
 (4.6.156)

SOME PEOPLE HELP US; some people hurt us. Some people are helped by us; some people are harmed by us. That’s life. There is no changing this. We can, however, increase the store of happiness in our little worlds by treating others well.

I have focused on misfortune and suffering in terms of what we believe others deserve. We morally withhold some or all of our compassion for those who suffer if we believe that they have brought their suffering upon themselves. I have talked about harm in terms of judging others, not physically attacking them. We are free to judge harshly people who suffer. However, we do well to remember an ancient exhortation: judge as ye shall be judged. Mercy, I am persuaded, unleashes a kind of satisfaction every bit as profound as revenge can.

I have presented 
Schadenfreude
, the morally acceptable kind of pleasure in the setbacks of others, as an emotional corollary of justice. I have contrasted
Schadenfreude
with
ressentiment
, which I take to be an ingrained moral failing.

Foucault once remarked that all of Nietzsche’s work was no more than “the exegesis of a few Greek words.”1 This study might be aptly described as the exegesis of a German word and a French one Germanicized by Nietzsche. I believe that one cannot properly understand Nietzsche’s highly influential theory of 
ressentiment
 without understanding what is at stake in the moral problem of 
Schadenfreude
. The moral problem of
Schadenfreude
is threefold. First, there is widespread confusion about the normative moral acceptability of taking pleasure in the suffering of a person whose
contretemps
 is either trivial or a result of having trespassed justice. Second, this confusion over the normative status of
Schadenfreude
may give rise to self-deceitful attempts to persuade ourselves that we take pleasure in the knowledge that another suffers, as opposed to taking pleasure in the actual suffering itself. Third, this same confusion no doubt invites mental efforts to rationalize as justified the suffering we fear or otherwise cannot understand.

An examination of the pain and humiliation from which
Schadenfreude
blooms contributes to moral progress as it strains and clarifies conventional standards of justice and the appropriateness of suffering. The temptation to define
Schadenfreude
according to which instances of happiness in others’ suffering we find acceptable provokes very difficult questions about justice and punishment. Feminist thinkers did not need Nietzsche to show them how easily and subtly justice degenerates into injustice, and how powerful groups assert the right to define what justice represents.

Feminists already knew that powerful groups use notions of justice to disguise systems of domination. Many volumes of political philosophy have addressed the question of whether justice can be disinterested. The temptation to define
Schadenfreude
on the basis of suffering we consider justified leads to the old question of whether justice veils our self-interest. Through excerpts from the writings of mainstream religious thinkers, St. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Häring, I have raised doubts about the possibility of our generating the kind of norms of justice that would or could satisfy a broad spectrum of people in a diverse society. That said, religious norms did not seem any more or less suspect than secular ones.

Nietzsche, of course, considered justice a rationalization for self-interest. This self-interest could create wide social ties, uniting entire groups (as for example, Jews, women, lesbian and gay people, even Nietzschean nobles). If justice could be shown as a kind of solidarity with others like ourselves, then my defense of
Schadenfreude
as an emotional corollary of (disinterested) justice would crumble. But my agreement with Nietzsche is not complete, for I want to hold on to the possibility of a purely punitive, non-retributivistic kind of justice.

Nietzsche’s opposition to my position would not end here. He found the impulse to read wrongdoing into human suffering a silly superstition. The very idea of
Schadenfreude
as an emotional corollary of justice relies on the legitimacy of such a relation of cause and effect. Although I have labored to present
Schadenfreude
as a function of rationality, Nietzsche would insist that I have missed the point. One of Nietzsche’s most famous passages (
GM
 I, Section 13) challenges “the popular mind” to rethink lightning and its flash. Nietzsche insists that there is no “being” behind doing; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed, he tells us, and the deed is everything. Whether we attribute the misfortunes of another to God, the invisible hand of justice, or whatever, we deceive ourselves. Misfortunes simply happen.

Schadenfreude
 is not so much a problem in and of itself on Nietzsche’s terms, as a symptom of a much deeper problem, that of believing in the “fiction” of justice. There is no justice at work in suffering, Nietzsche says, which means that there is no justice at work in 
Schadenfreude
. Although religious thinkers such as Maimonides and Rabbi Kushner have conceded the randomness of suffering, popular forms of religious belief continue to support causal links between human suffering and divine retribution.

Aside from the exception of trivial misfortunes, I have allowed this very link between “the doer” and the deed. I am willing to forebear “the popular mind” quite a bit more than Nietzsche is. Perhaps Nietzsche misses an important point, namely that people genuinely take their beliefs to be true. Whether or not God exists, people can believe in God. This means that people who attribute a neighbor’s suffering to God can reasonably defend pleasure in what they take to be the spectacle of justice.

The moral problem of
Schadenfreude
raises a question about the sincerity of our beliefs. The problem leads us back to a long-standing debate between retributivist and utilitarian views of punishment. While allowing that pleasure in the suffering of others might stem from an objective concern for justice, I have expressed doubt about the frequency of that kind of morally acceptable pleasure. I have leaned on Nietzsche and Durkheim to question whether celebrating suffering differs fundamentally from exalting justice. If we agree with Nietzsche that justice amounts to revenge, then
Schadenfreude
as I have presented it here once again fails on its own terms. For if justice is simply revenge, then there can be nothing disinterested about
Schadenfreude
. Here again I part ways with Nietzsche: I am willing to believe in the possibility of disinterested justice, a response to wrongdoing that has nothing to do with revenge. That some people whose job it is to administer punishment (judges, prison officers, high school principals) may take sadistic pleasure in their professional work does not mean that all do. Nietzsche would say that my skepticism about disinterested justice does not reach far enough.

My measured faith in selfless justice gives way to ambivalence about the moral acceptability of 
Schadenfreude
. I stand to the right of Nietzsche, but to the left of most moral philosophers (certainly far to the left of Schopenhauer). Though moral thinkers have deplored 
Schadenfreude
, they have extolled the love of justice. An emotional schizophrenia of sorts results from this conceptual polarization, and the unspoken lesson we learn is that
Schadenfreude
is to be tamped down deep within the psyche, or at least deep enough not to threaten our reputations as good neighbors. Gossip and laughter are the precarious chinks in the armor of disguise; they stand as the chief behavioral manifestations of pleasure in the suffering of others.

A commitment to justice or a personal loyalty is not the only catalyst for
Schadenfreude
I have presented. The judgment of appropriate suffering may have less to do with justice than envy or malice. Unlike the
Schadenfreude
of justice, the pleasure in the suffering of others which is motivated by and constituted by malice must always be condemned (for the same reasons we condemn malice). I have suggested that this second kind of pleasure be referred to as “malicious glee.” Though malicious glee remains unethical, the cognition of appropriateness (or triviality), together with the fact of passivity, may excuse
Schadenfreude
as morally acceptable. When it springs from an abhorrence of evil or injustice,
Schadenfreude
might even be considered exemplary.

Schadenfreude
 restricts its object to trivial or appropriate suffering. Despite the impossibility of definitively marking off trivial from non-trivial suffering, we may expect some consensus on what kinds of misfortune are serious enough to merit sympathy. 
Schadenfreude,
 which issues from an honest belief about trivial suffering, lies at the heart of laughter, and is recommended by Kant as a valuable asset that helps us get through life.
Schadenfreude
whose object is cognized as appropriate suffering may be a direct, though not necessary, result of caring about justice, and caring about justice remains a moral good (this formulation consciously combines both the “ethic of care” of feminism and the “ethic of justice” of Rawls). Part of the problem of
Schadenfreude
is that it has inaccurately been represented as aberrant and wicked. It is neither.