When Bad Things Happen to Other People (35 page)

16. Lucretius, 
De Rerum Natura
, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 52.

17. Immanuel Kant, 
Lectures on Ethics
, trans. Louis Infield (London: Methuen and Co., 1930), p. 219. Reprinted in 
Vice and Virtue in Everyday
 
Life
, ed. Christina Hoff Sommers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 271–279. In the same passage Kant approves of gossip and taking pleasure in the fall of a rich man.

18. Iris Murdoch, 
The Black Prince
 (New York: Penguin, 1973), pp. 28–29. Vittorio Falsina kindly shared this passage with me.

19. Charles Dickens, 
Great Expectations
 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 409–410.

20. Charles Dickens, 
Our Mutual Friend
 (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 132.

21. Richard Rorty, 
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
, p. 189.

22. Judith Shklar, 
Ordinary Vices
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 8.

23. Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy Rosenblum’s anthology 
Liberalism and the Moral Life
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 29.

24. Benedict de, 
The Philosophy of Spinoza,
 edited by Joseph Ratner (New York: The Modern Library, 1927), pp. 281–282.

Chapter Two

1. John Forrester, 
Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 171.

2. Richard McBrien, 
Catholicism: Study Edition
 (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1981), pp. 151–162. Emphasis added.

3. Barbara Goodwin, 
Justice By Lottery
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 144.

4. Paul Tournier, 
Guilt and Grace: A Psychological Study
, trans. Arthur W. Heathcote (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 174.

5. Karl Marx, 
Early Writings
, trans. and ed. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 201.

6. See 
The Social Importance of Self-Esteem
, ed. Andrew M. Mecca, Neil J. Smelser, and John Vasconcellos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

7. 
Francis Bacon: The Essays
, ed. John Pitcher (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 85.

8. John Rawls, 
A Theory of Justice
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 440. Rawls argues that a well-ordered society is unlikely to give rise to feelings of envy because material inequalities are likely to be comparatively small (pp. 536–537) and because the worst off are more likely to accept them since they know they work to their advantage and are allowed to exist only because they work to their advantage (pp. 177–179, 496–499).

9. Both Nietzsche, the originator of the term, and Max Scheler, the principal phenomenologist of the reaction, used the French word 
ressentiment
. It has become widely accepted within the German language. The English notion of resentment, indicating indignation or bitter feelings against some person or situation, is not equivalent in its impact or generality to the French notion of 
ressentiment
. I will discuss the import of this distinction more fully in Chapter Seven.

10. Bernhard Schlink, 
The Reader,
 trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 157.

11. Sigmund Freud, 
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 51f. (As cited in Rawls, 
A
 
Theory of Justice
, p. 439.)

12. 
Critical Inquiry
 20 (1994): 569. See also Wendy Kaminer’s cover story “The Last Taboo” in 
The New Republic
, 14 October 1996, pp. 24–32.

13. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in 
The Mirror of
 
Art,
 trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1955), p. 135. French passages are taken from the Gallimard edition 
Oeuvres complétes,
 vol. 2..

14. 
The Collected Dialogues of Plato
, ed. Edith Hamilton and Hunting-ton Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 50d, p. 1132.

15. Sigmund Freud, 
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
 (Standard Edition), trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), pp. 121–122.

Chapter Three

1. Mark Zborowski, “Cultural Components in Responses to Pain,” in C.

Clark and H. Robboy, eds., 
Social Interaction
 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).

2. Marcel Proust, 
Remembrance of Things Past,
 trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1982), vol. 3, p. 561.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 
Philosophical Investigations
, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).

4. Tristram Engelhardt, 
The Foundations of Bioethics
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 113.

5. Richard Posner, 
Overcoming Law
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 448.

6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 
Crime and Punishment
, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 180.

7. Peter Gay, 
My German Question
 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 83.

8. Thomas Hardy, 
The Return of the Native
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 206.

9. See Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, “Pleasure-in-Others’-Misfortune,” in 
Iyyun, The
 
Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly
 41 (1992): 41–61; “Another Look at Pleasure-in-Others’-Misfortune,” 
Iyyun, The Jersualem Philosophical Quarterly
 42 (July 1993): 431–440; and footnote number 19 in his “Envy and Inequality” in 
Journal of Philosophy
 89 (1992): 551–581.

10. William Ian Miller, 
The Anatomy of Disgust
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 291 n. 25.

11. William Ian Miller, 
Humiliation
 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 207.

12. Judith Shklar, 
The Faces of Injustice
 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 55.

13. Melvin Lerner, 
The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion
 (New York: Plenum, 1980).

14. William James, 
The Varieties of Religious Experience
 (New York: The Modern Library, 1958), p. 50.

15. See H. Richard Niebuhr, 
The Responsible Self
 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 58–60.

16. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, 
The Anatomy of Prejudices
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.

17. 
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
, ed. Louise DeSalva and Mitchell Leaska (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 110.

18. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 212.

19. According to William Frankena, the love commandment is so ambiguous that everything “depends on how one interprets it.” See his 
Ethics
 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 42. Three major interpretations of the love commandment follow here. First, love of neighbor is interpreted as the core of morality and follows from the modest use of it in Leviticus and those New Testament passages in which the love commandment is presented as a concise summary of the Mosaic or natural moral law. Charitable giving to others in need is required, as long as the cost to the agent is not excessive. Second, love of neighbor is identified by some Christian theologians who insist on the purity of heart stressed in the Sermon on the Mount. What counts before God are not only deeds but also dispositions. The demand for love “goes all the way down,” to use a phrase from Foucault. It is this interpretation that implicates
Schadenfreude
in blameworthiness. Quoted in Ernest Wallwork, 
Psychoanalysis and Ethics
 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 194.

20. Carol Gilligan, 
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
 
Women’s Development
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

21. 
Psychoanalysis and Ethics
, Chapter Nine. I have greatly benefited from Wallwork’s analysis.

22. Erving Goffman, “Fun in Games,” in 
Encounters
 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), p. 23.

23. Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” in 
American Journal of Sociology
 85 (1979): 551–575.

Chapter Four

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, 
On the Basis of Morality,
 trans. E.F.J. Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 135. Hereafter, 
OBM.

2. After Schopenhauer, Karl Marx was later to say, “There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain.” In a similar vein, Oscar Wilde once quipped, “God spare me physical pain and I’ll take care of the moral pain myself.” Quoted in Elaine Scarry, 
The Body in Pain
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 33.

3. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in 
The Mirror of
 
Art
, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1955), p 135. French passages are taken from the Gallimard edition 
Oeuvres complètes
, vol. 2.

4. Sigmund Freud, 
Civilization and Its Discontents
 (1930), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 36.

5. Sigmund Freud, 
The Future of an Illusion
 (Standard Edition), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 12.

6. Schopenhauer makes suffering a function of self-esteem. Similarly, William James in 1890 measures self-esteem according to the ratio of one’s successes to one’s pretensions. 
The Principles of Psychology
, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), vol. 1, p. 310.

7. Early in the 
Nichomachean Ethics
 Aristotle acknowledges that happiness depends at least modestly on the cooperation of “externals,” such things as good birth, good health, and good looks.

8. Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in 
Mortal Questions
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 28.

9. Immanuel Kant, 
The Metaphysics of Morals,
 trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 207. Hereafter, 
MM.
 This work of 1797 should not be confused with the 
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
 (1785), an earlier volume that is sometimes treated as the definitive statement of Kant’s moral philosophy but which, in fact, merely lays the foundation for the longer work.

10. Alasdair MacIntyre, 
A Short History of Ethics
 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 221.

11. John E. Atwell, 
Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The
 
Metaphysics of Will
 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 16–17.

12. 
The Journal of Religious Ethics
 20 (1992): 38. It is perhaps unfair to single out Roberts here, as there are so many other philosophers who walk around the problem I’m pointing to without noticing the distinction I’m trying to establish. See, for example, S.I. Benn, “Wickedness,” 
Ethics
 95 (1985): 795–810. Mention of
Schadenfreude
is strangely neglected in his discussion of “Wickedness and Moral Luck.” It is also conspicuously absent from J.C.B. Gosling’s 
Pleasure and Desire
 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), especially pp. 162–163.

13. Robert C. Roberts, “What is Wrong With Wicked Feelings?,” in 
American Philosophical Quarterly
 28 (1991): 13–24.

14. The self-righteous person delights in the moral failings of others. There may be a genuinely internal connection between self-righteousness and 
Schadenfreude
, for a self-righteous person may perceive the moral weaknesses of others as misfortunes.

15. Robert Gordon, 
The Structure of the Emotions
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 25.

16. Adam Smith, 
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 21.

17. Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character, and Morality,” in 
Moral
 
Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 3.

18. Joseph Fletcher, 
Situation Ethics
 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), p. 94.

19. Bernard Williams, 
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 88.

20. R.M. Hare, 
Moral Thinking
 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

21. See Marcia Baron, “The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty,” 
Journal of Philosophy
 81 (1984): 197–220.

22. Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer to mean “
teuflisch
” in both the subjective and the objective sense. See 
Human, All Too Human
, Section 103.

23. Nobel laureate in economics George Stigler emphasized the effects of greed. His contribution to “public choice theory” tries to explain political outcomes by assuming that people, including politicians, pursue selfish interests, often in well-organized private groups. Another Nobel laureate, James Buchanan, enhanced “public choice theory” by proposing institutions to help counteract the baleful tendencies of human nature.

24. Candace Clark, 
Misery and Company: Sympathy in Everyday Life
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

25. M.F.K. Fisher, 
Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me
 (New York: Pantheon, 1993), pp. 222–223.

26. Max Scheler, 
The Nature of Sympathy
, trans. P.L. Heath (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 138.

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, 
The Will to Power,
 trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), Section 962. Hereafter, 
WP.