Agnes Callard, Anger & turd sucking

Emotions- like anger or fear- may be directed at things as well as people. I may feel anger at my laptop and chuck it in the bin and get one which works better. I may similarly get angry with a supplier of mine and switch to a more reliable firm.

Sometimes anger is rational- in the sense that a reason can be given for it which most people would find compelling. Sometimes it isn't. There are certain contexts where one has to give an account of one's decisions and others where one has an immunity. In the former case, it may be necessary for us to justify a decision made in a heightened emotional state- like anger- and we may seek to show that our action was reasonable, not purely emotional, for legal or reputational reasons. Thus if I trashed a laptop because I was angry and that laptop belonged to the Company I might say, 'I was sick and tired of that wretched thing destroying valuable Company records and putting at risk mission critical operations.' This may still not be enough to get me off the hook legally but it may reduce reputational damage.

Rationality either means judging according to a more or less protocol bound procedure in a manner consistent with previous 'ratio decidendi' , or else it means anything you like.

Agnes Callard writing about the rationality of Anger in the Boston Review, takes the latter course. What is the result? Does she manage to say anything more foolish than she would otherwise be able to do? Let us see-

Suppose that you are angry on Tuesday because I stole from you on Monday. Suppose that on Wednesday I return what I stole; I compensate you for any disadvantage occasioned by your not having had it for two days; I offer additional gifts to show my good will; I apologize for my theft as a moment of weakness; and, finally, I promise never to do it again. Suppose, in addition, that you believe my apology is sincere and that I will keep my promise.
Could it be rational for you to be just as angry on Thursday as you were on Tuesday? Moreover, could it be rational for you to conceive of a plan to steal from me in turn? And what if you don’t stop at one theft: could it be rational for you to go on to steal from me again, and again, and again?

Anger- like other emotions- has two different functions. One is signalling preference intensity to affect Social Choice. The other is to solve concurrency deadlocks. As such, emotions can be described as 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' and thus their 'rationality' is to be judged after the fact by the fitness landscape.

Still, one's emotional state is relevant in juristic or social contexts where rationality is a criterion for judging and, perhaps, punishing actions.

Which ever way you slice it, the fact remains that Callard has asked a stupid question. We don't have enough information to say if it is rational for me to go on stealing from a guy who took my stuff without my permission.

Why not simply ask 'is it rational to scratch your butt?' The answer is, it depends. Callard's genius is to take a stupid question whose answer is 'it depends' to end up with an even more stupid question of the order 'is it rational to have a butt?' But first she has to assert some very silly propositions.

Though initial anger might be reasonable, we tend to view unending disproportionate revenge as paradigmatically irrational.

No we don't.  We don't give a shit. It's none of our business. If I hear I have a neighbor who acts in this manner, I'll be careful to be polite and keep out of her way. Having a maximal 'offensive strategy' can be cheaper than having an effective 'defensive strategy'. Tit for Tat is fine and dandy but Tit for I fuck up your life and eat your kids is even more effective.

There's a Sanskrit saying- 'Anger is a small pleasure'. But there's a good Newcombe type reason to cultivate this small pleasure and let this fact be known. Plenty of school masters through the ages have discovered this for themselves. Only after they retire do their grateful students realize that they were pussycats all along.

Though your initial anger at me might have been reasonable, we tend to view a policy of unending disproportionate revenge as paradigmatically irrational.

Nonsense! We tend to view people who use words like 'paradigmatically' to be as stupid as shit. On the other hand, I do think of people who keep shoving things up their asshole, coz they went to Collidge, as pajamatically Norf Lunnon. But that's a Sarf Lunnon thing.

Eventually we should move on, we are told, or let it go, or transmute our desire for revenge into a healthier or more respectable feeling.

Oh shit! I had no idea Callard was a bunny boiler. Still, I'm not Michael Douglas, so I should be safe enough. Any road, I iz bleck. Callard won't want to be thought guilty of a hate crime which would tend to make her a hero to the local Hindu community.

The fact is, if Callard and other philosophers really want to move on from their insensate rage and desire for revenge on Intelligence of any sort then they should drink till they either find themselves homeless or head of HR at a medium sized Company with a growing presence in an industry whose name you can no longer remember. Healthier and more respectable feelings are only desirable if you routinely wake up in a pool of your own vomit.

This idea has given rise to a debate among academic philosophers about the value of anger.

What idea? The notion that there are people out there too stupid to know they should stop knifing everybody they meet coz they are soooo ticked off? Telling these guys to chill is a matter for debate among academic philosophers is it? Why? How cretinous are these shitheads?

Should we valorize it in terms of the righteous indignation of that initial response? Or should we vilify it in terms of the grudge-bearing vengeance of the unending one?

Neither. We should get on with our lives.

I am going to explain how that debate goes, but I am not going to try to resolve it. Instead, I am going to peel it away to reveal a secret that lies behind it: we have been debating the wrong issue.

No kidding! The real issue we should be debating is how we ought to feel when moodily micturating on an Autumn afternoon in Paris in the early 1700s. Or, better still, we could skip the debate entirely and go get a drink.

The real debate concerns the three questions about anger and rationality in my second paragraph, which are not rhetorical, and to which the answer might well be: yes, yes, and yes.

But the real debate got gender reassignment surgery and is in the FBI witness protection program. Honestly, it simply doesn't want to talk to you. It has moved on with its life. You should too. It wishes you well but please don't try to get back in touch. No means no- not yes, yes and yes.

First, the academic debate. In one corner, we have those who think that we would have a morally better world if we could eradicate anger entirely.

But we can't. We'd need a Structural Causal Model of it. But this SCM would also allow us to boost our I.Q and...dunno... acquire ESP & telekenesis and so forth. I'm not saying it won't happen, but before it does there are going to be job openings for Anger Management counselors for irate elevators and wrathful washing machines.

This tradition has its roots in ancient Stoicism and Buddhism.

Which had their roots in more ancient shite. Anyway, Buddhist academics at Nalanda discovered that washer women were demanding lovers. They'd get so mad if you Thathgataed- i.e. gone and went and came- before they could. Appeasing Chandi Devi turned out to be more rewarding than Nir-fucking-Vana.

The first-century Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca wrote that anger is a form of madness; he authored a whole treatise—De Ira, the title of this volume—about how to manage its ill effects.

Which is why his student, Nero, turned out so well.

The eighth-century Indian philosopher and monk Śāntideva enjoined those wishing to travel the road of enlightenment to eliminate even the smallest seeds of anger, on the grounds that the full-blown emotion can only cause harm.

Then he shacked up with a dhobin and discovered that paratman parivartana- swapping selves with a laundry lady angered at the thought she won't get her end off-  is the quickest path to mutual salvation.

In the contemporary world, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on Seneca and the Stoic tradition to argue that anger is an intrinsically mistaken attitude, since it is infected with a backward-looking “payback wish” that is vengeful and destructive.

Nussbaum, poor thing, did not realize she was spewing hate speech at the neuro-atypical. Come to think of it, she's racist. And sexist. And anti-Semitic. And as affectless, shallow-minded, mendacious and relentlessly self-aggrandizing as Donald Trump.

The correct response to any setback or injustice, in her view, is forward-looking: preventing similar events from occurring in the future.

So fuck you if you are differently wired or from a different culture.

In a similar vein, Owen Flanagan, who draws on both Śāntideva’s Buddhism and a Confucian-inflected metaphysics, sees anger as an intrinsically hostile attitude, one that falsely presupposes a self-centered metaphysics of individuals who possess “intentions to be cruel, and to do harm or evil.”

 Who cares what he sees anything as? Has he helped anybody with psychological problems? Does he tell his Buddhist pals to quit getting mad at Rohingyas?

Nussbaum draws Seneca and the Stoic tradition to argue that anger is infected with a “payback wish” that is vengeful and destructive.

The silly woman grew up in a country whose nuclear doctrine was 'What's that? You're crossing our red line coz you want us to blow up the world? Well, we're only to happy to oblige.'

In the other corner of the debate stand those who conceive of anger—up to a point—as an essential and valuable part of one’s moral repertoire: anger is what sensitizes us to injustice and motivates us to uphold justice. By being angry with me on Tuesday, the day after I stole, you create the system and demand the terms under which I must acquiesce and “make things right” on Wednesday.

No. You do it through credible threats. Nice people need to register anger for the threat to be credible. But if you are the villain in a Bond movie just stroke your pussy to convey menace.

This pro-anger position has its roots in Aristotle’s view that the (well-trained) passions are what allow the “eye of the soul” to perceive moral value, and finds its fullest expression in the British moral sentimentalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Earl of Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith all held that our feelings are precisely what sensitize us to moral considerations.

Spoken like a true pedagogue of a tried and tested Racist type. Nothing has 'its roots' in Aristotle because Aristotle had roots.

Later, Peter Strawson’s watershed paper “Freedom and Resentment” (1960) injected new life into the pro-anger cause by making emotions the fundamental mechanism of moral accountability.

Responsibility is not the same thing as accountability. One may choose to delegate the accountability function for things for which one is responsible. Indeed, there may be no connection between accountability and responsibility.

Most things we are responsible for are not things which have the property of accountability. Strawson, poor fellow, thought-as many did back then- there was a way for Language to 'carve up Reality along its joints'. Sadly, Languages are merely a crappy type of search procedure involving coordination problems on a radically uncertain fitness landscape.

Strawson develops Smith’s insight that our status as moral creatures rests on the fact that we care—at an emotional level—what we think of one another.

We have no status as 'moral creatures'. We may do as mortals if we, or someone else on our behalf, puts a lot of work into ensuring that status. But that's how status works- it is costly to maintain, which is why keeping up with the Jonses can bankrupt you.

 Emotions may matter- almost as much as your hair-style and what is written about you in the boys' bathroom- but all things pass away save for revenge porn.

Strawson understands negative emotions in the anger family as paradigmatic expressions of moral assessment.

Coz he never had a period. Still, this is an insight into the state of mind in which Oxford dons awarded marks to their soon to be far more financially successful students. At the margin, their scholastic assessments may have made or broken one or two careers. But the whole exercise was performed in a state of seething, savage, yet utterly impotent fury.  Some little voice in their head told them this was immoral. But they were teaching a wholly worthless subject. Their rage could at best liberate their victims from a childish fraud.

Anger treats its target as someone capable of recognizing that she has done wrong and is to be contrasted with the indifference or calculating carefulness by which we might react to someone we see no hope of reintegrating into the moral community.

What if the 'moral community' is a Madoff type Ponzi scheme? How can one be sure one's existing 'moral community' isn't incentive incompatible and bound to crash?
In any case, why treat an emotion as though it always has the same cause? The thing is 'extensional' and 'multiply realizable'. It is not wholly predictable or programmable.
Consider the following case. Prof Binmore stops getting angry when I say stupid things in his Calculus class. Instead he sighs and says 'Accountants we shall always have with us.' But, the same night when I, as his waiter, add up his bill wrong, the guy goes freakin' mental till the Restaurant Manager intervenes and sacks me.
Has Binmore acted irrationally? Of course he has. An elementary reading of Strawson, Claydaughter et al. would suffice to prove that Binmore should have Socratically chopped off his own head and shoved it up his own arsehole. Anyway, that was the argument I used when trying to get the LSE to refund me some of the fees I paid them.

Strawson’s continued influence is visible in the work of contemporary philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace, Jesse Prinz, Allan Gibbard, Pamela Hieronymi, and Jean Hampton.

Shame about Gibbard. He started out so well.

Though differing in their conclusions and many of the steps along the way, all begin from the sentimentalist assumption that emotions lie at the bottom of our practices of holding one another morally responsible. 

But is this a reasonable view? There may be some medical condition such that a person has no emotions most others recognize as such. Would we really say we have no moral responsibility to them or that they could not act as full, responsible moral agents, towards us or each other?

This type of psilosophy was all very well when being a Racist, homophobic, misogynist was considered a good thing. But, surely, times have changed?

For sentimentalist philosophers, emotions are how we humans do morality.

Then the psychologists and anthropologists and so on showed emotions weren't whatever the Man thought appropriate. Turns out women do have emotions- like revulsion and hatred. They aren't 'hysterical' because their womb got unmoored and started wandering while you were doing them. Nor were they weeping tears of joy. How were you supposed to know they'd start making wild allegations of rape and kidnapping?  Honestly, a decent woman would be ashamed to advertise her own loss of virtue in such a brazen fashion! A moral Society must be founded upon people having appropriate emotions. If you kick a darkie who is slow refilling your glass, he has no call getting uppity. I mean, it's not like you don't let him cum inside you on his off-day- indeed, you even tip him generously for the privilege! He should be grateful to you for your condescension.

But are these two camps—the Stoics versus the sentimentalists—really diametrically opposed?

No. One can belong to both if one is Racist enough.

Each must respond to the data that motivate the other, and when they do so, they make some surprising moves toward reconciliation.

Like Hitler and Stalin. They responded to data pertaining to all the cool stuff and pretty real estate Polish peeps were meanly keeping to themselves.

Consider the data of the anti-anger side. There are at least two big drawbacks of anger, they note: first, the tendency to cling to one’s anger, bearing a grudge deaf to any reasonable voice of reconciliation, apology, or restitution; second, the tendency to exact (often disproportionate) revenge.

These are only drawbacks if, like Hitler, you picked a fight with bigger dogs. Stalin did fine clinging to his anger against the bourgeoisie. Texans did fine remembering the Alamo. It may be that, as Dylan Thomas said, one should rage against the dying of the light so as to fuck over the smug bastard who sold you your annuity.

The fans of anger carve these phenomena off as pathologies, not essentially associated with anger.

The same may be said of any 'Tarskian primitive'- like Utility, Justice, Beauty, Happiness etc. The problem is that 'pathology' is not a Tarskian primitive. It means stuff that can make your life horribly painful or just straight out kill you. So nothing has been achieved by 'carving off' pathologies- which is stuff smart people should study- in order to gas on about nothing at all.

They use special words such as “indignation” and “resentment” to refer to anger purified of such impulses. Purified anger, they say, protests wrongdoing but is free of vengeful impulses and is immediately responsive to reasons to give up one’s anger. (In this technical terminology, “resentment” is typically used to mark protesting on one’s own behalf, whereas “indignation” is for protesting on behalf of another.) This move—carve away the dark side—is remarkably similar to the move the enemies of anger make when confronted with what we might call the “moral side” of anger.

So, we're only talking about virtue signalling here. Nobody is really angry. They are just pretending.

Both Flanagan and Nussbaum, for instance, acknowledge that one who fails to react to grievous wrongdoing runs the risk of acquiescing in evil.

But so does someone who reacts in an ineffectual and stupid way. Guys who exit a jurisdiction where grievous wrongdoing is occurring aren't just safeguarding themselves. At the margin, they are undermining the fiscal base of an obnoxious regime. This is purely a matter of economics.

They grant the importance of a moral sensibility that would lead a person to object to being treated with disrespect, but they hold that such a response is possible without anger proper.

So- anger does not matter. This is a waste of time.

Flanagan uses the word “righteous indignation” to cover “judgment that such-and-such state of affairs is grievously wrong, the wrong ought to be righted, and a powerful emotional disposition to want to participate in righting the wrong without being angry.” Nussbaum speaks of “transition anger,” which is not so much anger as “quasi-anger”: “the entire content of one’s emotion is, ‘How outrageous! Something must be done about this.’”

The problem here is it is easy to say 'something must be done about usury. The thing is unconscionable' and then wax indignant that some productive minority has disappeared.

The emotion that is being simulated does not matter. What matters is having a good Causal Structural Model of the Polity in question. This is what tends to evaporate when people talk worthless virtue signalling shite. The consensus they reach is entirely vacuous.

Notice what has happened: what started out as a battle over anger ends with everyone agreeing to avoid using that word. Instead, both sides prefer to segregate the “moral side” of anger (Tuesday’s anger, which takes the form of rational and justified protest at injustice) from the “dark side” (Thursday’s anger, which takes the form of irrational grudges and unjustifiable vengeance). It does not matter whether we follow the Strawsonians and call this moral side “indignation/resentment,” or whether we use Nussbaum and Flanagan’s terminology of “transition anger” or “righteous indignation.”

This is scarcely surprising. Worthless debates cause worthless debaters, who may otherwise be perfectly nice people, to converge on something entirely meaningless.

Now, when philosophers fail to disagree about any question of substance, you know someone is hiding something.

They are hiding the fact that they are stupid and useless.

In this case, I believe the pseudo-war has distracted us—and the combatants themselves—from the contentiousness of an assumption being made on all sides. Everyone assumes that we can retain the moral side of anger while distancing ourselves from paradigmatically irrational phenomena such as grudges and vengeance. But what if this is not the case? What if we humans do morality by way of vengeful grudges?

Fools agree to retain 'the moral side of some shite or other' because they get paid to do so or hope to acquire a credential by pretending the thing isn't a waste of time.

But everybody assumes these guys are fools or credential seeking charlatans. Nobody thinks anger is moral except in the sense that they may think anger is Mexican or a type of Mathematics. In other words, they do so for a comic purpose during the course of a lecture on the poetics of Octavio Paz or on the Jacobi-Anger expansion.

When I was a kid, there was a sort of 'Oopar ya Nietzche' psilosophy which considered God and Morality and the pursuit of excellence in Research to be the vengeance visited upon us by our parents for ruining their sex-lives and making them work boring jobs and wipe our bums instead of tearing loose and enjoying themselves. Is this Callard's considered conclusion? How old is she?

It is a fact of life that human beings have a direct emotional vulnerability to how we are treated, so when you wrong someone, you inflict on them the distinctive pain of unjust treatment.

This is not a fact of life. It may be a 'legal fiction' but it isn't true. Some people who are wronging others are 'emotionally vulnerable' and liable to get very angry not just at imaginary wrongs but also in the case of genuine favors and benefactions. By contrast, those they wrong may have no emotional vulnerability whatsoever with respect to them. Yet, they may prosecute them to the full extent of the law because of a reasonable imputation re. the infliction of emotional harm to them.

This moral sensibility on their part is included in the very meaning of what it is to “wrong someone”: part of why wronging people is unjust is that they notice it.

In some jurisdictions, the law assumes such harm has been done on the basis of that a 'reasonable person' would have felt this was the case if she were the victim. But this may not hold in other jurisdictions. However, the quantum of punishment may be greater. It depends.

It is not the case that the meaning of 'to wrong someone' means that person who was wrong necessarily had 'moral sensibility'. That person may have been in a coma. Or they may have consented without having that legal capacity. The wrong may be tortious. It may be unintentional. It may even have been virtuous. Yet a wrong may have occurred.

It is also a fact of life that people tend to draw grudge-bearing and vengeful conclusions from premises involving genuinely moral facts about injustice and wrongdoing.

This is a hypothesis, not a fact of life. As for 'genuinely moral facts', how do we know they exist? How can they be differentiated from 'inauthentic moral facts'?
Is 'Abortion is wrong' a moral fact? If not, why not?

I believe that we should not be too quick to pathologize this inference or dismiss it as a psychological tic.

We should be quick to dismiss arguments based on stupid lies.

I will offer two arguments—the Argument for Grudges and the Argument for Revenge—that link those premises to those conclusions, suggesting that the reasoning in question is, in fact, valid.

But the premises are clearly false. These arguments will result in an ex falso quodlibet explosion of nonsense.

If we can’t purify morality, we can’t purify anger.

But we can 'purify' our method of reasoning by rejecting obviously false premises. It is obviously false to assert that 'morality can't be purified' because the word purified could mean 'improve health outcomes by removing things which are not salutary'. For any given morality, we can always imagine a manner in which it could be altered so health outcomes are improved. The same is true of anger. Indeed, anger management may be counselled for elderly people like me who are at risk of a stroke or a heart attack or something of that sort. We need to cultivate serenity.

Let’s go back to our original example. Is it rational for you to remain angry with me on Thursday, after all my hard work to restore justice?

It may be. It depends. For non symmetric games Tit for Tat, Tat, Tat, Tat and then I kick your head in, may actually be the eusocial strategy.

Both neo-Stoics such as Nussbaum and neo-sentimentalists such as Strawson would say no.

But they are low IQ shitheads.

They would say that you ought to take into account how the wrongdoing that prompted your anger has been addressed, via restitution, compensation, apology, and a promise.

But, because you are smarter than them- everybody is- you have done more than this already.
On the other hand, suppose you really are angry- these guys are last people you would listen to.

I have made amends for my wrongdoing in every possible way; if you continue to be as angry as you were, it must be, they would argue, because you are being irrationally insensitive to those amends.

There is no irrationality in your being yourself. People may tell you it is but that is their irrationality, not yours. No doubt, there are some 'moral communities'- e.g. small ethnic sects- where forgiveness is obligatory. However, if crimes against children are covered up, we may feel these are actually immoral communities.
Speaking of the Academic community- more particularly those academics who work on campuses which are obliged to observe Title IX type laws- it must be the case that the 'moral community' is defined by a Rawlsian 'overlapping consensus'. The quantum of punishment may be collectively determined but there is no obligation on any individual to forgive.

The tendency to cling to anger through apologies and recompense, for years sometimes and to the detriment of all parties concerned, is routinely dismissed as irrational.

By whom? Name names and shame the beggars!

It is often supposed, specifically, that not “letting go” of one’s anger must indicate a perverse pleasure in that anger. (Thus, poet Robert Burns in 1790: “Whare sits our sulky sullen dame / Gathering her brows like gathering storm / Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”)

This is foolish. Burns's poem is about a guy who should have gone straight home to his wife instead of drinking too much and almost becoming prey to goblins and witches. Burns is saying that the anger wives and mothers were supposed to show on these occasions was a salutary thing. He wasn't saying they should go cavorting at Witches' Sabbaths in 'cutty sarks'. Callard has chosen the worst possible example to make her case.  Men who beat their wives for 'nagging' them not to spend the rent money on booze were not justified in demanding that their wives come home from their Mums' to get beaten some more.

But this idea ignores the fact that there are reasons to remain angry.

Is it a fact that there are 'reasons' for an emotion? No. It is a working hypothesis. It may be a convenient one for a specific purpose- e.g. that of a Grand Jury, but to treat it as a fact is to produce a nonsensical argument.

And the reasons are not hard to find: they are the same reasons as the reasons to get angry in the first place. Apologies, restitution, and all the rest do nothing to cancel or alter the fact that I stole, nor the fact that I ought not to have stolen.

But it is equally true to say that apologies do nothing to alter the fact that I didn't steal and you ought not to be angry with me for an imaginary crime. The trouble with emotions, as opposed to arguments, is that they are not forensic in nature.

By pretending otherwise, you can write any type of nonsense. One may as well say 'the same reasons as the reasons for my getting hiccoughs are causing me to continue to have hiccoughs.' This may be in response to someone saying 'Enough with the hiccoughs already. Why can't you just fart noisily instead?'

People do have these sorts of conversations but they know they are as foolish as the conversation Callard is having.

Those facts were your reasons to be angry. Since they are not changed by my forms of redress—apology, compensation, what have you—then you still have, after the deployment of these amends, the very same reasons to be angry.

Nonsense! If the injury was repaired, the insult cancelled, there is a material alteration.

Anger, after all, is not a desire to fix something but a way of grasping the fact that it is broken.

Sez you. I get angry if I see someone approach any precious possession of mine in a careless or larcenous manner. I suit my actions to my words- unless they have a countervailing power or immunity.
 It is worth getting angry before things are broken. Why does Callard not know this?

You are angry about something that is now in the past, and there is nothing to be done about that.

Why make this assumption? Anger may be about preventing or minimizing potential future harm. It may disappear once that harm supervenes. Mums get angry with you before the calamity they fear occurs. After it has happened they let go of their anger. It serves no purpose. They may console you that the thing was inevitable.

What I did will always diverge from what I ought to have done, no matter what I do next.

How do we know? What you did is imperfectly known. It may be you did the right thing- as is subsequently discovered. It is a different matter that your intentions may have diverged from what they ought to have been. But intentions are imperfectly known while duties may be wholly unknowable.

There are, of course, many nonrational ways your anger might come to an end: you could die, develop amnesia, or it could just fizzle out over time. Suppose one day, out of nowhere, you simply decide to set your anger aside, and you succeed. We might judge that decision to be in some sense “rational”—who wants to go through their whole life angry?—but not in the sense that your reason for anger has been addressed. It hasn’t been, and it won’t ever be. Once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever. This is the Argument for Grudges.

It is also the argument for why if you one have hiccoughs you have a reason to have it forever. 

Now for the Argument for Revenge. Your desire for revenge, like your holding a permanent grudge, is typically taken to be irrational and unjustified.

If this were true we would never suspect a highly rational Judge to want to revenge the gang-rape and killing of his daughter. But that's not the universe we live in.

But this conclusion is typically a product of the assumption that revenge aims to solve the problem of anger, once and for all, by balancing out or undoing the wrong done.

In Societies where there is a duty to exact vengeance, no such assumption is made. 

Once we let go of this assumption that anger can be undone—you have a reason to be angry forever, after all—it is not hard to produce an argument in favor of revenge.

This is the case iff having hiccoughs means one will always have hiccoughs.

We should not find this possibility surprising; it would be strange if one of the oldest and most universal human practices did not have a rationalizing explanation.

It does. The thing is reputational and based on the Tit for Tat strategy in repeated games.

The Argument for Revenge is simply that revenge is how we hold one another morally responsible.

This is simply untrue. Vendetta may involve your killing kids from the other clan. The Mafia is not concerned with morality. It is concerned with 'respect' and 'omerta' and stuff like that.

When I steal from you, you see me as responsible for a serious gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be; there is a perspectival opposition between us.

Nonsense! I know how the world ought to be. I live in a mansion and am married to Beyonce. Fuck I'd care if you stole anything I currently own?

You see my action as morally unacceptable, and you experience that unacceptability as a pain, a harm.

Rubbish! I may have stolen that stuff myself. Morality simply does not come into it.

But I, who did it, evidently saw it as a perfectly fine thing to do, having judged the action to be a good thing for me.

If so, why did you apologize and make restitution?

Assuming that I understood that what I was taking was yours, and that I was not acting under some kind of duress—ignorance and compulsion are mitigating factors—my theft indicates that I see the world in value-terms opposed to yours.

No. Our values are the same. Our endowment sets have changed in a manner that one of us wants to reverse. If that party can do so, they may also help themselves to everything else the other possesses.

Your “bad” is my “good.”

So how come you stole my CD player? It was because you, like me, thought it was good, not bad. Callard is writing nonsense.

If you are to hold me accountable for this, instead of letting me off the hook, you will make this (accidental, adventitious) opposition a principle and rule for our interactions.

Perhaps Callard means if you think it good to do bad to me, I may reciprocate asymmetrically.

Revenge allows you to turn the principle of my action into a rule for your conduct toward me: you make my bad your good. This is the opposite of trying to undo or reverse my action. You hold me accountable by holding onto my theft, refusing to forget it, turning its one-off opposition between our interests into a rule to which I am now subject. You do not let me “live it down,” instead you force my own thinking down my throat. Seeing me as accountable for what I have done means treating my action as a principle governing our interactions. Angry people sometimes describe their vengeance as “teaching someone a lesson,” and this is quite literally true: you make my wronging of you into a general principle and then “educate” me by imposing it on me.

Callard neglects the large game-theoretic literature on the reputational effect of retaliation.

Educating me in this way is not easy on you: making my evil your good has psychological costs, among them the fact that you divert yourself away from what would otherwise be good for you.

If this is the case, the solution is 'risk pooling' such that a punitive justice system is a 'club good'.

You must remodel your psychological landscape into one devoted to regulating mine.

Or I could just call the cops.

This explains the uncanny intimacy of anger: though you can’t stand to be near me, it is also true that no one could be closer to you than me.

Don't say that. You'll attract a really twisted stalker.

I have infiltrated the patterns of your thought; I have my fingers on your heartstrings; I have even been put in charge of your sense perception: you see traces of me everywhere you look.

And I am sniffing your panties in between chopping up your kitty cat.

You complain about me to anyone who will listen, and when no one will listen you shout at a mental effigy of me. I’ve colonized your fantasy life. Holding me responsible involves an embrace, albeit an adversarial one. Anger feels exactly as you would expect, if it were true that my moral accountability was a matter of your seeing what’s good for you in terms of what’s bad for me.

Actually Callard is describing something like 'samrambha yoga' or 'virodha bhakti'- the notion that anger and hatred unites you to your enemy more securely than devoted love.

Again, as with grudges, the point is not that, all things considered, one should take revenge. One may take other factors besides anger into account in governing one’s behavior. But insofar as one acts from anger, one pursues what is good for oneself by doing what is bad for another.

This is false. In so far as one acts from anger one may be pursuing what is very bad for oneself. It may also be very good for your enemy. He may have deliberately tried to get you mad so you'd fuck up.

Emotions aren't forensic- they are not concerned with correctly identifying causal chains. Furthermore they can be just as easily triggered or discharged by an unconnected object as a bad actor.  I may throw away my laptop coz I'm angry that it isn't performing properly. Unknown to me, you infected it with a virus. Equally, I might smash it because I have writer's block brought on by jealousy of your latest publication.

In so far as an action is primarily dictated by an emotional state it is not rational in itself- though it may be rationalized in some other context. The same could be said about making decisions on the basis of some supposedly magical stochastic procedure. One may justify it after the fact- for e.g. by quoting statistics which show that the procedure appears more successful than just rolling a die. But the thing is not 'rational, justified, or intelligible' in itself. That is part of its charm.

Callard, very foolishly, says the opposite-

This is perfectly rational, justified, and intelligible. Polemarchus, in Plato’s Republic, expressed the hostile logic of anger: justice gives benefits to friends and harms to enemies.

 Polemarchus did not mention anger at all. Why? Anger may cause you to violate the reciprocity rule. Take the wrath of Achilles at a personal slight which causes him to withdraw from a War to which he is committed by reason of a complex social web of reciprocal obligations. Would Polemarchus have justified it? No. This wasn't a case of Tit for Tat. Achilles was damaging the Greek cause, he was not retaliating against Agamemnon. His mind had been clouded by anger. Then his friend Patroclus was killed and he rejoined the battle. As for Agamemnon, he escaped retribution for filching Achilles' concubine but got his comeuppance later in settlement of another score.

Callard, with her usual stupidity, has made a Classical reference fatal to her own cause.

The Argument for Revenge is simply that revenge is how we hold one another morally responsible.

Right! That's what happens when savage tribesmen engage in vendetta or Mafia Bosses massacre each others' foot-soldiers while carefully preserving the life of 'made men'. They are holding each other 'morally responsible' by killing some kids or second cousins.

These two arguments—the Argument for Grudges and the Argument for Revenge—suggest it is not so easy to separate the idea that anger is a moral sense from the thought that we should hold on to grudges, or to embrace anger as a mechanism of moral accountability without endorsing vengeance.

Both arguments are utterly shit. It is easy to separate the idea that anger is a moral sense from the set of reasonable assertions. Why? Because anger is not a moral sense. It is an emotion. The thought that we 'should hold onto grudges' has nothing to do with 'embracing anger as a mechanism of moral accountabiilty'. True, both are stupid thoughts. But that is all that they have in common. It would be as foolish to 'embrace anger' as 'embrace lust' so as to create a mechanism of moral accountability. No doubt, a guy who beat or raped a child may say he was only using anger or lust so as to hold the baby morally responsible for its actions. Callard may think this fine and dandy. But she is a cretin.

I do not claim that these arguments make an open-and-shut case; objections are certainly possible, and a full defense of the validity of these forms of reasoning would be a big project.

It would be a big turd.

My aim here has merely been to show that there is a case to be made for the conclusion that grudges and vengeance are perfectly rational—and that such a case is not an overly complicated one.

Sadly, the case that Callard made is one everybody rejects because it licenses the rape and beating to death of little kids.

The arguments I have offered are simple and intuitive,

Callard may be very simple. But she is incapable of offering anything 'intuitive'. Her metier is hitting on the stupidest argument to advance and then going ahead and making it in the stupidest manner possible.

qualities that make their neglect in the philosophical debates—in the form of the unquestioned assumption, on both sides, that grudges and vengeance are irrational—all the more striking.

Callard is right. The big problem with contemporary Philosophy is that it isn't stupid or evil enough. It must proactively develop arguments licensing the rape and beating to death of little kids so that they are properly held to account as moral agents.

Striking, but not inexplicable. For if we put the two arguments together, the result is that someone who is angry never has a reason to sever the link between the other’s evil and her own good. Perhaps the simple explanation for the neglect of these arguments is that we do not want to acknowledge the possibility that morally righteous anger provides rational grounds for limitless violence.

'Rational grounds'? Fuck would Callard know about rationality? She is as stupid as shit.

While it may seem, then, that the Stoics and sentimentalists are radically opposed, they share more than meets the eye. In particular, they share confidence—misplaced, I think—in a certain project of conceptual analysis. This project aims to identify a purified form of moral response, one incorporating all of the virtues and none of the vices of anger. I am not the first to argue that such a project is quixotic.

But you went the extra mile and developed an argument for raping and beating kids wherever and whenever a pervert can get his hands on them.

Some version of my point can be found in a number of thinkers who approach questions of morality from a more historical and anthropological angle. Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and René Girard have all argued that the darkest sides of anger—vengeance, bloodlust, and limitless violence—are baked into the very idea of morality.

Two of these guys were under a psychiatrist's care. Girard was a Literature Professor who developed a silly theory based on his reading of Proust.

We do not want to acknowledge the possibility that morally righteous anger provides rational grounds for limitless violence.

Then how come America has enough nukes to blow up the planet? The offensive doctrine of NATO is- we will unleash limitless violence if we get mad enough. Mutually Assured Destruction- the M.A.D strategy- is, as Nixon realized, more, not less, effective if 'morally righteous anger' is believed to have the power to literally drive a POTUS clinically insane.

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887) traces our present approach to morality to a turn away from a prehistorical ethic based on nobility and strength. The crucial sentiment guiding the new morality is ressentiment—a form of anger—felt by those previously oppressed and enslaved. What emerges is a “slave morality [that] from the outset says ‘No’ to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself ’; and this ‘No’ is its creative deed.” The negative or reactive morality we have ended up with foregrounds the concepts of guilt, conscience, promises, and duty. Nietzsche says these concepts are “soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time. And might one not add that, fundamentally, this world has never since lost a certain odor of blood and torture?”

He was a shite pilologist and ended up utterly bonkers. Why the fuck should we listen to him? Game theory, not Nietzche, informed America's nuclear strategy. Only shitheads in shite Uni Departments bothered with Nietzche or Foucault. Girard may have found favor with some Catholics. But his reliance on shite African anthropology means we think of him as a stupid racist cunt from back when that was a qualification to teach.

Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1972), a work of religious anthropology, discusses the role of human and animal sacrifice in the curbing of violence. Girard begins from the observation that every form of human community is threatened by one basic problem: once one act of violence happens, it threatens to set off a chain reaction of limitless retaliatory violence. According to Girard, what drives this chain reaction is nothing other than the moral horror at violence: “The obligation never to shed blood cannot be distinguished from the obligation to exact vengeance on those who shed it . . . it is precisely because they detest violence that men make a duty of vengeance.” Girard’s book contends that phenomena as widely varied as ancient scapegoating, Greek tragedy, and the sexual norms governing the nuclear family are all attempts to respond to this basic problem of the containment of violence.

Girard was a silly man. The Indians got rid of animal sacrifice. So gassing on about 'korbans' and the 'pharmakos' was special pleading. The stupid cunt hadn't noticed that the Church wasn't actually requiring animal sacrifice any more.

Finally, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) analyzes the shift from punishment by public torture and execution to punishment by imprisonment.

Foucault literally 'died of ignorance'. He didn't have access to Wikipedia. Thus he didn't know that punishment by imprisonment existed side by side with public torture and execution.

Foucault’s thesis is that although these reforms were couched in the eighteenth-century language of human rights, their aim was to turn punishment into a focused attack on the prisoner’s human rights: “From being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.”

But Foucault was wrong because he was crazy and stupid and as ignorant as shit.

Foucault then builds outward from the prison and argues that we can see the values of our society inscribed in the methodology of forcible restraint that characterizes such social artifacts as schools, examinations, timetables, and professional careers.

And not being allowed to carve your name into the flesh of your students after sodomizing and decapitating them. It is a terrible indictment of the Academy that you can't get a Doctorate by submitting a snuff video. This probably has something to do with Neo-Liberalism.

The way we value freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and human rights is by taking those things away from people at every turn.

So, that's how Callard spends her spare time.  No wonder she is as ignorant as shit.

All three of these thinkers remain hugely influential

amongst shitheads

despite having had the empirical details of their argumentation called into question by scholars from a variety of fields. I want to suggest that one reason for their enduring and even cult-like appeal is that they make a compelling and deep philosophical point that floats free of the particular historical-anthropological terms in which it is couched.

In other words they tell stupid lies which appeal to stupid liars.

What do these views have in common, after all? Nietzsche says we have built our whole morality out of resentful bloodlust; Girard says that violence and the opposition to violence are one; Foucault says that punishment is crime. The common denominator is the observation that human morality has a tendency to turn in on itself. Being a good person means, at times, being willing to do bad things.

They don't go far enough! People who force us to wash our hands rather than consume our own feces are OPPRESSING us! Also, the neighbor's cat is SURVEILLING me! My Human Rights are being violated! We must OCCUPY WALL STREET so as to regain our dignity as cannibals- which would also be so good for the Environment coz like meat is murder? And we'd be sure to rape and beat to death the kids we eat so as to hold them morally accountable. So, like, we're Social Justice Warriors- right? And could you raise my allowance in recognition of this fact?

Nietzche, Foucault, and Girard have all argued that the darkest sides of anger—vengeance, bloodlust, and limitless violence—are baked into the very idea of morality.

But they had shit for brains. Thus their arguments were rubbish.

I have offered reasons for thinking that the “dark side of morality” these three thinkers see mirrored in various social institutions derives ultimately from the logic of moral responsiveness: the morally correct way to respond to immorality is to do things—cling to anger, exact vengeance—that are in some way immoral.

No you haven't. You have offered spurious arguments based on absurd assertions- e.g. if, for some reason, you have hiccoughs, there's a reason you will always have hiccoughs.

If we abandon the anthropological distance and admit that we are the humans we are describing, grappling with this insight should produce nothing short of a crisis.

But the 'insight' is shite.

We cannot climb outside of our own moral theory in order to assess it as bankrupt or broken; we must rely on it for the very terms of assessment.

Callard's 'moral theory' is shit because she is a shithead. The way forward is for her to flush it down the toilet rather than pretend it is peanut butter or chocolate cake which she should offer round at faculty mixers.

Of the three, Nietzsche comes the closest to facing this crisis, though even he often hides behind the suggestion that words such as “health” and “strength” offer him some kind of alternative footing. But who wants a society that is healthier or stronger unless those words are meant in a moralized sense—which is to say, a sense already shrouded by the darkness of our morality system? There is no magic trick that lets us climb outside our own normative skin.

But realizing we have been talking shit, or have been talked at by shitheads, is all that is necessary.

Anger implicates all of us in moral corruption, then.

No it doesn't. It implicates all of us in immoral concupiscence except on Tuesdays when it implicates all of us in a homophobic tweet sent by Honeytits Cumbucket to Atul Gopichand.

Well, almost all of us. There is a certain Stoic so extreme that his position is represented by neither Nussbaum nor Flanagan, nor any modern thinker I know of. This Extreme Stoic sees emotions as having no role in morality;

But this is the common sense view! Emotions are one thing. Morality is another. Some people or some cultures may have different emotional responses while cleaving to a common moral code.

in order to achieve this complete emotional detachment, he places no value on anything the world can remove from himself, including his children, his life, and his freedom from physical torture.

There is no need to do so. Risk pooling by collective insurance or collective public good provision works even better. This may require exit from one's current jurisdiction.

Extreme Stoics take inspiration from Socrates, who claimed that a good man could not be harmed, and who correspondingly denied that the Athenians were harming him when they put him to death for crimes he did not commit. Socrates died anger-free.

He could have escaped. Lots of people die anger free. Others die really pissed at something they read in the Morning Papers. The thing doesn't matter very much.

Most of us are neither willing nor able to achieve the kind  of detachment that this immunity from wrath requires.

But there is little point worrying about it. It makes little difference- though no doubt a few very badly paid people have to pretend otherwise so as to offer 'counselling'.

When people commit injustice against us, we feel it: our blood boils.

Or we call our lawyers or the police or whatever. Justice is a service industry. We form coalitions and pool risk so as to protect our endowments and entitlements.

At that point, we have to decide how much we want to fight to quell our anger, how much effort we are going to put into repressing and suppressing that upswell of rage.

Not if we have a good lawyer or an effective police force. Alternatively, if you are really good at Kung Fu or have powerful Mob connections, you keep cool and ensure the threat is eliminated.

The answer is rarely none. While we do not want to let our anger get away from us and drive us to its logical, eternally vengeful conclusion, if we quash it with too heavy a hand, we lose self-respect and, more generally, our moral footing.

At my age, the important thing is to avoid a coronary.

Inhibiting any and all anger in the face of genuine wrongdoing is acquiescing in evil.

Nonsense! This may occur because the evil in question is having its finger nails pulled out. After that, it's going to get chopped up and fed to pigs.

So, we are regularly faced with the complicated question of how much anger to permit ourselves under a given set of circumstances.

Really? Is that what happens? We 'permit ourselves' to feel anger? What about permitting ourselves to fart? How many farts do we permit ourselves under a given set of circumstances?

But notice that, if the arguments I have offered here are correct, this question is equivalent to asking: How much immorality should we permit ourselves?

Incorrect arguments are based on stupid lies. They lead to even more stupid propositions. If we are permitting ourselves immorality why not also say we are permitting ourselves mortality? 'Man yields not unto the angels, nor yet unto death utterly, save through weakness of the will.' To what extent should we permit ourselves to obey the law of gravity?

The realistic project of inhibiting anger must be distinguished from the idle fantasy of purifying it.

Why? If the thing can be inhibited, why can't it be purified to some extent? After all, purification is about neutralizing or inhibiting something which might otherwise pollute or otherwise put the outcome at hazard.

We  can use a word such as “indignation” or “transition anger” to postulate a feeling that righteously protests wrongdoing without any hint of eternality or vengeance—but the item to which that word refers is a philosopher’s fiction.

Nonsense! Suppose the Police come to see me. Someone I had reason to be angry with has been found hideously murdered. I need to convince the police that though I was angry at one time, that anger passed. I am not committed to an 'eternality of vengeance'. Only some one as stupid as Callard would believe in the last mentioned 'philosopher's fiction'.

The multiplication of kinds and flavors and species and names for anger is designed to distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger,

It's all a conspiracy!

which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood.

Your Courts are a sham! You are trying to repress our true human species-being as sadistic cannibals who rape and beat kids to death before feasting on their flesh! Foucault was right! Neighbor's cat is surveilling me! Boo to Neo-Liberalism! Boo to Mummy and Daddy for not letting me eat my own feces and cut up little animals! I have seen through your bourgeoisie morality! I have gone beyond Good and Evil!

The morally correct way to respond to immorality is to do things—cling to anger, exact vengeance—that are in some way immoral.

Is that really what Priests and Gurus and Community Leaders have been doing all these centuries? What happens on Campus when staff discover a student has been cheating in her exams? Is she furiously berated and subjected to a vendetta of hate? Do Professors continue to torment her wherever she moves with the aim of finally driving her to suicide?

I suppose Callard may teach at a place where Fascist views are considered immoral. Thus a student expelled for cheating or rape who can show she is a Fascist could sue the University for conducting a sustained campaign of hate such that her life had been irreparably damaged. Callard would be a useful witness in a case of this sort. She may be a cretin, but the University may have employed her precisely because she advocates the crazy policy the aggrieved Fascist is complaining about.

I believe that, when faced with injustice, we should sometimes get somewhat angry.

But only if we hadn't anticipated it- i.e. had been negligent or stupid.

Such anger is not “pure” and entails submitting oneself to (some degree of) moral corruption,

Nonsense! Anger at an unanticipated outcome could be a driver for procedural reform.

but the alternative, acquiescence, is often even worse.

Acquiescence is not the alternative. Doing stupid shit is. That's what Callard is recommending. There is an old Persian proverb- the anger of the poor man burns himself up. Yet the dervish can make a plan and organize a coalition. But that takes a rational brain not thymotic ire.

The point I want to emphasize, however, is this: just because the moral corruption of anger is our best option doesn’t mean it is not corruption.

Why emphasize it? You are saying the equivalent of 'morality requires us to suck a turd'. There is no need for you to underline the foolishness of your view by adding- 'I want to emphasize that just because sucking a turd is our best option doesn't mean that turds don't taste really shitty and that sucking them won't make us very very ill'.

The consequences of acknowledging this point are sobering: victims of injustice are not as innocent as we would like to believe.

Because they are not sucking turds like I told them to.

Either these victims are morally compromised by the vengeful and grudge-bearing character of their anger, or they are morally compromised by acquiescence.

Just suck a turd already or I will give you a failing grade in my course.

Long-term oppression of a group of people amounts to long-term moral damage to that group.

No. Women are not 'morally damaged'. Men must not deny them equal opportunities on the grounds that they are immoral or heteronomous. On the other hand, everybody should immediately start sucking turds.

When it comes to racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, classism, religious discrimination, anti-neurodiversity, elitism of any stripe, this argument entails that the oppressors have made the oppressed morally worse people.

So the Savior has to be from the Oppressor caste. Everybody should just quietly suck turds till instructed otherwise.

Of course, oppressing people is also bad for your soul, but we do not need to be reminded of that; we are accustomed to the thought that wronging others makes you a bad person. My point is: so does being wronged, even if to a lesser degree.

This is silly. Shitheads like Callard don't know anything about souls or morality. Oppression is not easily defined. To identify a group as 'oppressors' or 'oppressed' is seldom a sensible way to make moral or ethical decisions. It may be convenient to do so for some juristic or political purpose. But that is irrelevant.

I moved to the United States from Hungary when I was five years old, but I still spent my childhood summers there, at Lake Balaton. Across the street from my grandparents’ house there was  a resort popular among East Germans. I could not enter the resort area—it was surrounded by a fence—but one summer, when I was around ten years old, I befriended a girl around my age who was vacationing there. We had no common language, but we communicated by way of a marching game: we played soldiers and invented a complicated militaristic dance to which we would add moves day by day. We marched side by side, separated by the fence—until the day I was caught by my grandmother.
My grandmother was a concentration camp survivor, so she was horrified by what she saw: her granddaughter, marching with one of Them. I tried to explain that we were only playing a game, but to her it was clear: I was collaborating with the enemy. I argued that her prejudice against the German girl was no different from the Germans’ prejudice against us. My protest only made her angrier, and I was forbidden from ever approaching the girl again.
But how innocent was my game, really? All four of my grandparents, in fact, had survived concentration camps; all of them lost almost everyone they knew in the Holocaust. My grandmother denied that the Holocaust was the greatest tragedy of her life, giving that honor to the fact that her first child, my uncle, was born with cerebral palsy. But she even blamed that on the Nazis, perhaps not without reason: there are many stories of birth injury in the first generation of children born to women who had suffered malnutrition and other forms of abuse in concentration camps. (My other grandmother’s first baby was stillborn.)
Just because the moral corruption of anger is our best option doesn’t mean it is not corruption.

Is there any 'moral corruption' here? No. Jews in that area had a long tradition of telling their kids- more particularly girls- not to play with Gentiles. But Catholics would tell their kids not to play with Protestants and Upper Class people didn't want their kids consorting with the offspring of proletarians. Why? Because Group Affiliation on the basis of costly signals created a superior 'separating equilibrium' such that life-chances were improved. Hungarian nationalism had militated for higher Jewish fluency in Magyar. Hapsburg Rule was different from Tzarist rule and there were some Rabbis who spoke Magyar.

My parents decided to leave Hungary when the synagogue on our block was blown up. (After that, the Jews in the area went to my grandmother’s house to pray, secretly.) When we arrived in New York City, my parents pulled me out of public school after I was beaten up for wearing a necklace with a Star of David. They could not afford private school, but Orthodox Jewish elementary schools were willing to accept my sister and me for free, as charity cases. Why? Because the Holocaust, of course—which, at those schools, was its own subject, alongside English, math, and science. Before high school, I hardly wrote a poem or short story that was not in some way about the Holocaust.

Callard is wrong. Jews have always been charitable. In the Nineteenth Century, the rich Jews of the West End of London paid for excellent schooling for the poor refugees living in the East East. Sadly, Balfour introduced anti-Semitic immigration controls at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Jewish Community was close-knit and charitable from its earliest origins. 'Mussar' ethics shines through in every line of the Torah. Meeting the material needs of the alterity is necessary to fulfill the spiritual needs of the pious.

The Holocaust- like the Armenian genocide- was different in scale and barbarity than anything that went before, but ancient Nations like the Jews and the Armenians have always had a strong charitable tradition. No doubt, this was reinforced by such terrible events. Going forward, they are determined to have well defended homelands or places of refuge. But this involves rationality and the cultivation of the military and other sciences. Anger and Vendetta proved counterproductive. The Armenian assassination squads started extorting money from wealthy people of their own Community. Jewish terrorism declined because Jews did not want to see Jews killed even if they had 'acquiesced' in Evil. Thus the Rudolph Kasztner assassination was a turning point. Israel benefited by suppressing internecine conflict. Would the Palestinians had learnt the same lesson!

Anti-anti-Semitism was so much the theme of my childhood that it is simply impossible to believe I accidentally fell into playing soldiers with a German girl. I wasn’t innocent. But my grandmother wasn’t innocent, either: she was full of anger. Innocence was not a possibility.

But that has to do with Religion- the notion of Original Sin. Muslims in countries where they have never suffered in the slightest have similar rules about not associating with 'najis'- unclean- infidels.

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Girard contributed to a strand of cultural criticism often invoked in support of attitudes of cynicism, misanthropy, and pessimism about the human condition.

But the people who did so were as stupid as shit and taught shite subjects. Meanwhile people who did STEM subjects were helping billions out of poverty and insecurity.

They are seen as radicals.

No they are seen as shitheads.

In my view, however, all three are to be faulted for their timidity.

Coz they didn't insist everybody should suck a turd.

It is striking the degree to which each writer held himself at a safe anthropological distance from the dark side of morality he so accurately described.

So, these guys did not suck turds enthusiastically enough. They should be ashamed of their timidity!

If they had stepped inside their own theories, they would have immediately drawn the simple, devastating conclusion that it is impossible for humans—you and me and the three of them included—to respond rightly to being treated wrongly. We can’t be good in a bad world.

But we can suck turds. So there's a silver lining- at least according to Agnes Callard. Why has the Boston Review published this dreck? I guess, since Callard identifies as Jewish, its a case of 'Boo to Netanyahu. Jews are evil coz they won't get over the Shoah.' But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. African Americans are evil coz they aren't properly thankful for Slavery and Jim Crow and so forth. But Al Qaeeda is cool coz their grievance was imaginary- they were only pretending to be mad and were disguising a slaughter of the innocents as a vendetta.