Between Psychology and Philosophy by Michael Slote

Author:Michael Slote
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030225032
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5

We are finally ready to bring in the psychology that, as I think and shall argue, is relevant to the question whether the worst people, the most malicious people, are not happy in their lives. I am not going to bring in the actual literature of recent psychology because I don’t believe any of the literature directly addresses the main psychological issue that faces us here, the question of whether in terms of a realistic understanding of human psychology, one can argue that malicious people are unhappy. What I hope to show or at least give you reason to believe is that there are two basic and intuitively realistic models of what lies behind malice. Both involve revenge, but the revenge involved is differently related to human emotion in the two basic cases.

And I shall make another assumption in order to facilitate the argument and in order, too, to engage realistically with the immorality I am going to be talking about. There are different degrees or levels of malice and revenge, and the revenge my older brother takes against a schoolmate of mine who has bloodied my nose is not comparable in moral seriousness and in degree of malice with the more extreme versions of malice that characterize the people we think are most morally bad or vicious. If my brother merely bloodies the nose of the boy (or girl?) who has bloodied my nose, that is revenge and embodies (at least temporary) malice to the extent, as it is realistic to suppose, that my brother thinks the person who bloodied my nose deserves similar treatment. He wants that person to suffer not as a means to some further good for himself (my brother) or me, but because, as he thinks, the person deserves to suffer, and that counts as malice even if it is also somewhat excusable or understandable or, on certain views (an eye for an eye and a nose for a nose), justified. But all this, as we can say, is minor malice , and I think we can assume that the morally worst people engage in malicious actions of a much more serious kind and on a much larger scale. They hurt other people, they kill other people, they rape or torture other people, and take pleasure in doing so apart from and independently of any (other) benefits they derive or may hope to derive from doing so. We are talking, in other words, about (serial) killers, about (serial) rapists, and about serial torturers who take sadistic pleasure in torturing their victims, and actually all of these categories involve some kind of sadism commonsensically understood. This is even, though in a more minor and temporary way, true of my brother’s attitude and actions toward the person who has bloodied my nose. Malice, revenge, and sadism are arguably part of one package, but this assumes that malice not only cannot be free-standing but also always depends on some sort of desire for revenge.

In what follows, I shall

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