When Aristotle discusses indignation, displeasure at another's undeserved good fortune or pleasure at their deserved bad fortune, he says "Both feelings are associated with good moral character; it is our duty both to feel sympathy and pity for unmerited distress, and to feel indignation at unmerited prosperity; for whatever is undeserved is unjust, and that is why we ascribe indignation even to the gods."
While this is a pretty standard statement for a guy with a top-down worldview, I think it's interesting that Aristotle chalks everything that isn't deserved up to injustice. Do people exist in constant states of deserving or not deserving everything in the universe? Can I, at this moment, be said to deserve or not deserve to win a free car out of the blue, because of my moral goodness or badness? Could I be said to deserve a free car, but not a free house? Should I be keeping a balance book?
Here is where I have to remind myself that Aristotle believes in deities. In Aristotle's world, when people are morally good, they ARE rewarded -- every time, at least in theory. The gods bless a good person with wealth or health or public office. If a person is morally bad, it's lightning bolt o'clock. Aristotle believes in a totally (or almost, anyway) incorruptible social system, whereby justice is meted out from a higher authority. The Greek gods, unlike many of the gods from modern traditions, can be tricked, hurt, evaded, and even temporarily thwarted, but the stories where these things happen are usually about heroes, and the average Greek citizen is expecting his comeuppance around every corner. Even Greek rules about hospitality invoked the gods: you had to be nice to guests because they might be gods and might be able to take their own revenge.
Today, though, not everything is deserved or undeserved. When we refer to something as an "act of God," half the time we're using the term to figure out whether our insurance is willing to cover it, not how we brought the misfortune on ourselves through lack of sacrifice. We have a better understanding of random chance and of guilt that is difficult or impossible to locate, that is shared socially or that can't really be chalked up to a single person even when the facts point that way. Not many people really think the CEO of BP is personally responsible for the Gulf oil spill. He might have let it happen, even encouraged practices that made it likely to happen, but he didn't want it to happen and didn't choose to make it happen. He's culpable, but not guilty. Do we feel indignant at Tony Hayward? What about Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the freshmen who leaked video of their roommate Tyler Clementi and inadvertently brought about his suicide?
Obviously, many people do feel indignant at these people -- commenters on news, GLBTQ, feminist, and even celebrity gossip blogs were engaged in battles for weeks after the incident, arguing about the appropriate punishments for Ravi and Wei. Thousands of people did personally attack Tony Hayward, especially after his YouTube video circulated and he was judged not to feel sorry enough. Emotions do dissipate with distance from an event, and by now, as I'm looking at a Molly Wei update on Celebitchy.com, I'm seeing comment wars over whether or not she, and to a lesser extent Ravi, were guilty even though they were culpable or causative. Many people point to the fact that Wei let Ravi borrow her computer and might not necessarily have been directly involved, and some commenters even say that what Ravi did was reprehensible, and what happened to Tyler was terrible, but that it's still a stretch to equate a suicide after a bullying incident with murder.
What does it mean to offer bodies to the crowd for judgment, especially now that we can no longer hope for an absolute decision, even at a final judgment? Obviously the great unwashed were always a sounding board for popular morality, but now that we can't rely on religious pardons or condemnations to give us the final word, how do we deal with the social responsibility of public morality?
Your Act of God/Insurance comment made me laugh. But back to Aristotle:
ReplyDeleteI am in no way questioning what you're saying, but, for the sake of discussion, I have to question Aristotle: If justice is meted out by the gods, and Aristotle believes in a polytheistic system, how does indignation come into play? Wouldn't it be bad form to question or express indignation towards a judgement that came from a higher authority?
You make an interesting point about how what is deserved or undeserved is defined. Yet again, Aristotle's oversimplification of emotional experience expects that there are clearly defined rational basis behind emotions. While there certainly is a dimension of rationality to emotions, even this rational basis is subjectively defined, rather than objectively determined. This is certainly true in the case of indignation. Each individuals personal experiences and outlook on humanity, based on social, cultural, gender, religious, and other values, will shape what he considers deserved or undeserved. And even if a person sees something as deserved or undeserved, they may or may not be indignant about it. For example, someone who receives a huge inheritance may be fully aware that it was undeserved, but may not care at all. I think that indignation has to involve so threat to one's personal values or experiences and thus isn't so simply defined. The emotional experience he defines as indignation may occur in most individuals in some way, but the way it is expressed certainly varies from person to person.
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