Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice

"This is a really interesting book. Martha Nussbaum began as a classical philosopher and has immersed herself in ancient philosophy. She has read very widely in literature. She is politically engaged and she travels widely – often to India. She has a huge range of experience and understanding through life and books that she brings into this book. Lurking behind it is Seneca: the Roman philosopher who talked about anger being a useless emotion. What Nussbaum argues in the book is that there is something confused about what we think we will get from our emotion of anger. We feel anger, anger is often used in political contexts, and anger is often praised: we feel that we should feel angry about how people have been treated, the injustice. She argues that we should get beyond anger, and the associated desire for payback, and that it usually exacerbates the evil in a situation rather than removing it. It is often more about getting a good feeling from expressing the anger than it is about bringing about beneficial results of the kind that we claim to want to bring about. Think about what happened after apartheid in South Africa. You might have expected a situation where there were reprisals, a justifiable humiliation of the people who’d committed torture and murder, and harassed people. This retributive approach would have come very naturally to most people. The world almost expected payback. Instead, we had Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The choice of a civilised, not straightforwardly forgiving but transparent process of coming to terms with what had happened was, in most people’s eyes, a better solution. “Justice is a human invention. It’s not a natural given that if somebody harms you, you have to harm them back in proportion to the harm that they brought about.” Martha Nussbaum is making the case for a new Stoicism in society. Stoicism famously involved control of the emotions and not giving in to irrational passions when they could not bring about any benefit. In society, we should hold back on anger, hold back on something which comes very easily to most of us. We will produce a better world by looking for other solutions. There isn’t justice in the sense of an eye for an eye, but there’s a question whether that is the best view of justice. Justice is a human invention. It’s not a natural given that if somebody harms you, you have to harm them back in proportion to the harm that they brought about. True, many of us are predisposed to behave that way, but we can resist that temptation. What Martha Nussbaum is inviting us to do is to step back from that and ask, does it actually bring about a better situation, than some alternative, more restorative approaches to wrongdoing? Ultimately the message of the book is that love is better than hate. The book is stimulating a debate about how we should respond to wrongdoing. It’s an important book, it’s beautifully written and it draws on a wide range of sources, but it is not the final word on the issue. It’s somebody putting forward an interesting position, defending it, arguing for it, believing in it sincerely. That opens up a conversation that we wouldn’t otherwise have had. That, for me, is the great value of philosophy: that it allows and encourages people to think. It doesn’t simply present a pre-packaged view that you have to learn. What’s nice about the way Martha Nussbaum does it is that she can draw on some of the great philosophy of the past. She knows the classic texts very well and has read them in Latin and Greek. These topics were much discussed in ancient philosophy. So there’s a really interesting way it can feed back into the present debate. Philosophy can be very good at renewing its past and making it relevant to today, and that’s true of my final book choice as well."