Class 14.2: Revenge
So far we’ve been thinking about positive ways of moving forward from conflict. But today I want to turn and think a little bit about some of the negative ways that we can move forward. I don’t have a great article to assign about breaking up - I wish that I did - but I do have something provocative and thoughtful to read about revenge. So that’s the plan for today.
Alice MacLachlan
Alice MacLachlan teaches at York University, in Toronto. Her research is primarily concerned with issues about moving forward from conflict, including apology, forgiveness, reconciliation, and repair. And of course, for today, revenge. Her work often brings together interpersonal issues with broader themes concerning gender or gender relations, as you will also find in today’s reading.
Trigger Warning
MacLachlan frames her article by discussing the “Me Too” movement and the accusation sometimes made that public accusations amount to a kind of “revenge” over sexual assault and there is therefore something wrong with them. And many of the kinds of cases in which she is interested throughout her article are cases in which for one reason or another it is not possible or realistic or is too costly to the victim to reach a kind of social reckoning with what a perpetrator has done to their victim. She doesn’t describe any cases in detail, but I want to warn you of what to expect before you go into it, so that you’re not taken by surprise.
Orthodox Thought: Revenge is Bad
MacLachlan’s article is a kind of qualified defense of revenge, under certain circumstances that are akin to those at stake in the “Me Too” movement. There is something appropriate and therapeutic about revenge when it is proportional, under circumstances where other forms of justice are unavailable or perhaps unrealistic. MacLachlan’s examples are serious, but season two of Friends also depicts, perhaps, a milder case with the same structure, when Julia Roberts gets back at Chandler for lifting her skirt in the third grade:
MacLachlan has two kinds of opponents in her article. The first is someone who accepts the orthodox view that revenge is always bad. Against this opponent, MacLachlan argues that sometimes revenge can be virtuous and even restorative, provided that it satisfies certain constraints. But she also has another kind of opponent - other philosophers including Peter French who have argued that revenge is good, but who take what MacLachlan thinks is the wrong view of what revenge involves or what makes it good. In a way, she thinks that French’s view of revenge is part of what the critics of revenge identify as bad, and so disagreeing with French is part of how to make revenge more palatable to its critics. This argumentative strategy is a bit like our discussion of offering concessions earlier this semester.
