Class 6.1: Hurt Feelings

So here is where we are: we spent three weeks trying to understand what would rationalize or make sense of what puts people into opposition with one another, and now we are in the middle of spending three weeks trying to think about what makes conflicts “personal”, and not just “strictly business”. Our reading for today is about hurt feelings. More specifically, it is about how hurt feelings are different from blame and resentment - at least according to today’s author, David Shoemaker, who will also be our guest speaker later in the semester.

David Shoemaker

David Shoemaker is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He previously taught at Tulane University, and before that in the Cal State system here in California. Shoemaker is the organizer and convener of the biannual New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility and so has played a large role in socially organizing philosophers working on moral responsibility in recent years. And he has made seminal contributions to thinking about ways in which moral responsibility might be multifaceted and about how and why and for what we can hold people responsible in marginal cases of agency - people who are diminished in some way because of cognitive deficits or childhood. In order to do so, he has drawn extensively on work in empirical psychology about diminished agency. He is also the author of a forthcoming book about the moral significance of humor, and on April 1 will join our class in person to give the annual Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project Public Lecture.

Background

Shoemaker’s paper about “hurt feelings” tries to tell us some important things about hurt feelings and where they come from. But he isn’t just trying to tell us something about them de novo - he is trying to justify to his readers, who he expects to know a lot about recent discussions in philosophy, and who he therefore expects to already be more interested in some questions than in others. So he takes his audience to be people who have read Strawson’s article “Freedom and Resentment” (great! we check that box) and who are aware that Strawson’s article has led to thousands of pages being written about blame and resentment (okay, we don’t check that box, but I’ll save you thousands of pages of reading and summarize it briefly).

Some common themes emerge in the literature on blame and resentment that validate some of what Strawson says about quality of will (with many qualifications that will not be important for us). These include that some of the main things that Strawson says are excuses - things like “it was just an accident!” (my son loves this one), “it was inadvertant”, “I didn’t realize”, “I was coerced into doing it”, “I was under duress”, and others, can each be explained because they are cases in which an action doesn’t really reflect ill-will after all.

So a lot of what Shoemaker is focused on in his paper is trying to show that feelings can be hurt even when they are not responses to ill will. Hurt feelings are a response to how other people feel about us, but not necessarily to whether they disregard or disrespect us in any way. He thinks that theorizing about moral responsibility has been distorted by focusing too much on resentment and not enough on hurt feelings. We don’t care as much, in this class about the abstract question “what is moral responsibility?”. But we do care about what is required for hurt feelings, and want to know what is likely to lead to them.

Comparison to Basu

You’ll notice as you read that there are some similarities between this article and Basu, earlier this semester. Shoemaker’s article was published in 2019, and probably written at the same time that Basu and I were writing our first article about how beliefs can wrong together. So Basu and Shoemaker were thinking about similar things at the same time without knowing about each other. But while both emphasize that we care about people’s thoughts even when they don’t manifest in action, they drew different conclusions from this.

Hurt Feelings

As you read the article, focus on asking yourself, what makes hurt feelings different from resentment, for Shoemaker? And try to go beyond the reading to ask yourself when your feelings have been hurt, and whether it was always what someone did, or how they felt or what they thought, that hurt your feelings. If someone else had felt or thought that, would it have hurt you in the same way? Does it matter what your relationship is with them?

Quiz Time!