Vengeance

Are Vindictiveness and Vengeance Irrational?

An emotion is considered irrational if it is not fitting to its object, is harmful to the person who experiences [Page 1658]the emotion, is inherently self-defeating, necessarily leads to pathological excess, or lacks any useful purpose. By these measures, vindictiveness does not appear to be irrational. Indeed, it seems fitting that people strike back when they have been injured—such a response seems encoded in us by our evolutionary history. The vindictive person, therefore, does not seem like the neurotic who exhibits emotions that are not fitting to their object, such as the phobic who has an irrational fear of situations or objects that are not in fact dangerous.

Neither does vindictiveness seem pointless. The vindictive person wants revenge and no doubt will often feel much better (having asserted and protected the value of self-respect) when such revenge is realized. Having been brought low by a wrongdoer, the victim may regain a sense of equality if the wrongdoer is brought low as well. That is the point of vindictiveness. To say it is pointless only because it does not have a point of which the critic of vindictiveness would approve is simply to beg the question at issue.

Nietzsche famously argued that a vindictive person tends to harm himself—like a scorpion stinging itself to death with its own tail. It is, of course, irrational to regard as legitimate an emotion that is self-poisoning, and this looks like a good case for the irrationality of vindictiveness. But such a conclusion would be hasty for two reasons. First, what Nietzsche really argued is that vindictiveness (what he calls ressentiment) becomes poisonous if it is repressed. This is as much an argument in favor of expressing vindictiveness in acts of revenge as it is an argument for the elimination of vindictiveness. Second, it is important to distinguish between the rationality of an emotion itself and the rationality of the role that this emotion plays in the life of a person. Spinoza did not argue that the fear of death itself is irrational (he did not suggest, for example, that we should not look both ways before crossing a street). Rather, he argued that it is irrational to be led by the fear of death, to let fear play such a dominant role in life that it sours all the good things that life has to offer. Unless it can be shown that vindictiveness is always the dominant passion and leads the vindictive person in some self-destructive way, Nietzche's statement does not provide a case for the irrationality of vindictiveness itself.

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