Can Moral Responsibility Skeptics Feel Schadenfreude?

For years I’ve found the culture critic Lee Siegel to be completely insufferable—a whiney pretentious abusive humorless hack.  Read this letter to Jon Stewart (who I don’t even like that much) and you’ll see what I mean.  Last weekend Siegel was suspended from his post as senior editor of The New Republic for “sock-puppetry,” meaning that he posted comments on his own article under an assumed name.  Here are a couple of posts from 'sprezzatura' (i.e. Siegel himself.). 

“How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn't like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos. Siegel accuses Stewart of a "pandering puerility" and he gets an onslaught of puerile responses from the insecure herd of independent minds. I'm well within Stewart's target group, and I think he's about as funny as a wet towel in a locker room. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be.”

“I'm a huge fan of Siegel, been reading him since he started writing for TNR almost ten years ago. (Full disclosure: I'm an editor at a magazine in NYC and he's written for me too.) I watch the goings-on and have to scratch my head. The people who hate him the most are all in their twenties and early thirties. There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can't. Maybe if they'd let themselves go and write truthfully, they'd get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.”

(Can you imagine doing this?  The closest I could even come is giving myself a red chili pepper on ratemyprofessor.com.  Right now I only have one student review, and it was clearly a guy, since I wasn't given a chili pepper.)  Anyway, Franklin Foer of The New Republic discovered this and fired him.   The story went public and Siegel is now a laughing stock.  When I heard about this, I was giddy with schadenfreude.   If I had thought about it for a week, I couldn’t have imagined a more appropriate fate for this guy.  Talk about getting your just deserts!  But then I remembered: I don’t believe in just-deserts.  So I asked myself: am I being inconsistent with my skepticism about moral responsibility?  After all, it’s not Siegel’s fault that he’s an pompous pr---.  He doesn’t deserve blame for that, and so why should I be so happy to hear about his disgrace? So I ask the Garden: Is there a way to reconcile schadenfreude with skepticism about moral responsibility, or is this just another area, like sports, where skeptics have to set aside philosophical beliefs and do the Hume backgammon thing?

Comments

[Neil]

One of my pet peeves in the moral responsibility literature is the failure, almost ubiquitous in a certain kind of (otherwise) thoughtful compatibilist, to distinguish between bad agents and blameworthy agents. People like Scanlon, Angela Smith, and most recently Arpaly have argued that if an agent acts badly, they just are blameworthy. Now, I'm increasingly tempted to join the responsibility sceptics (I use to say that I was a compatibilist 4 days a week; I think it might have dropped to 3). But if I go, I hope I can take the bad/blameworthy distinction with me. That is, I hope that a sceptic can still say that X is not a blameworthy agent, but X is still a bad agent. And there are certain kinds of reactive attitudes that can be appropriate for a bad agent. Consider another serial sock puppet, John Lott. It was a good thing that Lott was exposed as a sock puppet, because it did so much to discredit his views, which are objectionable and false. So I rejoiced at the exposure. Of course, that's not to say that feelings of desert aren't playing a role, but we (4 day) sceptics don't need to deny that we have such reactions. We merely deny that they're justified.

[Tamler Sommers]

Neil,

I agree with you that bad and blameworthy are too often confused. And it's just an empirical fact that I reacted with schadenfreude to the news so no one could deny that. (This Siegel guy has tried to ruin too many careers for me to feel sorry for him that his own has taken a hit.) My question is whether a reaction like that could be justified on days when you're a skeptic.

Incidentally, I predict that the proportion of your skeptical days continues to increase until, like me, you're only a free will-ist on Yom Kippur and when the Yankees play the Red Sox.

[Peter Brian Barry]

In one sense, I'm not sure I see the problem. If schadenfreude is simply taking pleasure or delight or satisfaction in the suffering of another person, then certainly skeptics about moral responsibility can consistently feel schadenfreude--I can see no reason for supposing, quite generally, that skeptics about free will and moral responsibility cannot feel pleasure or delight or satisfaction.

Of course, if schadenfreude requires taking pleasure in suffering that is believed to be deserved, then the skeptic must, I suppose, conclude that schadenfreude is incoherent. But I hadn't supposed that we can only feel schadenfreude if we think the suffering of another is deserved; for example, we might think that paradigmatically evil persons experience schadenfreude when good people suffer, when that suffering is deserved or otherwise.

[Tamler Sommers]

Peter, that's helpful. I guess the question should be: can MR skeptics feel justified schadenfreude (given that the objects of the feeling don't deserve the bad things that are happening to them)? The soon-to-be reinstated (I hope) Robert Allen writes to me in an email:

"schadenfreude is a reactive attitute the occasion of which is someone receiving his comeuppance- what he deserves. It's in light of the fact that some pr-- is finally 'getting his' that I'm delighted. I don't see how I can adopt this attitude while denying he is blameworthy; the realization that he is yet bad does not seem sufficient."

That seems like it might be right to me. But Peter's first point suggests the following broader question: is schadenfreude the type of feeling that can be or needs to be justified?

[Gustavo Llarull]

Neil's reminder above (the bad/blameworthy distinction) is helpful. Now, I'd like to press that line a little, and wonder whether a skeptic can --borrowing from Gary Watson's distinction between responsibility as attributability and responsibility as accountability-- retain the former (attributability) and reject the latter (accountability), and then say that her (the skeptic's) reaction toward Siegel is an expression of the former and not of the latter.

If the skeptic accepts this move, then we can reject the view that schadenfreude is necessarily related to blameworthiness. It would still be related to a judgment of attributability, of course, but that should be OK for the skeptic, right?

Also, it would seem to me that that judgment of attributability is all we need in terms of justification.

[Tamler Sommers]

That's an interesting idea, Gustavo, but why do you think judgment of attributability is enough to justify schadenfreude? The skeptic denies that it's the agent's fault that that he has all the bad qualities we attribute to him, right? So why should we take any pleasure in any harm that befalls him (even if it's a particularly suitable sort of harm), when he just had the bad luck to have all of these bad qualities?

[Cihan Baran]

I don't know whether this really answers the question.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the skeptic is not justified in feeling schadenfreude.

Can we then 'blame' the skeptic for feeling such? If we say, "you are a bad philosopher. You have attitudes that contradict your doctrines..."

"True", the sceptic will say, with wistful eyes and perhaps a tired sigh. "But who said I could be held responsible for contradicting my doctrines?"

(Side note: Schopenhauer was notorious for not heeding his doctrines of asceticism. He dismissed his critics, saying something like the relation between the moralist and her life was akin to that of a sculptor's body and the bodies she sculpts.)

[Gustavo Llarull]

Tamler,

If it's the same kind of "pleasure" that we feel when, say, a storm takes care of the branches of a tree that we'd planned on trimming, then that (admittedly, thin) feeling of schadenfreude is justified. The overgrown branches were the reason that the tree failed to meet a standard (an aesthetic standard, say, of what our frontyard should look like). Likewise, there is a failure to meet a standard in Siegel's case, and that standard pertains to moral responsibility in the sense of attributability only, i.e. in the sense that the failure to be virtuous is indeed attributable to him, although the question of whether he should be held accountable (and blameworthy) remains a separate question. "Oh good; that looks right," we say with a feeling of satisfaction when we wake up and see that those branches are not there anymore. "Oh good; that looks right," we say with a feeling of satisfaction when we wake up and see that Siegel has been "trimmed" by his failure to meet a standard being exposed. If we're skeptics, in neither case would we say that the object of our judgment "deserves" (in the sense of being accountable) the "trimming." Only by extension, and not rigorously, I submit, do we hold inanimate objects or plants "accountable" ("This damned computer crashed; she does whatever she wants, the mean thing!").

Insofar as the feeling of shadenfreude goes *this* far only, the skeptic is justified. Now, if the feeling goes beyond this, and involves accountability components (e.g. retributive feelings), then I'd say the skeptic is *not* justified. But again, the skeptic can say that that sort of ultimate justification should be overriden by pragmatic reasons (more on this below).

Cihan,

I think you're painting the skeptic as a bit of a cynic (in the ordinary, not technical, sense of the word). True, the skeptic can always respond as you say she does ("Who said that I could be held responsible for contradicting my doctrine?"), but only if she and her interlocutor are talking about deep or ultimate responsibility (and, moreoever, about the accountability aspect of responsibility). Otherwise, the skeptic could still say that there are good reasons to hold people responsible, even though she knows that doing so is ultimately unjustified. (You know, the stock reasons having to do with the importance of those unjustified feelings for social control; for a rich emotional and social life, and so on).

On a different note, Cihan, your Schopenhauer anecdote is interesting. It always bothers me when people hold that X's views are false or unjustified because X's life is not consistent with those views. At most, that proves that X is a hypocrite, not that X's views are false. And it's not even always the case that not being consistent with one's views is tantamount to being a hypocrite. Again, the skeptic who feels "thick" shadenfreude (i.e. shadenfreude that includes accountability-related feelings) can say that although that feeling of shadenfreude is not ultimately justified, there are practical reasons that may favor having those feelings.

Brian Leiter has an interesting post at The Leiter Reports on how sometimes there are good reasons not to live by one's own moral views. The post addresses criticisms leveled at Chomsky's alleged inconsistency between his life and his views on moral, social, and political philosophy. I can't find the post now, though.

[Carmen Sternwood]

This was a courageous and brilliant post--but then I'd expect nothing else from Sommers. He's always willing to challenge contemporary orthodoxy, and he does it with the wit and enthusiasm of a modern day Diderot. Also, I've seen him in person and he really deserves a chili pepper!

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks for the kind works, Carmen!

Gustavo, you wrote:
"If it's the same kind of "pleasure" that we feel when, say, a storm takes care of the branches of a tree that we'd planned on trimming, then that (admittedly, thin) feeling of schadenfreude is justified."

I agree we might get pleasure from that, but would you really call it Schadenfreude? That seems more like the feeling we get watching those guys crush the printer (or something) in Office Space. It's pleasure, it seems suitable, but I'm not sure it's Schadenfreude (if there is a true essense of schadenfreude...there's always that lingering worry that we're arguing over words.)

On the other hand, I think your strategy could work in human cases--ones where certain qualities an agent has are clearly not his or her fault. For example, whenever Alex Rodgriguez goes through a slump, the Schadenfreude meter of the country goes off the charts. Yet everyone thinks he's a decent guy, who doesn't really deserve the humiliation he gets. So why do we feel it? There is, as, yes, Robert Allen pointed out, some sort of suitable fit between his contract, demeanor, and facial expressions (none of which are his fault), and his not coming through in the clutch that makes almost everyone, even many Yankee fans, feel happy.

Cihan,

You're right that a skeptic would not deserve blame for feeling schadenfreude (if skepticism is true, and the two are incompatible). But as Gustavo says, that doesn't mean that skepticism is false, nor does the skeptic have to take that tired wistful attitude you mention. He's not a fatalist, remember. He knows he has plenty of take-charge compatibilist control. And if he wants to make his feelings more consistant with his theoretical beliefs, he has every reason to do so. He won't deserve praise for this decision, but so what? How often do we do things just to deserve praise?

[Gustavo Llarull]

Tamler, if you had to do the garden during the summer, in Riverside, CA (over 105 F a few weeks ago!) you'd agree that discovering that Nature has done your job with those damned branches triggers genuine schadenfreude ! Now, serious: I think you're right -- I may have gone too far with the tree example, and instead an example taken from sports is much better. Actually, if I'm not wrong Gary Watson uses examples from baseball, too, when presenting the distinction between attributability and accountability.

Other than that, the question remains whether schadenfreude requires retributive feelings, or whether a weaker version of the sort I sketched above would work. The Online Webster defines schadenfreude as "enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others" but that's not very helpful, because, again, "enjoyment" is ambiguous. Like you, I suspect that most people mean the stronger version (i.e. including retributive feelings and/or feelings relating to accountability). But as far as the original question goes, I think I'd stick by my guns and say that, provided the feelings in a given episode of schadenfreude involved only something like attributability-feelings (and not accountability-feelings), the skeptic would indeed be justified in having those feelings. It may seem a stretch from the way most people use the term "schadenfreude", but the definition seems to allow us to use the term that way. And hey, here's another job for those interested in Experimental Philosophy! What do people mean when they use "schadenfraude" beyond the (for our purposes, unhelpful) dictionary definition?

[Eddy Nahmias]

Well, most ordinary non-German people don't mean much when they hear "schadenfraude" since most people don't know what it means. So, just as we can't ask people what they think about "determinism" when we want to know what they think about it in relation to free will (because they don't know what philosophers mean by "determinism" so we have to use scenarios to describe it), similarly we can't ask them what they mean by "schadenfraude". But we could (try to) come up with scenarios, perhaps like the ones in the posts above, and see if they would think and feel about them in the way described above (e.g., are the human and non-human cases relevantly similar). (Speaking of which, I'd like to know--and test--how similarly people think about "could have done otherwise" in human and non-human cases--would people think that if determinism is true, my dog *couldn't* have caught the frisbee when she just misses it, and if they think she could have (and that it's not because she has libertarian freedom), what would that suggest about how they think about whether humans can do otherwise if determinism is true?).

Sorry, I didn't mean to get philosophical; rather, I just wanted to ask my old buddy (half-pepper) Tamler whether he bothered to set up an email account for "Carmen Sternwood" so he could Siegel himself.

[Tamler Sommers]

I have no idea what Eddy's talking about.

[Phil]

As a novice and armchair philosopher, I can't see that there is any incompatibility or infidelity involved in the experience of "schadenfraude" in response to the event of an irritating man suffering the consequences of his nature. You and I are presumably predisposed to a whole range of visceral attitudes and responses which come over us in spite of our intellectual perspective. This is uncomfortable, but not unexpected. It seems extremely difficult to live life without the experience of the force of karma; as if it existed. Apparently, it just so happens that sometimes what goes around comes around. So it goes. I am almost entirely unable to distinguish between badness and blameworthiness. Both require a frame of reference, which I suspect has no meaningful basis. If I misunderstand the issue, I suspect you will indulge me. I can hardly be blamed.

[Neil]

Phil,

Tammler mistates the problem in his title (it's his only fault). Of course a sceptic can feel schadenfreude. He really wants to know if there is any inconsistency here: schadenfreude seems to have a content; it seems to commit us to thinking that the agent got what they deserve. That's the question, really: does it have that content? If it does, and desert scepticism is right, we should see the disposition to it as something like the disposition to judge that the lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion are unequal.

[Kip Werking]

I just want to echo Neil's claim about the possibility of cognitive biases affecting human judgment in the moral domain just as they affect us in the visual domain. Joshua Greene makes precisely this analogy, with respect to moral realism, in his Ph.d thesis, and he repeatedly refers to free will as an "illusion" in his "For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything." I describe a multitude of candidate biases (perhaps too many) that may work in this way, in my article The View from Nowhere through a Distorted Lens. With respect to schadenfreude, the most important such biases may be the fundamental attribution error (or correspondence bias) and the incapability, or unwillingness, to understand the behavior of wrongdoers.

Ross, L. (1977) The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortion in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 174-221

Baumeister, R. F., Stillwell, A. & Wotman, S. R. (1990). Victim and perpetrator accounts of interpersonal conflict: Autobiographical narratives about anger. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 994-1005.

I also suspect that Tamler's work brings us closer to understanding why such biases evolved.

"The Illusion of Freedom Evolves." (in press). In Distributed Cognition and the Will. ed. Spurrett, D., Kincaid, H. Ross, D., Stephens. L. MIT Press

As best as I can tell, Tamler and I are the only ones to have suggested how our species might have evolved something like the illusion of free will (I would be very happy to learn of other suggestions).

[Tamler Sommers]

I would just like to report that MR skepticism notwithstanding I'm enjoying a big helping of fully justified schadenfreude after the Tigers 8-3 win over the Yankees today.

[Tamler Sommers]

Blog plagiarism alert!

http://bostondirtdogs.boston.com/Headline_Archives/2006/10/schadenfreude.html#more