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there can be no golden mean (NE 2.6.102 and Rhetoric 2.9 10.231 43).
Here Aristotle neglects the reality that we sometimes approve of and even
celebrate the suffering of another for reasons we take to be moral.
Malice frequently causes people to lose a sense of proportion, causing
them to hope for or actually to inflict terrible suffering upon another who
has committed a fairly trivial offense. Of course, malice need not stem
from any offense at all. Malice may subvert any attempt to develop con-
sensus on the appropriateness of suffering in any given context. To make
matters worse, cruelty and hatred may erupt indiscriminately, unprovoked
by the persons toward whom they are unleashed. This fact further frus-
trates and impedes efforts to reach agreement on what punishment or suf-
fering any given person may deserve.
The impossibility of reading the minds of others prevents us from
knowing whether another feels malicious glee or Schadenfreude. The em-
pirical complexity of human needs and interests blurs the distinction be-
tween the two. Commentators on Schadenfreude have seized on this
ambiguity and taken the easy way out by declaring any pleasure in the dis-
tress of another morally off limits. This is not so surprising, given that nu-
merous taboos aim to regulate ambiguities which would further complicate
morality. Schadenfreude frustrates a moralist s desire for simplicity.
Low self-esteem, commitments to justice and loyalty, responses to the
comical, and dispositional malice, these four are the principal antecedents
of Schadenfreude. Only the last unequivocally calls for moral blame.
Given the differences among the cognitive components of pleasure we
take in the misfortunes of others, it should not seem farfetched to claim
that this pleasure takes several forms.
These four sources divide themselves equally between worry and
release. With either injuries to self-esteem or commitments to justice,
Explaining Schadenfreude 43
another person (or other persons) threatens the self in some way or trig-
gers a worry about the possibilities for self-realization, self-fulfillment,
and happiness. These instances reflect worry about one s personal safety,
possessions, status, or self-respect. In the cases of the comic and malice,
however, pent-up emotion is released. Some prior attitude toward another
person (or other persons) prompts a need for a release of sadness, aggres-
sion, or perhaps both.
What objections might be raised to this account of the genesis of
Schadenfreude? The very idea of cutting Schadenfreude up into small
pieces might itself seem suspect. For one way of taming a threatening idea
would be to dissect the idea into so many harmless elements that nothing
remains of the threat (as, for example, when Rawls distinguishes among
at least six kinds of envy). The threat is all in our minds, the dissection
would demonstrate, not in the idea itself. Of course, the threat is all in our
minds, but not in the way that Schopenhauer insists. Schopenhauer makes
Schadenfreude disappear by collapsing it into malice. In so doing, he
makes moral monsters of us all. Schopenhauer fortifies a moral tradition
that insists that good people always feel compassion when bad things hap-
pen to other people. When a moral tradition produces universal guilt and
willful ignorance about that guilt, our personal and social stake in trans-
forming common assumptions is quite high.
This section on the genesis of Schadenfreude sets up a framework for
assessing morally acceptable examples of pleasure in the misfortunes of
others. Far from a knee-jerk reaction, Schadenfreude evolves from a
thought process that leaves us judges of what other people deserve. In
Schadenfreude we find ourselves winners: experience has presented us
with evidence that the world punishes bad people, or people who have
managed their affairs badly.
This framework, focusing as it does on how much we like ourselves,
will not lead us to find morally acceptable every emotion of people who
suffer from low self-esteem. But our new knowledge should prevent us
from hastily condemning the Schadenfreude of people who possess little
self-esteem and help us make sense of our interaction with other people
generally. We are less apt than others to consider our own suffering de-
served or trivial. We forget that just as we can assure ourselves that we
44 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
take a morally acceptable pleasure in the suffering of others (because it
seems deserved), so also can others justify their pleasure in our miseries.
When we realize that so-called justice can just as easily work against us as
for us, we should think twice about how hard we will allow ourselves to
be on others.
Our way of looking at the world possesses extraordinary power: it can
make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven. That outlook can make others
suffer more than they already do. Or less.
II
When Really Bad Things
Happen to Other People
TALKING ABOUT THE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO OTHER
people raises questions about the experience of suffering. Suffer-
ing can harm most deeply by eroding cherished beliefs we hold
about ourselves or the world around us. Suffering threatens to
rob us of control. Few would dispute that there are degrees of sad-
ness; I argue as well for a difference of kind between trivial and
significant misfortunes. Another father-son narrative will prove
useful here; this one turns on Schadenfreude that arises from signif-
icant misfortune.
Further, I ask what it is to take suffering too seriously and
what it is to take suffering in stride. I then turn to the matter of in-
terpreting suffering as a sign of God s punishment. The main idea
I advance is that interpreting suffering as a message from either
God or the invisible hand of justice will almost invariably land us
in trouble. We have shown great difficulty in accepting the role of
randomness in our lives and in the world.
Injustice similarly confounds our way of thinking about the
world. The violation of a law or a social norm angers us so deeply
that we feel we must see the violator brought low, as Kant said.
Our institutional response to bad people has been to make them
46 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
suffer (at the hands of judges we have appointed). We do to oth-
ers what we do not want done to us. In order for justice to be rea-
sonable, we must have well-founded notions both of what is due
us and what is due others.
Those whose suffering we celebrate must possess the intelli-
gence necessary to conform to social standards. We ourselves
must realize that it is only fair for others to judge us as we have
judged them: the same rationale that justifies our taking pleasure
in another s suffering today may justify his or her taking pleasure
in our suffering tomorrow.
Forgiveness and mercy point to a different way out of our bad
feelings. Even when we manage to forgive people who have trans-
gressed, though, we may still insist on punishment in order to
demonstrate loyalty to our principles. Proper self-respect, so vital
to our flourishing, stands in the way of our forgiving readily
people or classes of people who have harmed us. Few have been
willing to concede that we often possess morally acceptable rea-
sons for not forgiving others. Although we may morally choose
not to forgive others, we forget at our peril an ancient maxim:
judge as ye shall be judged.
Three
The Meaning of Suffering
It is in the response to suffering that many and per-
haps all men, individually and in their groups, define
themselves, take on character, develop their ethos.
H. Richard Niebuhr
WHAT ARE THE SORROWS OF OTHER MEN TO US, AND WHAT THEIR
joy?, Defoe asks in Robinson Crusoe. H. Richard Niebuhr, a towering
figure in modern theology, never mentions Defoe but supplies the begin-
ning of what must be the best answer to this, the question from which
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