Morality – NY Times

Here’s a simple moral idea: We’re entitled, absent special considerations, to feel and to express resentment when we are wronged. Indeed, you aren’t treating people as responsible for their acts if you don’t respond to them with the appropriate “reactive attitudes,” as the philosopher Peter Strawson called feelings like resentment. Your elder sisters, you note, grew up without the financial stability you enjoyed and experienced the kind of corporal punishment that was once the norm and that you were fortunately spared. Yet these historically commonplace circumstances aren’t known to turn people into devious schemers. So your resentment is merited. If your aim is simply, as we say, to get it off your chest, there’s no moral reason not to do so.

But you may also wish to tell her because you want to shame her or otherwise cause her distress. Some people think that taking satisfaction in other people’s suffering is always wrong, whatever they’ve done. This position is airily remote from the affective texture of moral life, from the motivating complex of sentiments — whether admiration or abhorrence — that certain actions can produce.

The simple truth is that, as every village storyteller and every Hollywood screenwriter knows, people do enjoy seeing the wicked suffer, particularly if the wickedness has been directed at them or those they care about. The retributive idea that wrongdoing will be punished is what makes Christian and Muslim ideas of hell — and Hindu ideas about karma — morally plausible. (“There’s a special place in hell … ” we like to say about those with habits that especially rile us.) Perhaps if you confronted your sister, she would pay some emotional cost for her misdeed. I wouldn’t condemn you for taking comfort from her discomfiture.

Are you reading too much into your father’s demeanor toward you, in the light of your later knowledge? Alas, you’ll never know: That’s part of the injustice that rankles you. Your sister’s mischief was on the smallest of scales; its effect — given that it daily preys on your mind — is not. Your reticence, in sum, is misjudged. For you, these bygones are anything but bygone; your decision to brood silently on an injury done to you only magnifies that injury.