There is no right to dislike people
A common view is:
The right to dislike people: It is permissible to dislike people on the basis of scarce evidence, small wrongdoing, or perhaps even no good reason whatsoever.
Some people are even proud of their dislikes, regarding them as a carefully cultivated list, and boast of their discernment in disliking people later revealed to have been wicked, or worse, unfashionable, before it was cool.
In this piece, I’m only going to consider the case of disliking someone you know personally without good reason. though I think much of what I say applies to distant strangers too, albeit more weakly.
In brief, I reject the existence of such a right to dislike others because disliking someone carries the foreseeable risk of harming the person or hurting the person’s feelings. They may be able to tell you dislike them and that might be upsetting. You might prejudice other people against them, even if you don’t openly speak ill of them. You may be unexpectedly put in a position where you have to make a decision that affects among other things, their welfare, and your dislike may unconsciously (or consciously) bias you against them. In expectation, your dislike of a person harms that person, even if only modestly.
Some people suggest that you shouldn’t dislike anybody, rather you should love everyone. On this view, if you have to take adverse action against a person you should do it not out of dislike, but instead despite your love for them (perhaps even in a sense, because of your love) and because it is right. I don’t want to endorse this view or reject it in this essay. I don’t doubt that an angel would take this view, but for us limited humans, dislike might be essential. Sometimes we have to take adverse action against bad people, and it may be that dislike makes that adverse action easier and more likely to be successful. Whether we fallible humans should try to live by the rule “dislike no one” involves complex ethical and empirical questions I don’t want to get into here. For the purposes of this essay then, I accept that you may dislike someone when you have excellent reason to do so.
Defenses
The most common defense of the idea that you may dislike people for little or no reason goes as follows:
We cannot control whether or not we dislike people.
Ought implies can.
Therefore forbidding disliking people makes no sense.
My reply to this is two-fold, firstly, I am not convinced that we exercise no control over whether or not we dislike people, especially when we dislike them on flimsy grounds. I strongly suspect this is, at least in many cases, avoidable. We can try to cultivate a temperament of compassion.
My second reply is that even if we cannot stop ourselves from disliking someone, we can at least mentally mark out to ourselves that our dislike is wrong. Acknowledge it and try our best to look at the person in a different way. This may well reduce the likelihood that you will harm them.
A common view is emotional non-agency- we do not control our emotions and can only choose how we react to them, in a sense, we must accept them all and then choose what to do with them. Such a view seems to me like a kind of pair to an opposite view- that all emotions are irrational passions that we should suppress. The right view is a middle way, just like thoughts, some emotions are right and some are wrong, and just like thoughts, while we cannot eliminate emotions we don’t like [and trying can lead to mental disorders like OCD], we can make choices about which emotions and thoughts we entertain and promote. I take disliking someone to be a persistent tendency to form antipathic feelings about them, and we can choose not to entertain and cultivate that dislike even if we can’t wholly stop it.
I’ve sometimes had people suggest that my view is disrespectful to emotions, or treats them as lesser than a supposed non-emotional reason. I disagree, in fact, I hold the opposite. I think treating emotions as states that can be right or wrong grants them respect, and simply taking them all as valid is, in its own way, almost as disrespectful as saying they’re all wrong. Emotion and thought aren’t separate, and emotions aren’t marked out as beyond appraisal.
Another common reply is that disliking someone does not require you to take any action that will harm them. This is true, but it makes it foreseeably more probable as I argued previously. We do not have perfect control over ourselves, our mannerisms and our expressions can get away from us. Further, we do not have perfect access to the motivations for our actions- it’s possible our dislike may tip the balance into us taking some action that harms the person.
I also think that it is at least plausible that being disliked is itself a harm even if we somehow keep our dislike secret from the person forever. A lot of us think we can be harmed by things we never know, like a partner sleeping with someone else, even if we never found out. With acquaintances, we have an obligation to behave in a friendly way. By hypothesis- since we are exploring the possibility that we have managed to conceal our dislike- we have managed to keep up this friendly facade- and this is certainly better than projecting apathy or worse, dislike- but secretly disliking someone under the guise of friendly acquaintance is a kind of minor betrayal. It’s not out of the question that this is a harm in itself.
Also, easily disliking others either alienates you from yourself or alienates you from humanity. If you think badly of others very easily, then you don’t think much of humanity in general. In addition to being sad in itself, this will tend to either push you to dislike yourself or to deny your likeness to the rest of humanity, neither of which are healthy or conducive to compassion.
100%. But it's hard. Sometimes those who show contempt for me cause me great pain, and sometimes I lash back. But I try to ever lash a personal attack. Last Thanksgiving a permanent rift occurred in my family. I was discussing with another member of the family about the "Biden economy," my comment had merely been to question whether at mid-terms we can really call it one president's economy after two years when his policies need a year to pass and another year to implement. My Republican in-law only overheard enough to think I was somehow disparaging the ex-president. He called me a "dumb no-nothing who spent too much reading liberal media, I asked him pointedly, "why am i dumb because I know how to read and you are not dumb because you don't know how to read?"Of course no one heard my careful attempt to not call him dumb, everyone heard only that I did use "dumb". Because he had called me dumb. Well he jumped up and was going to strike me and I managed to pull myself up to let him have a fair blow,. Well it didn't come to that, they carried me out, but since then, at Christmas, and birthdays our kids come and visit, but I am no longer permitted or welcome at any family celebrations. I wept that night, and I still feel the pain of his dislike (which existed before that night) but I don't dislike him, I am sorry I hurt him but can't tell him because he has forbidden anyone to speak my name in his presence. But even the kids and my wife are still angry at me and I am still angry at myself.
Is that an example of what you are saying. Because dislike, it seems to me, only creates pain on all sides.
Why should we think that people have a general right not to be harmed? Being overtly disliked seems like a harm that we have no legitimate complaint about, absent other info. There’s no general right against being harmed emotionally. If you’re in a consequentialist frame of mind, then why not just say “disliking people makes it more likely to hurt their feelings and thereby not maximize utility”? If you’re not, then you need to argue for a right not to be harmed emotionally.
You could try to analogize with physical harm, but I’m not sure that would work well. Emotional harm is much less consistent, especially re something like being disliked.
As an aside, it’s kind of strange to imagine a moral universe in which buying a car instead of saving children’s lives via charity is morally ok but disliking someone is not. I think your worldview described here is too full of morality.