When Hatred and Fear Mask as Indignation

I’m going to define two terms with meanings similar to, but a little different from their normal meanings:

Indignation, in the sense I mean it, is moral indignation. It is a feeling of outrage at one who is thought capable of doing the right or wrong thing, and has, despite that capability, done the wrong thing.

Contempt is a deeply negative, even spiteful, feeling directed at one who has done something awful but is held not to have moral agency. It simultaneously dehumanizes the target then to the extent that the less-than-human entity can be blamed, blames them.

As always in philosophy, giving exact definitions is difficult, but If I were to hazard a more exact definition of contempt, it would be as follows:

Not caring about a person’s welfare, or actively wishing them non-instrumental harm, because they have done the wrong thing, despite recognizing that they are not a morally competent agent.

It comes in two varieties.

Variety 1: The paradoxical type of contempt- it wants to dehumanize but blame morally simultaneously and tries to do both despite the contradiction.

Variety 2: The non-paradoxical type completely dehumanizes and regards the remaining “subject” as it is, blameworthy only in the sense they are held in irritation like one might hold a dog that must be destroyed.

Indignation can be a noble or ignoble, good or bad feeling depending on the circumstances. Contempt is generally not- perhaps even never- an appropriate way to regard another human being. If a human being did lack moral agency, yet was doing harm, the appropriate feeling would be pity, even as one worked to stop them. One would be concerned for their welfare as far as possible, in an undiminished way.

Because people at least vaguely know that contempt is rotten, whereas indignation can be virtuous, people try to hide their contempt under the mask of indignation. There are though, certain clues by which we can ferret them out. One of the chief is assigning full responsibilities to people whom you would never in a million years assign full rights.

In Queensland, a state of Australia, the LNP campaigned on and was elected on a promise of “Adult time for adult crimes” (never trust a criminal policy that rhymes).

Children are expected to obey the law, attend often arduous compulsory schooling, and pay taxes should they have income, yet they are not given the vote. In general, a state of affairs where people are governed but not represented is considered bad, but it is justified in this special case due to the lack of maturity of children. Is this immaturity a lack of knowledge? No. I would warrant the average 14-year-old knows just as much about the political system as many perhaps even most adults. They are, after all studying civics and are yet to forget all of it. Nor does their immaturity consist in a lack of general intelligence- general intelligence is largely matured well before 18 and even if it weren’t, plenty of very dumb people are given the vote. Their immaturity is held to reside in special areas like:

1. A lack of impulse control

2. The inability to foresee cause and effect

3. Moral reasoning

I dunno at what age children should be allowed to vote. I do know that it’s strange to hold that a group deserves to be blamed like adults, but should not have the same rights as adults. Indeed it’s self-contradictory. If the moral capacity to murder just as much as an adult is present, then surely the moral capacity to vote is present. These people don’t believe the kids can vote. Nor do they think the kids are particularly close, indeed, a lot of them would probably rather the voting age were raised quite a bit above 18.

The circle is squared like so. The people calling for “adult time for adult crimes” (mostly at least) do not think that kids are just as culpable as adults. They simply view them as reprobate and dangerous elements that need to be removed from society for as long as can be gotten away with, less human than themselves. It is not because they have misused their moral capacity that they need to go, quite the opposite- the problem is they have little if any moral capacity to misuse.

They want to present their contempt as indignation because they know that seeing young criminals as irredeemable subhumans is wrong. Thus, they want to hide it. They also know that if the kids really were non-moral but dangerous human subjects, the right thing to do would be to take care of them in a secure, comfortable facility, much, in the same way, we should take care of dementia patients. But they don’t want to do this, they want to stuff them into the cheapest facility available and not have to think about them anymore. It’s an ugly view, so it’s understandable why they’d try to pretend that they’re just really morally angry at the kids. They seek the rights (adult punishment) without the responsibilities (granting the vote etc.)

Do not let people present contempt as indignation. Push them on it. Ask them if they really think that the group in question are full moral agents. Unmask their disguise.

I guess I should give my view on children and the judicial system for completeness. I’d like to raise the age of criminal responsibility and lower the age of enfranchisement/voting rights till they touch. To the extent this is politically impossible and/or undesirable, we must exercise a second-best option. The criminal law must acknowledge that inasmuch as a child is judged as being incapable of exercising very fundamental rights, any responsibility they have is drastically diminished. Although I do not always agree with the specific decisions made by the judicial system in Australia regarding children’s crimes, the courts do- when left alone by angry politicians, largely try to implement this broad philosophical second-best approach within the constraints of often poorly written and cruel laws.

To expand a bit, while it is true we can expect kids to "know" not to (for example) murder, this is not coextensive with the level of moral responsibility needed to hold someone responsible for the gravest of acts. Kids learn "not to murder" around 3-4 years old as a bit of abstract propositional knowledge, but this is not the same thing as having moral responsibility which is an integrated and deep comprehension of moral norms, and series of personality traits (e.g. impulse control). It's not just a matter of things being clear-cut morally but of the personality of the person facing the clear-cut moral choice.

Moral development continues quite late in life. We have the choice of where to locate both enfranchisement and criminal responsibility, both choices are somewhat arbitrary because moral responsibility is a spectrum, but in general, we should avoid imposing the most grave aspects of state power on someone if we do not think they are ready to exercise among the most fundamental of human rights- rights that should only be denied for very strong reasons and not just because someone isn't the 'ideal' agent to exercise them.

Look at it this way- if you expect someone will develop a great deal more- and this must be the justification for not giving them the vote- then it seems plausible that such development would have also prevented the murder. Thus you should not hold anyone who you don't think should be allowed to vote responsible in a full-throated sense.

Permit me an interlude here, I’d like to say for the record that being a kid is really fucking hard. You work nearly full time (school + homework) for which you are not paid and everyone thinks you should be grateful for that. You have no idea what is going on half the time. You are vulnerable, more vulnerable than you will ever be likely, and you have not learned to cope with it. You have almost no money in a world that requires money for anything. You have no access to transportation. You are looked down upon and patronized even when it is utterly unnecessary. You did not ask to be born, yet giving you access to the things you need to live and grow is seen as a kindness done by society and relatives, a kindness that your inability to repay is seen as at least vaguely unsatisfactory. You are in the way, and even kindly neighbors and teachers will have little reluctance in passive-aggressively expressing that. If society had its way everything you do and everything that happens to you will be assessed from the point of view of whether it will lead to your “healthy development” into a productive member of society and not from the point of view of its intrinsic worth, or your joy. I remember childhood as the least happy years of my life- and I had wonderful parents- I can only imagine what it would be like for those from abusive or dysfunctional families. Insult was constantly turned into injury by people insisting that these were the best years of my life. Even when things are done to address the problems I have outlined, they are done from the point of view of addressing the sentimentality of adults.

And no one cares about any of the above. I spoke with a philosopher working on childhood and parenthood once, and tried to raise some of the above issues. Bright guy, but it was notable how every time I tried to talk about the situation of children, he bought it back to just how hard parents have it. I agree parents have a rough deal but cannot even philosophers of childhood take a moment to admit that being a kid is hard? Why does no one seem to care? Meanwhile, these stupid pricks smirk about their little rhyming slogans and stew in their hatred of the most vulnerable class of subjects out there.

I think, in general, that contempt is found more on the right than the left, partly because the idea that being human comes in degrees and some people are only quasi-human is a more rightwing idea. However, I’ve seen it on both sides- it’s just a matter of the crime. I remember one case where some 12-year-old boy committed a sex crime, and was punished for it and decades later this came to light when they were an adult. Was it appropriate that they be held up to opprobrium by Twitter et al?

Of course, the left split on the matter, but there was no shortage of outrage coming from the left. Presumably, the outraged didn’t think that a 12-year-old had moral agency anything like an adult- so why the furious anger at the now adult for something he did many years ago while not morally capable? In many cases I suspect the truth was this- they didn’t think of someone who would commit a sex crime at 12 as human. They thought of him as simply a dangerous element, even fully grown and so they wanted him sent to the margins of society. They dressed up their contempt as indignation.

Now someone will probably say “Hey, that kid really was, empirically, dangerous- even grown up! His likelihood of committing another sex crime really was much higher than the average Joe or Jared. I don’t disagree- but we often have evidence that people are dangerous that doesn’t entitle us to treat them with outrage now- we have to reserve judgment till they do something wrong. Let’s say Jack was involuntarily injected with a substance that makes you extremely angry, reduces morality and induces psychosis. In that state of rage-filled amoral psychosis- a state he entered without his consent- he kills someone. Now let’s say there’s been a spate of people injected with this substance, and we know empirically that if you kill someone while on the substance, that gives evidence you are more likely- but not certain- to become a murderer without the substance at a later date. It would still be unfair to treat the substance-induced killer as if they were a bad person in their non-substance injected normal state. That’s the way I feel about people who committed serious crimes at 12.

The main reason contempt is unjust is because, naturally, it is not fair to treat someone as if they were a moral agent who had done wrong when they are not. However, I would point to two other factors that make contempt wrong, one for each of the types I mentioned above:

1. Variety 1 of contempt- paradoxical contempt- the attempt to “squeeze” bad behavior by the morally incapable into the category of immoral behavior despite really knowing better.

   This variety of contempt degrades morality insofar as it assigns a kind of moral outrage to a behavior the outraged recognizes has been performed by the morally incapable. By acting as if being merely dangerous, or annoying, or destructive was the same as being immoral, variety 1 degrades the dignity of moral behavior, treating it as if it were co-extensional with the merely useful or fortunate. In so doing, the contemptuous ultimately degrade themselves, as they are moral beings, yet they have failed to recognize the dignity of morality which is part of their own dignity..

2. Variety 2 of contempt- seeing morally incapable humans who have done wrong as somewhat like mere obstacles or dangerous animals whose welfare matters little or at all

   This variety of contempt degrades humanity. It takes the good things about humans that make them worthy and deserving, and assigns them little weight just because the person is inconvenient or dangerous- not recognizing the features of human beings that make our welfare worthy of consideration. Thus it implicitly asserts that “being human doesn’t matter much”. Once again the contemptuous ultimately degrade themselves, as they are humans, yet fail to recognize what makes humanity intrinsically valuable and fail to recognize that these things- also present in themselves, entitle a being to concern about its welfare.

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