The Moral Psychology of Contempt

Michelle Mason

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786604170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The eye roll, the smirk, the unilateral lip curl. These, psychologists tell us, are typical expressions of contempt. Across cultures, such expressions manifest an emotional response to norm violations, among them moral norms. As such, contempt is of tremendous personal and social significance – whether in the context of a marriage on the rocks or a country in the grips of racial unrest. Scholarship on contempt, however, lags far behind that of other emotional responses to norm violations, such as anger, disgust, and shame. Introducing original work by philosophers and psychologists, this volume addresses empirical questions concerning contempt’s emotional, cognitive, and behavioural signature. It invites the general reader to reflect on whether contempt is something to be embraced and cultivated as an emotional safeguard of valued norms or, rather, an emotion from which we have good reason – perhaps overriding moral reason – to distance ourselves so far as is psychologically possible. Advancing the nascent literature on contempt while setting future research agenda, the volume is a resource for advanced students and scholars of both empirical and normative moral psychology.

Part 1

INTRODUCING CONTEMPT: PRACTICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

Chapter 1

Contempt, Honor, and Addressing Racism

Macalester Bell

In recent years, there has been an uptick in the number of student protests on college campuses in the United States and around the world. While their demands vary, many protesters are calling for the removal of building names and other memorials honoring those who are, by contemporary standards, generally regarded as racist.¹ In a highly publicized case, students at Prince- ton demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from a school and residential college in response to Wilson’s history of defending segregation. Around the same time, protesters at Yale called for the renaming of Calhoun College because John Calhoun was a well-known champion of slavery; students at the University of North Carolina demanded that an iconic memorial to Confederate soldiers be removed from the main campus quad; and Bryn Mawr College students called for the renaming of Thomas Hall because M. Carey Thomas, the college’s second president, is deemed such a virulent racist that many students reported feeling uncomfortable attending classes in a building which honors her contributions to the college.

The calls for the removal of these memorials seem to be motivated by protesters’ sense that leaving them in place is profoundly disrespectful and tacitly condones, and perhaps unintentionally celebrates, the racism of those honored and memorialized. There has been much debate on campuses and in the popular press about whether specific memorials should be removed or should stay, but collectively these cases also raise several fundamental questions about protesting racism and the ethics of honoring: what attitudes should we take up and express toward those who are considered racist? Does it matter if the person is an historical figure who lived in a very different social milieu and is long dead? What attitudes are we expressing when we rename a building or take down a statue because we judge the person memorialized to be unworthy of the honor? What attitudes are we expressing when we refuse to rescind the honor by removing the memorial, despite vocal protest from community members? Should we de-honor those who are now generally regarded as racist? If so, how?

In previous work, I have argued that contempt is an especially apt response to racism, and I think the protesters’ demands for the removal of these memorials are best interpreted as expressions of contempt directed at the persons honored and at the institutions honoring them.² The protesters express what they see as the inferior moral status of the honored racists by calling on colleges and universities to remove the honor originally bestowed. The protesters are demanding that their institutions share and publicly express this contempt for the honored racists by the ritualistic removal of names from buildings and statues from quads.

I’m sympathetic to the position that the public honoring of racists, even long dead racists, poses a serious moral threat, and, given the nature of this threat, I think responding to this honoring of the dishonorable with contempt is apt. Moreover, I support the protesters’ insistence that their institutions publicly stand against racism. Yet, despite my endorsement of many of the protesters’ aims, I think their demands for the removal of these memorials are ultimately misguided. My reasons for coming to this conclusion are not the reasons widely cited in discussions of the student protests: I’m not concerned that we are acting unfairly in judging historical figures by contemporary standards or that in so doing we are “sanitizing history,” nor am I especially worried that we will have no one left to honor if we refuse to honor those we now judge to be morally compromised. Instead, my objection to these proposed processes of de-honoring is focused on the kind of contempt that institutions are being asked to express. My worry, stated most succinctly, is that the form of contempt the protesters are demanding their institutions publicly express is not the kind of contempt that is especially well suited to answer the ongoing threat posed by racism or the public honoring of racists. Considering precisely where the protesters go wrong provides a helpful lesson in how to contemn well, especially at the social level.

I will begin by summarizing my reasons for thinking that contempt is the best attitudinal response to the threats posed by racism. I will then outline the implications of my views for how we might think about campus protests and the calls for de-honoring racists through the removal of memorials.

CONTEMPT, SUPERBIA, AND RACISM

In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt I offered an account of what contempt is and the kind of moral work it can do. As part of this task I also considered ways in which contempt may go terribly wrong. Inapt contempt is, I argued, at the heart of racism, sexism, and other vices I dubbed “vices of superiority.” I went on to argue that apt contempt has an important role to play in responding to these vices of superiority. Specifically, I argued that contempt’s downward-looking appraisal and withdrawal answers the “superbia,” or false attitude of superiority, at the heart of these vices. I think contempt does a better job than other attitudes in responding appropriately to these vices and mitigating their threats.

I will explain and elaborate on these claims in what follows, but first let me step back and give an overview of contempt.

According to my account, contempt has four central features.³ First, contempt involves a negative appraisal of the status of the object of contempt. The target is regarded as low vis-à-vis some standard that the contemnor sees as important. While resentment typically takes as its object a person’s actions, the object of contempt is the person herself; contempt is a response to perceived badbeing, whereas resentment is a response to perceived wrongdoing.

Second, I believe contempt is a globalist emotion; that is, not only is the proper object of contempt the person as opposed to her action, but contempt takes the whole person as its object.⁴ Like shame and disgust, contempt is a totalizing attitude—it presents the person, as a whole, as low. This does not mean that every trait of the target is seen as contemptible; having contempt for someone is compatible with the recognition that the person also has admirable qualities. However, when we contemn, we see the contemptible qualities as more important to the overall assessment of the person, given our relationship with the target of contempt.

Third, contempt is comparative or reflexive.⁵ The subject makes a comparison between herself and the object of her contempt and takes the contemned to be inferior to her along some axis of comparison. This comparative element of contempt is so central that some commentators identify contempt with this comparative assessment. William Ian Miller writes, “What is common to all [tokens of contempt] is one’s relation to someone over whom one is claiming some superiority, the very assertion of the claim being identical with the manifestation of contempt. Contempt is itself the claim to relative superiority.”⁶ I don’t think we should reduce contempt to this claim of comparative superiority, but Miller’s assertion signals how central contempt’s reflexivity is to the emotion.

A final characteristic of contempt is the psychological withdrawal or disengagement from the target of contempt. Contempt presents its target as someone to be kept at arm’s length. Some psychological distance and certain forms of psychological engagement are incompatible with contempt. The types of psychological engagement precluded by contempt will vary depending upon the exact nature of the relationship between the contemnor and the contemned.

To summarize, in its paradigmatic form, contempt for a person involves a way of negatively and comparatively regarding someone who is seen as having utterly failed to meet some standard that the contemnor endorses. This form of regard is totalizing and constitutes a psychological withdrawal from the target.

While it is often derided as a nasty or morally objectionable emotion, contempt can sometimes be an apt response. In previous work, I have argued that it is a particularly apt response to superbia, especially the superbia that is evinced by racists.⁷

Superbia is an attitude of misplaced superiority. Someone evinces superbia when they take themselves to merit higher esteem and deference than they actually deserve. The person who manifests superbia makes a mistake about his status; he takes himself to have higher moral status than he actually merits. But in addition, he seeks recognition of (what he takes to be) his superior status. As a result, he attempts to exact esteem and deference at the expense of others.

Superbia poses a threat because the person who harbors it has the potential to exert a distorting force on the way deference and esteem are distributed within a moral community. The person who evinces superbia puts others down in an attempt to gain esteem and deference; those put down are vulnerable to internalizing these negative comparative assessments, and those harboring superbia may come to unfairly enjoy unearned esteem and deference.

The ways superbia can disrupt the distribution of status is especially clear in cases of undetected hypocrisy. Consider, for example, literature’s arch-hypocrite: Tartuffe. Throughout Moliere’s play Tartuffe enjoys increasing power and esteem as a direct result of his superbia. He presents himself as an especially pious person and others as comparatively impious, and as a consequence he is unfairly rewarded, and others unfairly punished, in terms of status goods.

Even if superbia does not alter the distribution of status in these ways, the person who manifests superbia evinces a character flaw because his beliefs and desires constitute an objectionable form of ill will. The person who evinces superbia wants his perceived higher status to be recognized in such a way that this recognition is achieved at others’ expense.

The moral failings at the heart of racism are best characterized in terms of race-based superbia. In virtue of their race, racists take themselves to have a comparatively high status vis-à-vis the persons they contemn, they desire that their comparatively high status be recognized, and they often attempt to exact esteem and deference from others by dishonoring members of the scorned race. What is morally objectionable about the racist’s attitude is that he has a seriously mistaken view about the proper grounds of status, and he attempts to exact esteem and deference at the expense of others on this basis.

Being a target of race-based superbia can have serious consequences. As W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out, targets of anti-black racism often come to interpret themselves through the lens of inapt contempt. What Du Bois called the “double-consciousness” of American blacks is characterized by racist contempt. Double-consciousness marks a “world which yields him no true self consciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”⁸ As Du Bois makes clear, this form of alienation can have devastating effects.

I’ve argued that, if certain conditions are met, contempt is a morally valuable response to the vices of superiority because contempt is uniquely well positioned to answer the superbia at the heart of these vices. This may seem a curious claim since superbia is itself a form of inapt contempt. But this is precisely why apt contempt is the best response to superbia. Contempt answers superbia by undercutting the target’s claim to merit esteem and deference. As a result, the target cannot, or at least cannot as easily, disrupt the distribution of status. When we respond with apt contempt to someone who evinces superbia, we attempt to diminish the threat posed by his vice by regarding him as low and unworthy of the esteem and deference he wrongly claims for himself. Regarding someone as low obviously does not have immediate transformative effects, but esteeming and deferring are activities we perform as social creatures, and if we collectively regard someone as unworthy of esteem and deference this will rob the person of their social power and, in this way, render their superbia inert.

Even if we are unable to act in concert in this way, responding to superbia with counter-contempt may still be ameliorative. When an individu...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• The Moral Psychology of Contempt: An Introduction
• Part 1: Introducing Contempt: Practical and Historical Contexts
• Part 2: The Moral Psychology of Contempt
• Part 3: Contempt, Self-Conceit, and the Maintenance of Moral and Social Hierarchies
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes on Contributors