Episode 142: Emily Dupree discusses the rationality of revenge
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What is the central question about the rationality of revenge?
Yeah. Yeah, no.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. An unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Tykman. And with me today is Emily Dupree. Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and in the College at the University of Chicago. And longtime co host of this very podcast, she is here to discuss the rationality of revenge. Emily Dupree, welcome.
Thank you, it's great to be here.
Great to have you in the guest's chair.
Yeah, the other side of the table.
So whenever I teach a class, I like to start with examples of things. So maybe let's do that here. Uh what would be just like a boring textbook example of taking revenge?
A very classic case of taking revenge would be the Let's say After a a long time of suffering abuse at the hands of somebody This victim of abuse decides to take matters into their own hands and kill the person who had wronged them.
Like a kidnapping victim maybe or something like that. Some extreme Form of violence and it's like you're retaliating.
Yeah, although again we'll have to untangle a lot of the different concepts at play here. But um yeah, typically a classic case of revenge will be one that doesn't aim at anything outside of the action itself. So in your case of kidnapping, my worry is that perhaps uh the killing would be in order to escape or something like that. Revenge, on the other hand, is something that we want to narrow uh the scope of possible justifications for such that it starts to be just about the act itself.
Okay, right. So we're using maybe the term revenge in a little bit more of a restricted sense here. where it only gets to count as revenge if getting back at the person is the goal rather than like subordinate to some other goal. For example, escaping.
Yeah, I think that's right. And As philosophers, we always have to make decisions about how much we're willing to depart from the ordinary use of the particular terms we're investigating. And so I don't wanna depart too far and have a too narrow definition, but I think you're right. Um A good starting point for revenge would be behavior that seeks to impose a harm on the wrongdoer because that person has harmed the avenger and for the sake of making up for the wrong in some way, rather than achieving some goal apart from that.
Okay, nice. Are there any other examples of things we might ordinarily talk about revenge which we should try to exclude from this discussion from the outset?
Yes, absolutely. A lot of times um when we speak of revenge, a lot of different parties to a wrongdoing might be involved. Very classic cases are somebody avenging the death of someone close to them. So sort of making up for what they couldn't have done themselves. This can be thought of in a very loose way as third party revenge, although sometimes I don't even want to call it revenge. But just for the sake of this conversation, I want to exclude any type of third party on behalf of another justice seeking. For our purposes today, I just want to focus on cases where There's a two party relationship the wrongdoer and the person who was wronged. Who then gets back at the wrongdoer in some way because of that prior wrong.
Okay, good. So we're excluding all cases of revenge. Where I exact my vengeance on behalf of someone other than me that was wronged.
That's right. And that's not to say that those cases aren't interesting. I myself find them fascinating. But for the purposes of my own research, I've tried to start in what I take to be the most straightforward cases and see what we can discover there before branching out to the more mediated cases that involve third parties.
Okay, good, right.
How do we define revenge versus retaliation in philosophical terms?
That's for the next episode we do.
Exactly.
Can an act of revenge be a response to any kind of harm done against the Avenger, or like does it have to be a specific type of harm in order for it to count its revenge?
Yeah, that's a very good question. And it brings up I think again, some obstacles that any philosopher encounters when they're trying to delimit a particular concept. So One challenge is, as I said before, how far do we want to depart from ordinary usage?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question about the rationality of revenge?
0:13–4:32
2
How do we define revenge versus retaliation in philosophical terms?
4:32–8:53
3
What criteria must be met for revenge to be considered rational?
8:53–13:26
4
How does the concept of moral personhood relate to revenge?
13:26–17:13
5
What historical examples illustrate rational revenge?
17:13–21:58
6
Why might institutional justice fail, making personal revenge seem justified?
21:58–26:29
7
How does the Holocaust case demonstrate the restoration of moral personhood through revenge?
26:29–31:45
8
What are the broader implications of viewing revenge as a rational response?
31:45–35:49
Speakers
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