Q&A: Please write a column about revenge. When is it moral, bad, appropriate, praiseworthy, contemptible
Please write a column about revenge. When is it moral, bad, appropriate, praiseworthy, contemptible
Question
If you don’t feel like it, you don’t have to, but just know that if you don’t write it, I won’t read it.
Answer
Thanks for the flexibility.
Discussion on Answer
Hershele will do what his father did.
Whoever does not bestow kindness on the good—it is forbidden not to take revenge on the wicked.
Measure for measure.
Aquinas on anger (my free translation):
In one way, anger can be connected to rational judgment with respect to the end result, such that after reason has determined and authorized the fitting form of requital, only then does the desire arise to carry it out. In this way, anger and passions of this kind do not hinder the rational judgment that preceded them, but help carry it out more quickly; and in this way [such emotions] are useful to virtue. (De Malo 12.1c)
Since human nature is a composite of soul and body, and has both an intelligent and a sensory nature, it follows that for man’s good, *the composite as such* should be subject to virtue—that is, in the way appropriate to the intellectual part, the sensory part, and the body. Thus human excellence requires that the desire for fitting requital should exist not only in the rational part of the soul, but also in the emotional-sensory part, and in the body itself, and that the body itself should be moved to serve virtue (ibid.).
Overall the intention is positive, but there’s a common youthful lack of tact, that’s all.
Aquinas—another babbler who didn’t understand a thing, or the tiniest fraction of a thing, about the human soul.
In general,
write a column,
and if not, etc.