The Moral Psychology of Hate

Journal of Hate Studies

Social Justice Research, 2007

Hate, a simple word, is easily understood by young children. But as a concept, hate is vast, complex, and slippery. The study of hate is not limited to one discipline; it is studied throughout the humanities and social sciences. This paper, which presents a psychological theory of hating, argues that hate is an understudied psychological construct and has particular relevance to justice research. Hate can trigger injustice, and injustice has the capacity to trigger derogation, violence, and hate. Relying on four literatures-justice, psychology, psychoanalysis, and criminal justice-we present a theory of hating that describes the formation, perpetuation, and expression of this influential emotional state. The Intensification Theory of Hating describes hate as a dynamic process that moves from antecedents to emotions, cognitions, morals, and behaviors. Hate, we argue, is not only an emotion; it becomes systemic when interactions among its components unfold over time to intensify hate. We conclude by proposing research approaches and questions that could address hate in psychological and justice research. 68 0885-7466/07/0300-0068/0 Ó 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Crime, Law and Social Change, 2021

A relatively nascent discipline, the field of hate studies has been explored and theorised from a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. However, the field is ill-defined, and the relationship between hate crime and other related concepts unexplored. Here, we consider the range of phenomena which might fall within or without the field of hate studies, initiating a discussion of the boundaries of the field. We signal both the continuities and discontinuities among and between an array of strategies intended to sort and maintain hierarchical relationships, with the purpose of provoking scholars in the field of hate studies to reflect on its scope.

Australasian Political Studies Association. Hobart, Tasmania, 2003

We are so well-equipped with an emotional capacity to hate that this element of the emotional repertoire is entrenched in common parlance. We may hate persons we have known and loved, those we know only by reputation and entire groups whose members we do not know at all. We are even capable of hating abstractions and general ideas. Such a robust capacity for expression across the full range of human relationships suggests that hate is not obviously perverse or pathological. Nevertheless there is a reluctance to acknowledge hate as a normal, much less universal, element of human experience. In recent years the meaning of hate has been broadened by way of denial into an ambiguous adjective to characterise odious or illegal behaviour (e. g. hate speech and hate crimes). Hate is, of course, a strong emotion, potentially yielding a disposition to forceful action. But numerous other emotions are also powerful and may lead to aggressive and violent action. Love, for example, or patriotism, fear, envy and greed may in extreme instances incline us to danger, violence and self-destruction. This paper will explore the proposition that, like many of these emotions, hate has a range of expression that is 'developmental' in the sense of normal biological, psychological and perhaps even social formation. Although the human emotions are powerful and potentially dangerous forces, without them we would surely not be the sentient and social creatures we imagine ourselves to be. The discussion will focus on the sparse philosophical discussion of hate, beginning with Aristotle, and proceed to the cautious and decidedly reluctant examination of hate within the province of theoretical and clinical psychology.

2013

2019

This study will consider the emotion of hate as a socio-collective mechanism that may be triggered at any moment and as such is prone to exploitation. Hate, in this context, becomes institutionalised in the form of terror (terrorism) and counter-terror (war against terrorism) and as such is transformed into a social, cultural, and political precondition for the operation of markets. The intellectual trajectory leading up to this research premise is based on the Idealist epistemological hypothesis that all of knowledge is essentially grounded in experience, and that the experience of modern society leads to ignorance or lack of knowledge as a requirement for the establishment of hate on a socio-collective scale.

Philosophy and Society 32(3), 2021

What exactly is wrong with hating others? However deep-seated the intuition, when it comes to spelling out the reasons for why hatred is inappropriate, the literature is rather meager and confusing. In this paper, I attempt at more precision by distinguishing two senses in which hatred is inappropriate, a moral and a non-moral one. First, I critically discuss the central current proposals defending the possibility of morally appropriate hatred in the face of serious wrongs or evil perpetrators and show that they are all based on a problematic assumption, which I call the 'reality of evil agents assumption'. I then turn to the issue of non-moral emotional appropriateness and sketch a novel, focus-based account of fittingness. Next, I outline the distinctive affective intentionality of hatred, suggesting that hatred, unlike most other antagonistic emotions, has an overgeneralizing and indeterminate affective focus. Against this background, I argue that hatred cannot be fitting. Due to the indeterminacy of its focus, hatred fails to pick out those evaluative features of the intentional object that would really matter to the emoters. I close with some tentative remarks on the possibility of appropriate hatred towards corporate or group agents.

Journal of Hate Studies, 2007

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19(3), 453–480, 2020

In the face of longstanding philosophical debates on the nature of hatred and an ever-growing interest in the underlying social-psychological function of group-directed or genocidal hatred, the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred is still very little understood. By drawing on resources from classical phenomenology, recent social-scientific research and analytic philosophy of emotions, I shall argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: (1) it has an overgeneralizing, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a form of collectivization of the target; (2) short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the commitment to the attitude itself; (3) finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus.

2021

This paper looks at Thomas Szanto's theory of hatred that suggests that hatred has an indeterminate affective focus and that it derives its intensity from the commitment to the attitude itself. Contrary to Szanto's theses, this paper claims that the hated properties are not necessarily fuzzy. On the contrary, in many cases we can clearly reconstruct the quasi-rational genesis of hatred, by relying on the deep structures behind the social dynamics (as demonstrated by the example of anti-Semitism). Furthermore, the paper states that even though in certain cases hatred is a truly empty of content, these cases are marginal in comparison to other, more important forms of hatred.