Keeping the Moral Score

Abstract

Love and generosity are by their nature boundless, free from calculation. However, much of human interaction and particularly relations of justice are based on keeping score. Keeping score is by definition backward-looking. Like in sport, it is constituted by recording past events and retaining them in memory for some future use. Even forgiveness, as will be argued below, is characterized by some element of retention of past events since, as most analysts of the concept agree, forgiveness does not simply mean forgetting the offense. Justice, from Anaximander, through Plato, to the emblem of the blindfolded goddess holding a pair of scales, is a concept of balancing. Neither desert nor punishment, neither gratitude nor revenge, can be dispensed without keeping score. In her impressively rich book on anger and forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum provides a broad and deep critique of score-keeping in general and of moral and legal score-keeping in particular. Her starting point is the detailed examination of anger, that universal emotion which was studied by ethical theories of the past but which has been ignored by modern moral philosophy. The book then presents an argument for forgiveness as one way of overcoming the dangers of anger and specifically argues for unconditional forgiveness. But since forgiveness is only a second-best solution to the drawbacks of anger, Nussbaum proposes the attitudes of love and generosity as the normative ideal. Settling accounts is anathema to Nussbaum in both personal relations and in the impersonal realm of justice. It is harmful to both the individual’s psychological health ∗David Heyd is the Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel. Email: david.heyd@mail.huji.ac.il Criminal Justice Ethics, 2018 Vol. 37, No. 2, 189–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2018.1499699