Jerome Neu

Why should understanding lead to forgiveness? What is it about knowledge of the cause of an offense that makes it not an offense or less of an offense? Does such knowledge affect the character of the harm inflicted or does the forgiveness depend on other conditions of anger? And when should understanding lead to forgiveness? After all, every action has some explanation. Is any explanation enough for forgiveness, or are only certain ones of the appropriate kind? Which? What are the implications of these questions for contemporary therapeutic movements that urge forgiveness (of self and others) as a step toward self-healing?

This essay uses plays by Ibsen and O’Neill to consider whether self-deception is always a bad thing, and whether undeceiving others is always a good (or easy) thing. There is a focus on the question of the possibility of mistake about one’s own present happiness, involving a consideration of the nature of happiness. There is a further focus on the role of collusion by others in self-deception, using a distinction between two types of self-deception: one characterized by inner conflict and another by a contrast between self-perception and external views. The work of Sartre and Freud is used to illuminate these two types of self-deception and the conditions for overcoming them.

Philosophical and popular ethics tend to focus on the question "What ought I to do?" Is there, in addition to the ethics of action, an ethics of fantasy? Are there fantasies one ought not to have? Of course there are fantasies with horrific content. Does it follow that there is something wrong with a person who has such fantasies or that they ought to make efforts to suppress them or to otherwise change themselves? Do the problems such fantasies raise depend on their links to desire and action? Masturbation fantasies are considered as well as fantasies that may emerge during sex with others, fantasies that include actual others, and fantasies that get embodied in pornography. Psychoanalytic and legal aspects of the issues are emphasized. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Oatley's discussion of “resentment” in Othello works with an unfortunately impoverished notion of resentment, and the narrative of emergence and unfolding that he offers suffers from it. As explicated by Bishop Butler, John Rawls, and other philosophers, resentment rests on moral claims and is to be distinguished on that basis from envy and Nietzschean ressentiment. W. H. Auden, in “The Joker in the Pack,” provides more persuasive insight into the dark destructive malicious envy that motivates Iago. Such destructive aims are as characteristic of humans as “relational goals,” and must be attended to if we are to learn from literature about ourselves