When Bad Things Happen to Other People by John Portmann

453–512). Even if we accept such a characterization, love for justice may still prompt pleasure in the suffering of others no less than personal loyalties might. This is so because of a sense of personal investment (resulting from self-esteem) which may accompany the endorsement of a moral or political view. Of crucial importance is the question of whether such suffering signifies a means to an end (that is, whether the suffering instructs someone whose worldview seems to require correction) or an end in itself (that is, whether the suffering should come to the sort of person who deserves to suffer). Once again, there is an important difference between enjoying  that  someone suffers and enjoying actual suffering. The former case must be held apart from  Schadenfreude , for the attendant pleasure is not properly in seeing someone suffer, but in the hope that someone will learn a valuable lesson from having suffered. Thus we take pleasure not in the suffering of another, but in the hope that he or she will correct a mistake (because we may take pleasure in both, this case is not entirely distinct from  Schadenfreude ). The latter case, including as it does a notion of desert, involves  Schadenfreude . Ultimately, it is the notion of desert that makes justice a more important and a more complicated consideration than loyalty. By “justice” I mean the fairly straightforward notion that people receive their just deserts. As I have said, we generally believe that a talented person who works hard deserves success, that an innocent person harmed by wrongdoers deserves compensation, and, to a lesser extent, that an arrogant person deserves his or her comeuppance. Such outcomes strike us as morally appropriate.
    Freud denied the relevance of desert to justice, or at least to one way of understanding justice. He accounted for the egalitarian understanding of the principle, in which justice requires (subject to important qualifications) equality of net welfare for individuals, by attributing it to a psychology of envy.11 Freud believed that the only reason we strive for social equality is that the disadvantaged envy the advantaged. This is a ponderous claim. Critics have pointed out that Freud’s view of justice cannot, however, readily explain why the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged figure among lovers of equality. That persons are motivated by opposing interests, further, does not mean that they are motivated by envy or jealousy.
    Religious convictions may decisively shape an understanding of desert or justice. The conceptualization of hell as the paradigm and culmination of suffering almost seems to beg comparisons of temporal suffering with eternal suffering and, consequently, thoughts about day-to-day justice. Contentious examples of religious justice may surprise us by their sheer variety. Some of the best known illustrations involve claims to land, as we find in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the West Bank of Israel. These examples suggest what is perhaps the most familiar objection to religious ethics, that organized religions breed intolerance and hypocrisy. In considering arguments as to how morality might depend on loyalty to any religion, it is surely prudent to keep in mind at what and whom the arguments are aimed.
    In their introduction to the “Symposium on ‘God’” recently featured in a 1994 issue of  Critical Inquiry , Françoise Meltzer and David Tracy remarked that the invocation of God currently seems to work as a point of obstruction, or a limit, in most contemporary critical discourses. As they put it, “the word  God , in or outside of quotation marks, has become the last taboo in the postmodern era.”12 Certainly, it could be disarming to hear a neighbor invoke scripture to explain our own (i.e., intrinsic) suffering. A good deal of confusion has surrounded the idea of divine retribution, for the same God who famously proclaimed “Vengeance is mine” also avowed: