Contempt may seem an extreme and troubling emotion. More than just annoyance at some particular action, contempt is a cold, haughty judgment of someone’s character. With a curled lip and a look down their nose, the contemnor seems to say, “You’re beneath me—I no longer respect you.” Philosophers have wondered: can such harsh treatment ever be justified? Is contempt starkly incompatible with our basic moral duty to others? Why would we ever act so cruelly?
We can better understand contempt by focusing on low-stakes, everyday cases. I have to admit, I’ve felt contempt like this in my own life, and I bet you have too. Maybe you’ve had a hotshot teammate or coworker, like a soccer player who always expects you to pass him the ball and then immediately gives it up to the other team. Or maybe there’s this friend of yours who loves advising you about music or fashion despite having a frankly awful taste. The way you feel towards these people might come close to annoyance, or disappointment, or even pity. But let’s say they keep it up even if you ask them nicely to cut it out, not ready to just leave you in peace. And let’s say the community you’re sharing, the soccer team or the broader group of music appreciators, really matters to you, so you’re not inclined to just let it roll off your back. Maybe you can feel it now—the curled lip, the superior attitude. We’ve reached the territory of contempt, and perhaps we can start to see it in a new light.
Although our emotions aren’t directly under our control, we can recognize how they function interpersonally: what triggers an emotion, how it makes people feel, and consequently, what effect it has. Contempt is triggered when someone is a failure relative to an important standard. Their failure is characteristic: instead of improving themselves or stepping back (if possible) from the standard, they continue on out of arrogance or insensitivity as if asking for treatment they don’t deserve. The contemnor responds by treating them as distant and low. “You can’t be here acting like that,” contempt says. “Step it up or shut up.”
The key to these cases of everyday contempt is that we don’t contemn someone’s overall character. Instead, we contemn their character relative to a normative community (or “community of respect”), where people come together around a set of shared standards. The important standards at stake aren’t the universal standards of morality but the standards of soccer shared by our team, or the standards of taste shared by the people we enjoy talking music with. These, too, are standards we do and should care about. We want to have games and conversations that work, shared with other people who are on the same page about what matters. And whenever we care about a community with shared standards, we’re prone to express hard feelings towards people who are messing with those standards, in hopes of getting them to stop.
When you contemn someone relative to a specific normative community, you’re not accusing them of failure as a person—just as a soccer player, music appreciator, or the like. This insight grants us a clearer view of why contempt isn’t necessarily too harsh and when it’s morally justifiable.
It’s perhaps strange to think of contempt turning on and off from community to community, and sometimes intense negative emotion can “spill over” across contexts. But we all know people who are, for example, qualified and helpful at the office but unskilled and arrogant during game night. They succeed by one set of standards but fail by another, so it’s reasonable to respond to them differently in different contexts, and we often do. The framework of normative communities nicely accounts for such cases.
When philosophers worry that contempt is too cruel to ever be acceptable, they’re often thinking about moral standards of deservingness. It’s hard to deny that everyone deserves decent moral treatment and everyone deserves the same basic level of moral treatment. Arrogant, immoral jerks are people too. But when we turn to other normative communities, deservingness looks different. Only some people merit a spot on a high-level soccer team, and certainly, not everyone deserves to be a team captain. That depends on their soccer skills and their ability to be a team player. Kicking someone off a soccer team or taking away their captain’s armband for not being a team player may feel harsh, but it isn’t pure cruelty: it’s a way to uphold the standards of soccer.
You might remain unsatisfied: even if community standards demand contempt, it’s still not very nice. Kindness towards everyone is a powerful ideal—but costly. Contempt shows everyone, in no uncertain terms, what treatment people deserve by community standards. (As a widely understood emotion, it can often do its work more quickly, subtly, and powerfully than an explicit statement to the same effect.) To stick to kindness is to risk acquiescing (or appearing to acquiesce) to unreasonable demands and stepping back from the importance of community standards. In some communities, acquiescence may well be the right move: in a pickup soccer game, you might shrug your shoulders and pass to the arrogant player, deciding that getting through the game without hurting his feelings is more important than making all the best plays. On a high-level team, though, conceding to his demands would worsen your team and undermine values central to the activity. When it’s important to the goals of a community that people get what they deserve, contempt (if properly targeted) will often be justifiable. Of course, it’s up to you (and those around you) to decide what should matter in the communities you care about and where, if anywhere, contempt has a place. I just hope your decisions can be strengthened by a better understanding of what contempt can do across communities of all sorts. In the everyday passions and pursuits we share with others, hard feelings like contempt are part of our commitment to the community and its standards.
Jacob Blitz
Jacob Blitz is a PhD student at the University of Arizona studying ethics (and related areas in social philosophy, philosophy of language, aesthetics…), focusing on normative phenomena and what they reveal about our interpersonal and intrapersonal lives. He also works on pedagogy and public philosophy outreach. He promises he isn’t a very contemptuous person.
