"The Poison in the Snake's Fang": Schopenhauer on Malice

Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming)
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Abstract

Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers in the history of Western ethics to dedicate sustained critical attention to the nature, extent, and phenomenology of malice. Yet while other aspects of Schopenhauer's moral psychology have received significant attention, his nuanced account of malice is under-explored. This paper attempts to remedy this oversight. It argues that Schopenhauer defends a unified and hierarchical account of moral vice in which malice is a sui generis motive, the pinnacle of immorality, and far more pervasive in the human psyche than typically recognized. Moreover, it is argued that part of the significance of Schopenhauer’s account lies in how his idiosyncratic conceptual framework allows him to philosophically capture many widespread beliefs about malicious persons — particularly the view that malice is best explained in terms of the agents own inner-suffering. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer’s views about malice raise a number of interpretive puzzles, which the paper subsequently aims to elucidate and solve.

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Patrick Hassan
Cardiff University

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