Violence as a Response to Oppression

In the first section, in Chapter 3, Smith talks extensively about how "we judge the propriety or impropriety of the affections of other men" (11). Smith establishes a few truths. One, that we are capable of understanding when other people are in pain. This idea is heavily supported in his prior chapters on sympathy, but he expounds upon it further when judging the merits of emotional reactions. Humans are, with a few exceptions, necessarily sympathetic, and we delight when we can commiserate or celebrate with other people (9). The expression "Misery loves company" is not merely colloquially true, it is reflective of human nature. Two, that when we witness peoples' reactions, particularly to negative events, we instinctively pass a moral judgment as to the affections' propriety or lack thereof. Three, even if we don't experience the same emotions as a person who is grieving, angry, or confused, we can still approve of reactions. Smith gives the example of a man who is grieving from the death of his father - you don't need to have lost your own father to approve of his grief.

I think we can take his points two steps further. One, I think we can examine the proportionality of responses. Two, I think we can apply individual sentiments to communities.

On the first point, it makes sense that if one is grieving, that such grief may be accompanied by physical action as well. Shouting and tears accompany grief, and in many cases, the mental state of grief, particularly when the grief is great, is inseparable from the physical result. I don't think Smith defends disproportionate responses. In fact, he writes "The propriety of every passion excited by objects peculiarly related to ourselves... must lie... in a certain mediocrity." (23) If I receive news that my dog dies, I have a right to be sad, but I don't have a right to disrupt other peoples' lives for my plight. While it is obvious that one can overreact to grief, an interesting question is whether or not one can underreact to tragedy. Lebron certainly thought Bush underreacted to Katrina; perhaps if one is not bothered by tragedy, either internal or external, one is not behaving properly, just as the one who overreacts is not behaving properly.

On the second point, I think this is a lot easier to prove. If I watch my floormate receive bad news, I feel sympathy toward him. If I watch him score a homerun in a Stags baseball game, I feel joy with him. Someone in the bleachers behind me might feel the same joy I do, even though the runner's joy is primarily focused on his victory, not on the exact number of fans in the stand. If two people can share a common emotion, I don't see why three people, four people, or an entire society's worth of people could not also share that emotion. In 1970, at the Kent State shooting, when a newspaper took this photograph, the entire country felt the woman's grief. She did not run out of grief to share because her emotions were seen from coast to coast.

I think we have now established a groundwork for a question on violence. We know that certain sects in a nation will often collectively feel grief or outrage in a society, much like the African-American community did after Trayvon Martin's demise a few years ago or Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson. If the degree of reactions must be proportional to the negative event, the question is: in a time of oppression, can violence ever be justifiable, and if so, what conditions are necessary? Smith writes "The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer." (16) In the Kent State example, while we might feel outraged at the national guard, we won't feel the same outrage that the woman (Mary Ann Vecchio) in the photograph feels. I'm not 100% clear on Smith's explanation, of doing our best to simply bring the case home to our hearts (13). For me, his claim is dubious because 1) I am not convinced we can know what it's like to be another person. 2) This standard relies on subjective human character. Someone who is more prone to violence or has anger management issues is going to be more likely to condone violence as a response to oppression than will a pacifist, even if such biases are implicit. This poses a problem for Smith because the righteousness of an action, found in whether or not the response is proportional or disproportional, is entirely subjective.