About cruelty - A philosopher’s perspective

Something can be cruel, in the first instance, without being unjust; we can be cruel towards those to whom we have no particular duties of political equality. Indeed, Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century humanist – and Judith Shklar, his 20th century intellectual descendant – both took cruelty to be a natural human failing, which has a particular home in those spaces in which people are not predisposed to think of each other as moral and political equals. We are, said Montaigne, often tempted towards cruelty towards those who are vulnerable to us; it is the fact of their vulnerability, in part, which makes us want to hurt them. The desire to hurt, moreover, is at the heart of what cruelty is. All policy – no matter how well-designed – will cause pain to some people; the goal for public policy is to figure out how to design that policy, so that the pain is minimized (and distributed fairly). Cruel policies, though, take the hurt of some people to be, not a necessary evil, but a positive good; cruelty, as Montaigne has it, involves taking the pain of one’s enemies to be a sort of spectacle, watched for enjoyment, rather than regretted and subjected to public justification.

A philosopher’s perspective on the cruelty of Donald Trump’s immigration policies
BY MICHAEL BLAKE