In Chapter 1, I introduce and scrutinise the conception of hope that dominates contemporary philosophy: that of a desire for a future outcome held in conditions of epistemic uncertainty. I argue that – despite their ostensible technical disagreements – analytic philosophers are committed to a shared framework that generates an ultimately depoliticised understanding of hope. Through discussion of Adrienne Martin’s How We Hope, and other relevant works, I show that contemporary philosophy understands hope as an everyday psychological phenomenon and an amoral/non-normative concept with merely contingent value. I suggest that the dominant philosophical understanding is incapable of distinguishing between hope and optimism. It therefore cannot acknowledge that the experience of hope can be sparked by commitment to the mere possibility of a specific future rather than the predictive calculation of forecastable outcomes. I discuss the theological account developed by Gabriel Marcel – as well as the political experience of Nelson Mandela – to indicate the importance of understanding hope in terms of the merely possible rather than probable.

Ressentiment has been invoked to explain a range of political phenomena, including authoritarian populism, identity-based antagonisms on both the left and right, incel ideology, the manosphere and fanatical movements. But what, exactly, is ressentiment? Is it an emotion, an evaluative stance or something else entirely? I argue that ressentiment is an emotional mechanism that transforms painful feelings of powerlessness, shame and inferiority into hostile, retaliatory emotions directed at others. I analyse the structure of this process, showing how ressentiment alters one’s evaluative outlook, sustains particular kinds of narratives, reshapes identity and fosters lasting forms of political antagonism. Ressentiment is seductive because it promises relief from self-directed pain by offering targets for blame; and it is sticky because its narratives create belonging and bolster self-worth. Understanding ressentiment in these terms reveals how seemingly intractable political hostilities can arise not from reasoned disagreement, but from deeper affective wounds.

Chapter 6 includes a summary, discussion of contributions, and avenues for future research. The summary discusses findings while incorporating insights obtained from qualitative elite interviews that I conducted in the British context. Conversations with politicians revealed interesting observations that support and shed further light on the motivation, theoretical expectations, and findings of the book. In particular, they revealed that moral rhetoric is a crucial type of communicative frame that should be used to expand the coalition of voters to which a party speaks. As to contributions, I discuss the significance of the book for studies of comparative party politics, political behavior, and moral psychology. Regarding next directions, I discuss the wide variety of topics that future work could investigate. For example: How does moral rhetoric interact with other aspects of party politics like the clarity with which parties deliver their positions to voters? What are the consequences of moral-representational (mis)alignment between what voters want and what parties provide? How different is the role of moral rhetoric in new democracies and authoritarian contexts?

The chapter motivates the topic of moral rhetoric by highlighting its relevance for how voters experience politics in everyday life. This leads to the question explored in the book: What role does moral rhetoric play in party politics? The chapter defines moral rhetoric as argumentation that frames political positions into moral views about right and wrong. Moral rhetoric can be used to frame views about specific policy issues (e.g., the economy, immigration) and more general political matters (e.g., the immorality of rival parties). Moral rhetoric contrasts with pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric. To further illustrate, I present a series of examples of moral rhetoric used by parties and politicians in advanced democracies. Then I explain the research approaches of the book, such as use of the Moral Foundations Theory and geographic focus on Western democracies. The chapter ends with an outline of the rest of the book. The book examines the role of moral rhetoric in party politics in three parts: (1) whether and how moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of political communication, (2) what effects it has on voters, and (3) its significance for democratic representation.

Abstract: In this chapter, Fahy explores the parallels between John Dewey’s and Aristotle’s moral psychology, particularly their shared emphasis on habit (hexis) and practical wisdom (phronesis). He shows how Dewey, like Aristotle, views habits as the foundation of moral character, shaping perception, deliberation, and choice. Aristotle defines virtues as acquired dispositions that guide action through practical wisdom, whereas Dewey extends this idea, emphasizing the dynamic, transactional nature of habit formation. Both thinkers see deliberation as dramatic and integrative, determining both actions and the meaning of values in lived experience. However, they diverge on key points: Aristotle envisions a hierarchical structure of virtues culminating in contemplation (theoria) as the highest good, while Dewey rejects fixed ends, advocating continual growth. This chapter concludes by stating that despite differences, both of these accounts of moral psychology provide rich frameworks for understanding human action, ethical deliberation, and character development.

Why do evaluative frameworks succeed each other in the ways that they do? If ascetic morality is a prejudice, how does it assist us in hiding from ourselves? Which unbearable affective responses does it screen out or subdue? If ascetic morality is a prejudice, what might it propel us toward? Which affective responses does it support or even require? What forms of life does morality encourage, even support? Taking up these questions and issues is the work of Chapter 3. The answer, in the reading I propose, is that morality serves psychologically protective functions: It wards off the fear and anxiety born of powerlessness and vulnerability as it also functions to preserve and foster a sense of efficacy. When feelings of powerlessness strike, when feelings of inadequacy become overwhelming, morality can help one restore oneself by holding tight to a list of grievances, by blaming someone or something else for one’s suffering. The evaluative system, here, does double duty: Morality assists us in feeling less helpless and less powerless as it also fosters a sense of efficacy and perhaps even a sense of (moral) superiority.

Moral philosophy can and ought to be a source of moral wisdom. Wisdom is a special kind of understanding, in particular, an ethical understanding of what it is to be a success as a human being, a healthy and fully formed specimen. Such understanding involves both a delicate grasp of the grammar of moral concepts and an appreciation of their import for a human life, including the philosopher’s. Virtue ethics is an important department of moral philosophy, especially for the philosophical goal of becoming wise. It consists in a careful investigation of the concepts of moral virtues (generosity, justice, the sense of duty, and so forth), both in their conceptual contours and in their importance for a human life.

In Chapter 4, I explore another way in which morality functions to serve psychological protective functions: the will to “self-tormenting” (GM II 22). By attending to this inwardly directed form of “self-ravishment” (GM II 18), I conceive of the protective, defensive functions of morality thus: To stave off, moderate, disavow, or dissociate a painful affect that is “becoming unendurable” – for instance, helplessness, impotence, “depression, heaviness, [or] weariness” – one turns to oneself as the “sole cause of [such] suffering” (GM III 20). Such self-recriminations thereby: (1) drive “out of consciousness at least for the moment” the painful feeling (GM III 17) and (2) restore a sense of efficacy, a sense of power (GM III 15). After distinguishing between two prominent ways in which such cruelty turned inward may be felt – namely, through guilt and shame – I argue it is shame that plays an underdeveloped and underappreciated role in the Second Essay. In this evaluative framework, our shame, that familiar form of self-reproach, is shown to serve psychological protective functions as it renders us ever more obscure to ourselves.

In his Republic, Plato claims that we always do whatever we do in pursuit of the good. But in Book IV of the Republic, Plato shows that people can have attractions and aversive reactions at the same time toward the same objects or actions. In this essay, I argue that Plato’s recognition and use of aversion as a motivating response cannot be squared with what I call his ‘motivational monism’, that is, with the view that the pursuit of the good is the only thing that motivates us. Rather, as Plato’s own arguments show clearly, sometimes we don’t pursue what is good; instead, we act so as to avoid what is bad. I contend that this negative motivation cannot be wholly understood in terms of our positive interest in what is good.

An ongoing structural problem for the normative political theory of punishment concerns the question of ‘just deserts in an unjust society’, explored here as the question of the guilt of the victim who victimises another. While political theory cannot justify punishment in such circumstances, the possibility of a moral and psychological sense of guilt still exists. This chapter juxtaposes liberal theory’s impasse with a moral psychology of guilt drawn from the psychoanalytic perspectives of Melanie Klein and Jessica Benjamin. Based on complex love and reparation, this account of guilt is an important way of understanding what is at stake in human violation. Classical political views of the impasse are explored in Kant and Hegel, while Antony Duff’s theory of punishment as communication is seen as seeking to go beyond these but remaining constrained by them. Klein’s account of guilt as a reparative emotion is linked to Benjamin’s ideas of the ‘doer’ and the ‘done to’ and the possibility of reconciliation through recognition. This deeper sense of guilt cannot cure the problem in political theory but shows how an alternative moral psychology of guilt is available even where such theory is exhausted.

Taking Herbert Morris’s ethical concepts of guilt, identification, responsibility and atonement as ‘at-one-ment’, this chapter explores their metapsychological basis and somatic link to feeling ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). Exploring Freud’s metapsychology in Civilization and Its Discontents (1985), two conflicting routes to guilt are noted. The more prominent involves internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts. The better but less developed emphasises loving identification with others in the process of ego and superego formation of the self. This second route is in line with Freud’s later structural theory as developed by Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of self-formation makes loving identification the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement as at-one-ment. The superego is an ‘atonement structure’ that is reconciliative, and this links psychoanalysis to Morris’s metaphysics of atonement. The analysis is developed to include ‘prospective identification’, moral and psychological guilt for the violation of a stranger. Emotional disturbance at killing another with whom one could identify is explored and a comparison made with Raskolnikov’s guilt in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A closing section links this chapter to the previous, cementing the metaphysical and metapsychological dimensions of guilt in an expanded understanding of philosophy as both Greek and modern.

Experimental jurisprudence draws methods and theories from an increasingly wide variety of fields, including psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science. However, researchers interested in legal thought have thus far paid relatively little attention to its origins in development. This chapter highlights an emerging approach that leverages methods and insights from developmental science to better understand the nature and development of adult intuitions about the law. By studying children’s earliest intuitions about rules, laws, and other topics, this “intuitive jurisprudence” approach can provide new methods and theoretical frameworks for experimental jurisprudence, as well as clarify places in which the law does or does not match human intuitions about justice. Already, developmental psychology and legal scholarship may converge to be mutually informative in a number of diverse areas, and this chapter reviews several, including: intent and punishment; fairness and procedural justice; ownership and property rights; trust in testimony and evidentiary issues; and social biases and equal protection under the law.

The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.

Modern theory of punishment generally conflates two questions. The first concerns the justification of state punishment, the second the moral–psychological damage that occurs when a person is violated. The first leads to political theory and a legally based account of wrongdoing and punishment. The second considers the moral–psychological nature of violation, grief and reconciliation. Hegel’s early theological writings provide a critical vantage point from which to view law and the dominant liberal theory of punishment, including his own ‘mature’ position as a founder of modern retributivism. Based on a metaphysics of love, he develops there his account of a perpetrator’s guilt and how a victim might deal with violation, finding a common ground in the grief both may feel. This early metaphysical ethics contrasts with the Philosophy of Right’s later rational, retributive, metaphysics of punishment. The chapter considers critically Axel Honneth’s approach and suggests that the early theological writings are worthy of more consideration than they are often given. This early work might be more mature in psychological terms than Hegel’s later legal and political theory, providing the basis for a critique of that theory that is ethically real and institutionally critical. This is a prototypical ERIC critique pointing towards penal abolition.