In the first chapter of Recognizing Resentment, I historically situate the debate about the passions and their role in sociability to which Joseph Butler responded at the outset of the eighteenth century. I correct the mischaracterization of the seventeenth cenutry as the age reason reigned supreme, highlighting instead how a host of philosophers in the rationalist tradition began to pay particular attention to the importance of passion in moral and political motivation and obligation. For rationalists and psychological egoists like Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, passions were influential but socially destabiizing and “vicious.” The same was true of the philosophy of the father of the natural law tradition, Hugo Grotius. However, Grotius's disciple, Samuel von Pufendorf, and the heir to the egoist tradition in the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville, began to view the passions in a new light. However vicious they might be, Pufendorf and Mandeville believed passions positively contibuted to our ability to live together in large, diverse societies.

Resentment has a bad, but undeserved rap, in both political theory and popular culture today. But this book has shown that liberal political theorists were not always so dismissed of resentment as a moral motive because of its psychological features, most importantly, its basis in equal recognition. But I have also demonstrated the limitations of sympathetic resentment throughout the book. In this conclusion, I consider how commercial institutions like competition and free exchange might ameliorate our prospects for spectatorial resentment, as well as what the empirical research on resentment, empathy, and perspective-taking might teach us about how to improve sympathetic resentment. Finally, I reflect on what persistent injustice in liberal societies might suggest about the value of the theory of sympathetic resentment I have offered in this book.

Political theorists and social scientists alike agree that passions matter for politics, but disagree about which passions matter most and how they contribute to political flourishing. I make the case that resentment, contrary to its traditional associations with violence and injustice, in fact makes us alive to the suffering of others and leads us to aid them in seeking restitution. When we adopt the resentments of others by sympathizing with them, we implicitly recognize their equal moral and political status, too, key commitments of liberalism. I argue that liberals of all stripes should embrace sympathetic resentment as a proper moral motive for justice.

Although an Anglican bishop, Joseph Butler was the first thinker in the liberal tradition to argue that resentment could be morally justifiable, specifically when it was deliberate and sympathetically experienced on behalf of another person. Contrary to his egoist predecessors and also unlike eighteenth century theorists who took human sociability to be the product of our benevolent natures, Butler believed the resentments we adopted on behalf of those familiar to us were morally good motives for action and indeed the clearest evidence of our common humanity. Butler believed our sympathetic resentment was based on our belief in the equal status of victims, too. And, finally, Butler advanced a limited view of the nature and scope of our political duties, grounded in his moral psychology.

There is no eighteenth-century moral philosopher more reknown for his work on the passions than David Hume, but political theorists have only recently began to explore Hume's myriad, important contributions to the study of moral and political motivation and obligation. The study of Hume's political thought has always been plagued by a so-called “motivational dilemma” related to his theory of justice, which suprisingly appears to rationally established. I argue in this chapter instead that the affective components of Hume's theory of justice, including his treatment of sympathetic resentment, are just as central. Hume not only builds on Butler's account of sympathy but also nuances resentment's tie to injustice, as both an alert to injury and as a motive subject to partiality. Hume explains when and why we are likely to be partial in our sympathetic resentments, as well as what kind of instutions might counteract such partiality.

Like his predecessors, Adam Smith saw the value of resentment as a motive for justice and an emotion that best captured our belief in the equality of others, but he offered the most comprehensive account of how the passion of resentment might be made into a moral (or proper) passion. Through his innovative impartial spectator theory, which explains how–and why–individuals refine their own emotions and learn to better recognize the emotions of many, varied others, Smith developed a theory of justice based on spectatorial resentment that avoided the pitfalls of partiality and while leveraging resentment's potency as a motive and intimate connection to injustice. More than any other thinker, Smith was also attuned to the psychological toll that the refinement of spectatorial resentment imposed on victims and spectators of injustice alike, however, casting his social and political theory in a somewhat tragic light. Smith thus offers a therapeutic view of religious belief as one means available to liberal citizens who must cope with lingering resentment in an unjust world.