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The Outlaw Emotion |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Lloyd Eby |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,511 Words, 16,405 Characters |
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WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO OTHER PEOPLE
John Portmann
New York & London: Routledge, 2000
242 pp., $26.95
A decade ago Rabbi Harold Kushner published a best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. There he tried to tell us that the fact that someone is undergoing suffering does not show that this person has done something bad or offensive to God, because God does not operate that way. Bad things can happen to good people. Much suffering is random, Kushner held, and is not the working out of some form of divine or cosmic justice.
"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies," Gore Vidal once said. Vidal's funny but too-true observation points to the pleasure we take in others' ill fortune. How, then, should we feel about it when someone else suffers misfort...
. . .
...only a very few here. It is praiseworthy for taking up the frequently neglected topic of the ethics of emotions and for pointing out why discussion of emotions has been shunned by many philosophers. In fact, although the book's style is quite readable, its content is sufficiently dense that I expect it will appeal mostly to readers who have professional or scholarly interests in these issues.
(821 of 16,405 characters)
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