The morality of vengeance: Confucianism and Tutuism in dialogue

Abstract

The desire for vengeance, or the feeling of righteousness of vengeance, often motivates individual and collective action to the extent that it sometimes results in warfare. The topic of whether revenge is morally justified has attracted much scholarly attention. Nonetheless, the Anglophone philosophical literature has mostly discussed the morality of vengeance from the point-of-view of Western philosophy (Govier, 2011;Murphy, 2005;Uniacke, 2000). Far less attention has been paid to cross-cultural perspectives that include Chinese and African perspectives on vengeance. As the cognitive empire of the Global North is declining and that of the Global South is rising (de