Content area
Abstract
Self-righteousness consists in either exaggerated or inappropriate claims of moral injury or personal moral development, or excessive or misplaced public moral pronouncements, which may be true or false. In the first case, the aptness of the charge of being self-righteous, and so a moral assessment of the actions or speech which are the target of the charge, rests on the acceptance or rejection of antecedent moral claims. Yet in the second case the resolution of the moral issue is different. Even when we are in the right, and know that we are clearly in the right, there is good reason to refrain from the kind of behavior that warrants a charge of self-righteousness. Very little philosophical analysis has been done directly on self-righteousness and related moral attitudes and emotions. The concept is traditionally more at home in theology, where it is contrasted with righteousness in God and is seen as the enemy of repentance. However self-righteousness connects to a cluster of related and different issues, some of which have been the subject of philosophical analysis. First, self-righteousness can be analyzed as part of an account of our moral attitudes to others. Self-righteousness can be found together with emotions, whether self-directed like pride, or other-directed, including anger, indignation, contempt, disgust, resentment, and schadenfreude. Presumably self-righteous attitudes and such emotions reinforce one another, and sorting out just how the emotion influences the attitude or is part and parcel of it would be difficult and might not help us with moral questions.