Appealing, Appalling: Morality and Revenge in I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

Jones, Steve (2023) Appealing, Appalling: Morality and Revenge in I Spit on Your Grave (2010). Quarterly Review of Film and Vide, 40 (6). pp. 739-763. ISSN 1050-9208

[img]
Preview
Text
Appealing Appalling.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (363kB) | Preview
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2022.2045167

Abstract

The notion of revenge – intentionally seeking to inflict harm in return for a perceived wrong – is encumbered by several ethical and conceptual problems. Even defining revenge is challenging because revenge has been variously distinguished from or combined with retribution and retaliation by numerous thinkers (see Stainton 2006). The present work focuses on one particular conceptual problem: in philosophical scholarship, revenge is reputed to be either morally appealing (satisfying, universally desired, natural, righteous and so forth) or appalling (immoral, universally abhorred, disquieting, and so forth). Although these positions are presented as mutually exclusive in the literature, the sustained presence of both defences and vilifications in revenge scholarship indicates that revenge presents us with a genuine dilemma: revenge is simultaneously appealing and appalling.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: P900 Others in Mass Communications and Documentation
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Arts
Depositing User: Rachel Branson
Date Deposited: 28 Feb 2022 14:19
Last Modified: 11 Sep 2023 03:30
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/48569

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics