Hate

 

Hate is a natural feeling. When you experience it you should remind yourself that hate hurts only the you. Still, there are things properly worth hating.

That’s a tension most ethical traditions have noticed. Hate does arise naturally—almost automatically—when we perceive cruelty, betrayal, injustice, or threat. It’s part of the emotional alarm system. In that sense it isn’t surprising that we feel it. The difficulty is that hate tends to consume the person who carries it longer than it harms the object of the hate.

Your first sentence reflects a very old insight. In various forms you find it in Stoic writers, in Buddhist teaching, and even in bits of Christian moral thought: the idea that hatred corrodes the mind that holds it. The anger may feel energizing at first, but sustained hatred narrows attention, distorts judgment, and keeps the hated object living rent-free in one’s thoughts.

Yet your second sentence is also psychologically honest. Some things really do provoke a moral recoil—torture, cruelty toward children, deliberate deception for power, and so on. When people say “nothing should be hated,” they often mean something like “do not allow hatred to rule your actions,” but the wording gets slippery. Moral disgust and condemnation are real responses to real harms.

One way some traditions handle the paradox is by separating the emotion from the stance you take toward it. The emotion arises; you notice it; you decide what to do with it. Hatred might signal that something is wrong, but you don’t let it become the guiding principle of your behavior.

In Buddhist language—which you might appreciate given your sympathy for its emphasis on compassion—the problem is not the momentary appearance of aversion but the clinging to it. Aversion arises, but cultivating it is what poisons the mind.

So perhaps the workable version is something like this: there are indeed things that properly provoke moral revulsion—but holding on to hatred as a steady state is almost always self-destructive.

I’m curious about your phrasing, though. When you say “things properly worth hating,” do you mean actions (cruelty, injustice), or do you also include the people who commit them? That distinction is where many moral systems start to diverge.

An act can be worthy of hate, a person or group repetitively doing such an act can also be worthy of hate. I used the ungrammatical expression, "the you" to try to convey a special sense of what it is that hate can harm. The point may be to be mindful about it and keep it rational and controlled.

Yes, I see what you were doing with “the you.” It’s actually a clever phrase. Ordinary English forces us to say you as if the person were a single unit, but psychologically we all sense there is a sort of inner center—call it the self, the mind, the character, or simply the part that has to live with our thoughts. Hate corrodes that part. Your wording tries to point directly at the experiencer rather than the social person.

And I think your emphasis on mindfulness and control is the key point. Hatred becomes dangerous when it stops being examined and becomes automatic. When it is conscious, it can function more like a moral signal: something here is wrong. But if it takes over, it reshapes perception so that everything about the hated object becomes simplified and exaggerated.

Your distinction between a single act and repeated acts forming a pattern is also important. Most people will forgive or at least soften toward a one-time wrong. But when someone repeatedly commits the same harmful act, we begin to infer character. At that point the hatred is no longer about a discrete behavior but about a perceived stable disposition. That’s when it shifts from “that act is hateful” to “that person is hateful.”

The danger there—philosophically speaking—is that hatred tends to erase complexity. A person who repeatedly does something vile may still have other features, motives, pressures, or capacities for change. Hatred tends to flatten that into a single moral label. That simplification is emotionally satisfying but intellectually risky.

So the discipline you’re hinting at—to feel the hatred but keep it rationally bounded—is actually quite a demanding moral practice. It means you allow the emotion to inform judgment without letting it become the whole judgment.

It reminds me a little of something attributed to the Buddha: anger is like picking up a hot coal to throw at someone—you are the one burned first. But the same tradition also recognizes moral revulsion toward cruelty. The trick is not to become the coal.

Your phrase “keep it rational and controlled” may be the most workable formulation. Hate may arise naturally; cultivating it is the choice.

I wonder if part of what you’re getting at is this: hatred is sometimes justified as a diagnosis, but almost never as a way of living.

We must not judge; we haven't the competence or knowledge to do so. The Christian saying is "hate the sin but not the sinner." Still, there are individuals where it is otherwise. This illustrates the fundamental things that moral rules are not geometric axioms, that there are exceptions.

Yes, and what you’re touching on there is something moral philosophers have wrestled with for centuries: moral rules are not like mathematical theorems. They are closer to guiding principles than to axioms that yield mechanically correct conclusions.

The Christian phrase “hate the sin but not the sinner” is an attempt to preserve two competing insights at once. One is moral condemnation—some acts are genuinely wrong. The other is humility about judging persons, because we rarely know the full web of causes behind someone’s actions: upbringing, pressure, fear, ignorance, mental illness, desperation, simple bad luck. The saying tries to keep moral clarity without moral arrogance.

But as you point out, life pushes back against tidy formulas. When a person repeatedly commits the same cruel or destructive acts, the distinction between “sin” and “sinner” begins to collapse in practice. At some point the pattern appears to be the person’s character, not merely an isolated failure. People then feel that the object of their moral revulsion is not just the deed but the agent.

Your observation that moral rules have exceptions is actually very important. In mathematics an exception means the rule is wrong. In ethics, exceptions are often the reason the rule exists in the first place. Rules help ordinary people navigate ordinary situations, but extreme cases expose their limits.

There’s an old line in moral philosophy that captures this nicely: principles guide judgment, but they cannot replace it. Judgment requires context, experience, and sometimes uncomfortable uncertainty.

So perhaps the tension you’re describing is unavoidable. We are told not to judge because our knowledge is incomplete, yet we cannot avoid making judgments if we are to live morally at all. The real discipline may not be avoiding judgment, but holding it with a kind of humility—recognizing that even when we condemn something, we may still be seeing only part of the picture.

Your final point—that moral rules are not geometric axioms—strikes me as exactly right. Ethics is more like navigation than geometry: there are maps and compasses, but the terrain still has to be read as you travel.