The Value and Risks of Hope

This chapter considers the value and risks of hope. It defends the priority of first-personal assessments of the value of hope, suggesting that it is often hopeful people themselves who are best positioned to understand the value of their hopes. But since hope can lead us astray, an evaluative framework for hope is needed. While most philosophers who theorize hope’s value tend to focus on assessments of epistemic and prudential rationality, this chapter argues that hope can also be evaluated as fitting and morally appropriate. Recognizing the full range of evaluative dimensions of hope is important for answering the all-things-considered practical question of whether and for what one should hope. This chapter defends Victoria McGeer’s framework for what it means to hope well to capture how the evaluative measures for hope work in practice, while orienting the rationality-of-hope question as a social and political question about the value of hope in community with others.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the motivation for the book, the methodology, and the arguments of Hope Under Oppression. It offers an overview of the emerging interest in the nature and value of hope in philosophy, and it also explains how the author came to the subject of hope from feminist approaches to moral, social, and political thought. Feminist philosophy helps to reveal the nature and scope of complex and overlapping systems of privilege and oppression, and in doing so, it can give rise to questions about hope. A feminist approach to moral psychology enables reflection on how hope is experienced and valued by people who live under oppression, offering new conceptual resources for understanding the nature, value, and risks of hope in human life.

Hope and Anger

This chapter argues that hope under conditions of oppression cannot be adequately understood without considering how hope is cultivated, sustained, and lost alongside the emotion of anger. Anger, like hope, can be evaluated as a prudentially rational, fitting, and morally appropriate response to injustice. And there is an important relationship between hope and anger. Anger often responds to disappointed hopes. We invest hope in other people to live up to the demands of morality and justice, and when they fail to do so, anger tends to ensue. But anger about injustice is also often accompanied by the formation of hopes for repair.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter offers a summary of the key arguments in the book, situating them within the context of ongoing injustice and suggesting new questions that emerge for scholars working on hope and related topics. Drawing upon the emotional economy of hope, anger, bitterness, and faith under oppression defended in the book, it suggests the need for an ethics and politics of hope more generally, attention to human difference in theorizing the virtue of hope, further inquiry into the nature of despair, and further discussion of collective hope and other emotions in the pursuit of a more just world.

Hope’s Place in Our Lives

This chapter explores the nature of hope. It argues that hope is a way of seeing in a favorable light the possibility that an outcome one desires and believes to be possible obtains. This understanding of hope is similar to many competing accounts of the nature of hope in the philosophical literature. Setting the debate about which precise theory of hope is correct aside, the significance of human difference to experiences of hope and our relative power to affect the world is explored. A feminist perspective on hope reveals that oppression is a threat to hope. Attending to the power dynamics that shape how we hope, this chapter illustrates the ways in which people and institutions in positions of power use hope to further their ends. It then traces the relationship between the hope we place in others, normative expectation, and trust.

Hope, Faith, and Solidarity

This chapter develops an account of the relationship between hope, faith, and solidarity in struggles against oppression. It argues that a particular form of faith, intrinsic faith, enables resilience in the face of evidence that suggests the pursuit of justice is futile. Intrinsic faith is a deep belief in the intrinsic value of one’s actions or way of life. Drawing upon testimony of scholars and activists, this chapter illustrates how intrinsic faith can flow from spiritual faith, faith in humanity, and moral faith. Faith helps bring people together in solidarity against oppression. And through solidarity, a form of collective hope for justice can emerge. The chapter concludes by exploring different ways in which individuals and groups can hope well for justice.

Losing Hope, Becoming Embittered

This chapter considers what happens to anger when people’s hopes for repair in the face of injustice are not realized. It argues that anger can evolve into the emotion of bitterness. Bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. And despite its unfortunate reputation as an inherently bad and destructive emotion, bitterness can be a prudentially rational, fitting, and morally appropriate response to injustice. Although it can lead to despair and inaction, some people who are bitter continue to be motivated to act against injustice even without hope that their efforts will be successful.