If one reads those who would blow us up, the reason they give is revenge for humiliation. ''What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted,'' Osama bin Laden said shortly after 9/11. ''Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace.'' In other words, a certain kind of memory propels Muslim fundamentalists.
Humiliation, Avishai Margalit says in his thought-provoking book ''The Ethics of Memory,'' is a model case of a moral emotion: ''By moral emotions I mean emotions that motivate our ethical or moral conduct. The idea is that moral emotions motivate our moral behavior not just, and not even predominantly, through the way the emotions are experienced but through the way they are remembered.'' A crucial fact about humiliation is that it is hard to remember it without reliving it: ''The memory of humiliation is the bleeding scar of reliving it. . . . Humiliation, I believe, is not just another experience in our life, like, say, an embarrassment. It is a formative experience. It forms the way we view ourselves as humiliated persons.''
Now, to claim that fundamentalists ought not to kill us is an ethical claim, but to claim that they ought not to feel humiliated is a claim in the ethics of memory. What might ground such a claim? We would need to be able to argue that the memory itself is somehow illegitimate. And for this, I think we need a deeper engagement with Freud than Margalit's passing references to catharsis and to unconscious memories. On the face of it, no one wants to be humiliated. Indeed, because humiliation is supposed to be so awful, some kind of retaliation is thought to be justified. The question, then, is whether there might be hidden currents through which people become attached to humiliation, the very emotion they sincerely claim to despise.
We can gain some insight into this question if we contrast humiliation with the dynamics of another moral emotion, guilt. In ''Civilization and Its Discontents,'' Freud argued that guilt arises as a solution to the problem of how humans, who have various aggressive impulses, live in society. Basically, they turn aggression on themselves in the form of a punishing and inhibiting superego. Thus we have inhibiting guilt, which, Freud thought, is bound to make us somewhat uncomfortable with civilized life. When it comes to bin Laden and his associates, there does not seem to be any self-imposed inhibition about attacking Western civilization. In fact, in the peek the public got into his cave, he and his friends seemed to be taking tremendous pleasure in recounting the attack on the World Trade Center. But isn't this just the obverse of Freud's thesis? If the inhibition is lacking, one should expect someone to derive pleasure from the destructive aggression. And might not this pleasure serve to secure an alternative psychic structure to the one Freud described?
That is, in contrast to guilt, memories of humiliation make people feel entitled to discharge aggression in destructive acts. On the surface, the terrorist will think it is because of his people's humiliation that he is justified in his acts; just under the surface, the situation is the reverse: because he enjoys destructive hatred, he has become attached to his sense of humiliation. He is trapped in a peculiar kind of motivated irrationality. Consciously, and sincerely, he hates his sense of humiliation; unconsciously, he is holding onto it with all his might.
It seems to me that any sophisticated attempt to reach out to the young Muslim men attracted to bin Laden's message will have to take that psychic formation into account. But from an ethical point of view, we have found the ground for the claim that someone ought not feel humiliated: it is irrational. This is one example of why psychoanalysis is indispensable to an adequate ethics of emotion and memory.
For Margalit, who is the Schulman professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the paradigm is Jewish memories of the Holocaust, not Muslim memories of humiliation. Still, his sensitive meditations show how these two strains of hurt might be overcome. In a marvelous chapter called ''Forgiving and Forgetting,'' Margalit asks whether we have a duty to forgive those who have wronged us. His answer is elegant. Forgiveness does not require forgetting the wrong done, but it does require getting beyond certain moral emotions, like humiliation and resentment, associated with it. This is because forgiveness is not merely a policy change, an active decision to live in disregard of past wrongs. Rather, forgiveness essentially involves psychological change: it is ''a case of overcoming resentment and vengefulness, of mastering anger and humiliation. Such overcoming is a result of a long effort rather than a decision to do something on the spot.'' Forgiveness cannot be a simple act of will. Indeed, in some cases forgiveness may emerge only from a complex decision to undergo an arduous process of deep-seated psychological change. In Margalit's opinion, people who have harmed us -- even if they repent and beg our forgiveness -- cannot put us under an obligation to forgive them. For no one who has harmed us can put us under an obligation to go through such a process.
However, he continues, we nevertheless do have a duty to forgive those who have harmed us. But our duty is not to them; it is to ourselves: ''This duty stems from not wanting to live with feelings of resentment and the desire for revenge. Those are poisonous attitudes and states of mind.'' Thus we ought to forgive others, but for our own sake. Here the ethical norm -- the ''ought'' in ''you ought to forgive'' -- flows not from rationality or irrationality, as in the previous example, but from our commitment to our own well-being. That is, we are going to lead less happy, less rich lives ourselves if we are dominated by negative moral emotions.
I am not persuaded that we are always less well off when we hold onto a negative emotion, but I think Margalit is absolutely right in his overall orientation: that questions of humiliation, resentment and forgiveness essentially involve taking responsibility for one's own life and for how one wants to be. Margalit is an astonishingly humane thinker. His philosophy is always tied to making sense of us humans in all our complexity. And yet he is committed to making sense of us in ways that will make us better.
Jonathan Lear is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His new book, ''Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony,'' will be published later this year.