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them. This competition can lead to  Schadenfreude . When bad things happen to other people whose moral beliefs differ from our own, we sometimes take our own good fortune as evidence for the superiority of our beliefs. This, I will argue in Part Two, is a mistake.
    We cannot avoid choosing between intrinsically conflicting beliefs and principles. Because moral disagreements concern questions of value, not of fact, Schadenfreude implicates itself broadly in our lives. As the emotional manifestation of beliefs about justice, Schadenfreude will persist because of differing moral beliefs. Although I want to talk about justice in the context of non-trivial suffering, our anxiety about how much another person is suffering requires mention of justice and cruelty here.
    The distinction between commission and omission illuminates the difference between cruelty and  Schadenfreude . Unlike cruelty, which can be active or passive, Schadenfreude is passive, because it evolves in situations we do not create. Certainly it can be cruel to observe the terrible suffering of a person without attempting to help. But bearing in mind that cruelty almost invariably aims at disproportionality, one can see that Kafka experiences another  kind  of pleasure from that of a satisfied rapist or vengeful murderer. The Kafka, Lodge, and Paglia passages support a morally relevant difference of kind between the delight which results from two different sources of suffering: that which we have ourselves inflicted or in some part caused, and that in which we have had no hand.
    Disagreement on this point abounds. Colin McGinn would doubtlessly argue that my argument fails, given his view that
    The evil person can be either agent or spectator of the suffering he relishes. He need not always go to the trouble of bringing it about himself; he might be quite content if someone else, or just nature, does the harm. What matters is the state that pain produces in him, not necessarily his agency in producing it. Thus we might distinguish between active and passive evil, depending upon the agent’s own intentional involvement.9
    This is indeed a harsh line, making Kafka and Lodge both evil. In fact, McGinn’s view makes all of us evil if Schadenfreude is universal. Moral philosophy needs to be more psychologically realistic. McGinn’s view begs important, substantive questions about the mitigating effect of desert and the role, if any, of triviality in moral evaluation.
    Agency and passivity deserve greater moral priority than McGinn allows. Jon Elster articulates what must be the case for most people: “Many who find a titillating pleasure in a friend’s misfortune would be horrified at the thought of going out of their way to provoke it. Doing so by omission or abstention might be easier.”10 Elster believes that we generally see an important difference between celebrating mishaps we have caused and those we have not. McGinn conceptually obviates this difference, misconstruing the moral gravity of comedy and beliefs about trivial suffering.
    Whether we ourselves caused the suffering of another matters to moral analysis in roughly the same way that the degree of suffering involved does. In the  Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche stopped just short of calling trivial that pleasure in suffering we have not ourselves caused: “To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure. This statement expresses an old, powerful, human, all too human sentiment...” ( GM  II, Section 6). Nietzsche and Elster disagree on this point. Elster may well have come closer to capturing what goes on in our hearts than Nietzsche. In any event, both Nietzsche and Elster oppose McGinn and together suggest that if there weren’t a word for  Schadenfreude , we would need to invent one, in order to maintain the force of our concepts of sadism and cruelty. Schadenfreude is at worst a passively  cruel response  (in the eyes of other people,