ABSTRACT
This chapter undertakes to expose and unpack a second sense of the words 'judging' and 'understanding'. There are three main sections in the discussion. The first section looks at a few passages from The Reader which, in different ways, bring out the tension and the phenomenon of 'understanding', understood as [U]. The second section locates [U] in the context of Peter Strawson's famous discussion of the reactive attitudes. The third section develops and extends some of the observations made in Sections I and II, looks at other instances of [U], and connects it to the idea of 'moral complexity'. In Brian Penrose's words, 'properly understood, there is something noble and good about "understanding", and base, oversimplified, and often mean-spirited about "judging"'. Understanding, in this sense, is a kind of sympathetic identification with the perpetrator; Hanna, in the case of The Reader.
