It's unlikely you'll find philosophical positions that rationalize hatred and retribution; I certainly can't think of any. Philosophy as a field aims at individual wisdom and social harmony. Those terms may be disputable and ill-defined, but few if any people would hold that hatred and retribution are wise and harmonious. People argue that these are natural human inclinations — a pragmatic realpolitik that we must acknowledge, control, and occasionally excuse — but no one assumes they are part of 'the good' that we strive for as individuals and communities.
When we get to Sam Harris and the other prominent secular determinists, we have to remember that they are pundits more than philosophers: they are not following reason to discover any underlying wisdom, they are yoking reason to a specific agenda and trying to drive it. Harris is notably intelligent by pundit standards, granted, but he's conflating issues here to get to the point he wants, and it doesn't really hold water. I mean, consider this passage by itself:
But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be
viewed like any other natural phenomenon — and this, Harris believes,
would make us much more rational in our response.
In effect, he's saying that if we think of the 9/11 attackers as objects without free will, no more evil or culpable for the destruction they caused than a major hurricane then we can have a 'rational response'. But what does 'rational response' mean here, except that:
- we consciously choose (as an act of free will) to behave in more moral fashion, or...
- our deterministic response to the event will be more 'rational' if we consciously choose (as an act of free will) to see the 9/11 attackers in this different light.
In fact, while i can see Harris trying to be kind here — he wants to encourage a less violent response by getting people to shift from the 'evil' model to the 'natural disaster' model — he's actually setting up the context for genocide. We endure natural disasters like hurricanes with grace and compassion because we don't believe we can do anything about them. But consider a natural disaster like a swarm of locusts. We don't think locusts are evil, and we are happy to assume that they are just deterministically doing what locusts do. But that understanding doesn't stop us from extirpating locusts as brutally and efficiently as possible. If we remove the concept of will from those who commit acts of terrorism, they become nothing more than a plague of vermin that we might 'rationally' stamp out without remorse.
What Harris misses — or possibly merely avoids as an inconvenience — is the point that hatred and retribution are de facto dehumanizing moments. The act of dehumanizations implies removing the capacity for choice and imputing a disposition to bad behavior. It makes no difference whether we conceive of that dehumanization as 'deterministic' or 'evil'; in either case the other becomes a robot-like cipher bent on doing what we consider wrong. Only by imputing the capacity for free choice to others can we ever hope to find non-violent solutions to such tragedies.