Anger, Virtue, and Oppression

Abstract

In recent feminist moral psychology, anger has been defended as an appropriate response to sexist oppression. Most of these defenses of anger stress the instrumental value of discrete episodes or bouts of anger. In light of these defenses of anger, I take up the question of how one might defend what I call a virtue of appropriate anger under grossly non-ideal circumstances. I argue that defending a virtue of appropriate anger under grossly non-ideal circumstances is not at all straightforward. I consider one recent and promising defense of the virtue of appropriate anger (the Eventual Flourishing Account) and argue that this account conflicts with our considered judgments about when the character trait of appropriate anger is a virtue. Moreover, I argue that the Eventual Flourishing Account does not provide a fully adequate characterization of the kind of anger partially constitutive of the virtue of appropriate anger. I sketch an alternative justification of the virtue of appropriate anger (the Appropriate Attitude Account) that stresses this trait’s non-instrumental value. I close by arguing that the Appropriate Attitude Account offers a better understanding and justification of the virtue of appropriate anger than the Eventual Flourishing Account.