Abstract
Anger is often an appropriate reaction to harms and injustices, but is it a politically beneficial one? Martha Nussbaum (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1), 41–56, 2015, Anger and Forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 2016) has argued that, although anger is useful in initially recruiting agents for action, anger is typically counterproductive to securing the political aims of those harmed. After the initial shockwave of outrage, Nussbaum argues that to be effective at enacting positive social change, groups and individuals alike, must move quickly out of the state of anger. Feminist theorists (Frye, The Politics of Reality. Crossing Press, 1983; Lorde, 1997; Narayan, Hypatia 3 (2): 31–48, 1988) on the other hand have for long highlighted the efficacy of anger, as well as its moral and epistemic value, in fighting against the oppressive status quo. It might be thought therefore that for political action to be effective, a continued state of anger is preferable. Protestors must after all create and sustain a sense of moral obligation and justice. A main way of doing so is to promote successive moral shocks that trigger outrage (Jasper, Emotion Review 6 (3): 208–213, 2014). I present a novel, empirically informed defense of anger’s efficacy in political action. Nussbaum holds a traditional view on the nature of anger, inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics, which holds that anger constitutively involves a desire for retribution. The view that anger is counterproductive falls out of this and is dominant in academic work as well as in our personal and political lives. Based on work in social psychology, I argue that we need to reconsider this. In doing so, I highlight anger’s aim for recognition, rather than retribution, as key. Furthermore, I uncover conditions for anger’s political efficacy, as well as reasons for why the traditional view of anger has been so pervasive.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of social justice I employ throughout is a thin one. I take social justice to be (non-exhaustively) concerned with generating fair patterns of rights, opportunities, and wealth in a society. Such a conception is intended to capture a fundamental notion of social justice without taking sides on particular theories or forms of justice. I take what I have to say about anger to be at least in principle applicable to whichever theory of justice one might favour.
- 2.
I make use of an intuitive notion of desire throughout. I take desires to: (a) dispose one to act in ways that aim to achieve the desire’s aim, and (b) to be satisfied when the actual state of affairs in the world matches the desire’s aim.
- 3.
This view is shared by Stoics such as anger’s most famous critic Seneca (On Anger).
- 4.
This is actually a departure from the Aristotelian account of anger where for revenge to be enacted the offender must know by whose hand, as well as for what reason, he suffers (Rhet 1380b22–25).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Lepoutre (2018) and Srinivasan (2018) discuss the ‘counterproductivity objection’ and the ‘counterproductivity critique’ against anger respectively. My target is the weaker claim regarding anger’s inefficacy. In targeting the weaker claim, my argument challenges also the stronger claim regarding anger’s counter productivity.
- 8.
As does Pettigrove (2012).
- 9.
On anger’s value in the psychology of the oppressed see Spelman (1989: 266), hooks (1995: 17), Fanon (2008: 94), Yancy (2008: 847) and Leboeuf (2017). A common theme is that in anger one rejects the self-image imposed by the oppressor, and affirms one’s agency. On anger’s epistemic value see Frye (1983), Friedman (1986), Jaggar (1989) and Bell (2009). Anger plays a number of epistemic roles. It allows direct apprehension of injustice (often constituting one’s only means of apprehension), as well as indirect mapping of oppression through the observation of when and where one’s anger is systematically dismissed (Frye 1983). Additionally, collective scrutiny of shared anger plays roles in the generation of concepts that aid political progress. Independent to anger’s psychological and epistemic effects, becoming angry when there is justifying reason to, is thought to itself be intrinsically valuable (see Srinivasan 2018).
- 10.
Lepoutre (2018) is a recent exception. His argument relies on historical examples of political speeches where mine is informed by recent work in psychology.
- 11.
In psychology, group-based anger is taken to be anger that is experienced by individuals “as a result of their identification with a group or social category” (Mackie et al. 2000). This understanding of collective or group-based emotions is distinct from, and likely agnostic about, the problem in philosophy of mind as to whether there are such things as ontologically collective emotions (see Krueger 2015). I remain agnostic about such problems and follow the psychological construal of group-anger throughout.
- 12.
Anger and instrumental reasoning were measured by asking participants to rate how strongly they agreed with statements like: ‘I am furious about tuition rises’, ‘I am irritated by tuition rises’ in the case of anger, and for instrumental reasoning about group efficacy: ‘I think that students can stop the introduction of tuition fees’, ‘I think students have already lost the fight against tuition fees’.
- 13.
Mediators, in psychology, are variables that speak to how or why certain effects occur. In this case, empathy is a mediator because it can be seen as an intermediary step that explains the effect of anger on out group support for constructive actions.
- 14.
Everyday interpersonal anger and anger in social justice cases do not come neatly apart. First, for the oppressed, anger at social injustice can be their ‘everyday’. Additionally, although the objects of anger in cases of social injustice are often social objects, such as groups or institutions, anger at specific individuals, for reasons pertaining to social injustice (such as sexism and racism) are common. For simplicity of treatment, and to mirror the experimental work, I treat interpersonal anger and anger in cases of social injustice as conceptually distinct. The relevant distinction seems to me not to pertain to whether the object of anger is an individual or not, but to whether the reasons for anger involve group-based harms or not. My point in this section is that anger at individuals, for reasons independent to group membership (what has been called paradigmatic or everyday anger), has much more in common with anger in social injustice cases, such that accounting for anger’s differential effects in terms of its objects is not a promising move.
- 15.
- 16.
This pluralist view is compatible with a number of specific accounts on which I remain agnostic here. For example, anger could be constitutively linked to desires for either recognition or retribution. Alternatively, anger could be causally linked to these desires. The latter option leaves open the possibility that anger also bears strong causal links to additional desires, as well as allowing the possibility that a token case of anger can involve both recognitional and retributive desires. I think the causal rather than constitutive account is more plausible but do not argue for it here.
- 17.
The thought that emotions are appropriate or reason-responsive is widespread in moral philosophy (Skorupski 2010; Raz 2011; Scanlon 2014), feminist philosophy (Frye 1983; Jaggar 1989; Lorde 1997; Bell 2009) and philosophy of emotion (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000; Deonna and Teroni 2012; Tappolet 2016). It is therefore common to think of emotions as amenable to normative assessment, such that some emotions are appropriate, or fitting, while others are not. Appropriate emotions are typically those whose objects in some way instantiate the evaluative property in question; fear is justified when the object of your fear is in fact dangerous or poses you a threat, for example. Prudential and moral considerations are thought to be relevant to the normative assessment of emotions as well (it might be inappropriate to laugh during an academic talk, even though your friend’s whispered comment was funny), but these considerations are thought of as the ‘wrong sort’ of reasons in so far as we are concerned with whether the emotion gets things right about the world (see D’Arms and Jacobson 2000).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Josh Knobe for all his insight and support throughout the writing of this chapter. I am also grateful to Lucy O’Brien, Amia Srinivasan and Andrew Knox, as well as audiences at UCL, Yale University and UQAM’s Cognitio Conference.
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Silva, L.L. (2021). The Efficacy of Anger: Recognition and Retribution. In: Falcato, A., Graça da Silva, S. (eds) The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56021-8_2
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