Agnes Callard - On Anger (Boston Review / Forum)

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On Anger is Boston Review Forum 13 (45.1)

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d_r0

Deborah Chasman & Joshua Cohen

Agnes Callard

Paul Bloom

Elizabeth Bruenig

Desmond Jagmohan

Daryl Cameron & Victoria Spring

Myisha Cherry

Jesse Prinz

Rachel Achs

Barbara Herman

Oded Naaman

Agnes Callard

Judith Butler interviewed by Brandon M. Terry

David Konstan

Martha C. Nussbaum

Whitney Phillips

Amy Olberding

Deborah Chasman & Joshua Cohen

FEEL GOOD. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go, Claudia Rankine writes in her poem Citizen, in the internal monologue of a black woman trying to move past anger over racial wrongs.

Rankine depicts a familiar sensibility about anger: yes, we sometimes have good reason for getting angrywe feel wronged, after allbut there are all kinds of reasons for (eventually) letting it go. Even if our anger is righteous, perpetual anger is destructivewhether for its bearer or for society.

In our forum, philosopher Agnes Callard challenges this conventional view. Perhaps we shouldnt let our anger go. Our reasons for being angry are eternal, arent they? No apology or redress ever erases the original injury that provoked the anger in the first place. The affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood, she writes. Once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever.

Reflecting on two millennia of debates about the value of anger, Callard contends that we have been asking the wrong question. The effort to distinguish righteous forms of anger from unjust vengeance, or appropriate responses to wrongdoing from inappropriate ones, is misguided. Maybe anger is not a bug of human life, but a featurean emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world. And if it is both troubling and essential, what, then, do we do with the implications that angry victims of injustice are themselves morally compromised, and that it might not be possible to respond rightly to being treated wrongly. Because anger cannot be morally pure, Callard draws the bracing conclusion: We cant be good in a bad world.

The forum responses and essays that follow explore anger in its many formspublic and private, personal and political. With anger looming so large in our public life, these are issues we all must grapple with. Does the vast well of public anger compromise all of us?

Agnes Callard

S uppose that you are angry on Tuesday because I stole from you on Monday. Suppose that on Wednesday I return what I stole; I compensate you for any disadvantage occasioned by your not having had it for two days; I offer additional gifts to show my good will; I apologize for my theft as a moment of weakness; and, finally, I promise never to do it again. Suppose, in addition, that you believe my apology is sincere and that I will keep my promise.

Could it be rational for you to be just as angry on Thursday as you were on Tuesday? Moreover, could it be rational for you to conceive of a plan to steal from me in turn? And what if you dont stop at one theft: could it be rational for you to go on to steal from me again, and again, and again?

Though your initial anger at me might have been reasonable, we tend to view a policy of unending disproportionate revenge as paradigmatically irrational. Eventually we should move on, we are told, or let it go, or transmute our desire for revenge into a healthier or more respectable feeling. This idea has given rise to a debate among academic philosophers about the value of anger. Should we valorize it in terms of the righteous indignation of that initial response? Or should we vilify it in terms of the grudge-bearing vengeance of the unending one?

I am going to explain how that debate goes, but I am not going to try to resolve it. Instead, I am going to peel it away to reveal a secret that lies behind it: we have been debating the wrong issue. The real debate concerns the three questions about anger and rationality in my second paragraph, which are not rhetorical, and to which the answer might well be: yes, yes, and yes.

FIRST, the academic debate. In one corner, we have those who think that we would have a morally better world if we could eradicate anger entirely. This tradition has its roots in ancient Stoicism and Buddhism. The first-century Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca wrote that anger is a form of madness; he authored a whole treatiseDe Ira, the title of this volumeabout how to manage its ill effects. The eighth-century Indian philosopher and monk ntideva enjoined those wishing to travel the road of enlightenment to eliminate even the smallest seeds of anger, on the grounds that the full-blown emotion can only cause harm.

In the contemporary world, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on Seneca and the Stoic tradition to argue that anger is an intrinsically mistaken attitude, since it is infected with a backward-looking payback wish that is vengeful and destructive. The correct response to any setback or injustice, in her view, isforward-looking: preventing similar events from occurring in the future. In a similar vein, Owen Flanagan, who draws on both ntidevas Buddhism and a Confucian-inflected metaphysics, sees anger as an intrinsically hostile attitude, one that falsely presupposes a self-centered metaphysics of individuals who possess intentions to be cruel, and to do harm or evil.

In the other corner of the debate stand those who conceive of angerup to a pointas an essential and valuable part of ones moral repertoire: anger is what sensitizes us to injustice and motivates us to uphold justice. By being angry with me on Tuesday, the day after I stole, you create the system and demand the terms under which I must acquiesce and make things right on Wednesday.

This pro-anger position has its roots in Aristotles view that the (well-trained) passions are what allow the eye of the soul to perceive moral value, and finds its fullest expression in the British moral sentimentalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Earl of Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith all held that our feelings are precisely what sensitize us to moral considerations.