Anger looms large in our public lives. Should it?
Reflecting on two millennia of debates about the value of anger, Agnes Callard contends that efforts to distinguish righteous forms of anger from unjust vengeance, or appropriate responses to wrongdoing from inappropriate ones, are misguided. What if, she asks, anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world? And if anger 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? As Callard concludes, “We can’t be good in a bad world.”
The contributions that follow explore anger in its many forms—public and private, personal and political—raising an issue that we must grapple with: Does the vast well of public anger compromise us all?
Is anger eternal? Righteous? Reflections on the causes and consequences of an phenomenon critical to our intimate and public lives.
From Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum, philosophers have explored the moral status of anger. We get angry for a reason: we feel wronged. That reason can be eternal, some argue, because not even an apology or promise that it won't happen again can change the fact of the original harm. Although there are pragmatic reasons for ceasing to be angry and moving on, is eternal anger moral? Is anger righteous? In this collection, contributors consider these and other questions about the causes and consequences of anger.
Leading off the debate, philosopher Agnes Callard argues that anger is not righteous rage; it is not an effort to solve a problem. Instead, it reflects a cry for help—a recognition that something shared is broken. And only in acknowledging the value of that shared project, she argues, can we begin together to repair it. Anger, then, is a starting point. But could there ever be the end of anger?
Bringing together today's leading thinkers on anger, this volume raises questions critical to our intimate and public lives.
Contributors
Rachel Achs, Paul Bloom, Elizabeth Bruenig, Judith Butler, Agnes Callard, Daryl Cameron, Myisha Cherry, Barbara Herman, Desmond Jagmohan, David Konstan, Oded Na'aman, Martha C. Nussbaum, Amy Olberding, Whitney Phillips, Jesse Prinz, Victoria Spring, Brandon M. Terry
"I’m resistant to the idea that moral philosophy is just self-help dressed in tweed, but as this year lurched from one outrage to the next, and as I found myself becoming hoarse (metaphorically, but often literally) from what felt like shouting into a void, this collection became something of a workbook: a tool for parsing the more unwieldy parts of myself, and my loved ones, and the world."
—Helen Rosner, The New Yorker
