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Does Anger Help Us Appreciate Moral Reasons?

Today we welcome Steven Gubka, a postdoctoral associate at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, to share his recent paper: "How Anger Helps Us Possess Reasons for Action" (The Philosophical Quarterly).

 

Steven Gubka
 

Recall the last time that you got angry at someone. Did it help or hinder your decision-making about how you should treat them? Seneca, a stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, argued that anger makes it more difficult to deliberate correctly about what to do. He wrote that “it causes whoever has come into its clutches to forget his duty: make a father angry, he’s an enemy; make a son angry, he’s a parricide. Anger makes a mother a stepmother, a fellow-citizen a foreign enemy, a king a tyrant” (2010: pg. 16). 

Here Seneca claims that anger prevents us from appreciating moral reasons to avoid harming people, even those that we have special obligation to protect. This idea of tension between anger and reason remains commonplace, and as a result, anger continues to have a reputation as an emotion that we should manage carefully, if not avoid entirely.

I challenge this conception of anger in my recent paper “How anger helps us possess reasons for action” forthcoming at Philosophical Quarterly. I argue that anger helps us appreciate the moral reason to respond against wrongdoing done to oneself or others (to seek justice or repair). For example, when I am angry at my sister for wrongfully insulting my partner, I do not merely know that this wrongdoing has occurred, but I am motivated by this fact to defend my partner. 

Conversely, if I were not angry at my sister’s insult of my partner, I may not be motivated to defend my partner. This example shows that anger motivates us to respond against apparent wrongdoing. Moreover, I claim that we do not truly appreciate that wrongdoing merits a response unless we are motivated to act against it. So, when we are angry in response to genuine wrongdoing, our anger helps us appreciate and perhaps act upon the moral reason to respond against that wrongdoing.

What does this mean for how we should manage anger? If anger helps us appreciate the moral reason to respond to wrongdoing (as I claim), then we may have a moral obligation to help people (including ourselves) manage their anger in a way that promotes this benefit of anger. Otherwise, we risk failing to recognize and respond correctly to wrongdoing. 

For example, encouraging someone to cease their anger against an actual injustice may threaten their appreciation of the moral reason to respond to that injustice. Even more strikingly, this means that we sometimes have an obligation to make people angry (about actual injustices). For example, I might aim to provoke my students to anger about the injustice done to animals in factory farms, and in doing so, they may come to appreciate the moral reason to intervene against factory farming.

If I am correct about anger, what does this tell us about the perennial debates about the rationality and morality of anger? I hope to have illuminated a new consideration in favor of anger, one that opposes the ancient idea that anger may make us more likely to respond unwisely. 

Though anger is not necessarily the only way to appreciate the moral reason to respond to wrongdoing, it is worth considering that anger is the most common way that we come to appreciate that injustice has been done and that we should seek justice or repair in response. 

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