PART I
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT WORK DOES ANGER do in morality? What work ought anger to do in morality? The first is a question in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and politics. It calls for thick description and explanation. The second is a question in ethics. It calls for reasons and normative justification. How are the two questions and their answers connected? I will discuss one substantive and one methodological way they connect. The anthropological record shows that anger as “we” do it (for any group) is neither necessary for moral life nor normal in any robust psychobiological or statistical sense. These findings open up the space of moral possibility. Methodologically, the process of reflective equilibrium, where we bring our enacted norms of anger into alignment with our ideals, can work to recalibrate practices and provide internal normative justification for both our practices and our ideals. In a community that is Aristotelian about anger, the method permits members to remind themselves of the kinds of anger that are justified, that accord with the mean between too much and too little. Over the course of this chapter and chapters 2 and 3, I will provide such reminders and give some evidence that contemporary North American anger practices are far from ideal and embed vice, typically the vice of aiming to hurt another.
The two kinds of anger that are common and worth eliminating are payback anger and pain-passing anger. Payback anger is vengeful anger that says “You (or your people) hurt me or mine, are an obstacle to me or mine, or disgust me or mine, so I hurt you.” Although most Americans will pooh-pooh simple revenge, the political air is thick with vengefulness, disgust, and demonization of fellow members in what is supposed to be a commonwealth. Whereas payback anger is conscious and intentional, pain-passing anger is often lazy and inadvertent. It has this structure: “I am hurting, anxious, depressed, fearful, and wounded, and I strike out at you in anger and hurt you.” We are much too permissive about pain-passing anger, in part because we live in a peculiar kind of therapeutic culture that believes falsely that ventilating negative emotions is necessary for the well-being of the venter, and this good somehow overrides the hurt to an innocent bystander.
Because my main aim is to make the reader reconsider our practices of payback anger and pain-passing anger, I will often speak of “payback and pain-passing anger” together for ease of exposition, though the two kinds are different and deploy different norms and scripts. Payback and pain-passing are only two of many varieties of anger. Many other varieties of anger are entirely justified—for example, anger against structural racism or sexism. Such anger has, as its aim, ending racist and sexist practices, and it does not require the intention to harm racists or sexists or to pass pain to racists and sexists. But if it does, then it embeds and encourages types of anger we should actively discourage.
The conversation between the anthropology of anger and the ethics of anger has implications for how we should think about anger and how we should think about the methods of ethics. I enact and model the method of reflectively comparing, contrasting, and criticizing our anger practices in the hope that doing so will help us see when, whether, why, and where our own practices of doing anger need reform. The method has this simple structure: Look, see, imagine, and reflect on how you do the emotion of anger by using information about other ways of doing it and rationalizing it as data.
Moral Imagination
How do the human sciences matter to moral philosophy? In a paper titled “How I Survived the Moral Philosophy of the Twentieth Century,” Alasdair MacIntyre offers one answer to this question, embedded in a lament:
For on the view that I have found myself compelled to take, contemporary academic moral philosophy turns out to be seriously defective as a form of rational inquiry. How so? First, the study of moral philosophy has become divorced from the study of morality or rather of moralities and by so doing has distanced itself from practice. We do not expect serious work in the philosophy of physics from students who have never studied physics or on the philosophy of law from students who have never studied law. But there is not even a hint of a suggestion that courses in social and cultural anthropology and in certain areas of sociology and psychology should be a prerequisite for graduate work in moral philosophy. Yet without such courses no adequate sense of the varieties of moral possibility can be acquired. One remains imprisoned by one’s upbringing. (2013)
The reason for normative ethics to engage with the psychology, sociology, and anthropology of morality is straightforward: The study of actual moralities, including alien ones, is protection against taking for granted the parochial moral order, and from being “imprisoned by one’s upbringing.” At the same time, engaging with other moral traditions provides sources for moral imagination and critique, for exploring the “varieties of moral possibility.”
Here, I explore this idea, discussing its merits as a distinctive method for ethics that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of consistency testing, what philosophers call the methods of seeking narrow or wide reflective equilibrium, or under the method of seeking an overlapping or unforced moral consensus, and certainly not under methods that involve fully informed rational agents or impartial observers. The method of exploring the moral possibility space by engaging cross-cultural empirical and philosophical sources is a method well suited to engaging in moral reflection and critique in both settled moral ecologies and in unsettled multicultural ecologies, where a dominant tradition speaks about how we do things when, in fact, there is not any way “we” do things, nor any “we” with the moral authority to speak in this way.
I deploy the method of philosophical anthropology in order to unsettle certain views held by philosophers and ordinary people about the naturalness and moral defensibility of, especially, two types of anger—payback and pain-passing anger—which are hard to challenge unless one explores contrastive spaces that deny that they are normal, necessary, or good.
Anger is a special case in comparative ethics. All cultures have a theory of virtues. The virtues, whatever they are, are considered to be necessary for a good human life (though rarely sufficient). Although lists of virtues (compassion, justice, honesty, loyalty, courage) differ in terms of which ones have the highest status and trump the others when there are conflicts, it is rare for a virtue in one tradition to be considered a vice in another. There is disagreement across and among traditions for any particular virtue (justice, courage, temperance, compassion, loyalty) and what its “mean” form, as in the doctrine of the mean, is. So, for example, there might well be a kind of Confucian family loyalty that is considered nonvirtuous because it allows too much partiality, even nepotism, from the perspective of an impartial morality, which nonetheless also views loyalty (of the right kind) as a virtue (Henrich 2020). Anger is exceptional in that most people, including most moral philosophers, think there are varieties of anger that are virtuous. But some well-respected moral traditions consider anger as always, or almost always, a vice. It is worth considering why.1
Here’s a true story that was pivotal in my own exposure to alternative moral possibility spaces and that provoked my imagination. In March 2000, I visited Dharamshala, India, for four days of meetings with the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, some of his fellow Buddhists, and a group of Western scientists, mostly psychologists and neuroscientists, to discuss the topic of “Destructive Emotions and How to Overcome Them.” Daniel Goleman’s (2003) book on these meetings with that title is a good report. There was much to learn at these discussions in the Dalai Lama’s residence and many surprises. Here is one unforgettable one.
It became clear after a day or so of talks that Tibetan Buddhists believe that anger, resentment, and their suite are categorically bad, always unwarranted, wrong, and “unwholesome,” as they are inclined to say. That was surprising by itself. We have many norms for appropriate anger, such as “Don’t get too angry” or “so angry” as we sometimes say. And wrath is a deadly sin. But we do not think that one should never get angry or that anger is always wrong. For us, the right kind of anger reveals that one sees and cares about something of value. Everyday, not-so-warranted anger shows that one is normal. Minimally, we expect and tolerate a certain amount of it.
But even more mind-boggling, these Buddhists also believed that anger could be eliminated in mortals, that there are practices that actually work so that it is possible to not experience anger, practices that can extirpate anger and cleanse the soul of tendencies toward anger. I understood that there are practices and rules of decorum—“counting to 10,” sublimation, or “stuffing it”—norms of apt anger that keep us from expressing anger and that work to contain it, but not experiencing anger at all seemed unnatural, weird, and unhuman. Again, self-work to keep from getting pissy over small frustrations makes good sense and is possible. But, except for a rare saintly bird of maximally even temperament, not experiencing anger at the cosmos or the gods for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and especially at evil people for their awfulness, seemed close to a psychological impossibility. Then there is the fact that most people I know were raised to think it is okay, permissible, and possibly sometimes required to feel and express outrage. Righteous anger is something we ought to experience and express sometimes, something that certain people or states of affairs deserve.
So I found myself posing this thought experiment to the Dalai Lama: “Imagine that one were to find oneself in a public space—say, a park or a movie theater—where one realized that one is seated next to Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao, early in the execution of the genocides they perpetrated. We (my people) think it would be appropriate first to feel moral anger, possibly outrage at Hitler and the others on the list, and second, that it would be okay, possibly required, to kill them, supposing one had the means. What about you Tibetan Buddhists?”
The Dalai Lama turned to consult the high lamas who were normally seated behind him, like a lion’s pride. After a few minutes of whispered conversation in Tibetan with his team, the Dalai Lama turned back to our group and explained that one should kill Hitler (actually with some swashbuckling ceremonial fanfare, in the way a samurai warrior might). It is stopping a bad, a very bad, karmic causal chain. So “Yes, kill him. But don’t be angry.”
What could this mean? How did it make sense to think of one human being killing another, being motivated to kill another human being, without emotion, without activating the suite of reactive attitudes such as anger, resentment, or blame?
Varieties of Anger: “A Multiform Evil”?
Moral emotions are complex. There are cultural norms, scripts, and permissions for how we do them, and there are often, but not always, ethnotheories about the nature and functions of the emotions—in whose terms ordinary people explain themselves—as well as norms and scripts for enacting them. I propose that we reflect on anger and seriously consider whether we have, as I think, reason to reconsider how we do it, to turn down its temperature, modify some uses we make of it, and stop modeling payback anger and pain-passing anger for the youth. Just as we know there is an obesity epidemic in our country and we need to model new health and nutrition habits for the sake of the next generation, the same is true with anger. When we model bad anger norms, we endanger the moral and psychological well-being of our youth. We need to change how we do anger.
I intend “anger” to serve as a superordinate term, as the name for a genus. All, or almost all, comparative work on emotions assumes some overlap across the instances of an emotion genus, typically some core phenomenal feeling (this might just be something like valence and intensity), a distinctive set of somatic markers, plus some evolutionary old behavioral links. But what exactly falls under the term translated as “anger” so conceived—its broad phenomenal features, semantics, psychological linkages, neurobiological characteristics, and the norms that govern anger scripts—involves cultural particularity (Wierzbicka 1999). Inside American English there are puzzles: Is frustration a type of anger, a precursor, a fuel, or a different emotion altogether? Are resentment, indignation, and contempt types of anger or close cousins? What about envy and jealousy? Are moral outrage and righteous indignation types of anger?
In On Anger, Seneca, the first-century CE Stoic, writes of the abundance of words for the varieties of anger, enviously noting that the Greeks make more distinctions than the Romans:
What anger is has been sufficiently explained. The difference between it and irascibility is evident: it is the same as that between a drunken man and a drunkard; between a frightened man and a coward. It is possible for an angry man not to be irascible; an irascible man may sometimes not be angry. I shall omit the other varieties of anger, which the Greeks distinguish by various names, because we have no distinctive words for them in our language, although we call men bitter and harsh, and also peevish, frantic, clamorous, surly and fierce: all of which are different forms of irascibility. Among these you may class sulkiness, a refined form of irascibility; for there are some sorts of anger which go no further than noise, while some are as lasting as they are common: some are fierce in deed, but inclined to be sparing of words: some expend themselves in bitter words and curses: some do not go beyond complaining and turning one’s back: some are great, deep-seated, and brood within a man: there are a thousand other forms of a multiform evil. (1928)
We will need to keep our minds on the varieties of anger. I do not think every variety is bad. It may be that anger is a “multiform evil,” as Seneca puts it. I think it is. But not every form of anger is a vice. In fact, the Dalai Lama claims that even Buddhists can allow that there is “healing anger” (1997).2 It is hatred, not righteous or healing anger, that is vicious. This suggests that what the Dalai Lama said to me about killing Hitler without anger should really be understood as recommending that one ought not to hate Hitler because hate, but not righteous anger at the evil that he did, is incompatible with love and compassion. Another interpretation is that if you love him, as an act of mercy, you would kill him, because allowing him to keep committing genocide is harmful to his humanity. In this regard, killing him is lovingkindness. With both interpretations, one can certainly be angry at genocide. One can also, I assume, be angry at Hitler because he intends genocide, and one is permitted to kill him to stop a genocide. But one ought not to hate Hitler or have a lack of compassion for him. If hate is a species of the genus anger, then this means that not every form of anger is prohibited, even for the Buddhist. I’ll leave to the reader the exercise of thinking about whether hatred is in fact a variety of anger (I’d be inclined to say it is) or a different beast altogether, and to consider how one could determine this in a nonarbitrary way.
Distinguishing among varieties of anger might seem tedious, but it is necessary. On my view of emotions, there are several places at which cultures regulate and build norms and scripts for apt emotional expression—and rightly so. There are the causes of anger, how the anger feels or seems (its intensity, magnitude, duration), what it is about, how it is expressed, and what it intends. Regarding causes, we often say that such and such (the traffic jam) was nothing to get angry about or that a noticeable slight (the condescension) was something to get angry about, even though you let it pass. Regarding feeling (suppose some minor slight from long ago still gnaws at me) or expression (I blow my stack), I might well think, depending on the case, that I am over- or underreacting. Regarding intention, I say anger aimed mainly to execute a grudge or gain revenge is wrong (see Agnes Callard [2020] for a defense of grudges and revenge),3 whereas anger aimed to increase awareness of structural racism, and then to overcome racism, even if it hurts, is legitimate.
Aristotle and Anger
I am interested in whether anger is a good or bad thing morally. I have a view on the matter: in my world, many kinds of anger worth worrying about are normalized. Surprisingly, Aristotle explicitly defends one variety of anger that I think is bad:
Anger (orgê) may be defined as a desire accompanied by pain for a conspicuous revenge, on account of a perceived slight (belittlement) on the part of people who are not fit to slight one or one’s own. (Rhetoric 1.2, 1378a31–32)
According to Aristotle, there are three kinds of slights or belittlement that produce the justified desire for vengeful anger:
1. Contempt—as when you treat me as of no or little value, as deplorable.
2. Spite—as when you block me from some good, not to have it for yourself but just because you don’t want me to have it.
3. Arrogant abuse—as when you publicly shame, humiliate, and embarrass me.
The first thing to notice is that orgê is a term of much more limited scope than the word “anger” as it is used in English. Orgê names only the species of revenge-desiring anger that comes from, or is legitimately caused by, contempt, spite, and arrogant abuse, and is scripted to respond to these types of causes. It is personal. One might credibly think that even understood narrowly, orgê is narrower still, embedding cultural knowledge about status and hierarchy, about “who is not fit to slight one or one’s own.” One wonders: What about when I am angry at the rock on which I stubbed my toe or at the drought, or at the coronavirus, or about the legislation to limit government health care, or to make voting more difficult for some groups, like poor people and people of color?
Among Greeks of Aristotle’s time, what one is feeling in these cases is ekhthra (enmity) or misein (to hate) (Konstan 2007). These are distinctive responses to bad or harmful things and involve the desire that the bad or harmful thing—the inanimate obstacle, the bad weather, the coronavirus, or the bad legislation—cease, disappear, go away, and be erased. Ekhthra or misein might be fairly thought to be a kind of anger that can involve enacting vengeance or not. My view is that one can respond to slights with anger if the anger is not aimed at payback or pain-passing, but only rectification of the person who has done the slighting and harmed the relationship. The same could be said for ekhthra or misein for unjust social policies. That is, these are acceptable if they are aimed at removing bad people from power or the rectification of unjust laws or social policies, and if they are not vengeful.
Despite the fact that Aristotle approves of vengeful anger for slights and belittlement, he is no fan of irascible souls. In the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), he makes clear that the virtuous person is gentle and their anger is targeted at wrongdoing in a way that is neither excessive nor defective. “There is praise for someone who gets angry at the right things and with the right people, as well as in the right way, at the right time and for the right length of time” (NE 1125b 27). A person who never gets angry when they are slighted or belittled is stupid and servile (NE 1126a).
Nonetheless, when the “slight” passes certain tests, then “revenge” is virtuous.4 The American Psychological Association goes further and says this: “Anger is a completely normal, usually healthy, human emotion” (n.d.). One might wish for a joint communiqué from the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association specifying whether, when, and how healthy anger and moral anger coincide, if they do.
Carol Tavris describes the dominant American view among psychologists and psychiatrists and, thanks to them, also among laypeople, as the “ventilationist view” (1982; rev. 1989). Anger must be released, otherwise there will be addiction, eating disorders, skin disorders, migraines, divorce, and general mayhem—except when one examines the evidence, it is all bullshit in the technical, philosophical sense (Frankfurt [1986] 2005). The message is designed to persuade, but with complete disregard for the truth and evidence. Ventilating anger models self-indulgent expression, allows people to practice how to have an outburst, and increases rather than decreases the total amount of angry expression, especially among people who are receiving “anger management” treatment (Barash and Lipton 2011).
The ventilationist view gives permission both for vengeful anger, which aims to pay back, and also for pain-passing anger. Whereas payback anger is aimed at the person or persons who caused the anger, pain-passing anger expresses anger at an individual or audience who did not cause your pain. You are hurting, so you vent your pain and cause pain to innocent others. Aristotle only defends the first kind of anger, payback. Therapeutic culture, inspired by nonscientific models of emotions and emotional well-being, provides permission for pain-passing anger as well. It’s as if the Hatfields and McCoys, Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Janov (of evidence-free “primal scream” fame) set our anger norms.
Even worse, ordinary, garden-variety anger is considered normal, an expectable part of the “to and fro” of everyday human interaction. The world I live in partakes in an orgy of anger but doesn’t see or acknowledge it.5 Anger is sometimes recognized as a problem in politics but is not much of a topic of discussion or reflection in other spheres. In my world, anger is interpreted as an emotion that involves the political right or those who are down on their luck and are unenlightened. Such unfortunate souls are volatile, erratic. They may need “anger management” training; their children may require mindfulness training.
Liberal people—the lucky, well-educated, and enlightened—are also angry and permissive about anger, but they do not see their own anger very well. American culture, the Left and the Right, and across racial, gender, and class lines, normalizes anger that aims at payback, that excludes, downgrades, mocks, and condescends, which is motivated and energized by the not-so-disguised wish that the other slink off and disappear from sight, fearful and wounded or crushed like a bug.
What about the claim that there is misguided/hurtful/excessive anger in antiracist movements, anticolonialist movements, and movements for gender justice? The objection comes in two forms. Sometimes the objection is not so much about the revenge or pain-passing aspects of such anger (often there is no revenge or pain-passing intended) but that such anger causes disharmony, unpleasantness, and/or inconvenience. This is an elite, bourgeois objection to anger. It simply expresses a low tolerance for discomfort of any sort. But opposition to revenge or pain-passing anger does not entail opposition to anger that speaks truth to power, so long as it doesn’t aim to enact revenge or pass pain. It might be, and a sensible person will fully expect that such anger will cause pain, which she does not intend but produces, and for which she takes responsibility. A different type of objection to some kinds of personal and political anger is that independently of whether they intend to pass pain, they are unforgiving, and sever relations forever. My thinking is that human fallibility, together with the cosmic contingency of moral personality, warrant mercy and forgiveness when there is remorse and regret. That said, it just may be that some harms in some relations need to be forever reasons for the parties involved.
#BlackLivesMatter, #NODAPL (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe), #MeToo, and #NeverAgain are movements that aim at grievous economic, institutional, and structural injustices, or in the case of #NeverAgain, at grievous threats to public safety due to guns. The anger involved can be entirely righteous, dedicated to correcting these injustices. Like all social movements, the aims of individuals in such movements are multifarious. If an aim of some is to pay back or to pass pain to racists, indifferent capitalists, sexual predators, or government agents, then it is a hybrid anger and the payback/pain-passing parts are, according to my view, not good.
There are ways of expressing justified or righteous anger that are intentionally cruel and vicious. In my world, many people I know think it is morally acceptable to tell people with whom they disagree politically to “go fuck themselves”—often from the cowardly pose of social media, where the target is not reading what they say, write, or “do.”6 “Fuck you” is not a façon de parler that has evolved to colloquially express disagreement with another’s ideas, a preparatory gesture before one explains why they disagree; it is not a way of gaining the other’s attention in order to have a conversation. The use of the second-person pronoun is not an invitation to intimacy; it is not a Buberian “I-Thou” moment. It is an angry speech act directed at another person, intended to hurt the other, and often an invitation to others to join in the pile-on. The situation is morally, socially, and psychologically unhealthy.
It will be good if we can talk about some of the destructive features of anger that are triggered by wrongdoing or injustice.7 Anger that aims to enact revenge or pass pain is bad, and a healthy moral community ought to teach this truth and keep it visible. A stronger norm than the minimal one that judges revenge and pain-passing as bad, and one that I prefer, but that is even harder to defend, is this: The best world is one in which when anger is necessary, it is motivated by love and compassion for the person or community of persons that one is angry at or with and does not aim at revenge or harm but only to make the person or persons, at the limit the world, better.8 This is loving anger. Philosophical advocates of the norm, or something in its vicinity, include Glenn Pettigrove (2012) and Martha Nussbaum (2015, 2016).
Anger that has payback as its main or sole aim is not good, nor is anger that passes pain because I am in pain. One reason is platonic. Ethics aim at the good. Seneca uses the platonic point against Aristotle and points out that orgê—“conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight”—aims to do harm, which is inconsistent with the aim of ethics.
But there is a move that admirers of orgê can make. They can claim that revenge anger has an aim beyond hurting the other, as when we say: “I needed to teach them a lesson” or “He needs to learn he can’t get away with that!” Genuine cases of this sort, where the aim is to hurt in order to improve the other or set an example for others, are complicated. Another tactic is to claim that there is some significant psychosocial good at the level of the collective that comes from legitimate exercises of revenge or, what is different, from cathartic venting.
Since holding people accountable sometimes, possibly often, makes them feel guilty or ashamed, which is painful, I will need a doctrine of double effect for legitimate cases of anger, where an individual or collective is called to change their beliefs, norms, or practices in a way that is guaranteed to cause pain but where that is not the intention.9 Anger that aims to improve the other, to preserve and restore balance in a relationship, can be respectful and good (a lot depends on the manner in which it is expressed). Making the other feel guilty or ashamed is not the aim in such cases but a predictable effect of respectful, conscientious accountability practices.
There are many other complexities about loving anger: The norm does not require the elimination of anger. It sets conditions in good moral worlds on anger at a person or persons. In such worlds, the aim or motive of the angry person ought not to be to hurt or to pass pain. It ought to be the other person’s well-being, and ought to be done, at least in part, out of such concern. The norm requires that objections—including outrage—to beliefs and policies defended or enacted by particular persons be directed at the beliefs and policies, not at their carriers and defenders, in a way that aims to injure, mock, or downgrade them.
Loving anger is compatible with circumstances where punishment, civil disobedience, violence, and even killing might be warranted—for example, in situations of self-defense or when an evil person must be stopped. According to the norm, killing an evil person such as Hitler, if necessary, is to be done out of love and compassion, including love and compassion for Hitler. One reason is that a good understanding of causation undermines the view of Hitler as a causa sui who chose to be evil in the ways that he was surely evil (see Fleischacker 2019 for an argument against all demonizing).
Anger that is designed to activate feelings of responsibility, shame, and guilt, all of which can be experienced as painful (at least they are not standardly pleasant), will need to be distinguished from the proscribed payback and pain-passing kinds in the first instance by the motives and intentions of the angry person, as they can be understood inside a way of worldmaking in which loving anger plays a role.
Some expressions of the relevant norm for loving anger say it is warranted “for the love of God”; others say that it is warranted for the love of the good, by the nature of morality, or for the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Gandhi typically endorsed something in the vicinity of loving resistance for the sake of the truth: satyagraha. I am interested in naturalistic justifications of the norm (perhaps some of the latter can be read naturalistically) according to which the norm or the wisdom it contains involves a discovery about goodness, about a reliable feature of good lives.
I have just told you the norm I favor, but I am not confident that it can be vindicated by the method of reflective equilibrium, narrow or wide, since there are many arguments that both the fans of anger and its opponents can locate inside “our” tradition.10 There are also no unequivocal, theory-neutral findings in the human sciences that reveal that payback and pain-passing anger objectively undermine individual or collective well-being. Nor is there an overlapping consensus inside my culture or across cultures that anger of the revenge and pain-passing types are vicious. What comparative resources do reveal to a certain extent are different kinds of reasons that different cultures offer for containing, moderating, and morally proscribing certain kinds of anger that may be good reasons for us to pay attention to the shape of our own norms and practices. What can happen is that we can get glimpses of alternative ways of being, “varieties of moral possibility,” that have various attractive features, and that might, if we are open to these features, cause critical reflection on our normalized practices, and motivate us to rethink those practices.
Anger and Fitness
One obstacle or family of obstacles to calls to modify or moderate how we do anger or any other basic emotion come from the flat-footed view that we evolved to be angry when necessary, and thus anger serves whatever function it is supposed to serve. The mistake here is to think that the natural history of anger reveals much about anger’s optimality, its plasticity, or about its proper cultured scope and form.
Once upon a time, there was no anger. Now there is a lot of anger. Why is there any anger at all? What is anger good for? There is a scientific consensus that the disposition to something in the vicinity of anger—call it “protoanger”—is a biological adaptation. A biological adaptation is a phenotypic trait that enhanced fitness in ancestral species over the time it evolved, and was gifted in some modified form to modern Homo sapiens, thanks to our descent. A disposition to anger, first and foremost keyed to threats to the food supply, children, mates, and close kin, is nature’s solution to a particular sort of fitness problem. The disposition is now part of human nature.
This is just the short version of a very long story: The original earthling creatures (single-celled organisms) of two billion years ago were almost certainly not conscious, but they were self-protective and utilized light, water, and carbon dioxide to flourish. All fit creatures, even the most ancient ones, show a single, dominant architectural feature. They move toward nourishment, away from noxious threats, and colonize or attack obstacles, if necessary. This requires a sense of one’s boundaries so as not, for example, to chew on or eat oneself, or if one is a sexually reproducing animal, not to eat one’s mate or offspring—unless, as in the case of some insects, the female consumes the male postcoitus as part of nature’s plan to nourish the newly fertilized egg. The black widow spider that eats her husband after sex is not angry; she is just doing what nature decrees as best for perpetuating black widow spider genes. That’s the thing about evolution by natural selection; it is not concerned with being loving, kind, or nice unless these traits serve fitness.
The original reflexes or tropisms fired ballistically and without phenomenal consciousness: detect an obstacle/threat → infest it/sting it/bite it/kill it. Bacteria, viruses, insects, sponges, sea slugs, crabs, and jellyfish all possess survival circuitry that involves policing boundaries and a withdrawal-and-attack mode. But there is nothing like anger in such critters, although their survival circuitry can and often does lead them to kill.11 Unconscious survival circuitry evolved by way of gradual modification and integration in ever-evolving nervous systems to include phenomenally conscious feeling states, including, eventually, the conscious emotion we call “anger” (LeDoux 2019).
Homo sapiens are hominids, members of a clade that includes chimps, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas, and as many as a dozen species of extinct humans (Neanderthal, Naledi, Erectus, etc.). All these species are descendants of a common, long-lost ancestor that existed fourteen million years ago. The work of Frans de Waal (1982, 1991, 1996, 2006b, 2013) is a treasure trove of information on anger in various nonhuman primates. Our kind of gregarious social animal, as well as our nonhuman primate relatives, evolved to be able to control some of the anger circuitry some of the time. Getting angry in both the phenomenal (what it is like to feel angry) and cognitive (what I am angry about) senses alerts the organism to its own behavioral dispositions and provides a window to moderate, modify, and adjust its thinking and feeling, and to deliberate and plan action. A conscious, flexible mind with good memory, the capacity to imaginatively spin scenarios, to communicate what I am feeling and likely to do, and to be read by conspecifics enhanced fitness all around.
Darwin (1872) hypothesized that humans evolved to more or less automatically express the intersection of the somatic, phenomenal, and behavioral properties of anger and the other basic emotions on our faces. An angry face or angry posture, or, especially in the human case, angry words, can signal how I feel and what I intend to do to you in time for you to stop doing what I interpret as a threat before I take hostile action.12 In this way, others can see or know that I am angry and respond appropriately. Anger in response to a threat both communicates that there will be hell to pay if the other doesn’t stand down and efficiently motivates or sustains motivation for hostile action on the part of the angry individual if necessary.
The adaptationist account of the disposition to anger or protoanger settles very little. It provides a causal history of the core disposition, and it explains why it has the initial settings it has; settings normally vary in a population in a bell-shaped fashion so that at the two ends of the distribution, 17 percent of us will be on the meek and mild side and 17 percent will be quick to “flip our lids.” But the adaptationist genealogy does not, at the same time, provide reasons for anger, especially in its cultured forms, where the objects of anger can be states of affairs and institutions that could not have been part of what caused the disposition to be as it is; they didn’t exist when the core disposition evolved. The natural history of anger or protoanger does not even settle the question of whether the disposition to anger is fitness enhancing now, only that it once was.
The disposition to anger or protoanger that is an adaptation is almost certainly only satisfactory as far as fitness goes, not optimal. It is not perfectly tuned to only detect genuine threats to fitness but is prone to perceiving threats that aren’t really there, to overreaching. I kill the poisonous snake in a furious rage, except, well, it was a piece of rope. Even if anger is fitness enhancing now, nothing follows about whether anger is also good for well-being, flourishing, fulfillment, or whether getting angry or being angry or acting angry is morally good, since these concepts—well-being, flourishing, fulfillment, good, bad—are not the same as one another. Neither are they reducible to one another, or to the concept of biological fitness. They have different criteria that are not always mutually satisfying. A martyr for a cause dies with integrity but sacrifices fitness. She is noble. She is good. She is dead.
Additionally, knowing that some sort of disposition to anger or protoanger is an adaptation does not settle whether and to what degree the disposition can be controlled, moderated, modified, suppressed, or sublimated by individual will, education, self-cultivation, culture, or the moral and political order. We don’t know how much individual variation there is in the disposition to anger or whether, and if so how, the settings might be gendered (Panksepp and Biven 2012). These are questions for neuroscience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and medicine.
What is settled is that there is some sort of core disposition to anger or protoanger that is universal, that evolved because it had ties to fitness. If reasons of fitness are acceptable as justifying reasons for anger at some times and in some situations—for example, in self-defense—then there are such reasons for some kinds of anger.
One caution: It is easy to overemphasize the link between anger and aggression, punishment, violence, and killing. Many birds and animals that prey—hawks and tigers, for example—stalk for the pleasure of it, and they kill, when they do, because they need food. There is no reason to think that hawks and tigers are angry when they stalk and kill, although they are phenomenally conscious in a host of ways, and capable in other parts of life, say, when raising chicks or cubs, of experiencing something in the vicinity of anger at both unruly chicks and cubs, and at threats to them.
Likewise, in the human case the psychological causes of aggression, punishment, violence, and killing are multifarious. Anger plays a role in some cases of aggression, punishment, and violence, but so do fear, shame, and guilt, as well as nonpsychological sources, economics, the prison system, the power of police, the size of the military, and so on.
Varieties of Anger
Anger, along with shame, is empirically the most widely studied moral emotion. I don’t mean anything very controversial by calling anger a moral emotion. I am simply marking the fact that anger (and shame)—perhaps unlike fear, surprise, and happiness—are normally heavily moralized and morally regulated. Compare anger, disdain, and contempt on one side to fear, surprise, and happiness on the other. All of these are governed by norms for apt or fitting expression. One can be too happy, scared, or surprised given the situation. But when one finds a joke too funny, or is too scared to climb a trail, the mistakes are primarily epistemic. The individual hasn’t interpreted the joke or the risk accurately. Being too angry or too contemptuous involves a moral mistake. One can do something wrong, not simply foolish, by getting too angry.
Anger commonly targets moral violations such as inconsiderateness, dishonesty, and injustice. Anger is known everywhere on the earth. It is assigned an important moral role in some cultures and can be considered a virtue or a potential virtue. Or better: it has virtuous forms or has some role to play in a virtuous life if its aim is narrowly focused, and its mode and intensity are suited or proportional to the wrong it detects. But, in other cultures, anger is considered vicious, personally and interpersonally destructive, and mostly the noisy sound of an ego that has tantrums when the cosmos fails to comply with its fancies. Seneca, the Stoic, doubted that anger could be tamed, noting that it always gets involved with what is “on the outskirts of the case.” The angry person loses focus. I am angry that you lied to me. I say so. But in my rage I mention how ugly I find your eyeglasses, and then that your mother is a bore. Such escalation quickly leads to the point of no return. Thus, Seneca recommended that we “extirpate anger root and branch.”13 It’s the only way to avoid the unending vengeance and pain-passing traps.
Anger comes in varieties that can overlap and intersect. These include:
· Payback anger, where I intend to cause another physical or mental pain and suffering, and/or status harm, typically because they caused me pain.14
· Pain-passing anger, where I intend to cause pain to another because I am in pain, but not pain that they caused.
· Feigned “as if” anger, where I am not really angry or very angry in the inner phenomenal sense but use angry words or threats to gain compliance.
· Instrumental ameliorative anger, where I am really angry but primarily aim to get you to behave, apologize, or fix things (but not to cause you to suffer).
· Recognition respect anger, where I have been diminished and demand that you recognize my dignity and equal worth as a way of restoring a sense of my self-worth and as a signal that you are not the callous kind of person you seem to be.
· Political or institutional anger at social policies, laws, structures, or communal institutions that are unfair, racist, sexist, or otherwise harmful or dehumanizing.
· Impersonal anger that expresses horror and fury at the heavens, nature, human evil, or folly.15
My main interest is in payback and pain-passing anger, both of which I think are bad, but for different reasons. Payback anger is intentionally cruel. Pain-passing anger is thoughtless and self-indulgent. Both hurt others for no greater good or higher purpose, such as improving the other, balancing a relationship, or changing harmful practices or institutions. The arguments against them apply to the other kinds of anger insofar as they embed, enact, and encourage payback or pain-passing.
I heard Eddie Glaude Jr., the Princeton professor of African American studies, describe on TV the anger in the aftermath of George Floyd’s May 25, 2020, murder by a Minneapolis policeman as “blue anger,” anger born of sadness, tears, exhausting and exhausted patience, and righteousness. This seems like the right description, and as poetic as it is, it captures what seems to me to be the ameliorative and loving aspects that the multiracial righteous anger #BlackLivesMatter displays at this moment. There is, as far as I can tell, little desire to pay back or pass pain to racists but just to have the racism, systemic and personal, be done with. It’s wrong, it’s exhausting, it’s shameful, and it aligns with no system of decent values.16
Scripts for Anger and Spheres of Anger
Anger, like all emotions, is culturally scripted. We learn the scripts over time in distinctive social ecologies, in countries and nation-states, often in microecologies, as the ways various “we’s”—native New Yorkers, Pennsylvania Amish, Tibetan Buddhists in exile, Tamang or Brahman in Nepal, and Utku Eskimos in Northern Canada—enact anger. Some anger scripts are acquired and maintained in micro-microecologies, as distinctive familial or neighborhood ways of being angry and doing anger. What matters first and foremost for acquiring the right scripts is what the locals do where one is born, where “right” just means the scripts practiced by us, around here, in this locale, where you ended up, and then, if you move around, in whatever social-ecological niches your personal life journey takes you. A person’s internalized norms are largely a function of the postal zip codes they traverse, each of which is a proxy for some set of dominant norms, how much reflection and conversation about norms is endorsed, and the amount of information available about alternative norms and practices. Even within zip codes, there can be multiple norms and scripts. In the introduction, I mentioned the different emotional scripts of my Italian and Jewish friends’ parents where I grew up in zip code 10530. It may be easier, I suspect, for kids than it is for adults to figure out which emotional norms and scripts are appropriate in which microecologies. Children raised in bilingual or multilingual households can adapt pretty quickly to which language to speak to whom without discombobulation. I suspect it is the same with multiple scripts for emotions.
Anger expresses, signals, communicates, and motivates both the angry person and the person they are angry at, if the object of anger is also sentient. The angry person hopes or aims to get its target to do something(s): feel pain, cease and desist, shape up and conform to a norm, be scared, acknowledge a harm, recognize my standing, reconsider what you have done, redescribe what you have done, ask for forgiveness, make amends, accept blame and responsibility, get out of town, or something else. The scripts follow rules that govern which situations warrant feeling angry, permissible expressions of anger, rules governing the intensity and duration of angry episodes, and so on.
There are three main spheres of anger: anger in the personal sphere involving loved ones, family, and friends; anger in “the middle realm,” Nussbaum’s useful phrase, comprising communal, commercial, and work relations; and anger in the political sphere, at politicians, institutions, laws, legal decisions, and government policies. Anger might employ similar norms for a people across all three spheres or zones, or it might not.
There are rules for evaluating anger in each sphere. Anger among family and friends is warranted especially where there is inconsiderateness, disloyalty, failure to pitch in as expected, or betrayal; in commercial relations when there is rudeness, trickery, scheming, or contractual failure; in politics when there is injustice. Various norms govern how one appropriately expresses anger in different spheres—for example, by harsh words (personal), by low ratings of services on social media or lawsuits (commercial), or by demonstrations, voting, and civil disobedience (political).
Consider just the sphere of personal anger. When is it justified, for what ends, and how often does it accomplish what you want it to accomplish? I have come to think that the national average of success with payback anger and pain-passing anger in the personal sphere is about the same as the 1962 New York Mets win-loss record. At the time, the Mets were the “losingest” team in the history of modern baseball (the Cleveland Indians beat their record in 2003). The Mets record was 40–120.
When I speak about anger, I ask members of the audience to reflect on their own experience with payback and pain-passing anger in the personal sphere, among loved ones and friends (one could perform the exercise by asking about payback and pain-passing anger separately). Across all those angry payback and pain-passing exchanges, do you feel as if you were usually on the winning side morally? What about practically or instrumentally? Did you usually get what you wanted from the other in a way that was satisfying? My experience is that most people judge that they have engaged in a lot of innings of personal payback anger, and more than a few of pain-passing anger, and that both morally and practically, they have usually lost at about a 1:3 ratio—the same as the 1962 Mets did. They did not get what they wanted, or if they did, there were high costs to pay, including guilt or shame, afterward.
In a paper titled “The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge” (2008), K. M. Carlsmith, T. D. Wilson, and D. T. Gilbert explain that people are poor at affectively forecasting how they will feel after exacting revenge. People think it will make them feel good, satisfied. It doesn’t. One reason is that exacting revenge causes second-guessing, rumination, and guilt, which are not taken into account in making the forecast. So, even if payback anger wasn’t immoral, which it is, it would still be self-defeating.
One can ask the same questions about anger in the middle sphere and in the political sphere. When you got angry on the phone at the agent for your cable company or credit card company, how did that work out for you? For them? When you vent about politics and the “scumbags” or “stupid motherfuckers” on the other side, to like-minded people, does that do good—instrumental, psychological, or moral—for you, for your like-minded friends, for political life? If not, why do it? What is the anger for? What about anger directed at political opponents to their faces, in email, or on Facebook or Twitter? Could you be in the grip of the misguided ventilationist view (Tavris 1989), which really just stokes the flames and does almost nothing to address the source or cause of distress?
There are power, gender, age, ethnic, and racial norms governing who is permitted to feel and express anger in different spheres and who is not. Just as there are scripts for getting and being angry, there are norms for receiving and responding to the anger of others. There are various code words that mark where another is on the anger spectrum—irascible, stoic, passive-aggressive, repressed, disciplined, severe, harsh, mean, cruel, sadistic—and where one is on the scale of worthiness for another’s anger: selfish, thoughtless, insensitive, disobedient, worthless slime, a scumbag, a douche bag.17
WEIRD Anger
Allan Gibbard, speaking of twentieth-century fin-de-siècle American morality, says that it is the zone of life governed by the twin emotions of anger and guilt.18 We can demarcate a large part of what we consider morality, and make sense of the language of right and wrong, blame, and responsibility, in terms of norms of apt anger and guilt. “Moral convictions … consist in norms for anger and for the first-person counterpart of anger, guilt” (1990, 126). Moral anger, anger that passes moral inspection, is anger from the special standpoint of “full and impartial engagement” (ibid., 127). Gibbard writes: “Morality, on a narrow reading, concerns the moral emotions it makes sense to have from the standpoint of full and impartial engagement. It concerns the things it makes sense to feel guilty for having done and the things it makes sense to be angry with others for having done” (ibid., 128).
According to Gibbard, morality is shaped—in some central ways constituted—by norms for when anger and guilt are fitting. It isn’t that anger and guilt are the ends of morality, not at all. They are tools that can be used in detecting, anticipating, and enforcing moral norms designed for whatever the ends of morality are: peace, harmony, well-being, the happiness of the few or the many, and so on. Fittingness has to do with such things as appropriate triggers and contents of anger and guilt, what kinds of things it makes sense to be angry about, the quality and intensity of these emotions, and the range of warranted displays and actions. If, as many think, guilt is just anger turned inward—note, Gibbard calls guilt “the first-person counterpart of anger”—then anger alone is the master key to the moral domain. North American morality is the domain of norms designed to govern when it makes sense to be angry at others, or in the case of guilt, to be angry at oneself.
One might think that the special standpoint of “full and impartial engagement” will restrict the kinds of anger that are judged to be warranted. And indeed it will. But “full and impartial engagement” is intended in the first instance to test whether wrongdoing has occurred. If it has, and if the expression of anger is proportional to the degree and kind of wrongdoing, then anger that has “conspicuous revenge” as part of its aim will—at least it might—be warranted from that standpoint.
Cross-cultural philosophy, psychology, and anthropology teach that anger and guilt play more of a role in WEIRD moralities—of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic peoples—than in all other moralities (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010; Henrich 2020). And, in fact, Gibbard is sensitive to the fact that some moralities might not use the same emotional tools or fuel that ours does. He writes: “What about the moralist with special views, the moralist who rejects guilt and anger? … Other cultures may lack guilt altogether, or may give it no great play in their norms of social control. Could there not be shame moralities, or fear moralities?” (1990, 51). Gibbard answers that there are such moralities, disdain-shame moralities, but he insists that our morality is an anger-guilt one.19 I’ll return shortly to what this idea of “our morality” could mean, and how it is, and ought to be, weighted in the methods of ethics.20
At this point, I hope to have given the reader some reasons to be open to reconsidering how they do anger, and especially some reasons to worry about pain-passing and payback anger. Both kinds are fundamentally incompatible with the aim of ethics, which is to promote the good. Revenge and pain-passing are performatively inconsistent with the aim of ethics. There may also be reasons to want to modify and turn down the temperature on other kinds of anger. Such reasons in my experience are likely to be prudential, strategic, and psychological (anger is noisy and unpleasant; anger in one’s soul can make one feel depressed) rather than moral. But all such reasons can be good reasons for modifying how we do anger.
Conclusion
Let’s take stock:
· I’ve proposed a view of emotions as plastic, normative, and scripted. Emotions are things we do, and, if we have reason, can do differently.
· Changing emotional scripts requires changes in role models, moral educational practices, social practices, and social structures.
· We live in an “Age of Anger,” as Pankaj Mishra calls it. There is more anger than I have ever seen in my lifetime, and it is of a particularly unhelpful “Fuck you!” “Fuck you too!” sort.
· I’ve proposed a method that uses data from cultural psychology and anthropology to see our anger practices more clearly and to entertain alternatives, so as not to be “imprisoned by our own upbringing” but rather to be aware of the “varieties of moral possibility.”
· I’ve argued that the core psychobiological disposition to anger sets parameters regarding cultured anger but radically underdetermines cultured anger. The natural history of anger tells us very little about how we ought to do anger in twenty-first-century worlds.
· I’ve distinguished among seven types of anger: payback anger, pain-passing anger, feigned “as if” anger, instrumental ameliorative anger, recognition respect anger, political or institutional anger, and impersonal anger.
· I’ve distinguished among three spheres of anger: personal, commercial, and political.
· I’ve argued that two distinct kinds of anger—payback anger and pain-passing anger—are morally bad. The first kind aims to hurt another (or others) for reasons of revenge; the second kind hurts inadvertently, callously—I hurt, and you, often simply the nearest sentient being, suffer for it. We indulge both kinds of anger, but we shouldn’t.
· Payback anger and pain-passing anger sometimes, possibly often, infect entirely justified anger with noble aims. In this way, even entirely righteous, ameliorative anger can be poisoned ethically and instrumentally.
I now turn to resources in cultural psychology and anthropology to advance my argument.