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Fifth in a series of posts on what philosophy can contribute to understanding and addressing anger (part IV here)
In Anger and Forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum tries to persuade her readers that anger has no good rationale. As we have seen, she believes that anger cannot be justified as payback, because doing so does nothing to restore what we have lost when the individual at whom we are angry wronged us. Nor, she believes, can anger be justified by the desire to ‘knock down’ wrongdoers whose actions have communicated the message that they have an elevated moral status.
These are Nussbaum’s main arguments against anger. But her case against anger also involves showing that many of the best ‘pro-anger’ arguments turn out to be weaker than they seem at first glance. Here I’d like to discuss of the arguments made in defense of anger: that a person who does not get angry does not exhibit sufficient self-respect.
As we observed in our post about ‘the road of status,’ when others wrong us, they implicitly send a message that we are not as morally important as us. A natural, and understandable, reaction to that message is a counter-message, one that conveys that we are important or valuable, others’ attitudes notwithstanding.
Getting angry seems like a powerful way to convey that very message. By manifesting our respect for ourselves — our self-respect — our anger signals that we are worthy of respect from others. A person who refrained from anger appears weak or lacking in self-respect. In fact, her lack of anger would seem to be endorsing her own mistreatment. To suffer others’ unjust treatment without complaint seems to suggest that you are not worth much, so that being mistreated, even if not exactly deserved, is nothing to get worked up about. We owe it to ourselves to get angry!
Nussbaum’s reasons for believing that self-respect does not require anger are hard to pin down, but they seem to rest on two lines of thought.
The first has to do with Nussbaum’s understanding of what anger is. You will recall that Nussbaum understands anger as necessarily involving a desire for payback, a desire that the person who wronged you be made to suffer in response. The desire for payback, Nussbaum seems to hold, is not essential to maintaining our self-respect when others wrong us. It’s not as if, by witnessing a wrongdoer suffer, we gain any self-respect. Here Nussbaum echoes her general critique of the “road of payback”: Getting angry cannot change the past events that are the source of our ire and does not produce any positive good.
Whether you find this first line of thought credible will depend on whether you found Nussbaum’s critique of the road to payback. (See here for my worries about her critique.) But I also think Nussbaum’s first line of thought is open to the objection that it does not seem to distinguish between angry feelings and angry actions. Nussbaum could well be right that acting out of anger, seeking to inflict pain on those who have wronged us, is problematic as a way of affirming our self-respect. But that would not show that having angry feelings is not essential to self-respect. To my eyes, the person who never felt anger, even in response to the grossest mistreatment, would be lacking in a certain sort of concern for herself. Anger is one of the aspects of our emotional repertoire that registers the significance of how others treat us. If we do not even feel angry when we are mistreated, this may indicate a basic lack of self-worth and (more worrisomely) a neurotic embrace of being mistreated.
I gather Nussbaum would not agree that even angry feelings are crucial to self-respect. Her second line of thought is that a person with “lofty character” will rise above the wrongs she suffers. A fully self-respecting person, Nussbaum seems to think, does not feel wounded or inadequate when others mistreat her. She simply has no need of anger.
Certainly one picture of “lofty character” is as Nussbaum suggests, a person with a kind
of stoic emotional tranquility, able to detach herself from whatever others may do to her. But one wonders how realistic, and hence how desirable, such an ideal of character is for actual human beings. As Nussbaum notes, because we are not god-like — we are not omnipotent, immortal, and so on — we are vulnerable to what others do to us. Anger (and other emotions in that neighborhood, such as resentment) are important to beings like us as ways of registering others’ mistreatment of us. We might worry, therefore, that to imagine that we could divorce ourselves from angry feelings altogether is not to imagine an ideal that we could pursue. It’s rather to imagine us being very different from how in fact are. Insensitivity to anger is lofty — but perhaps too lofty for imperfect and sensitive creatures such as ourselves.
Of course, this ideal of emotional tranquility might nevertheless be an ideal to aspire to. And maybe in pursuing it, we would achieve a healthy reduction in anger. But it hardly seems like a criticism of angry human feelings that invulnerable, god-like beings would not feel anger!
No doubt Nussbaum is on the right track to suggest that thoughtless, hair trigger anger is not necessary for self-respect. But as with some of her other arguments, doubts can be raised about whether the insights to which she appeals support so strong a case against anger.
