THE BEAUTY OF ANGER: ANGER AS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF INJUSTICE

Abstract

Anger and the actions it is thought to motivate have gotten a bad rap in diverse philosophical and religious traditions, in popular culture, and in everyday life. While many agree that anger at grievous wrongs is justified insofar as anger rightly bears witness to injustice, much is contested about the nature and value of anger. Theorists and ethicists disagree about whether anger conceptually includes a retributive element and what good there is in the desire for and pursuit of payback. There are concerns about how to balance the injured and angry person’s claims for redress with concern for the social good, whether anger accurately tracks its targets, and whether other affects might do a better job bearing witness to injustice and motivating just social change.“The Beauty of Anger: Anger as Acknowledgment of Injustice” joins polyphonic voices in the philosophical and feminist ethical literature in accenting the value of anger, especially in contexts of oppression surrounding race and gender injustice. The dissertation first synthesizes common philosophical accounts of anger’s retributive element, ultimately offering that one way the desire for a wrongdoer’s suffering appeals to an angry victim is that the angry person desires the intimacy that arises when the wrongdoer suffers in the way the victim suffers. Second, it explores what is gained from an angry response to injustice or wrongdoing that is not captured simply by having the moral facts of the matter. The dissertation suggests that acknowledgment or appreciation of injustice is tightly bound to angry responses to injustice. Third, the dissertation aims to locate the value in an oft-maligned, hostile variety of anger and under what conditions such anger, when leveraged toward revolutionary justice, might be permissible. Finally, I explore how rituals of anger in protests and movements for justice social change can reconnect protesting persons to the anger they are often socialized to suppress.