Timothy Kwiatek
Cornell University
Anger sometimes detects injustice, either on a personal level (Shoemaker 2015) or political level (Cherry 2021). But it’s not just a tool for detecting injustice, anger can also be used as a tool to confront that injustice. One important way that anger can confront injustice is by frighten one’s interlocutors into taking one seriously as a moral agent (Reis-Dennis 2019). Call this anger’s shock value. This looks appealing for correcting injustice when it works up social hierarchies, like where bosses are scared by the anger of their employees. There are worries about anger working down those hierarchies (Fricker 2016). Still, this camp argues that anger is so important to our personal and political lives that we should drop the moral condemnation of it. Call these people optimists because they think sometimes anger is fitting, good, or constructive. Contrast this with pessimist, who condemn anger. Perhaps because anger is harmful or irrational (Nussbaum 2016). Or because anger is unjustified on metaphysical grounds, like if the putative targets of that anger lack the kind of free will required to justify it (Pereboom 2021).
Consider a third position, the buddhist. The buddhist can treat anger as an affliction to work with (McRae 2015b). But it is also a tool that can be used to resolve itself. One can be a buddhist in this sense by being a pessimist about anger as we find it ordinarily, but an optimist about it after it has been to transform it into something good (McRae 2015a). Or one can be a buddhist by being a pessimist about one’s own anger, while being agnostic about the value of someone else’s. For example, Shantideva’s Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is written as an account of his own struggles with anger as an affliction, not as a normative claim for others.
The aim of this paper is to show that shock value creates a problem for optimists and pessimists alike. When anger is effective, it is because of its shock value. But shock value comes from defying expectations, violating social or moral norms. When pessimists morally condemn anger, they give it the power to be shocking. When optimists morally endorse anger, they take away its power to be shocking. This is a problem for the optimist and the pessimist but not so much for the buddhist.
Chair: Emma Jaura
Time: September 8th, 14:00-14:30
Location: HS E.002
SOPhiA 2026 