Unpacking a Charge of Emotional Irrationality: An Exploration of the Value of Anger in Thought

Abstract

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue about which she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger.

Acknowledgements

This paper has gone through numerous changes as the ideas have developed. I received valuable input on the various iterations of the paper from a range of people and at different symposia, including the conferences ‘Negative Emotions: The Good the Bad and the Ugly’ at the University of Geneva, and ‘Feeling Reasons’ at the University of Edinburgh.

Notes

1 The charge is pernicious in more than one way, where the social and psychological harms arising from silencing may remain even if the charge is warranted. However, if it is unwarranted, those harms are compounded, hence my narrow focus in this paper.

2 Fittingness is only one sense in which an emotion like anger can be appropriate, and it is distinct from whether it is appropriate in other ways, such as by being morally or pragmatically appropriate (for more on the appropriateness of emotion, see D’Arms and Jacobsen 2000).

3 That said, in many cases a global assumption about a person’s status as rational may be made, as well as a more general assumption about emotion being detrimental to reason. I take both assumptions to be implausible, given how emotion is fundamental to our practical rationality. As such, I focus on what seems to be a more plausible interpretation of the charge of emotional irrationality as a local charge about theorising on the issue about which one is angry while influenced by anger, hence the rather long name ‘the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger’.

4 An appraisal theoretical framework has dominated the work done on emotion and decision-making in psychology. As the idea that anger is a response to injustice is compatible with such a framework and I cannot see any immediate difficulties for the current project, I shall adopt the insights from this framework.

5 See Lerner and Tiedens (2006) for a review of the overlapping effects on processes and outcomes of judgements.

6 Someone with power in one context or with reference to one aspect of their identity may lack power in another context or with reference to another aspect of their identify, which is why I refer to ‘comparative power’.

7 See a summary of studies on mitigation techniques in Lerner et al. (2015).

8 In a context of systematic injustice, one might argue that a reliance on stereotypes and heuristics could be justified because the notion of systematic injustice allows one to bypass what the conscious intentions of members of the non-oppressed group are. As such, who the individual agents and what their intentions are need not be relevant, allowing that a reliance on stereotypes could be well-suited. Note that my point here is compatible with this kind of claim as I am not arguing against the use of stereotypes and heuristics tout court. What is important, however, is that the stereotypes are themselves appropriate and that the cues responded to are themselves relevant. The problem with a reliance on stereotypes and heuristics arises if it results in less attention being paid to argument quality, not simply from making use of stereotypes and heuristics, and this is the problem that increasing awareness of misattribution can address. Thank you to a reviewer for this journal for raising this possibility.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant no. 121985), which enabled me to finish this paper.