Cosmopolitan anger and shame

ABSTRACT

Sentimental cosmopolitans argue that cultivating empathy for distant others is necessary in order to motivate action to address global injustices. This paper accepts the basic premises of the sentimental cosmopolitan project but argues that it ought to be extended to include cultivating other cosmopolitan emotions, particularly anger and shame. There is a tendency to think of anger and shame as unworthy, or as base motives to be overcome; but I argue that, in fact, they constitute an important resource for motivating action to address global injustices. The argument proceeds in three parts. Section 1 outlines sentimental cosmopolitanism and explicates the relationship between empathy, and anger and shame. Section 2 examines the link between anger and shame and responsibility, arguing that anger and shame are well-suited to capturing notions of responsibility for injustice, something lacking in an empathy-based account of sentimental cosmopolitanism. Section 3 provides two further arguments in favour of anger and shame: (i) anger represents a powerful source of energy for political action, and (ii) shame can motivate cosmopolitan action where empathy is absent.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• motivation
• sentiment
• anger
• shame
• global justice

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Kerri Woods, Derek Edyvane and to the participants at the Association for Social and Political Philosophy Annual Conference 2017 for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editors of the Journal of Global Ethics, Professor Christine Koggel, Professor Eric Palmer and Professor Martin Schönfeld, for their encouragement and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Orcid

Joshua Hobbs http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5478-3117

Notes

1 As I focus on making a positive case I do not directly address Nussbaum’s recent book Anger and Forgiveness (2016) in which she offers two arguments against anger: the empirical claim that because anger aims to right wrongs via payback it is an ineffective strategy, and the normative claim that anger’s concern with status renders it intrinsically wrong. I address the empirical claim in detail in Section 3.1, and further note that retribution need not be understood as aimed at righting a past wrong but instead as aimed at deterring future wrongs.

2 Anger at one’s self is both qualitatively different from shame, and structurally different as a third party is not referenced in the emotion. Anger at one’s own complicity in injustice maintains a tripartite structure; however, the agent herself serves as both the first, and the second reference points.

3 The exact relationship between the conclusions of individual reasoners and the norms of the community (or communities) with which they identify is necessarily highly complex; however, I take it that we can distinguish between the two, at least for practical purposes.

4 As noted above, this paper uses ‘empathy’ to refer to feeling for others, rather than to refer to perspective-taking as on Nussbaum’s account.

5 Empathy also tracks harm but does not direct attention toward responsible parties.

6 I thank an anonymous reviewer for the point that shame is necessarily perspectival.

7 Causal responsibility need not entail moral responsibility, as we can be causally responsible but not morally responsible for actions that result from our non-culpable ignorance. However, in the case of global poverty I take the severity of the harm to entail that ignorance is typically culpable.

8 Norms determining group membership can themselves be a source of injustice that need to be uncovered and challenged.

9 Further discussion of corrected anger as a means to motivate political solutions to injustice can be found in an extensive feminist literature on the topic (Campbell 1994; Jaggar 1989; Spelman 1989). This literature argues that the anger of oppressed groups is typically dismissed by those in power as devoid of political meaning, and may be internalised by these groups as such. The dismissal of the anger of the oppressed constitutes an injustice in itself and suggests that this anger can serve an epistemic function – directing attention to injustices that are not presently perceived as injustices.

10 This is not to assume that national communities embody a single set of values.