gists such as Lazarus and James Averill should agree on this. They have
thought long and hard about the concept, and it would be surprising if
they had made an obvious error. Still, let us think again. Anger is not the
only emotion that contains a double movement. Many emotions contain
a backward- looking appraisal while also having associated action ten-
dencies oriented toward a future goal.
Compassion, for example, looks at the bad fate that has befallen some-
one else; but it also has an associated future- directed action tendency.
When I feel compassion for a person who is suffering, I often imagine
helping that person, and in many cases I do it. Daniel Batson’s research
shows that this tendency toward helping behavior is quite powerful, if
the helpful action is ready at hand and not very costly. But the connec-
tion between compassion and helping is typically understood as con-
tingent and causal, rather than conceptual. Philosophical definitions of
compassion (from Aristotle and the Stoics through Smith and Rousseau
to Schopenhauer) do not suggest that the helping tendency is part and
parcel of the emotion, something without which one could not be said to
experience compassion.34 I think this is probably correct: the connection
is indeed causal and external rather than conceptual and internal. We
can feel compassion for people even when there is nothing to be done
for them: people who have been drowned in a flood, to take just one
example, or distant people whom we can imagine no way of helping.
With anger, however, the future- oriented aim is standardly thought
to be part of the emotion, something without which there is pain of some
sort, but not anger. (Butler, we recall, holds that anger’s internal goal is
the misery of our fellow humans.) We must figure out, first, whether this
is correct— whether there really is a conceptual connection in this case,
and not simply a causal connection as in others. Second, we must figure
out how, more precisely, the pain is connected to the strike- back response.
Let’s be clear, first, about what the claim is. The claim is not that
anger conceptually involves a wish for violent revenge; nor is it that
anger involves the wish to inflict suffering oneself upon the offender. For
I may not want to get involved in revenge myself: I may want someone
else, or the law, or life itself, to do it for me. I just want the doer to suffer. And the suffering can be quite subtle. One might wish for a physical
injury; one might wish for psychological unhappiness; one might wish for
Anger
23
unpopularity. One might simply wish for the perpetrator’s future (your
unfaithful ex’s new marriage, for example) to turn out really badly. And
one can even imagine as a type of punishment the sheer continued exis-
tence of the person as the bad and benighted person he or she is: that is
how Dante imagines hell. All that I am investigating here (and ultimately
accepting, with one significant qualification) is that anger involves, con-
ceptually, a wish for things to go badly, somehow, for the offender, in a
way that is envisaged, somehow, however vaguely, as a payback for the
offense. They get what they deserve.
So let’s investigate this, considering a range of different cases. And
let us start from a basic scenario: Offender O has raped Angela’s close
friend Rebecca on the campus where both Angela and Rebecca are stu-
dents. Angela has true beliefs about what has occurred, about how seri-
ously damaging it is, and about the wrongful intentions involved: O,
she knows, is mentally competent, understood the wrongfulness of
his act, etc. (I choose rape rather than murder, in order to leave Angela
with a wider range of possible actions and wishes than would typically
be the case with murder. And I choose a friend in order to give Angela
more latitude about how to position herself toward the offense and the
offender.) Most rapes take place in the context of intimate relationships.
But because for me this domain has special complexity, involving issues
of trust and grief that relations with strangers do not, let me imagine the
case as a (conceptually simpler) stranger- rape, or at any rate not rape in
the context of an ongoing intimate relationship involving trust and deep
emotion.
Case 1. Angela feels pain at Rebecca’s rape. She feels that her circle of concern, what she deeply cares about, has been severely damaged, and
she believes, correctly, that the damage was wrongful. She now take steps
to mitigate the damage: she spends time with Rebecca, she makes efforts
to support her in therapy, in general she devotes a great deal of energy to
mending Rebecca’s life— and thus to mending the breach in her own cir-
cle of concern. So far, Angela’s emotion appears to be grief/ compassion,
and I think the standard definitions are correct when they suggest that it
is not anger, even though the occasion for the grief is a wrongful act. We
should notice that in this case the primary focus of Angela’s emotion is
the loss and pain caused to Rebecca, rather than the criminal act itself,
and to that extent her emotion seems to have Rebecca, not the rapist, as
its target.
Case 2. Angela feels pain at Rebecca’s rape, etc. She does all the things that she did in Case 1, thus expressing her compassion. But she also focuses
on the wrongfulness of the act, and her pain includes a special pain directed at the wrongful act— to some extent distinct from her pain at Rebecca’s suffering. This additional pain leads her to want to do something about that
24
Anger and Forgiveness
wrongfulness. So Angela forms a group to support rape victims, and she
gives money to such groups. She also campaigns for better public safety
measures to prevent rape and for better treatment of the problem of sexual
violence on her campus. (Again, I abstract from the special complexities
of rape in the context of intimate relationships involving trust and love.)
Should we call Angela’s emotion anger because it focuses not only on
Rebecca’s pain but also on the wrongfulness of the act, and has an outward
movement aimed at something like a righting of the wrong? It is an inter-
esting case, but I think that we typically would not call Angela’s emotion
anger. I am inclined to see it as a type of morally inflected compassion—
not very different, really, from a compassion for one hungry acquaintance
that leads me to campaign for better welfare support for all. As in Case 1,
the emotion does not have the offender as its target; its target is Rebecca,
and other women in Rebecca’s position. The offender comes into it only
because stopping similar harms is Angela’s goal for the future. Angela is
thus thinking of general utility (and in Case 2 the Utilitarian idea of anger’s limits appears for the first time).
Case 3. Angela feels pain, etc., as in Cases 1 and 2. As in Case 2, she focuses on the wrongfulness of O’s act, and she may campaign for general
measures to prevent that sort of damage in future. But she also focuses,
this time, on O. She seeks to mend the damage by making the offender suffer.
Because h
er circle of concern is damaged, she wants something to happen to O (whether through legal or extralegal means). Here we finally seem to
have arrived at anger, as the philosophical tradition understands it: a retaliatory and hopeful outward movement that seeks the pain of the offender
because of and as a way of assuaging or compensating for one’s own pain.
The question now is, Why? Why would an intelligent person think
that inflicting pain on the offender assuages or cancels her own pain?
There seems to be some type of magical thinking going on. In reality,
harsh punishment of the offender rarely repairs a damage. Adding O’s
pain to Rebecca’s does not do anything to ameliorate Rebecca’s situation,
so far as one can see. In a TV interview after his father’s murder, Michael
Jordan was asked whether, if they ever caught the murderer, Jordan
would want him executed. Jordan sadly replied, “Why? That wouldn’t
bring him back.”35 This eminently sensible reply is rare, however, and
perhaps only someone whose credentials in the area of masculinity are as
impeccable as Jordan’s would dare to think and say it.36
Ideas of payback have deep roots in the imaginations of most of us.
Ultimately they probably derive from metaphysical ideas of cosmic bal-
ance that are hard to shake off, and that may be part of our evolutionary
endowment.37 Indeed the first preserved fragment of Western philoso-
phy, the famous words of the Greek thinker Anaximander, dating from
the sixth century BCE, is based on just such a powerful analogy between
Anger
25
the institution of punishment and the alternations of the seasons: they are
said to “pay penalty and reparation” to one another for their sequential
encroachments, as the hot and dry drive out the cold and wet (not so suc-
cessfully, however, in Chicago). We think this way naturally, for whatever
reason. Many cherished literary works contain such ideas of “comeup-
pance,” which give us intense aesthetic pleasure.38 Whether the pleasure
we take in such narratives derives from antecedent cosmic- balance think-
ing or whether narratives of this sort (the entirety of the detective- story
genre, for example) nourish and augment our tendency to think in such
ways, we cannot say. Probably both. But we do think in such ways, and
we do take pleasure in narratives in which the doer suffers, purport-
edly balancing the horrible act that occurred. Aesthetics, however, like
our evolutionary prehistory, can be misleading. Our satisfaction does not
mean that such ways of thinking make sense. They really do not. Raping
O does not undo the rape of Jennifer. Killing a killer does not bring the
dead to life.39
This brings us to an alternative to this type of magical thinking
which at first seems rational: a focus on the idea of personal slighting or
diminution.
Case 4. Angela is pained, etc. She believes that O’s bad act is not only a wrongful act that seriously damaged someone dear to her, but also an
insult or denigration of her. She thinks something like, “This guy thinks
that he can insult my friend’s dignity with impunity, and, insofar as he
thinks this, he thinks that he can push me around— that I’ll just sit by while my friend is insulted. So he diminishes me and insults my self- respect.”
Here the connection between pain and retaliation is made through the
Aristotelian idea that the eudaimonistic ego- damage O has inflicted is
a kind of humiliation or down- ranking. No matter how implausible it is
to read O’s act as a down- ranking of Angela (given that O doesn’t know
Angela, or even Rebecca), Angela sees O’s harm to her friend as an ego-
wound that lessens Angela’s status. She therefore thinks that lowering O
through pain and even humiliation will right the balance.40
Many cultures, past and present, think this way all the time. In most
major sports we find an emphasis on retaliation for injury, and players
are thought wimpy and unmanly to the extent that they do not strike
back so far as the rules permit (and a little beyond that). Even though
it is obvious that injuring one player does not take away the injury to
another, it is a different story if one focuses not on injury but on ranking
and humiliation: the retaliatory hit is plausibly seen as taking away the
humiliation of the first hit. Slighting in the sense of diminution reaches
a broad class of cases, even if not all cases where anger is involved. It
is very easy for people to shift mentally from a eudaimonistic concern
(this is part of my circle of concern, what I care about) to a narcissistic
26
Anger and Forgiveness
status- focused concern (this is all about me and my pride or rank). In
such cases, a retaliatory strike- back is thought symbolically to restore the balance of status, manliness, or whatever.
Jean Hampton, whose analysis is very close to mine, puts it this
way: if people are secure, they won’t see an injury as a diminishment;
but people are rarely this secure. They secretly fear that the offense has
revealed a real lowness or lack of value in themselves, and that putting
the offender down will prove that the offender has made a mistake.41
I feel her account does not cover all the cases: more straightforwardly,
people may simply care a great deal about public standing, and they can
see quite clearly that to be pushed around has indeed diminished that.
Even in her subset of the cases, the fear she describes is much more plau-
sible if the value people care about is relative status, which is easily dam-
aged, than if it is some inner worth or value, which is not.
All of a sudden, the retaliatory tendency makes sense and is no longer
merely magical. To someone who thinks this way, in terms of diminution
and status- ranking, it is not only plausible to think that retaliation atones for or annuls the damage, it is actually true. If Angela retaliates successfully (whether through law or in some other way, but always focusing on
status- injury), the retaliation really does effect a reversal that annuls the injury, seen as an injury of down- ranking. Angela is victorious, and the
previously powerful offender is suffering in prison. Insofar as the salient
feature of O’s act is its low ranking of Angela, the turnabout effected by
the retaliation really does put him down and her (relatively) up.
Notice that things make sense only if the focus is purely on relative status, rather than on some intrinsic attribute (health, safety, bodily integrity, friendship, love, wealth, good academic work, some other achievement)
that has been jeopardized by the wrongful act, and that might incidentally
confer status. Retaliation does not confer, or restore, those things. It’s only if she thinks purely in terms of relative status that she can plausibly hope
to effect a reversal through a strike- back that inflicts pain of some type on the offender. (Thus people in academic life who love to diss scholars who
have criticized them, and who believe that this does them some good, have
to be focusing only on reputation and status, since it’s obvious that injuring someone else’s reputation does not make your own work better than it was
before, or correct whatever flaws the other person has found in it.)
It’s
clear that Angela need not think that the injury she has suffered is
a down- ranking. That is why Aristotle’s definition is too narrow. Indeed,
in this case it seems odd for her to do so, given that O is a stranger who
does not know her connection with Rebecca. But this way of seeing injury
is very common, and very common even in cases where people are eager
to deny that this is really what is going on.42 That is why Aristotle’s defi-
nition is helpful.
Anger
27
At this point I must introduce a distinction that will be important
in later chapters. There is a special status that good political institutions rightly care about: equal human dignity. Rape can be seen, plausibly, as a
dignitary injury, not just an injury to bodily integrity. It is right for legal institutions to take this into account in dealing with rapists and rape victims. However, notice that equal dignity belongs to all, inherently and
inalienably, and is not a relative or competitive matter. Whatever hap-
pens to the rapist, we should not wish his equal human dignity to be vio-
lated any more than we approve his violation of the victim’s dignity. And
it is most important to see that pushing his dignity down does not push
the victim’s up. Dignity is not a zero- sum game; in that way it is utterly
different from relative status.43
Suppose Angela does not think this way, but stops at Case 3. Then,
insofar as her emotion is anger and not simply some combination of grief
and compassion, she does initially wish some sort of bad result for the
offender, and she does initially think (magically) that this will set things
right, somehow counterbalancing or even annulling the offense. It is
human to think this way. However, if she is really focusing on Rebecca
and not on her own status- injury, she is likely to think this way only
briefly. Magical fantasies of replacement can be very powerful, but in
most sane people they prove short- lived. Instead, she is likely to take a
mental turn toward a different set of future- directed attitudes. Insofar
as she really wants to help Rebecca and women in Rebecca’s position,
she will focus on the responses characteristic of Cases 1 and 2: helping
Rebecca get on with her life, but also setting up help groups, trying to
publicize the problem of campus rape, and urging the authorities to deal
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