Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  afflicted free. Only an intelligent and imaginative effort toward justice

  can do that. This is what I mean by the “Transition,” a movement of mind

  we shall study more fully in subsequent chapters.51

  We notice something further: once the Transition gets under way,

  there is no room for a familiar type of forgiveness, which we’ll study

  in chapter 3. The payback mentality often wants groveling. What I call

  “transactional forgiveness” exacts a performance of contrition and abase-

  ment, which can itself function as a type of payback. (Often, too, the

  payback mentality is combined with a focus on status, in the form of

  abasement and lowness.) The Transition mentality, by contrast, wants

  justice and brotherhood. It would do no more good for Governor Wallace

  to moan and grovel than for him to burn in hell: these things do not pro-

  duce justice, and they are restorative only in the magical thinking char-

  acteristic of anger’s initial pre- Transition phase. In the Transition, one

  comes to see that the real issue is how to produce justice and coopera-

  tion. Rituals of forgiveness might possibly be thought useful to this end,

  and in chapter 7 we shall encounter such arguments. But King has no

  room for them: he wants reconciliation and shared effort. To these politi-

  cal issues we shall return.

  Lest, however, the idea of the Transition should seem too lofty or

  remote, too connected to the almost saintly figure of King, let me add

  a more homely example, which shows the Transition embodied in

  American popular culture and in the conduct of, perhaps surprisingly,

  an iconic “manly man.” In the 1960s TV show Branded, Chuck Connors

  plays such a classic Western figure, Jason McCord— courageous, loyal,

  yet aloof and alone. In the first episode, he meets a dying man in the des-

  ert and saves his life by giving him water and even carrying him on his

  own horse— only to find himself held up at gunpoint at an oasis, as the

  duplicitous Colbee takes McCord’s horse and leaves him to walk across

  the desert, very likely to die in the attempt. Colbee explains that he has

  to do this because he has a wife and two daughters, and so he has to

  live— and to get to town in time for his daughter’s birthday! McCord sur-

  vives, and meets up with the Colbee family in town. A friend urges him

  to anger and confrontation. McCord really is angry, and he walks toward

  Colbee resolutely, as Colbee’s two little daughters play around him with

  their hoops. McCord, looking at the family, then has a second thought; he

  turns around and walks away. As he does, he says over his shoulder, with

  a wry smile, “Happy Birthday, Janie.”

  Here’s a very flawed and yet somehow heroic character choosing

  the general welfare (in the form of the well- being of this family) over

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  anger— after an initial very human period of rage. He is stronger than his

  anger, and that is part of what makes him a truly heroic man.52

  Before moving on, however, we must return to Bishop Butler, for he

  suggests a good role for anger that needs to be pondered. According to

  Butler, who finds anger pretty appalling, it nonetheless has this value:

  it expresses our solidarity with wrongs done to other human beings.53

  Human beings have a general desire to see wrongdoers punished. This

  desire is felt to a higher degree when we, or people we care about, are

  victims, but it is felt to some degree as a purely general matter. It is a

  good thing if justice and social order become objects of concern to all

  of us; so the anger that reacts to a wrongful disruption of that order is

  highly useful, reinforcing concern and binding human beings in a useful

  sort of solidarity. I shall shortly make some concessions to this argument,

  discussing anger’s instrumental role. But Butler claims more: he claims

  that the payback thought itself, and anger including that thought, have

  normative value, containing the idea of general human concern.

  First, we ought to question Butler’s empirical claim that human

  beings have a general desire to see wrongdoers punished that leads them

  to seek solidarity with the human species as a whole. I’ve said that the

  desire for payback probably expresses an innate evolutionary tendency.

  But Paul Bloom’s examination of the desire for payback in young infants

  does not support Butler: Bloom finds that the payback wish does not link

  young humans to the human species as a whole. As children develop,

  a very powerful tendency to care narrowly and to demonize strangers

  makes moral thinking develop narrowly and unevenly. Most of human-

  ity remains outside the child’s circle of concern, and often strangers

  are seen as harmful and deserving of punishment just because they are

  strangers.54

  Even to the extent that Butler is correct, however, what he does not

  explain is why solidarity is aided by the desire to inflict pain and suf-

  fering on the wrongdoer (which he takes to be essential to anger, and

  it’s what he means by punishing). We could agree that the disruption

  of social order is bad and that the desire to protect people from wrong-

  ful damages is good, without buying into the payback idea or thinking,

  magically, that returning pain for pain achieves anything. Butler’s sug-

  gestion is free of the status error, but it does not avoid the payback error; indeed, it is simply a high- minded form of the latter. The best form of

  solidarity with other human beings would surely focus on doing some-

  thing constructive to promote human welfare, not on a project doomed

  to incoherence and futility.

  This much, however, is right and important: human welfare is served

  by taking note of wrongful acts and establishing public standards of

  accountability for them. Truth and accountability promote welfare, by

  Anger

  35

  announcing to all what society takes seriously and what we are commit-

  ted to protecting. With Butler, then, my argument favors denunciation

  and protest when wrongful acts occur— and, after that, whatever policies

  can be shown to have a likelihood of discouraging those acts going for-

  ward. Victims are right to demand acknowledgment and accountability,

  and societies are right to offer it. I discuss this question in chapters 6 and 7.

  For now, however, we may turn to an emotion that does appear to con-

  tain what Butler wanted from anger, without anger’s defects.

  VI. Transition- Anger, a Rational Emotion; Anger’s

  Instrumental Roles

  There are many ways in which anger can go wrong. The person may

  be mistaken about the target: O did not do what Angela thinks he did;

  another person, P, was the rapist. The angry person may also go wrong

  about the event that is anger’s focus: O was there, but did not rape

  Rebecca. The person may also be mistaken about the appraisals of value

  involved. Aristotle remarks that people often get angry when someone

  forgets their name, and this plainly is a confused response. (Either the per-

  son has a bizarre view of the importance of names, or she has interpreted

  this forgetfuln
ess as a more general slighting of her own importance.)

  I discuss such errors in chapter 5.

  Often, however, the facts and the relevant appraisals are correct: the

  wrongful act occurred, it was intentionally inflicted by the target, and it

  inflicted a serious damage. I introduce here a further piece of terminology:

  in such cases, anger is “well- grounded.” I refuse to call this sort of anger

  “justified,” because, as I’ve argued, anger conceptually contains the pay-

  back wish, and that is normatively problematic. So “well- grounded”

  means that everything but that one part of anger’s cognitive content is

  well- established.

  Even if anger avoids such errors, however, it still founders on the

  shoals of payback. It is here that I introduce a major exception to my thesis that anger always involves, conceptually, a thought of payback. There are

  many cases in which one gets standardly angry first, thinking about some

  type of payback, and then, in a cooler moment, heads for the Transition.

  But there are at least a few cases in which one is there already: the entire content of one’s emotion is, “How outrageous! Something must be done

  about this.” Let us call this emotion Transition- Anger, since it is anger, or quasi- anger, already heading down the third fork in Angela’s road. One

  might give it some ordinary- language name, such as Jean Hampton’s

  “indignation,”55 but I prefer to segment it cleanly from other cases,

  since I think a lot of cases we call “indignation” involve some thought

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  of payback. So I prefer the clearly made- up term. Transition- Anger does

  not focus on status; nor does it, even briefly, want the suffering of the

  offender as a type of payback for the injury. It never gets involved at all

  in that type of magical thinking. It focuses on social welfare from the

  start. Saying, “Something should be done about this,” it commits itself to

  a search for strategies, but it remains an open question whether the suf-

  fering of the offender will be among the most appealing.

  Is Transition- Anger a species of anger? I really don’t care how we

  answer this question. Such special borderline cases are rarely handled

  well by conceptual analysis. It’s certainly an emotion: the person is really

  upset. And it appears distinct, though subtly, from compassionate hope,

  since the focus is on outrage. The person says, “How outrageous,” not

  “How sad,” and entertains forward- looking projects focused on dimin-

  ishing or preventing wrongful acts. What is important is how rare and

  exceptional this pure forward- looking emotion is. Angry people very

  rarely think in this way from the start, not wanting ill to befall the offender, even briefly (except as a means to social welfare, should a dispassionate

  inquiry show that it is indeed that). It is much more common to get angry

  first and then head to the Transition, than to be there already, focused on

  social welfare. The retaliatory instinct is deeply human, no doubt through

  both evolutionary tendency and cultural reinforcement. It is only excep-

  tional individuals who are there already, in major issues affecting their

  welfare. Such presence of mind typically requires long self- discipline.

  Thus, one could imagine that King’s own emotion was Transition- Anger,

  while the emotion constructed in his speech, for his audience, is brief

  (standard) anger and then a turn to the Transition. In what follows I shall

  use the special term Transition- Anger when that is what I mean, and if

  I use the bare word “anger,” that is not what I mean: I mean the familiar

  garden- variety emotion, about whose conceptual content Aristotle and

  Butler are correct.

  Transition- Anger will be very important in thinking about political

  institutions. But it is not totally absent in daily interactions. One place

  it often flourishes is in parents’ relationships with their young children.

  Their behavior is often outrageous, and yet parents rarely want payback.

  They just want things to get better. If they are wise, they choose strategies designed to produce improvement. Garden- variety anger, wishing ill to

  the offender, is in tension with unconditional love. Transition- Anger is

  not, because it lacks that wish for ill.

  Transition- Anger may also be found when people get angry at a vio-

  lation of an important principle, or at an unjust system.56 Not all such

  anger is Transition- Anger: for the payback wish is subtle, insinuating

  itself in many places, like the snake in the garden. Sometimes people who

  say they are angry at a violation of a principle want the violators to suffer

  Anger

  37

  in some fashion for what they have done. Sometimes people who get

  angry at the injustice of a system want to “smash the system,” to bring

  chaos and pain down around the heads of the people who upheld it. If,

  however, the entire content of the person’s anger is “This is outrageous,

  and how shall things be improved?” or “This is outrageous, and we must

  commit ourselves to doing things differently,” then the anger is indeed

  Transition- Anger.

  To illustrate the subtlety of this distinction, let’s focus on a common

  case: people think that it is outrageous that the rich do not pay more taxes

  to support the welfare of the poor. They are indignant at a system that

  seems to them unjust. Let us simply stipulate that their empirical analy-

  sis is correct: if the rich pay more taxes, this will indeed help the poor.

  (Of course it’s not obvious that this is true.) And let us grant, as well,

  what seems obvious: the rich will be upset and pained by such a change

  if it occurs. Now let us imagine two proponents of this change. P focuses

  on social welfare. Outraged by injustice, he wants to produce a more just

  society. He doesn’t think that the likely suffering of the rich should stop

  us from doing what is right, but he doesn’t want that suffering. Indeed, to

  the extent that it might create political resistance to his project, he would rather that there was no such suffering. Q, by contrast, wants the benefi-cial change, but she also likes the idea of the rich suffering, as a payback

  or comeuppance for their arrogance and greed. They deserve to suffer, she thinks, and the goal of her anger is at least in part the justified (as she sees it) pain of the rich. P’s anger is pure Transition- Anger. Q’s anger is the

  usual mixed bag that is garden- variety anger. It might move toward the

  Transition sooner or later, but it also might not. Unfortunately, real political actors, including voters, are rarely as pure as P.

  What good can be said of (garden- variety) anger, in the end? Anger

  has three possibly useful instrumental roles. First, it may serve as a signal that something is amiss. This signal can be of two sorts: it can be a signal to the person herself, who might have been unaware of her value-

  commitments and their fragility; and it can be a signal to the world, a

  kind of exclamation point that draws attention to a violation. Since the

  latter role can be equally well played, and often better played, by a non-

  angry performance of anger, as chapter 5 argues, I shall focus here on the

  former role. Anger embodies the idea of significant wrongdoing target-
/>   ing a person or thing that is of deep concern to the self. While one could

  have that idea of significant injury without anger— with, and through,

  grief and compassion— those two emotions do not contain the idea of

  wrongfulness, which is anger’s specific focus. (It is for that reason that

  Butler, for all his animadversions against the passion, attempts to defend

  its social utility, with the mixed results that we have seen.) Nor, impor-

  tantly, do those two emotions contain the thought that something needs

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  to be done, which, as I’ve argued, is a conceptual part of anger, though

  usually in the defective form of the payback thought. The experience of

  anger can make a previously unaware person aware of her values and

  the way in which another’s wrongful act can violate them. For example, a

  person who is in a hierarchical relationship may not realize how unfairly

  she is being treated, until she has an experience, or repeated experiences,

  of anger. If the experience helps her to decide to protest, or in some other

  way to improve her situation, then it is useful.

  The signal anger sends is pretty misleading, since it embodies an idea

  of payback or retribution that is primitive, and that makes no sense apart

  from magical thinking or narcissistic error. So it is a false lead to that

  extent, and the angry person is always well advised to begin moving

  beyond anger as soon as possible, in the direction of the Transition. Still,

  it can be a useful wake- up call.

  We see this in King’s speech (addressed to a public some of whose

  members might have been incompletely aware of the ills of racial oppres-

  sion): he does indeed encourage anger at the behavior of white America,

  acknowledging the magnitude of the wrongs done and the way in which

  they affect everyone’s well- being. But then he immediately turns his audi-

  ence away from the payback thought that inevitably surfaces, toward a

  different picture of the future. Managed by such a skillful entrepreneur,

  anger can be useful, and King always conceived of his project as active

  and militant, pitted against complacency. Perhaps it’s even more useful

  in cases where the wrongdoing might have slid along barely noticed,

  beneath the surface of daily life, and only the emotion directs the per-