Abstract
I argue that there is an interesting and underexplored sense in which some negative reactive attitudes such as anger are often absurd. I explore implications of this absurdity, especially for our understanding of forgiveness.
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12 November 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10225-0
Notes
Coren (2020) discusses Nagel’s absurdity-argument in an account of a less prominent reactive attitude, namely, awe. Contra Nagel, Coren argues that the benefits of awe as a reply to our cosmic insignificance shows one way in which human life is not absurd.
Nagel’s later view is that an absurd situation includes “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and aspiration and reality” such as “…you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded announcement; as you are being knighted your pants fall down” (1979: 13). For discussions of Nagel’s views on the absurd, see Westphal and Cherry (1990: 199–203); see also the provocative account in Gordon (1984).
Following Shoemaker (2015), I restrict my focus to agential anger. All references to anger should be read this way. There are many cases of anger that do not instantiate a reactive attitude; or, if they do, they do not seem like the sorts of reactive attitudes in which I’m interested here. For example, I might become angry after a gust of wind blows an important paper from my grasp. In the cases of interest here, there must be some possibility of communicating our anger with the agent with whom we are angry, and it must be possible for that agent to answer us. Interestingly, Shoemaker (2015: 105, 162, and 202) argues that there is no communicative point in blaming or becoming angry with psychopaths. I’ll not explore that implication of the communicative account of agential anger.
Of course, the literature on Strawson’s piece focuses mostly on the more controversial step of his argument, which runs something like the following: those reactive attitudes and emotions form our responsibility practices (praise and blame), and moral responsibility is misunderstood by incompatibilists (and by consequentialist incompatibilists) because they assume that the facts of moral responsibility can be, or ought to be, explained by something other than those ordinary attitudes. I don’t need to address those controversies, for my purposes here. But for further reading on those controversies, see, for instance, Todd (2016), Beglin (2018), Coren (forthcoming), and the collection of essays in Russell (2016).
Derk Pereboom (2005) argues that we can and should suppress and ultimately get rid of some of the negative reactive attitudes.
This is importantly compatible with anger often being an appropriate response, such as in response to morally heinous actions.
Christopher Franklin (2013) asks why blame is preferable to sadness or disappointment as responses to horrendous evils and atrocities. Franklin persuasively motivates a plausible answer (and one that’s consistent with everything I support in this paper): our blaming practices are parts of how we express our standards of value, such that to give up on blame entirely (and adopt sadness instead as replies to evil) would be to “fail to value what we ought to value” (209). Myisha Cherry (2018) observes that moral anger may be proportionate or disproportionate; Cherry connects this proportionate anger to Aristotle’s claim that we ought to be angry to the right degree (and in the right way, at the right time, toward the appropriate people, and generally aiming at the mean – relative to us, not the objects alone – between excess and deficiency) (51).
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Coren, D. Anger and Absurdity. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 717–732 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10217-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10217-0