Responding to Wrongdoing
I’ve been recently thinking about small-stakes conflicts of the following form: One party is angry with or resentful towards someone, while a friendly third-party extols the wisdom of giving up anger and resentment for pragmatic reasons. Typically, these pragmatic reasons center on anger not doing anything happy or productive for the wronged party. The odd thing is that I frequently find myself occupying both roles: I’m often the person getting angry, and I’m often the person preaching the virtue of simply relinquishing blame—not because the other doesn’t deserve it, but because, in certain sorts of cases, blame just doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything.
Here are two cases of what I have in mind (in which I’ve often played both roles):
Road Rage: Someone blows through a stop sign and nearly swipes your car. It’s not a life-or-death situation—they were only going 20 miles per hour—but it was a close call. You see they were clearly on their phone, and you’re instantly angry. Maybe you honk and express your anger using an appendage. And maybe your anger lingers for the final ten minutes until you’re home. However, immediately upon realizing that no damage or harm was done, your friend in the passenger seat questions the wisdom of becoming that angry (and of fueling it for the next ten minutes). Their sentiment is some version of the following: “I get it—the guy is totally an idiot. But you’re never going to see him again, and I doubt that seeing you give him the bird is going to correct his habit of texting and driving. You’re just getting mad (and remaining mad) for no end.”
One-Off Irritant: My partner’s job requires frequent travel to work with people on a one-time basis. Sometimes, she works with very irritating people. And sometimes, those people anger her to great extents, and I hear about it after the sessions are over. Sometimes the offending party does something that’s amusing or absurd, and hearing about that is somewhat fun. But other times, I feel like my partner’s resentment and continued frustration just isn’t ‘doing anything for her.’ My sentiment is some version of the following: “I get it—that woman selfishly derailed the training session trying to showcase her own abilities. But you’re never going to see her again, and you seem to be reupping your anger for no real end.”
These cases have the following features: The offended party is correct about the blameworthiness of the action and about whether the party they are angry with is a fitting subject of their blame. Secondly, the sympathetic third party is suggesting giving up on or letting go of blaming emotions (anger, resentment, etc.) on the basis of practical considerations: whether continuing to fuel these emotions is ‘getting you anything.’
I’ve been thinking about these sorts of cases for several reasons. One is self-interest. Like I said, I frequently find myself playing both roles: the angry blamer with no productive outlet and the third-party extolling the virtues of giving up that anger. In the broader philosophical literature on reactive attitudes, blame, and responsibility, there are several prominent lines of thought that either state or imply that when a genuine wrong has occurred, we have an imperative to feel (and possibly express) the right sort of fitting reactive blaming attitudes in turn. Interestingly, there are several lines of thought endorsing this conclusion for divergent reasons.
Christopher Franklin (2013) makes the case that blame is the only means by which we defend and protect our values. That is, when we are genuinely wronged, blaming the wrongdoer is the only way for us to fully defend our moral values (or objects of moral value). And because moral values (and objects of value) should be defended, we have an imperative to blame people when they wrong us.
Christine Korsgaard (1992 & 1996) takes a different line: following Strawson, she interestingly suggests that our experience and expression of reactive attitudes show others a type of respect. When we become angry and resentful towards someone in response to how they treat us, we hold them interpersonally accountable; we treat them as agents who can deserve our fitting reply to how they choose to treat us. Korsgaard, though, adds some interesting Kantian topspin to Strawson’s idea in a way that makes blaming people who have genuinely wronged us more absolute. Korsgaard takes the second formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative—to treat others always an end and never as a means—and reinterprets what it means to treat others as end as meaning that we hold them responsible for what they do. That is, we should react to people, not according to what suits our needs, but by what their actions warrant. And one way we do this, Korsgaard suggests, is by reactively blaming people when they genuinely wrong us.
Finally, Amia Srinivasan (2018) address this question is a more political context. Focusing on anger in response to political injustice, Srinivasan says that debates about whether anger and resentment are counterproductive are missing something critical. Even when anger is decisively counterproductive, Srinivasan suggests that there is a value to fittingly responding to the way the world is. In other words, there’s a value to blaming people which can’t be undercut by counterproductivity critiques. (And, when circumstances force the wronged party to suppress this justified anger, there’s a secondary instance of affective injustice: the injustice of not being able to express one’s reaction to the original wrong.) Srinivasan’s argument is made in a political context involving large-scale and serious injustices. But there’s no obvious reason why her remarks shouldn’t apply to smaller-scale, lower-stakes wrongdoings as well.
When we synthesize these three distinct lines of argumentation, we arrive at an interesting imperative: there’s something wrong with eschewing anger in response to legitimate wrongdoing. And here is where my interest arises: I find these arguments compelling, but when I think about implementing this conclusion, I can’t help but think something has gone awry.
I can’t help but think about people who, generally speaking, don’t let minor injustices rile them up. These are the people who tend to let things like a near-fender-bender or an arrogant coworker roll off their back. I think we tend to admire these people—I certainly do at least. But letting go of or giving up on blame in this way occupies an odd position in the philosophical literature on blame. When we relinquish blame for our own practical reasons, we don’t have to do so by pretending as if the wrongdoer isn’t a fit recipient of our blame. In other words, we don’t have to pretend that an exempting condition obtains (like a mental impairment or exculpatory childhood). We can simply forswear or let go of our anger because we don’t want to be angry.
Already, there’s a conflict brewing. It seems like we admire people who do not become angry in response to every wrongdoing that genuinely merits anger. We esteem those who don’t treat minor offenses as a license for blame. However, on Franklin and Korsgaard’s suggestions, when we fail to blame people for genuine wrongdoing, we fail to defend moral values and fail to treat wrongdoers as Kantian ends in and of themselves.
But consider the kind of people who never forswear anger—the people who take every injustice as an opportunity for blame. It seems like these people are missing something, not just about what’s perhaps best in that situation, but about their own agency. People who get angry at every offense seem to be failing as agents in an interesting way; they seem to be allowing external forces to rule their emotional lives in a way that relinquishes their own agency in the way they themselves respond to wrong.
When should we become angry and when is it wiser to let it go? I’m not sure (and I lack the space to further ramble on). But I’m drawn to an approach that avoids narrow utility calculations as a guide to when we want to be angry. There’s something more appealing about a particularist approach, but the basis of what determines a wise response is completely opaque to me, at least at the moment. Hopefully, in raising these questions, I’ve motioned towards an interesting challenge that plays an important role in thinking about our everyday lives—a question of how we balance what morality might demand with the kinds of characters we wish to cultivate.
Contributor
Jordan Myers
Graduate Fellow
