Dr. Mara Bollard, Assistant Director of the Weinberg Institute, will present "In defense of distinctively moral anger."

ABSTRACT

Anger is thought by many philosophers to be central to morality. Anger often occurs as a response to wrongdoing and seems to play an important role in the blaming and punishing of wrongdoers. As such, it’s neither uncommon nor surprising for anger to be referred to as a moral emotion, though what precisely is meant by the term “moral anger” is not always clear: does generic, garden variety anger, which is likely familiar to us from computer malfunctions or heavy traffic, also show up in the moral domain, perhaps as a morally appropriate, fitting, or epistemically reliable response to (certain features of) wrongdoing? Or is there a distinctive psychological state of moral anger that is differentiable from generic anger, and from other emotion types? I defend the claim that there is a distinctively moral kind of anger. I argue that moral anger counts as distinctively moral primarily in virtue of its action tendencies, which are typically triggered by perceived injustice against oneself or others and aim to satisfy two moral goals: a communicative goal, and a retributive goal.