Abstract

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue about which she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger.

摘要

愤怒具有潜在的认知价值，因为它可以促进我们了解和理解我们愤怒的问题的过程。然而，愤怒的本质可能最终会破坏这个过程。例如，关于愤怒的常见非哲学抱怨经常将愤怒的人作为某种非理性的目标，其中一个未形成的假设是她的愤怒破坏了她理性地处理她愤怒的问题的能力。将此假设称为对愤怒的情绪不合理的指控。这种指控在激怒那些处于边缘化或受压迫地位的人的愤怒时是有害的，它可能威胁到他们所面临的不公正问题上的声音。因此，在本文中，我对这一指控进行了急需的审问。首先，利用关于愤怒对决策影响的经验文献，我充实了这一指控，以及为什么它对如何捍卫愤怒的认知价值构成威胁。其次，我认为关于愤怒的情绪非理性指控仍然是没有根据的，至少在政治愤怒的共同背景下是这样。