Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T07:04:52.559Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2023

Abstract

There has been recent discussion of a puzzle posed by emotions that are backward looking. Though our emotions commonly diminish over time, how can they diminish fittingly if they are an accurate appraisal of an event that is situated in the past? Agnes Callard (2017) has offered a solution by providing an account of anger in which anger is both backwards looking and resolvable, yet her account depends upon contrition to explain anger's fitting diminishment. My aim is to explain how anger can fittingly diminish even when there is lack of contrition. I propose a permissivism about fittingness by showing that both anger and compassion are fitting responses to blameworthy behaviour. I argue that anger is rendered fitting because it accurately appraises the behaviour, whereas compassion becomes fitting as a valuational response to what the behaviour reveals about the lived experience of the offender. I then respond to some worries my account raises, and I clarify details of my account to show that it is not unrealistic to the way some of our anger actually does diminish. I end with a proposal that our anger can fittingly diminish through the act of forgiveness when compassion is not a forthcoming affective response.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Editors' note: this paper is the joint winner of the 2022 Philosophy Essay Prize Competition.

References

Callard, Agnes, ‘The Reason to be Angry Forever’, in Cherry, M. and Flanagan, O. (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 123–37.Google Scholar
D'Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (2000), 6590.Google Scholar
Garrard, Eve and McNaughton, David, ‘In Defense of Unconditional Forgiveness’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103:1 (2003), 3960.Google Scholar
Marušić, Berislav, ‘Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief’, Philosophers’ Imprint, 18:25 (2018), 121.Google Scholar
Moller, Dan, ‘Love and Death’, Journal of Philosophy, 104:6 (2007), 301–16.Google Scholar
Na'aman, Oded, ‘The Fitting Resolution of Anger’, Philosophical Studies, 177:8 (2020), 2417–30.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C., ‘Transitional Anger’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1:1 (2015), 4156.Google Scholar
Reis-Dennis, Samuel, ‘Anger: Scary Good’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 97:3 (2019), 451–64.Google Scholar
Shoemaker, David, ‘You Oughta Know: Defending Angry Blame’, in Cherry, M. and Flanagan, O. (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 6788.Google Scholar
Silva, Laura, ‘Anger and its Desires’, European Journal of Philosophy, 29:4 (2022), 1115–35.Google Scholar