The aptness of anger

Speaker: Dr Amia Srinivasan, Fellow, All Souls College Oxford
Chair: Professor George Letsas & Professor Riz Mokal, UCL
Admission: Free
Series: Social & Legal Philosophy Colloquia 2015

It is both a philosophical and political commonplace to claim that victims of injustice ought not be angry because their anger is counterproductive. A counter-tradition defends the psychic and political usefulness of anger. This debate obscures the fact that anger is normatively evaluable independently of its consequences: we should distinguish the question of whether anger is intrinsically justified (viz. an apt response to the facts) from the question of whether anger is instrumentally justified (viz. a productive response to the facts). Contexts of injustice are rife with occasions for anger that is justified in the first sense but unjustified in the second. Attending to this phenomenon – of apt but counterproductive anger – might in turn teach us something about the place of anger in a rational politics, about the nature and extent of injustice, and about moral conflicts faced by both victims of injustice and their allies.

About the speaker

Amia is a fellow in philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford. She recently completed her DPhil under the supervision of John Hawthorne and Tim Williamson. In her dissertation she suggests an approach to epistemology, ethics and metaphilosophy that is more tragic. A tragic approach is one that acknowledges the way in which our knowledge — of our own minds, of what is normatively required of us, and of philosophical truths — is hostage to forces outside our control. She is currently thinking about the role of anger in politics, the nature of feminist philosophy, and what sort of metaphysics/epistemology (realist or anti-realist) is required for political action. Amia will be joining the UCL Philosophy Department as a Lecturer in Autumn 2015.

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