The Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is a qualitative spatial reasoning formalism, developed in knowledge representation and geographical information systems. We argue that RCC can be viewed as a more fine-grained approach to the use of Euler diagrams to visualize categorical statements like ‘all A are B’. We present RCC using the syntax of first-order modal logic and a topological semantics. We compare the Gergonne relations (a well-known set of 5 jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint relations between two non-empty sets, visualized (...) using Euler-type diagrams) with RCC8 (a similar set of 8 relations for regions). (shrink)

It can be difficult to articulate a substantive materialism in film and media studies, owing to the slipperiness of that term and its cognates. Changes in media and their technology can even bring out the materialist elements of supposedly idealist views in past film theory, thus raising the question of whether there is any meaningful contrast with “materialism.” We proffer the hypothesis that these difficulties lose their force as we move away from the global center and toward sites shaped by (...) material scarcity and colonial extraction. Consequently, a materialism thought through to its full implications must be a geographically grounded one. An example is the sololoy cinema articulated by Peruvian filmmaker and programmer Aroldo Murguia: an idea of cinema as materially continuous with cellulose nitrate dolls and related practices of reappropriation in Mexican popular art. We also explore the idea that the more a film is geographically situated away from colonial standardization, the more likely it is to be diegetically transparent to the resources making that very film possible, from its manufacturing to screening to preservation. These hypotheses are presented in the spirit of introducing a set of six written essays and three hybrid audiovisual/written essays, all of them concerned with geographically situated film materials. The essays are organized according to the topics “Infrastructures and Ecologies,” “Archives and Historicity,” and “Concepts and Metaphors.” Ultimately, this Introduction to the special issue “Filmic Matter and Geographic Specificity” frames these essays as models of a vision of geographic specificity’s material survival, as well as of how speaking about the survival of matter is indissolubly linked to place. (shrink)

Victims of oppression are often called to let go of their anger in order to facilitate better discussion to bring about the end of their oppression. According to Amia Srinivasan, this constitutes an affective injustice. In this paper, we use research on emotion regulation to shed light on the nature of affective injustice. By drawing on the literature on emotion regulation, we illustrate specifically what kind of work is put upon people who are experiencing affective injustice and why it (...) is damaging. We begin by explaining affective injustice and how it can amount to a call for emotion regulation. Then we explain the various techniques that can be used to regulate emotions and explain how each might be harmful here. In the penultimate section of the paper, we explain how the upshot of this is that victims of affective injustice are left with a dilemma. Either they try to regulate their anger in a way that involves ignoring the fact of their oppression or they regulate it in a way that is likely to be harmful for them. Finally, we consider whether there are any good solutions to this dilemma, and how this issue opens up the possibility for further research into emotion regulation and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, using it as a paradigm case to argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (not only an epistemic one). Drawing on Marilyn Frye, I introduce the concept of “uptake” as a tool for identifying anger gaslighting behavior (persistent, pervasive uptake refusal for apt anger). But I also demonstrate the larger significance (...) of uptake in the study of affective injustice: just as the concept of credibility names the epistemic behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an epistemic being, the concept of uptake names the uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being. I answer Miranda Fricker’s epistemic notion of a prejudicial credibility economy with the affective notion of prejudicial uptake economies: uptake, like credibility, can be produced in a deficit for one social group relative to a surplus for another. Deviating from the parallels with Fricker, for whom the injustice of epistemic injustice is due to prejudice in the motives or character of individuals, as well as from accounts that ground it in aptness or affective goods, I suggest that the injustice of anger gaslighting behavior can be located at the structural scale of power relationships between social groups, in the tradition of Iris Marion Young. Anger gaslighting behavior counts as unjust wherever it (re)produces prejudicial uptake economies. Adapting sociological concepts of feeling rules and the emotion work they demand, I introduce the concepts of “uptake rules” and “uptake work” to further enable analysis of uptake economies as affective social structures, and to suggest a site for resistant or reparative affective agency. (shrink)

If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the (...) class='Hi'>anger that saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The orthodox view of anger takes desires for revenge or retribution to be central to the emotion. In this paper, I develop an empirically informed challenge to the retributive view of anger. In so doing, I argue that a distinct desire is central to anger: a desire for recognition. Desires for recognition aim at the targets of anger acknowledging the wrong they have committed, as opposed to aiming for their suffering. In light of the centrality of (...) this desire for recognition, I argue that the retributive view of anger should be abandoned. I consider and dismiss two types of moves that can be made on the part of a proponent of the orthodox view in response to my argument. I propose that a pluralist view, which allows for both retribution and recognition in anger, is to be preferred. (shrink)

Luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. urge that Black Americans love even those who hate them. This can look like a rejection of anger at racial injustice. We see this rejection, too, in the growing trend of characterizing social justice movements as radical hate groups, and people who get angry at injustice as bitter and unloving. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum argue that anger is backward-looking, status focused, and retributive. Citing the life of the Prodigal Son, the victims of (...) the Charleston Church shooting, Gandhi, and King, she claims that we should choose love instead of anger – not only in our intimate relationships but also in the political realm. Buddhist monk and scholar, Śāntideva, argued that anger is an obstacle to love. Anger leads to suffering. Love frees us from suffering. All this makes an initially compelling case against anger at racial injustice. In addition, although philosophers Jeffrie Murphy and Antti Kauppinen argue that anger communicates self-respect and valuing, respectively––they make no connection between agape love and anger. In this essay I’ll show that the love King and others have in mind––agape love––is not only compatible with anger at hateful racists and complicit others, but finds valuable expression in such anger. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that susceptibility to suitable emotional responses is part of what it is to value something. Indeed, the value of at least some things calls for such emotional responses – if we lack them, we don’t respond appropriately to their value. In this paper, I argue that susceptibility to anger is an essential component of valuing other people, ourselves, and our relationships. The main reason is that various modes of valuing, such as respect, self-respect, and love, (...) ground normative expectations towards others and ourselves. And holding someone accountable for violating legitimate normative expectations involves emotions from the anger family, such as resentment and indignation. I hold that such forms of anger, which aim at getting the target to conform to expectations or lower their unduly elevated status, are neither inherently problematic or dispensable parts of the package of attitudes involved in valuing. Finally, thinking about anger’s role in valuing also helps see when it is out of place or immature – roughly, it is often excessive, because we easily exaggerate the magnitude of the value involved, the harm or threat to it, or the degree of the target’s moral responsibility. (shrink)

Arrogance has widespread negative consequences for epistemic practices. Arrogant people tend to intimidate and humiliate other agents, and to ignore or dismiss their views. They have a propensity to mansplain. They are also angry. In this paper I explain why anger is a common manifestation of arrogance in order to understand the effects of arrogance on debate. I argue that superbia (which is the kind of arrogance that is my concern here) is a vice of superiority characterised by an (...) overwhelming desire to diminish other people in order to excel and by a tendency to arrogate special entitlements for oneself, including the privilege of not having to justify one’s claims. (shrink)

I argue that anger helps us possess reasons to intervene against others. This is because fitting anger disposes us to intervene against others in light of reasons to do so. I propose that anger is a presentation of reasons that seems to rationalize such interventions, in much the same way that perceptual experience is a presentation of reasons that seems to rationalize our judgements about our environment. In this way, anger can help us possess reasons that (...) make specific actions rational to perform. Moreover, the significance of anger to practical rationality informs how we should regulate anger, especially the anger of others. Along these lines, I argue that it is wrong to prevent anger to the extent that this prevents someone's possession of reasons to intervene, and it is right to provoke anger to the extent that this enables someone's possession of reasons to intervene. (shrink)

This paper appears in an interdisciplinary collection of essays, mainly in Psychology, offering a general survey and assessment of the leading views on anger in Ancient Greek ethics – those of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. One of the key ideas in Stoic ethics is the rejection of acting on the basis of our passions/emotions, especially anger, which Seneca singles out as particularly harmful in his On Anger. Accordingly, anger is irrational and to be avoided, completely (...) in the ideal case. The Stoic 'ideal of eradication', however, is not common among Ancient Greek Philosophers. Plato and Aristotle offer different views of the role of anger in a virtuous person’s life, one where anger is not merely an undesirable feature of our lives that should be eradicated. Aristotle argues, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that the virtuous person experiences anger on the right occasions, in the right way, and to the right extent. The right point, on Aristotle’s ‘doctrine of the mean’, lies on a continuum between excess and deficiency, and must be determined by reason, through a detailed grasp of the particular circumstances. Plato, on the other hand, argues in the Republic that the soul consists of three parts, and that the ‘spirited’ part is the seat of anger and our other aggressive motivations. On Plato’s tripartite model of the soul, a virtuous person’s soul is ruled by the rational part while the spirited part follows and assists it, as opposed to being subdued or suppressed. In different ways, both Plato’s 'ideal of rational alignment' and Aristotle’s 'ideal of moderation' treat anger as playing a more active and constructive role in a good life than does Stoicism. Their treatments, I argue, offer a more realistic perspective on our aggressive motivations and a sounder path towards well-being. I maintain, moreover, that Plato’s unconventional conception of anger is in the best position to accommodate the most sophisticated contemporary thoughts on the matter. (shrink)

Anger is often an appropriate reaction to harms and injustices, but is it a politically beneficial one? Martha Nussbaum (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1), 41–56, 2015, Anger and Forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 2016) has argued that, although anger is useful in initially recruiting agents for action, anger is typically counterproductive to securing the political aims of those harmed. After the initial shockwave of outrage, Nussbaum argues that to be effective at enacting positive social (...) change, groups and individuals alike, must move quickly out of the state of anger. Feminist theorists (Frye, The Politics of Reality. Crossing Press, 1983; Lorde, 1997; Narayan, Hypatia 3 (2): 31–48, 1988) on the other hand have for long highlighted the efficacy of anger, as well as its moral and epistemic value, in fighting against the oppressive status quo. It might be thought therefore that for political action to be effective, a continued state of anger is preferable. Protestors must after all create and sustain a sense of moral obligation and justice. A main way of doing so is to promote successive moral shocks that trigger outrage (Jasper, Emotion Review 6 (3): 208–213, 2014). I present a novel, empirically informed defense of anger’s efficacy in political action. Nussbaum holds a traditional view on the nature of anger, inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics, which holds that anger constitutively involves a desire for retribution. The view that anger is counterproductive falls out of this and is dominant in academic work as well as in our personal and political lives. Based on work in social psychology, I argue that we need to reconsider this. In doing so, I highlight anger’s aim for recognition, rather than retribution, as key. Furthermore, I uncover conditions for anger’s political efficacy, as well as reasons for why the traditional view of anger has been so pervasive. (shrink)

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept (...) of feminist fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation. (shrink)

Anger has an undeniable hand in human suffering and horrific deeds. Various schools of thought call for eliminating or moderating the capacity for anger. I argue that the capacity for anger, like the capacity for grief, is at the heart of our humanity.

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine why anger exists by combining evolutionary psychology with a sociology of digital communication. Drawing on the recalibrational theory of anger developed by Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, it argues that anger evolved as a strategic social emotion designed to renegotiate unfair welfare tradeoffs, enforce boundaries and deter exploitation. Far from being a loss of control, anger functioned as (...) an internal alarm system that mobilised energy, signalled resolve and restored balance within small-scale social environments. The article then shows how this adaptive mechanism becomes systematically distorted in digital societies. Networked communication systems continuously activate anger through symbolic cues, algorithmic amplification and attention-based incentives while removing the conditions necessary for resolution, negotiation and recalibration. As a result, anger shifts from an episodic corrective response to a chronic background state. What once stabilised cooperation now accumulates into permanent grievance, narrowed judgement and identity-based hostility. The article argues that digital platforms do not merely host anger but exploit its evolved alarm properties, transforming a survival mechanism into an infrastructure of engagement, visibility and power. Understanding why anger exists is therefore essential for explaining both its historical value and its contemporary dysfunction in networked public life. (shrink)

Anger occupies a paradoxical position in democratic life: it is simultaneously one of the most powerful catalysts for civic engagement and one of the greatest threats to democratic stability. This paper argues that anger functions as both a vital diagnostic and mobilizing force alerting societies to injustice, equalizing emotional resources for marginalized groups, and propelling citizens into participation—yet becomes corrosive when it shifts from issue-based grievances to identity-based animus. Drawing on political psychology, social movement theory, and empirical evidence, (...) the analysis traces anger’s dual trajectory: its approach-oriented nature overcomes apathy and drives collective action, while chronic, identity-driven rage fosters affective polarization, diminishes cognitive flexibility, amplifies echo chambers and misinformation, and reframes democratic compromise as moral treason. African cases ranging from ethnic polarization in Nigeria and Kenya to xenophobic violence in South Africa illustrate how unchecked anger can erode deliberative norms and contribute to democratic dysfunction. The paper concludes that the goal is not to eliminate anger from politics which is an impossible and undesirable aim but to channel it productively. Employing the metaphor of a combustion engine, it contends that righteous indignation provides essential energy for democratic movement, but requires robust containing structures such as institutional reforms, protected civic spaces, civic education, and improved digital habits that allow high-stakes disagreement without descending into tribal warfare. By building a better fireplace for political anger, democracies can harness its transformative potential while safeguarding the deliberative trust and mutual accommodation essential to their survival. Keywords: Political Anger, Democratic Stability, Affective Polarization, Civic Engagement -/- . (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of the moralization of anger have not, to date, substantively engaged classical Chinese thought. This is unfortunate, given the abundance of appeals to moral anger in the classical literature, especially among the Confucians, and the suppression, expression, and functionalization of anger. Accordingly, this essay engages in two general projects: one interpretive, one applied. The interpretive project examines the manner in which classical Confucian thought regards anger as having both destructive and constructive aspects, how these (...) aspects are unavoidable human experiences, and how they can (and should) be regulated or recruited by ritualized social forms. Specifically, while the early Confucians at times depict anger as a precarious feeling to be assuaged, there are circumstances in which anger is not only understandable, but morally warranted. In this tradition, adherence to ritual prescriptions is a primary means by which problematic anger is alleviated while moral anger is effectively expressed, achieving prosocial ends without producing undue harm. This understanding and analysis of anger from a Confucian perspective gives rise to an applied project that considers how even contemporary, non-Confucians can ritualize and deploy anger for positive moral and political ends. In particular, I examine how forms of reconciliation, etiquette, and protest can be construed as rituals through which moral anger is effectively channeled. (shrink)

In this article I argue that characterizations of anger as a hostile emotion may be mistaken. My project is empirically informed and is partly descriptive, partly diagnostic. It is descriptive in that I am concerned with what anger is, and how it tends to manifest, rather than with what anger should be or how moral anger is manifested. The orthodox view on anger takes it to be, descriptively, an emotion that aims for retribution. This view (...) fits well with anger being a hostile emotion, as retribution is punitive. I will argue that a different view of anger deserves our attention. On this alternative view, anger aims for recognition of harms done, rather than for the punishment of those who have committed them. I argue that we have reason to favour a strong view that excludes retribution from anger’s main aims. In addition, I offer a diagnosis of the reasons that led the retributive view of anger to become, and remain, orthodoxy. This diagnosis provides indirect reason to give my descriptive proposal serious consideration, for it highlights that the orthodox view has dominated folk and philosophical conceptions of anger for reasons that do not speak in favour of the view’s veracity. The view that anger is a hostile emotion will therefore emerge as in need of serious scrutiny. (shrink)

I argue that recent attempts to vindicate blame have failed to fully face the vengeful feelings and angry outbursts that have led to scepticism about blame’s ethical status. This paper ende...

In this brief essay, I sketch out the philosophical landscape considering anger in general, and political anger in particular. I begin by sketching anger's profile and its relation to judgments. I also consider the role anger plays in moral life. I then consider how philosophers have conceived of political anger, particularly anger that arises in a context of oppression. I survey claims in support of anger's value, as well as debates around its counterproductivity. (...) And I suggest that debates can benefit from taking seriously different species of anger, and the injustices and burdens that are implicit in our forswearing, eradication, or moderation recommendations. I conclude with reflections on recent research and suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Emotions are an everyday occurrence. Much work has been done into what the point of emotion is and what part emotions might play in our lives. The great impact emotions have on our lives means it’s not surprising that great philosophers have studied them over the centuries. Anger is an emotion that we encounter every day and most of us are very familiar with. Anger is a response to some ‘wrongfully’ inflicted damage to someone or something that one (...) cares about. When this happens, it is natural for us to feel the need for ‘payback. It is generally agreed by most philosophers that this wish for retribution is a key part of feeling anger. If there is no wish for retribution in your mind when you think you experience anger then perhaps you are experiencing grief or some other emotion. Nussbaum states that anger is a central threat to decent human interactions and posits that a necessary component of anger is the wish for retribution. She states that a wish for retribution can occur independently of anger but anger cannot occur independently of a wish for retribution. In this case – we would be feeling different emotion. This paper has two sections; In section One I will discuss in detail Nussbaum’s view, the two concepts of anger she presents: ‘Payback Anger’ and ‘Status Anger’. The former being anger with a retributive element and the latter being where one would react to an insult or wrong with anger in order to ‘put someone back in their place’ so to speak. This is followed by a brief word on why Nussbaum thinks anger might be beneficial in some circumstances. Section Two discusses cases of anger without the retributive element and how Nussbaum might respond to these cases. We will see how we can be angry at something within our circle of concern but simply want an end to the issue such as a war. This may not involve retribution but still generates anger. I discuss how we can be angry at a flatmate or family member but not want retribution. “Self-Retributive anger” comes up as another case where there does not seem to be retribution involved in anger towards the self. I also discuss here what retribution might consist of and how Nussbaum’s view is unclear on this. The conclusion will summarise the objections to Nussbaum’s view and the objections to that view culminating in a request for further empirical research to determine if we can establish the nature of the feeling of anger in humans. (shrink)

I argue that the evolutionary history of anger has substantive implications for normative ethics. In the process, I develop an evolutionary account of anger and its influence on action. First, I consider a prominent argument by Peter Singer and Joshua Greene. They conclude that evolutionary explanations of human cooperation debunk – or undercut the evidential value of – the moral intuitions supporting duty ethics (as opposed to utilitarian or consequentialist ethics). With this argument they aim to defend consequentialist (...) theories. However, their argument also threatens to debunk intuitions that support consequentialist theories. I give a novel argument that overcomes this difficulty. Specifically, I offer an evolutionary story about anger that can explain retributive, duty-oriented intuitions concerning punishment. This explanation debunks these intuitions (and not others) by showing that they were selected for their biological consequences rather than their accuracy (concerning duties to punish). I develop this explanation by raising and resolving three additional problems. First, prominent evolutionary explanations of retributive motives fail because they appeal to models that apply only to organisms with strategic insight. To mitigate this problem, I explain the existence of a retributive-like motive in rodents by appealing to an economic model of resource competition, which applies to organisms without strategic insight. Second, I show that human anger was shaped by resource competition of this kind. To do so, I develop evidential criteria to determine when psychological systems in different species share common evolutionary origins. I deploy these criteria to argue that human anger and the retributive motive in rodents derive from the same ancestral trait. Finally, the continuity of anger across human and nonhuman animals stands in tension with the idea that anger causes purposive behavior like retribution or retaliation. I argue that differences between the angry behaviors of human and nonhuman animals are differences in degree and not in kind. In the end, this evolutionary story both explains and undermines retributive intuitions, but not in the straightforward way that Singer and Greene suppose. (shrink)

Moral philosophers have defended anger as an important part of our moral lives. In spite of these defenses, skeptics have nonetheless argued that it would be better all things considered to get over anger to the extent that we can. They will often point to moral exemplars like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi to show both (a) that we can successfully overcome our feelings of anger and (b) that we would be morally better off doing so. (...) In this chapter, I argue against this aspiration. Those who advocate for such an aspiration fail to recognize that getting over anger would require us to radically reshape our moral psychology. I argue that feelings of anger are more central to our moral emotional lives than skeptics realize and that they cannot be removed without altering other valuable moral commitments. (shrink)

Fear, anger and hopelessness were the most frequent traumatic emotional responses in the general public during the first stage of outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in the Czech Republic (N = 1,000). The four most frequent categories of fear were determined: (a) fear of the negative impact on household finances, (b) fear of the negative impact on the household finances of significant others, (c) fear of the unavailability of health care, and (d) fear of an insufficient food supply. The (...) pessimistic communications used by the Czech mass media contributed to intensifying traumatic feelings, fears and psychological distress in the general public during the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic. The anxious emotional tone of the messages and the presentation of selectively chosen “bad ending stories” contributed to the psychological traumatization of the Czech population. This form of communication was motivated by an effort to reach the broadest audience possible. Older adults were the most affected part of the population because of their isolation and their very limited opportunity to share their worries and emotions with others. The communication used by the Czech mass media during the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic is a representative example of a traumatizing form of media communication during an epidemic. (shrink)

Moral Outrage Networks: The Sociology of Digital Anger examines how anger has become one of the dominant organising forces of contemporary moral and political life. Rather than treating outrage as an emotional excess, a media pathology, or a democratic failure, the book argues that moral anger is a structural condition of morality itself. Wherever moral boundaries exist, anger emerges as the mechanism through which violations are detected, communicated, and sanctioned. In digital societies, this function has been (...) absorbed into networked communication systems that amplify, stabilise, and monetise outrage. -/- The book develops the concept of moral outrage networks to describe how platforms, institutions, and publics co-produce continuous cycles of moral accusation and response. Drawing on moral psychology, sociology, media theory, and political philosophy, it shows how moral disagreement increasingly takes the form of permanent indignation rather than deliberation. Moral outrage networks do not merely reflect conflict over values; they actively organise political identities, attention economies, and symbolic power. -/- Through a genealogy of anger across historical media regimes, the book traces how moral emotions were once embedded in local communities and institutions, and how digital infrastructures have transformed anger into an always-on, scalable resource. It analyses algorithmic amplification, outrage exploitation, and contemporary propaganda models, demonstrating how moral emotions are operationalised within platform capitalism. -/- The final sections confront the ethical paradox at the heart of digital moral life. If anger is necessary for morality to exist at all, how can it be restrained without undermining moral vigilance itself? The book does not offer prescriptions for eliminating outrage, but instead clarifies the conditions under which moral anger retains its critical function, and the conditions under which it becomes self-reinforcing, corrosive, or nihilistic. In doing so, it provides a sociological framework for understanding polarisation, media distrust, and the transformation of moral authority in networked societies. (shrink)

For many, anger has been seen as irrationality, even as illness. But it seems that anger-related disorder and its culture-relatedness have not receive much attention in psychiatry. Like backward-looking ressentiment, hwabyeong 火病can be literally translated into anger disorder. In this paper, I examine the notion of anger and culture with the help of considering the case of hwabyeong as a Korean culture-bound syndrome (hereafter, CBS). Drawing on historical changes in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of (...) Mental Disorders) and cases of hwabyeong as CBS, I will argue that the social and cultural aspects of mental disorder are indispensable parts. Additionally, it will be suggested that the rigid distinction between CBS and mental disorders is questionable. First, I begin by examining Jarome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis and Ian Hacking’s social constructionism on mental disorder. Next, given that the illness is common among poor old women who suffered from patriarchal social structures, I question whether hwabyeong is really a culturally specific illness. Moreover, hwabyeong cannot be properly understood without considering unequal power relations and extremely limited ranges of one's agency. Thus, calling it culture- bound may be due to WEIRD-ish (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), culturally stereotypical prejudice as well as misogynic thinking concerning hwabyeong. In present times, it's worth noting that, despite common biases, hwabyeong or han (恨) is no longer solely a Korean phenomenon, thanks to recent societal advancements. In conclusion, I show that curing hwabyeong or anger management is not just medical but sociopolitical matters. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine 'rage bait' and 'anger clicking' as core mechanisms of contemporary digital media economies, arguing that outrage has become a primary driver of visibility, engagement, and profit. Building on the concepts of the ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it shows how the classical logic of propaganda oriented toward silence, conformity, and manufactured consent has been structurally inverted. In platform-based attention economies, dissent (...) is no longer suppressed but actively cultivated, and anger functions as a predictable, extractable resource. The principle that ‘angry people click more’ is analysed not as a psychological curiosity but as an organising rule of digital capitalism, shaping content production, algorithmic ranking, and user behaviour. Rage bait is shown to rely less on plausibility or persuasion than on provocation, exploiting the fact that outrage generates reaction even when claims are openly implausible. Anger clicking converts moral concern into measurable engagement, transforming denunciation, correction, and ridicule into unpaid digital labour. Drawing on research in political communication, social psychology, and the sociology of online harassment, the article demonstrates how anger circulates collectively through networked infrastructures that reward escalation, polarisation, and symbolic conflict. The result is a communicative environment in which truth is economically disadvantaged, outrage is structurally rewarded, and dissent becomes a permanent and profitable output of the media system. Rage bait and anger clicking thus emerge not as pathologies of online culture but as rational adaptations to the incentive structures of platform capitalism. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Anger, far from being only a personal emotion, often signals a breakdown in existing societal structures like the justice system. This does not mean we should uncritically submit to our angry impulses, but it does mean that anger can reveal larger issues in the world worthy of attention. If we banish anger from the socio-political landscape, we risk losing its insights. To defend that claim, I turn to a range of sources from ancient China and Greece—philosophy, poetry, (...) drama, and political theory—that depict and analyze anger in a variety of situations and people. My basic claim is not that anger is simply “good” or “bad” but rather that it helps reveal and clarify our values, often pointing us towards real situations deserving of our ethical scrutiny. I situate the project amidst ongoing debates in analytic philosophy of emotions and feminist philosophy, joining the conceptual precision and clarity of the former with the latter’s attention to lived experience. Such cross-cultural, multidisciplinary conceptual analysis of anger parochializes Aristotelian understandings of anger by introducing different types and functions of anger. What role does anger play, for example, in a minister rebuking the king in an ancient Chinese court? How do Greek sources depict female anger differently than male anger, and why? By using ancient and comparative sources, I show how deeply anger is shaped by particular cultural and social structures, whilst remaining recognizably anger. (shrink)

This article treats rituals of apology and reconciliation as responses to social discontent, specifically to expressions of anger and resentment. A standard account of social discontent, found both in the literature on transitional justice and in the social theory of Axel Honneth, has it that these emotional expressions are evidence of an underlying psychic need for recognition. In this framework, the appropriate response to expressions of anger and discontent is a recognitive one that includes victims of injustice in (...) the political community by showing them that they are valued members. In the aftermath of injustices, such recognitive responses are thought to include acknowledgments of victim suffering, reconciliatory gestures, and rituals of contrition. I will argue, against this narrative, that treating victim anger as evidence of an underlying need for recognition threatens to depoliticize emotional responses to injustice by treating them as symptoms of psychic injuries instead of intelligible political claims. Discussing mainly the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation process set up to deal with the history of the Indian Residential School system, I show how rituals of reconciliation and apology, in the context of settler-colonial states and neoliberal politics, serve as a biopolitical management of “bad” emotions. This will serve as a critique both of the politics of reconciliation and of social–theoretic approaches that treat expressions of discontent exclusively through a lens of recognition. Instead, I argue, in politics as well as theory, we need to engage with emotional expressions as intelligible political claims that exceed the psychic need for recognition. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe anger as a patterned social force that has been reorganised by digital communication systems into a form of distributed social infrastructure. Drawing on sociological work on anger and emotion, it argues that anger is neither a private disturbance nor a purely spontaneous moral reaction, but a socially produced, socially sanctioned, and unevenly distributed process shaped by status, roles, inequality, and institutional (...) pressure. In networked publics, the article shows, anger is increasingly detached from immediate interaction and reattached to platform-driven cycles of provocation, attribution, display, and reward. This shift produces a public sphere in which low-level irritation becomes continuous, moral interpretation is accelerated, and blame is made readily available through simplified causal stories and symbolic enemies. Anger operates simultaneously as a power emotion and a mechanism of social control: it asserts dominance, signals entitlement, disciplines boundaries, and legitimises punishment, while also arising from perceived powerlessness when harm is judged remediable and blameworthy. By integrating research on social rage, political escalation, and social learning, the article proposes that moral outrage online is best understood as learned behaviour reinforced by metrics, imitation, and network norms. The result is not simply ‘more anger’, but a new architecture of anger in which outrage becomes predictable, reproducible, and strategically valuable for actors and systems that benefit from attention, polarisation, and moral drama. The sociology of anger, the article concludes, must therefore expand beyond roles and institutions to include platforms, algorithmic feedback, and network effects as central determinants of how societies feel, judge, mobilise, and govern dissent. (shrink)

This paper proposes a comprehensive phenomenological reframing of anger as an **ontological breach** rather than a merely affective state. Drawing on Heideggerian attunement (*Stimmung*), Merleau-Ponty's corporeal intentionality, and Levinas's ethics of responsibility, I argue that anger reveals a rupture in what I term the "tonal field"—the prosodic-affective infrastructure through which intersubjective recognition is constituted and maintained[^intro1]. Unlike traditional emotion theories that treat anger as a reaction to be managed, this account positions anger as a **revelatory event** (...) that exposes failures in ethical reciprocity and dialogical continuity. -/- Integrating insights from speech emotion recognition (SER) research, neurolinguistic studies of prosody, and phenomenological analysis, I develop a framework for understanding anger as a form of "tonal drift"—a measurable deviation from an agent's established prosodic-ethical baseline that correlates with ontological misalignment. The paradox of angry expression—that it demands recognition while often foreclosing dialogue—is explained through careful analysis of how prosodic intensity triggers defensive rather than receptive responses in listeners. -/- Through detailed analysis of Sara Ahmed's "feminist killjoy" phenomenon and extended examination of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a case of collective tonal repair, the paper demonstrates how this framework illuminates both individual affective experience and collective social transformation. I conclude by exploring implications for therapeutic practice, restorative justice institutions, and the design of organizations committed to what I term "tonal justice"—the fair distribution of capacity to be heard and have one's voice count as credible. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that one can literally perceive someone's anger in their face, I argue that this would not be possible if what is perceived is a static facial signature of their anger. There is a product–process distinction in talk of facial expression, and I argue that one can see anger in someone's facial expression only if this is understood to be a process rather than a product.

Anger occupies a peculiar place in the context of human experience. Although it is a constant phenomenon in our everyday reality, we cannot actually say much about it. However, can we reduce anger to just an elusive emotion or even a sentiment nurtured in our consciousness? Our ancestors believed anger to be a powerful force, capable of taking control over us, without our consent. Can we still perceive anger that way? Research in psychology precisely explains the (...) results of anger but rarely is interested in how it exists and how it begins. Is it only a content of our consciousness or something more? What are its sources? In this paper the author will explain, using mainly the concepts of Seneca and M. Nussbaum, how anger occurs, what anger is and how unique it is to human condition. (shrink)

In this chapter I give an account of how our judgments of anger often play out in certain political instances. While contemporary philosophers of emotion have provided us with check box guides like “fittingness” and “size” for evaluating anger, I will argue that these guides do not by themselves help us escape the tendency to mark or unmark the boxes selectively, inconsistently, and erroneously. If anger—particularly anger in a political context—can provide information and spark positive change (...) or political destruction, then we have moral reasons to evaluate it properly. But can we? And what are the limitations and errors we often face when evaluating anger? I will begin by laying out the ways in which we evaluate emotions and the moral and epistemic errors we attribute to the angry agent in judgments of disapproval. Then I attempt to answer the question: How do we judge political anger improperly? An improper evaluation, in my view, does not take into account relevant information that is needed to evaluate the anger. An overly generous, uninformed, biased, or selfish process of evaluation produces an improper evaluation. We see this occur when we immediately evaluate anger. I will also identify two social discursive practices of improper evaluation as well as the moral and epistemic errors committed when anger evaluators participate in these practices. (shrink)

Feminists have long argued that emotions have a rightful place in politics. Anger, specifically, is often said to play a crucial role in alerting people to oppression and motivating resistance. The task of this paper is to elaborate these claims and to outline a conception of the political value of anger. In doing so, I argue against the view that anger is valuable if and because it expresses a sound moral judgment. Instead, we should see rage, in (...) the first place, as simply a response to having one’s practical aims in the world thwarted—there need be nothing moral or righteous about this feeling for it to have political potential. Second, unlike those who highlight anger’s connection with love or claims for equal dignity, I emphasise its tendency towards aggression. With this non-moralized conception of anger in hand, we can see how rage reveals practical problems in a way that can spur on a dialectical process of political articulation and organized action. The resulting standpoint from which one can articulate and resist one’s oppression based on one’s rage is not inherent in the experience of anger—rather it needs to be seen as a political achievement in itself. (shrink)

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many beings commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be (...) manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of forgiveness that is sensitive to recent work on anger. Like others, we claim anger involves an appraisal, namely that someone has done something wrong. But, we add, anger has two further functions. First, anger communicates to the wrongdoer that her act has been appraised as wrong and demands she feel guilty. This function enables us to explain why apologies make it reasonable to forgo anger and forgive. Second, anger (...) sanctions the wrongdoer for what she has done. This function allows us to explore the moral status of forgiveness, including why forgiveness is typically elective. (shrink)

The way that George Kelly treats moving from an act of love to an act of hate, via his formulation of the construct of hostility, may indicate how far apart Kelly’s model and embodied intersubjective approaches stand concerning the issue of the fundamental integrity of experiencing. All feeling and emotion for Kelly expresses an awareness of the relative ongoing success or failure in relating new events to one’s outlook. But his definition of hostility stands out from his account of guilt, (...) anxiety, fear and threat in that it consists of a two-stage process. -/- Kelly defines hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” -/- Notice that this definition combines awareness of a validational event(invalidation) with a response to that event(extortion of evidence). Furthermore, as we will see, the way in which the first step is understood determines the sense of the second step, and vice versa. The crucial importance of interpretation in fathoming what Kelly meant by hostility can be demonstrated in the following questions: -/- How far-reaching did he mean his definition to be? Is hostility the same thing as anger, and if so, is there such a thing as healthy, adaptive, anger, or do all forms of anger extort evidence? And what about subtle forms of affective perturbation like irritation and annoyance? Are these also forms of hostility? (shrink)

This chapter presents an account of an angrily virtuous, or patient, person informed by research on emotion in empirical and philosophical psychology. It is argued that virtue for anger is determined by excellence and deficiency with respect to all three of anger’s psychological functions: appraisal, motivation, and communication. Many competing accounts of virtue for anger assess it by attention to just one function; it is argued that singular evaluations of a person’s anger will ignore important dimensions (...) of anger that bear on virtue and vice. Thus, possessing excellence with respect to only one function of anger is insufficient for virtue. The account is also extended to the characteristic vices of anger: wrath and meekness. (shrink)

The analysis of anger’s role in politics needs to overcome the oversimplified views of anger as positive or negative. Instead, a more useful normative question is one that asks how we should distinguish between forms of anger that are appropriate or properly political, and those that are dangerous and impermissible, or antipolitical. By drawing on a conflict-theory framework that makes a normative distinction between agonistic and antagonistic conflicts, I argue that properly political anger should meet two (...) criteria: fittingness and boundedness. Anger can sometimes be a fitting response to our unjust world. However, fittingness is not enough; it also matters how anger is channeled or acted upon in the public realm. Moreover, this paper contends that anger at structural injustice may relatively easily go wrong, as mistargeted or boundless anger. In light of these challenges, I argue that introducing a goal-frustration type of anger (as distinct from blaming anger) can prevent construing anger too narrowly, as always involving moral blame, and that one can learn (to some extent) to regulate one’s anger. At the same time, I acknowledge that the uptake that anger receives plays an essential role in creating an environment that favors (or disfavors) that anger at structural injustice remains bounded. (shrink)

With the #MeToo movement and the Women’s Marches behind us, it has become clear that women are angry. This anger is often criticised for being disruptive or uncommunicative, with calm rationality being praised as a superior alternative. In this article, I use the framework of Fricker’s (2007) Epistemic Injustice to examine the communicative disadvantages and merits of what I call feminist anger. I explain how feminist anger can be subject to both testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, but that (...) this does not mean it should not be used to communicate. Importantly, feminist anger can challenge the patriarchal status quo and it can provide an epistemic bridge towards hermeneutical justice. By listening to feminist anger, both our own and others’, we can get one step closer to epistemic equality. (shrink)

Philosophers are beginning to pay attention to climate emotions -- emotions experienced in the context of the climate crisis. Psychologists have been studying these emotions for longer than philosophers and have highlighted that they are among the most important predictors of climate change-related judgments and behaviors (see Brosch, 2021 for a review of this literature). A central debate in climate psychology and communication is whether it is most beneficial to induce positive or negative emotions regarding climate change (Brosch 2021). For (...) example, while despair may be justified given the current state of affairs, it may lead to inaction because agents become unmotivated to act as they consider the battle to already be lost. On the other hand, while some hope may be justified, it can make agents complacent and overly optimistic that change will arise without much effort. One emotion that has received surprisingly little attention in this psychological literature is anger (Stanley et al. 2021; Sabherwal et al. 2021). In philosophy as well, eco-anger has been neglected -- the dominant climate emotions studied are hope and anxiety (Moellendorf, 2022; Mosquera & Jylhä, 2022). This is perhaps particularly surprising in the context of philosophical research as the climate crisis is often characterized as an issue of justice, and anger is seen as the paradigmatic response to injustice. Our two main aims in this paper are, (i) to establish that eco-anger is a justified response to climate injustice and (ii) to argue that eco-anger is beneficial to the fight for climate justice. To make this argument we first make clear what is meant by ‘climate emotions’, and by the rationality of these emotions, before arguing that anger is non-instrumentally justified, i.e., fitting (because the climate crisis involves injustices and anger is an apt response to injustice), and instrumentally rational (because it can lead to beneficial individual and collective actions). In so doing we identify targets at which eco-anger should be directed and highlight climate obstructionists as the most pressing target. We end with recommendations for how to mobilize anger for climate justice. (shrink)

Anger is arguably one of the most important emotions in a human being’s life. An array of contemporary studies show that, far from being detrimental, anger can foster one’s self-esteem, improve their social interactions, and even benefit physical and mental health. In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume explicitly recognized the importance of anger. And yet, few topics have been so neglected in the Hume scholarship as his account of this passion. The following chapter aims to (...) fill the gap in the literature by showing that Hume’s analysis of anger is worth studying and strictly connected to some of the most intriguing problems in his philosophy. (shrink)

This article theorises ‘the morality of anger’ within the framework of manufacture of dissent and moral outrage networks , arguing that anger’s ethical status cannot be assessed as a private psychological state once it becomes infrastructural, amplified, and monetised. Classical condemnations of anger, from Seneca’s image of anger as madness to Martha Nussbaum’s critique of retributive ‘payback’ thinking, treat anger as morally suspect because it tends to imagine compensation through another’s suffering. Yet rehabilitative traditions, from (...) Aristotle’s doctrine of fitting anger to contemporary defences of righteous anger in response to structural injustice, insist that anger can be a condition of dignity, recognition, and moral repair. The article resolves this tension by shifting the unit of analysis from individual anger to networked anger. In digital publics, the boundary between justified anger and arrogant status-anger becomes systematically blurred: status anxiety is reframed as injury, grievance is aestheticised as virtue, and indignation is rewarded as a performance of belonging. Drawing on relational and pluralist accounts, the article treats anger as behaviourally pluripotent, capable of motivating communication, withdrawal, reconciliation, or retaliation depending on social cues and institutional constraints. In outrage-driven media ecologies, those constraints are stripped away and replaced by engagement incentives, so anger is selected for portability, intensity, and punitive clarity rather than proportion, truth, or repair. The article therefore distinguishes moral anger as ethical work from outrage as moral fuel. Moral anger retains value when it remains accountable to truth, proportionality, and the possibility of recognition, and when it is disciplined by compassion understood as agape rather than weaponised into hatred. Outrage networks, by contrast, convert anger into a renewable resource for attention extraction, stabilising communities through shared enemies and escalating moral certainty without increasing responsibility. The central claim is that anger is structurally necessary to moral life, yet morally dangerous when engineered as infrastructure: the ethical task is not to abolish anger but to recover the conditions under which it can still point beyond punishment toward repair, restraint, and civic coexistence. (shrink)

Despite the diversity of viewpoints throughout the history of philosophy on the subject of blame, one thing philosophers appear to agree on is that blame is an irreducible feature of experience. That is to say , no philosophical approach makes the claim to have entirely eliminated the need for anger and blame. On the contrary, a certain conception of blameful anger is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations. As a careful analysis will show, (...) this is true even for those philosophical arguments that pop up from time to time extolling the virtues of moving beyond blame and anger. In this paper, I assert that all forms of blame, including the cool, non-emotional, rational desire for accountability and justice and well as rageful craving for vengeance, are grounded in a spectrum of affective comportments that share core features. This affective spectrum includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, anger, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive’ or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, anti-social, hypocritical, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Blame is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong. -/- I challenge the reader to recognize that every time you experience any of the blameful attitudes, emotions and assessments I mentioned above, you are displaying your own failure of understanding. I challenge you to do away with your need for concepts of blame, anger and punitive justice in any of their philosophical guises, and with them the equally unctuous discourses of forgiveness. -/- Anger is neither inherently immoral nor irrational and destructive, but represents a limited understanding of human behavior. To the extent that concepts of ethico-political justice imply appraisal of blameful, guilty intent, they also represent a failure of understanding and a form of violence and an impetus of conformity. There’s no such thing as adaptive, moral or righteous blame or anger. Modern legal concepts of justice, to the extent they imply blame, depend on an inadequate grasp of motivation and intent. (shrink)