5 philosophers on anger - Delaney Thull

Anger is a complicated emotion. It can feel reasonable and righteous or impulsive and uncontrollable. But is it ever morally right to be angry? And if so, when? One of the most foundational understandings of anger comes from the Greek philosopher Aristotle who proposed an idea called “the doctrine of the mean.” In this model, there’s a sweet spot for our actions and emotional reactions, and it's up to you to develop practical wisdom about when you should feel what and how strongly to feel it.

For example, let’s say you’re going to sleep early because you have an important meeting tomorrow and your neighbor just started blasting music. If you can’t sleep, you might botch your meeting, so feeling angry is definitely understandable. But how much anger should you feel? And what actions, if any, should you take? To answer these questions, Aristotle would need to know more details.

Have you previously talked to your neighbor about this issue? Is it a reasonable time to be playing music? Is your neighbor trying to antagonize you, or are they just enjoying their evening? Relying on practical wisdom in Aristotle’s case-by-case approach makes a lot of sense for navigating interpersonal conflicts.

But what about when there’s no one to blame for your anger? Imagine a tornado completely destroys your house while your neighbor’s home is untouched. No amount of anger can undo the disaster, and there isn’t really a suitable target for your frustration. Yet for the ancient Stoics, the tornado and the noisy neighbor are basically identical.

The Stoics believed life is like an uncontrollable cart we’re all tied to, and we can either learn to go with the flow or hurt ourselves fighting its momentum. In their logic, we all live at the whims of fate, and our actions can never actually change things—whether it's a natural disaster or how others act towards us. So Stoics believe anger is always wrong, since it causes pain and is ultimately futile.

The 8th century Indian Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva also questioned our free will and the value of anger, arguing that because people often lack rational control over their emotions, we should endeavor not to let their anger and cruelty spread to us. But even if it’s hard for us to control our anger, there might be something we can learn from it.

Philosopher PF Strawson’s theory of reactive attitudes suggests that experiencing anger is a natural part of human psychology that helps us communicate blame and hold each other accountable. In this model, anger can be an important part of letting us know when something immoral is happening, so removing it would impair our social lives and moral communities. But finding the right response to those psychological alarm bells can be tricky.

For instance, if you were supervising cruel, disrespectful young children, it might be natural to feel anger, but it would be wrong to treat their moral mistakes like those of fully formed adults. So when should you act on anger? And can it ever help change things for the better?

Let's imagine your community is experiencing serious health issues because a nearby factory is illegally polluting the water supply. A long tradition in political philosophy argues that the righteous anger often invoked by witnessing this kind of injustice can be invaluable for fueling change and motivating community action. In unjust situations like this, it could be a moral mistake to suppress your anger, instead of channeling it into positive action.

But other philosophers argue that anger has an inherent negative element that limits its transformative power. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum pointed out that famous civil rights activists such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr warned that giving yourself over to even the most righteous anger can lead one to become bitter, vengeful, or hateful of others.

They cautioned that we should carefully calibrate our emotional responses to ensure that we see others not as enemies but as community members with whom we must learn to coexist, regardless of our ever-changing emotions.