dichotomy is too simple, since the intense love and trust of intimate rela-
tionships may still give legitimate occasions for painful emotions such as
grief and fear, whether or not law has stepped in.) As Aristotle will later
say, the gentle- tempered person (his name for the virtue in the area of
anger) is not vengeful, but, instead, inclined to sympathetic understand-
ing.15 Law gives a double benefit: it keeps us safe without, and it permits
us to care for one another, unburdened by retributive anger, within.
Notice, in particular, that law permits us to care about wrongs done
to friends and family members, without spending our lives consumed
with angry emotion and projects of retribution. Most of the anger in the
pre- law world that Aeschylus depicts had little to do with the actual liv-
ing people: it tracked past wrongs done to long- ago ancestors, or, occa-
sionally, one’s parents or relatives. Thus the Agamemnon opens with the
Introduction
5
past, in the form of the Chorus’s anguished depiction of the long- ago
slaughter of Iphigeneia— which Clytemnestra will shortly avenge. And
as soon as Aegisthus enters, late in the play, rather than speaking at all
about himself or what he cares about, he launches into the gruesome
saga of his father Thyestes, who was duped into eating the flesh of his
own children by Agamemnon’s father Atreus. People don’t get to exist as
themselves: they are in thrall to a past that burdens them. Anger about
wrongs done to oneself is transformed by law too, as we shall see, but
perhaps the largest change law effects is to give people a way of car-
ing about others that does not involve exhausting vicarious retributive
projects.16
This book is not about ancient Greek ethics, but it takes its inspira-
tion from the Aeschylean picture I have just sketched— from the idea that
political justice offers a thoroughgoing transformation of the moral senti-
ments in both the personal and the public realms. But I shall go further
than Aeschylus, arguing that anger is always normatively problematic,
whether in the personal or in the public realm.17 At the heart of my argu-
ment is an analysis of anger, which I present in chapter 2. Concurring
with a long philosophical tradition that includes Aristotle, the Greek and
Roman Stoics, and Bishop Butler, I argue that anger includes, concep-
tually, not only the idea of a serious wrong done to someone or some-
thing of significance, but also the idea that it would be a good thing if
the wrongdoer suffered some bad consequences somehow. Each of these
thoughts must be qualified in complex ways, but that’s the essence of the
analysis. I then argue that anger, so understood, is always normatively
problematic in one or the other of two possible ways.
One way, which I call the road of payback, makes the mistake of thinking that the suffering of the wrongdoer somehow restores, or contributes to
restoring, the important thing that was damaged. That road is norma-
tively problematic because the beliefs involved are false and incoherent,
ubiquitous though they are. They derive from deep- rooted but misleading
ideas of cosmic balance, and from people’s attempt to recover control in
situations of helplessness. But the wrongdoer’s suffering does not bring
back the person or valued item that was damaged. At most it may deter
future offending and incapacitate the offender: but this is not all that the
person taking the road of payback believes and seeks.
There is one case, however, in which the beliefs involved in anger
make a lot of sense, indeed all too much sense. That is the case that I shall call the road of status. If the victim sees the injury as about relative status and only about that— seeing it as a “down- ranking” of the victim’s
self, as Aristotle put it— then indeed it does turn out to be the case that
payback of some sort can be really efficacious. Lowering the status of
the wrongdoer by pain or humiliation does indeed put me relatively up.
6
Anger and Forgiveness
But then there is a different problem: it is normatively problematic to
ness, though common enough, is something we ought to discourage in
both self and others.
That’s the core of my main argument in a nutshell, but of course all
these ideas must be unpacked and defended. Anger may still have some
limited usefulness as a signal to self and/ or others that wrongdoing has taken place, as a source of motivations to address it, and as a deterrent to others, discouraging their aggression. Its core ideas, however, are profoundly flawed: either incoherent in the first case, or normatively ugly
in the second.
I then arrive at a crucial concept that I call the Transition. Most average people get angry. But often, noting the normative irrationality of anger,
particularly in its payback mode, a reasonable person shifts off the ter-
rain of anger toward more productive forward- looking thoughts, asking
what can actually be done to increase either personal or social welfare.
I explore the course of reflection that leads to this future- directed think-
ing, which I prefer. (I interpret the transition undergone by the Furies to
be this type of Transition, but that is not essential to my argument.) The
Transition is a path that can be followed by an individual, but it may also
be, as in Aeschylus, an evolutionary path for a society.
I also recognize a borderline case of genuinely rational and norma-
tively appropriate anger that I call Transition- Anger, whose entire content is: “How outrageous. Something should be done about that.” This
forward- looking emotion, however, is less common, in that pure form,
than one might suppose: most real- life cases of Transition- Anger are
infected with the payback wish.
In the core chapter and subsequent chapters, armed with this analysis,
I then tackle three commonplaces about anger that bulk large in the phil-
osophical literature, as well as in everyday life:
1. Anger is necessary (when one is wronged) to the protection of dignity
and self- respect.
2. Anger at wrongdoing is essential to taking the wrongdoer seriously
(rather than treating him or her like a child or a person of diminished
responsibility).
3. Anger is an essential part of combatting injustice.
I grant that anger is sometimes instrumentally useful in the three ways
I have mentioned. But this limited usefulness does not remove its nor-
mative inappropriateness. Nor is it as useful, even in these roles, as it is
sometimes taken to be.
Four subsequent chapters (4, 5, 6, and 7) develop this core argument
further in four distinct domains of life. A good inquiry into these matters
Introduction
7
should distinguish several different realms of human interaction, asking
carefully what human relations are proper to each, and what virtues are
proper to each of these relations. The realm of deep personal affection
(whether familial or friendly) is distinct from the political realm; it has
distinct virtues and norms, where anger and judgment a
re concerned.
My argument will be structured around this division of realms.
First, in chapter 4, I investigate the role of anger in intimate personal
relationships, where it is often thought that anger, though sometimes
excessive or misguided, is a valuable assertion of self- respect, and that it should be cultivated, particularly by people (and women are the example
so often given) who are inclined to have a deficient sense of their own
worth. I argue against this line of thinking, suggesting that the values
distinctive of personal intimacy not only do not require anger but are
deeply threatened by it. Of course serious damages and breaches of trust
do occur, and they are often occasions for short- term anger and long- term
grief. But grief for a loss is preferable, I shall argue, to an ongoing determination to pin the loss on someone else— both instrumentally, being bet-
ter for the self, and intrinsically, being more appropriate to the nature of
loving human relations. Though short- term anger is understandable and
human, it is rarely helpful, and it certainly should not dictate the course
of the future.
I next investigate (in chapter 5) what I shall call a “Middle Realm,”
the realm of the multitude of daily transactions we have with people and
social groups who are not our close friends and are also not our political
institutions or their official agents. A great deal of resentment is gener-
ated in the Middle Realm, from slights to reputation to that unpardon-
able sin— mentioned already by Aristotle— in which someone forgets
your name. In this realm, I make a different argument from the one
I advance for the intimate realm, where I recommend strong emotional
upset, albeit grief and not anger. Here, I argue that the Roman Stoics,
whose culture was unusually disfigured by resentments in the Middle
Realm, are entirely correct: the right attitude is to get to a point where
one understands how petty all these slights are, and one not only doesn’t
get angry but also does not grieve. The damage simply is not serious
enough. Seneca never quite got there, but he records his self- struggle in a
way that offers good guidance. (Thus I shall be following Adam Smith in
holding that the Stoics give sound advice except when they tell us not to
care deeply for our loved ones, family, and friends.)
But that cannot be the entire story, for of course, although a great deal
of daily anger does deal with trivia such as insults and incompetence,
sometimes damages in the Middle Realm are extremely serious: stranger-
rape, murder by strangers, and so forth. These cases are not like the petty
irritations and insults with which Stoic texts and daily life are typically
8
Anger and Forgiveness
filled. Here is where the insights of Aeschylus become so important.
In such a case, the thing to do is to turn matters over to the law, which
should deal with them without anger and in a forward- looking spirit.
Although serious matters in the personal realm may also be turned over
to law, they leave, and appropriately so, a residue of deep emotion (grief,
fear, compassion) that are integral to a relationship of love and trust. In
the Middle Realm, by contrast, there is no point to any ongoing relation-
ship with the malefactor, and law can assume the full burden of dealing
with the wrong.
I turn next to the Political Realm. In this realm, the primary virtue is
impartial justice, a benevolent virtue that looks to the common good. It
is first and foremost a virtue of institutions, but it is also, importantly, if derivatively, a virtue of the people who inhabit and support these institutions. But what sentiments animate and support justice? Here, once
again, it is often held that anger is important, as a sentiment vindicating
the equal dignity of the oppressed and expressing respect for the human
being as an end. I divide my treatment of the Political Realm into two
parts: everyday justice ( chapter 6) and revolutionary justice ( chapter 7).
In the case of everyday justice I shall argue that the pursuit of justice
is ill- served by a narrow focus on punishment of any type, but especially
ill-served by criminal law retributivism, even of a sophisticated sort.
Above all, society should take an ex ante perspective, analyzing the whole problem of crime and searching for the best strategies to address it going
forward. Such strategies may certainly include punishment of offend-
ers, but as just one part of a much larger project that would also include
nutrition, education, health care, housing, employment, and much more.
Although I shall not be able to carry out, here, the wide inquiry into social welfare that is really demanded, I offer at least an idea of what it would
look like, and I then look more narrowly at criminal punishment as one
tiny sliver of that enterprise.
But what about revolutionary justice? Here it is often believed that
anger can be both noble and essential, helping the oppressed to assert
themselves and pursue justice. I argue, however, following the theo-
retical writings of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., that
anger is not only not necessary for the pursuit of justice, but also a large
impediment to the generosity and empathy that help to construct a future
of justice. Anger may still have limited utility in the three instrumental
ways I have identified (as signal, as motivation, and as deterrent), but
it is crucial that the leader of a revolutionary movement, and many of
the followers, be strange sorts of people, part Stoic and part creatures
of love. Nonetheless there have been such leaders and followers, as the
thought and life of Nelson Mandela demonstrate. And maybe they are
not so strange after all, since human life does contain surprising stretches
Introduction
9
of joy and generosity, qualities that go well with the project of building
something better than what exists already.
This clean division of realms is too simple, of course, because the
realms intersect and influence one another in many ways. The family is
a realm of love, but it is also a political institution shaped by law, and it contains many wrongs (such as rape, assault, and child abuse) that the
law must take extremely seriously. Slights in the workplace (for exam-
ple) are Middle Realm wrongs, but they may also be instances of racial
or gender discrimination, of harassment, or of tortious negligence, thus
bringing them within the ambit of the law, and of the sort of carefully
limited Transition- Anger (the Eumenides in their new basement abode)
that is proper to political wrongs. Moreover, our relationships with col-
leagues, unlike relationships with strangers on airplanes and on the road,
are ongoing relationships that have at least some weight and significance:
so they lie between the full intimacy of love and friendship and the for-
gettable encounter with a rude seatmate. Furthermore, as I have already
emphasized, serious crimes against the person, such as assault, rape, and
homicide by non- intimates, are serious wrongs and also legal offenses
in the Middle Realm. The proper attitudes toward these wrongs, in their
different aspects, will take a lot of sorting out.
Equally important, the Political Realm is not simply a realm of
impartial justice. If a nation is to survive and motivate people to care
about the common good, the public realm will need some of the generos-
ity and the non- inquisitorial spirit that I think of as proper to the personal realm, where keeping score of all one’s wrongs may be carried too far
and poison the common endeavor. That, really, is the core of Aeschylus’
insight: that instead of exporting to the city the vindictiveness and blood-
thirstiness of the family at its worst, the city should draw on the bonds of
trust and the emotions of loving generosity that characterize the family
at its best.
Although my central topic is anger and its proper management in the
three realms, my project also has a subtheme, which involves a critical
examination of one prominent candidate to replace anger as the central
attitude in the area of wrongdoing. This substitute attitude is forgiveness,
and its candidacy is vigorously championed in modern discussions. The
concept of forgiveness is strikingly absent from the Eumenides, as, indeed, (I would say) from all of ancient Greek ethics,18 but it is so central to modern discussions of anger that one cannot approach the topic without grap-
pling with it extensively. I therefore propose to do so here, addressing
the familiar contention that forgiveness is a central political and personal
virtue. At the end of the day we will be close, in at least some crucial
respects, to where Aeschylus left us— but after clearing away a great deal
that intervening centuries have bequeathed. Thus we will be able to see
10
Anger and Forgiveness
more clearly what the insights of the Eumenides might offer to a modern world. Let me now introduce that subsidiary theme.
We live in what is often described as a “culture of apology and for-
giveness.”19 A cursory Amazon book search turns up scores of titles. Most
are works of popular psychology and self- help. Frequently they couple
the idea of forgiveness with that of a “journey” or a “road.” Taking this
journey, usually guided by a therapist, the wronged person moves from
some terrible place of pain to a lovely place of transfiguring happiness.
My favorite such title is Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.20 Imagine that. From the horrors of homelessness, and the anger one can imagine that life evoking in