Giden Rosen (Princeton University) Rage Against the Machine: Anger as a political emotion

Rage Against the Machine: Anger as a political emotion

The talk asks how we should respond to large scale social injustices like the pattern of police shootings to which the Black Lives Matter movement has called attention. The focus is on our moral and emotional responses: How should we feel when we take in this sort sprawling and uncoordinated pattern of injustice? Whom should we blame? How should we judge? The natural response to injustice recognized as such is anger (moral outrage). But anger is a form of blame. For deep reasons, it is hard to stay angry at someone when one is genuinely uncertain about whether he is morally responsible for what he did. Confronted with large scale social injustice, this is our predicament: it is often quite hard to say, given our uncertainty about the underlying facts, who if anyone is to blame, both for concrete episodes of injustice and for the pattern as a whole. Our emotional response thus tends to oscillate between blame focused on individuals — which ebbs as we lose confidence in their blameworthiness — and an abstract frustration that is qualitatively quite different from anger. The aim of the paper is to ask whether there is a stable form of political anger that does not depend on judgments of blameworthiness in this way.

New York Institute of Philosophy Event

Giden Rosen (Princeton University)

Friday, February 10, 2017, 4:00 p.m.

A reception will follow.