Debate: Anger, Fitting Attitudes, and Srinivasan’s Category of “Affective Injustice” *

ONE important dimension of how we evaluate anger concerns its effects. Roughly, we often want to know if someone being angry is productive or not, relative to certain values or goals. Debate on this kind of question runs through the history of political thought up until the present moment. For example, it’s long been a key part of the debate about the role of anger in political movements against a range of forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation, from campaigns to overthrow authoritarian dictatorships to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. In her recent article, “The Aptness of Anger,” Amia Srinivasan argues that focusing on the effects of anger is far from the only way we can, or should, engage in normative reflection about anger. In particular, Srinivasan argues that a key question about anger is whether it is apt or not. It might be apt for an agent to be angry—in the sense that her anger is warranted, given the situation—even if it is counterproductive for her to be angry, relative to certain goals. Srinivasan argues that the debate over the productivity of anger tends to obscure this dimension of the ethics and politics of anger, and that, in so doing, it prevents us from grappling with a range of normatively important questions about it. Srinivasan develops this idea by focusing on cases of what she calls “affective injustice.” In these cases, an agent is ethically pulled in two directions. On the one hand, an agent’s being angry is counterproductive, relative to certain goals. Srinivasan focuses on the effects on one’s own well-being, wherein anger is prudentially counterproductive in particular. More specifically, much (though not all) of her discussion focuses on cases wherein anger is counterproductive relative to the goal of dismantling unjust social/political structures, which, moreover, are