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Moral anger

Philosophical perspectives

Ancient history

Aristotle writes about anger in 350 BC in Chapter II of Rhetoric, saying that, "Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one's friends. If this is a proper definition of anger, it must always be felt towards some particular individual, e.g. Cleon, and not 'man' in general. It must be felt because the other has done or intended to do something to him or one of his friends. It must always be attended by a certain pleasure-that which arises from the expectation of revenge. For since nobody aims at what he thinks he cannot attain, the angry man is aiming at what he can attain, and the belief that you will attain your aim is pleasant.". According to the 1995 article by Simon Kemp and K. T. Strongman published in the The American Journal of Psychology, Aristotle said "that anger, which arises from perceived injustice, is useful for preventing injustice, and that the opposite of anger is a kind of insensibility."

According to Kristján Kristjánsson's 2005 article in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, Aristotle said that "what we should be aiming at in anger regulation is...neither the eradication of anger nor its control through calculated self-discipline but rather learning to experience that emotion…as part of our true selves in an uninhibited, rational and morally fitting way."

In his 2002 Ratio article entitled "Aristotle's Account of Anger: Narcissism and Illusions of Self-Sufficiency", Stephen Leighton said that Aristotle defined anger as "desire, accompanied by pain, for conspicuous revenge because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one." Leighton says that Aristotle valued anger as part of a "virtuous and flourishing life".

Moral anger and social psychology

In their 1993 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Haidt, Koller, and Dias found strong support for the social intuitionism model of moral judgment used in moral psychology.

Moral emotions, in general, are "those emotions that are linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent."

In their 1999 article, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt said that anger—when it was not a "lingering trait"—was more "moral than immoral", according to a 2016 Organization Studies article by Dirk Lindebaum and Gabriel Yiannis. Keltner, Haidt, and by extension Keltner and Lindebaum say that "[s]ocial functional accounts define emotions, and especially anger, in terms of consequences of goal‐directed behaviors, which would mean that a "function and a consequence of anger" is to "redress[...] injustice.

In 2000, Haidt, Bjorklund, and Murphy undertook the original moral dumbfounding study, "Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason", which was later replicated in four studies in 2017 by the research team which included Cillian McHugh, Marek McGann, Eric R. Igou, and Elaine L. Kinsella. They noticed a behavioral pattern that called "moral dumbfounding," in which "the stubborn and puzzled maintenance of a moral judgment without supporting reasons" persists.

In their 2001 Journal of Applied Social Psychology article, "Sexual morality: The cultures and emotions of conservatives and liberals", Haidt and Matthew Hersh ...

In Jonathan Haidt's oft-cited 2001 article "The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment", published in Psychological Review, he describes how moral judgement can be "plagued by two illusions"—the wag-the-dog illusion and the "allusion of objectivity." In the former, he described how if we "believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail)". The "allusion of objectivity, refers to the way in which we expect the "successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind" in a "moral argument." He compared this to the belief that "forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy. The wag-the-dog illusion follows directly from the mechanics of the reasoning process described above." Haidt said that one of the mechanisms underlying naive realism in which "people think that they see the world as it is whereas their opponents in a moral dispute are biased by ideology and self-interest." In "The emotional dog and its rational tail", Haidt said that anger is likely the "most underappreciated moral emotion."

From Haidt's The Righteous Mind

In his 2012 publication, Haidt says that humans have "five basic moral receptors: those pertaining to caring, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity[/purity]." Haidt and his co-researcher Sean Stevens, at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, conducted a survey on their website called yourmorals.org, with which users could be rated on these moral receptors and compare their results with liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. He has changed his mind – he used to be more dismissive of the right, and conservative cultures – but he is still in the same bind as the rest of us, choosing the evidence to support his beliefs. According to The Guardian review, Haidt says that we "tend to shape or select the evidence in order to justify our convictions." He uses the metaphor of a mahout or rider—our conscious intellect—on an elephant—our "gut instinct, trained by brute evolution"—that he is trying to nudge in a certain direction. Based on this survey, conservatives and republicans score higher on the five moral receptors on the side of "good order and individual responsibility towards the herd", while liberals and left wing parties score higher on caring and fairness but have a more narrow "range of moral impulses". The Guardian also said that by 2012, Haidt had had "changed his mind – he used to be more dismissive of the right, and conservative cultures – but he is still in the same bind as the rest of us, choosing the evidence to support his beliefs."

"If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives."

— Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind.

In May of 2014, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment attorney, had started working at Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as Director of Legal and Public Advocacy in 2001 and then served as President since 2007, shared concerns with Haidt about the shift in attitudes towards free speech. Prior to 2013, most of his work involved defending students against campus administrators, but in 2014 students began to request trigger warnings. In his 2012 book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Lukianoff examined how certainty can limit intellectual growth and impede freedom of speech. Inflexible certitude leaves no room for change or doubt and intellectual progress.The belief in your own perfectly formed truth can lead to antipathy.

In their 2016 Organization Studies article by Dirk Lindebaum and Gabriel Yiannis distinguished between righteous anger, indignation, simple aggression and moral anger. They examined the "pro-social capabilities" of anger and endorsed Haidt's view that anger is underappreciated. They used the definition of moral anger as an "aroused emotional state" that stemmed from a "primary appraisal of a moral standard violation" that "impacts others more than oneself", and "motivates corrective behaviour intended to improve the social condition, even in the face of significant personal risk" that was described by Lindebaum and Deanna Geddes in their 2015 article.