Abstract

Recently, philosophers have been giving increasing attention to the place of anger in politics. Many defenders of anger focused on the question of whether the feeling and expression of anger are appropriate or justified as individual responses to social injustices, but in this paper, I suggest that anger should also be viewed and critically examined as a social ethos. I further point out that weaponizing anger as means to political ends, or what I call “the politics of anger,” has an important limitation: it risks obstructing the cultivation of empathy society-wide that is vital for working across differences in a heterogeneous society. Philosophers and activists alike should take this limitation into serious consideration when defending the role of anger in politics, especially under circumstances where there are other political alternatives that might be as appropriate and effective as appealing to anger.