I am delighted to announce the publication of my first book, this coming fall, with Shambhala Publications. It is a book project I have been working on for many years, and the topic has veered considerably from the version I discussed five years ago, becoming much more specific than the ambitious project I had imagined then. The title will be After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Our Culture of Rage. As the title suggests, it will constructively address the Buddhist critique of anger – and then, afterwards, will turn to the deeper mental roots of our anger in craving and resistance. I’ll be saying more about the book in this space as we get closer to publication time.

In the meantime, I have a number of thoughts that had to be left out of the final version of the book, but that I think are nevertheless worthy of publication on this blog. As you can imagine, anger has many defenders, who have a variety of different reasons. I tried to deal with most of those sorts of reasons in the book, but there are a couple that didn’t quite make it in.

Today, in particular, I want to address the claim that anger is required for respecting others’ status as rational persons, and accordingly holding them accountable. In his chapter of The Moral Psychology of Anger, for example, the Finnish philosopher Antti Kauppinen claims that “holding someone accountable for doing something is in the first instance a matter of having a reactive attitude from the anger family toward that person, as Peter Strawson (1962) famously emphasized.” (p. 35)

I disagree with Kauppinen: accountability does not require anger or an attitude from its family. Indeed it turns out that the English philosopher Peter Strawson, who Kauppinen cites as an authority on this point, has a more accurate picture of accountability—one that Kauppinen misrepresents. Strawson argues that if we take the “objective attitude” toward a given person—the sort of attitude that Śāntideva recommends, where we view that person merely as the product of external causes—then we cannot actually reason with that person, though we may negotiate with her. If we take the objective attitude, Strawson says, our approach then “cannot include resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other.” (“Freedom and resentment”, 194-5) Śāntideva himself may be happy to accept such an approach, but most of us wouldn’t be.

But notice what Strawson does not say. He does not say that any particular emotion from the latter list is required for us to take the “participant attitude” (the opposite of the objective attitude). The participant attitude is a necessary condition for resentment, anger and so on; it is not a sufficient condition for any of them. Thus anger is not, in fact, required as part of the participant attitude. Indeed, Strawson himself makes it clear that he shares suspicions toward many attitudes in that list: “psychological studies have made us rightly mistrustful of many particular manifestations of the attitudes I have spoken of” (“Freedom and resentment”, 210). Strawson’s point is not to say that we need anger, or any other particular member of the family, for accountability. We do not.

We do need to disapprove of others’ actions in order to hold them accountable. Such disapproval can involve an affect or emotion and not a merely cognitive attitude. But disapproval and anger are not the same thing; one can disapprove while remaining calm. If Kauppinen counts disapproval as a “reactive attitude from the anger family”, then the claim that accountability requires such an attitude is relatively trivial; few if any of anger’s opponents have a problem with disapproval. That is no defence of anger itself.

In an interesting master’s thesis, Benjamin Porter takes a position similar to Kauppinen’s: he claims that anger allows us to treat its target as a full moral agent, respecting that agent’s responsibility for their actions. Taking the convicted sex offender Brock Turner as an example, Porter says:

To properly view the moral landscape that surrounds Turner’s case, we must be willing to see him as an agent, to get angry, and to respect the fact that he is also person with dignity…. Compassion or Transition Anger is not focused on respecting personhood. Instead it is focused on addressing the underlying causes that lead to the impediment. As such, I argue that compassion cannot properly respect Turner’s personhood. Compassion treats him as a victim of environment, fate, or bad luck. Turner for whatever reasons, many outside of his control, is the type of person capable of performing heinous actions. (pp. 27–28)

Now Śāntideva’s response to this objection would be to bite the bullet and bite it hard. He has no interest in dignity and moral agency, only in the prevention of suffering. We prevent that suffering more effectively by taking Strawson’s objective attitude and addressing the underlying causes, and that is all we need.

But one does not need to go as far as Śāntideva to respond to Porter’s view. Just as disapproval does not require anger, neither does blame. One can take a participant attitude that views others as agents responsible for their actions, and thereby blame them for their bad actions and not merely treat them as the products of causes—but do so in a calm and detached manner. In so doing, one makes oneself less likely to perpetuate a violence for which one may come to deserve blame oneself.