The Aptness of Anger

A long philosophical and political tradition holds that victims of injustice ought not get angry because doing so would be counterproductive.But this tradition neglects the possibility that anger might be counterproductive and yet apt.What ought a victim of injustice do when her anger would worsen her situation but nonetheless be a fitting response to the state of the world?Here reasons of prudence and reasons of aptness come apart, generating, I argue, a substantive normative conflict.Two things, I suggest, follow.First, the counterproductivity critic faces the burden of explaining why, in such conflicts, prudential considerations trump considerations of aptness; until this burden is met, there is no obvious inference to be made from the counterproductivity of one's anger to an all-things-considered prohibition on one's getting angry.Second, it's plausible that such conflicts -where victims of oppression must choose between getting aptly angry or acting prudentiallythemselves constitute a form of unrecognised injustice, what I call affective injustice.I conclude by discussing the prospects for alleviating affective injustice in the political sphere, and offering a diagnosis of our reluctance to make room, in our politics, for anger. The counterproductivity critiqueIn 1965, the Cambridge Union held a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr on the motion 'The American dream has been achieved at the expense of the American Negro'.Baldwin's essay The Fire Next Time had been published two years earlier; Buckley had been editor-in-chief of the conservative magazine National Review, which he founded, for the past decade.Both men were at the height of their fame, the most important public intellectuals, respectively, in the American civil rights movement and the American conservative movement.Baldwin took the floor first, and began in a quiet, recalcitrant tone: 'I find myself not for the first time in the position of a kind of Jeremiah'. 1 He was to deliver bad news, but as history rather than prophecy.Instead of revealing the future he came to