<p>The eternal anger puzzle invites us to explain how fitting anger about a past event (e.g., an injustice, a betrayal) can cease to be fitting, even though the reason that makes it fitting is constituted by an unchangeable fact about the past. The responses that receive the most attention tend to require revisions to philosophical orthodoxy or pre-theoretical intuition. They attribute fittingness-regulating powers to processes that are not standardly presumed to have them, change the directionality of anger from looking backward to looking forward or sideways, bite the bullet and affirm that all fitting anger remains fitting forever, or deny that the puzzle’s explanandum can be explained at all. I defend a more conservative solution. According to it, backward-looking anger simply ceases to be fitting when and because its duration makes it disproportional to how infuriating its object was. I argue that this solution follows from assumptions that no party to the debate can easily reject. I also highlight virtues that adjudicate in its favor. Chief among them are that it respects the puzzle’s own terms and that it stays true to the trend of explaining facts about fittingness by reference to qualities that reside in the attitudes’ objects.</p>

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

The reason to be angry proportionally

  • Michael Bruckner

摘要

The eternal anger puzzle invites us to explain how fitting anger about a past event (e.g., an injustice, a betrayal) can cease to be fitting, even though the reason that makes it fitting is constituted by an unchangeable fact about the past. The responses that receive the most attention tend to require revisions to philosophical orthodoxy or pre-theoretical intuition. They attribute fittingness-regulating powers to processes that are not standardly presumed to have them, change the directionality of anger from looking backward to looking forward or sideways, bite the bullet and affirm that all fitting anger remains fitting forever, or deny that the puzzle’s explanandum can be explained at all. I defend a more conservative solution. According to it, backward-looking anger simply ceases to be fitting when and because its duration makes it disproportional to how infuriating its object was. I argue that this solution follows from assumptions that no party to the debate can easily reject. I also highlight virtues that adjudicate in its favor. Chief among them are that it respects the puzzle’s own terms and that it stays true to the trend of explaining facts about fittingness by reference to qualities that reside in the attitudes’ objects.