Outrage and the Bounds of Empathy

Abstract

Often, when we are angry, we are angry at someone who has hurt us. Our anger is a protest against a perceived mistreatment, and its function is to hold the person accountable for their offense. The anger involves a demand for some sort of change or response: that the hurt be acknowledged, that the relationship be repaired, that the offending party reform in some way. Call this “reform” anger. A different sort of attitude, often contrasted with reform anger, is hatred. Hatred is also a response to a perceived mistreatment, and it also demands some sort of change. Unlike reform anger, however, its goal is not to repair the relationship. Instead, its goal is destruction, to remove the offending party. In this paper, I develop and defend an account of a third sort of attitude, which I call “outrage” anger, that is distinct from both reform anger and hatred. I argue that outrage anger has an important role to play in the context of political injustice, but that it also comes with significant costs. In §1, I introduce outrage anger, and contrast it with reform anger. In §2, drawing on the work of Maria Lugones, I develop an account of outrage anger as a second-order attitude directed at the state of affairs in which a violation is not fully intelligible as the violation it is. I argue its central function is a kind of psychological boundary setting: it closes off the victim’s ability to feel empathy for their abuser. In §3, I show that the benefits of outrage come with serious costs, both epistemic and prudential. In §4, I make some suggestions about when, and for whom, the benefits of outrage outweigh the costs.