A Defense of Angry Blame

Abstract

While blame is not a difficult practice to defend, in part because of its ineradicability in our moral lives, angry blame has been a tougher sell. Critics of angry blame cast it as an unnecessary, punitive, or unproductive practice—one that should be either avoided or abandoned altogether. Against these views, I argue that anger has positive moral value and should remain on the table in our blaming practices. The argument proceeds by identifying a specific mode of angry blame—what I call “authority-focused resentment”—which is both apt and uniquely valuable in cases in which agents’ standing as equals is under threat. Insofar as anger has value in these cases it should not be dismissed wholesale in favor of other blaming alternatives, as anger’s staunchest critics would recommend. For all the virtues of anger, it is not equally accessible to all. In final chapter of the project, I identify a distinct kind of harm that happens to oppressed agents when their anger fails to receive uptake. While feminist accounts of anger’s dismissal have tended to focus on its epistemic dimensions, I shift to consider the damage to oppressed subjects’ moral agency. I argue that what is going on in the dismissal of marginalized agents’ anger is not merely the loss of knowledge or the dismissal of testimony. Instead, we need a different paradigm to conceptualize the dismissal and its harms. If we understand angry blame as an invocation or an assertion of authority, then its dismissal is a refusal to comply and to recognize our authority as subjects—an altogether different problem.