Chapter 7 discusses anger in relation to gender. A character’s ability to display or suppress anger is tied to expectations of external judgment. In the Iliad, male characters frequently express anger; mortal women do not. Homer’s text highlights the gap between a female character’s words and her inner thoughts, creating an ambiguity that puzzles male audiences and characters attempting to read their minds. The chapter surveys theories of anger (from Aristotle to cognitive science) and analyses Homeric emotional expressions, including the emotional ‘script’ of anger. It focuses on ancient readings of Achilles’ anger. Aristotle’s influential definition of anger, presupposing Achilles as a model, shaped scholarly understanding but excluded anger from the emotions women could feel. Later, Seneca and Plutarch opposed this, linking anger to a lack of self-control, associating it particularly with women and barbarians. Ancient theories consistently stressed the connection between anger, rationality, and revenge.

Emotions and motivation are tied intimately together. Some motivations are based in emotions: fear, anger, and disgust. In other cases, though not forming their bases, emotion strongly interact with motivation; for example, disgust can strongly interact with sexual and feeding motivations. The chapter asks – what are the general properties of emotion and what do all emotions have in common? Emotions serve functionally coherent roles in behaviour, conscious experience, cognition, and the organization of the body’s physiology. The chapter draws a distinction between emotion, affect, and mood. It discusses specific action tendencies and Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The chapter places central importance upon affective neuroscience. It reviews the evidence for seven basic affective systems as postulated by Jaak Panksepp: seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, panic/grief, and play. Links are described between these basic emotional systems and high-level cognition.

Aggression is associated with inflicting damage. Anger underlies it. Links to coercion and dominance are described, as well as excitation transfer. Defensive/offensive aggression and predatory aggression are distinct. The dichotomy between reactive aggression and instrumental (proactive) aggression is described. ‘Appetitive aggression’ is conducted for intrinsic pleasure. The notion of levels of control applies to the inhibition on aggression. Explanatory models are discussed (e.g. Lorenz’s hydraulic model). Aggression can exhibit positive reinforcement. A number of brain regions are discussed (e.g. the amygdala, VTA−NAcc, hypothalamus, cortex, and periaqueductal grey). The role of hormones is reviewed. Healthy development consists in part of learning to inhibit aggression. Early exposure to toxic role models increases the chances of later showing aggression. Other things that inhibit aggression are discussed (e.g. empathy). The chapter concludes with a discussion of several situations associated with aggression: ostracism, xenophobia, dehumanization, the weapons effect, media violence, alcohol, and traumatic brain injury.

This chapter shows that, while there is reason to be skeptical about the value of public admiration in general, there is one kind of admiration – heroising admiration – that stands out as particularly problematic. Heroising admiration is public admiration of an individual’s or a groups’ supposed heroism. The main issue has to do with the way heroising admiration obscures its targets’ moral status as human beings, by overwriting it with heroic social status. The two are fundamentally in conflict. The imposition of hero status partially deprives targets of their moral status as fellow human beings within a socio-normative realm, so that that they are no longer as eligible for other people’s help or even sympathy, as they were before. It centrally contains depriving people of their social recognisability as human beings who potentially need other people’s help or solidarity. It is argued that there is perfect duty not to contribute to such deprivation.

Philosophers are increasingly examining climate emotions – feelings experienced in response to the climate crisis. Yet anger has received surprisingly little attention. This is striking, since anger is renowned for being a strong motivator of collective action against injustice and the climate crisis is widely framed as an issue of justice. We begin by clarifying the notion of “climate emotions” and the criteria for assessing their rationality. We then argue that anger is both non-instrumentally justified–because the climate crisis involves clear injustices to which anger is a fitting response–and instrumentally rational, insofar as it can motivate beneficial individual and collective action. In doing so, we identify appropriate targets of eco-anger and argue that climate obstructionists constitute its most urgent object. Our argument is empirically informed and empirically generative, generating specific hypotheses and concrete directions for empirical work on the topic. We conclude by offering recommendations for how eco-anger can be effectively mobilized in the pursuit of climate justice.

In war we see xenophobic hate, resentment, and violence-triggering anger, coupled with in-group solidarity, love, and altruistic sacrifice. This combination is mirrored in the opponent society. This structure recurs so often that there is an unfortunate tendency to naturalize it as adaptations produced by an ancestral environment characterized by widespread, intense, and frequent war. From this point of view, we are bellicose because our most successful ancestors were; our emotional structure comes from the fact that we are descendants of victors in battle. I don’t agree with this interpretation, which I will call the bellicose adaptationist story. I will sketch an alternative evolutionary story from ongoing anthropological controversies. I don’t deny that humans are violent, but I will try to show that a coherent story can be told in which war qua anonymous inter-group violence was not universal in human history and so could not serve as the selection pressure for altruism. After clearing the ground in this manner, to account for a non-war-based altruism I describe the hypotheses of collective breeding and collaborative foraging put forth by Sarah Hrdy and by Michael Tomasello.

Plato was the initiator, in the philosophical literature, of the idea that punishment should look to the future, not to the past. It must be beneficial and serve some useful purpose. Beneficial to whom? The first part of Plato’s answer is striking: ‘to the offender’. Punishment should be directed at reforming offenders rather than simply penalizing them because they had offended. This idea was accepted by a succession of (non-abolitionist) thinkers. It is still with us today. Plato was presumably unaware that he was opening a loophole that could be exploited by later reformers who sought a reduction, and then finally abolition, of the death penalty: an offender sentenced to a programme of rehabilitation was not a prime candidate for execution. However, a further possible answer to Plato’s question might be: ‘(beneficial) not for the criminal but for society as a whole’. Plato also held that punishment might serve as a deterrent, and this opened the door to harsh treatment, including death, of some offenders, namely, those who were judged ‘incurable’. One might kill a murderer, or a disparager of the gods, to deter others.

American Patriots argued the case for Independence in a distinctive emotional idiom that blended classical theories about the links between feeling and freedom, Enlightenment-era philosophies on the moral force of sentiment, and popular understandings of passion as the source of action. Together, they composed a Revolutionary spirit of liberty. Investigating the history of emotion in the Revolution allows historians to connect intellectual history (the study of political ideology) to social and cultural history (the stories of the revolutionary experiences and contributions of ordinary Americans). At the same time, it provides new insights into the vexed interrelationship of liberty and slavery in American history. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans and their descendants. Attention to the issue of Revolutionary “spirit” thus requires acknowledging the deep roots and enduring power of American racism, rather than simply accommodating the comfortable confirmation of the inevitability of slavery’s demise. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from the supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans. Yet a focus on Revolutionary emotion also reveals that even when members of the colonial upper orders tried to restrain the spread of liberty, they could not fully contain or control the spirit of freedom. Subordinated people, including white women, free and enslaved Blacks, and members of Native American nations worked actively to expand universal views of emotion, understanding intimately the links between feeling and freedom. Many Patriots took a more radical stance and argued that all Americans could lay claim to roughly the same set of universal emotions. In this view, natural feelings could bind all Americans together far more closely than cultivated sensibility had ever linked provincial elites with metropolitan aristocrats. Ultimately, novel theories of universal human emotions became both the foundation of Revolutionary organizing efforts and the basis for new theories of natural rights.

Chapter 11 explores anger and its connection with taking offence during two telephone calls to an insurance company call centre based in Spain. A sociopragmatic approach was adopted for the qualitative, interpretive analysis of the phone calls, which explores the indexical, social, and moral value of the expression of offence in interaction. The analysis focuses on anger and offence as the expression of emotional responses to the situation being experienced by the customers and aims to contribute to our understanding of the connection between emotion and morality. The two key activities involved in taking offence, namely, registering and sanctioning offence, are linked to both emotion and morality, respectively. Registration of offence with the expression of negative feelings is usually produced in combination with the sanctioning of offence in relation to a moral order. It is hoped that the chapter illustrates what a sociopragmatic perspective to the analysis of offence can bring to the understanding of its role in social life.

Forgivingness is virtue, a specification of generosity, a disposition to give offenders, especially against oneself, more of good and less of evil than they deserve. It is an interconnected set of sensitivities to features of situations marked by wrongdoing. The forgiving person is responsive to these features in ways that tend to mitigate, eliminate, or forestall anger in the interest of wishing the wrongdoer well and/or of enjoying a positive and harmonious relationship with him or her. The chief considerations favoring forgiveness are (1) the offender’s repentance, (2) excuses for the offender, (3) the offender’s suffering, (4) moral commonality with the offender, and (5) relationship to the offender.