Abstract
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.
About Michael Bruckner
Michael Bruckner is a philosopher interested in the ethics and epistemology of the "inner life" (emotion, perception, personality, etc.). After earning degrees from the universities of Vienna, Oxford, and Wisconsin, he is currently a GPS postdoctoral teaching fellow. His main research project at the moment aims to vindicate the unorthodox view that one person can be directly aware of another's character traits, rather than having to infer them from known behavior, thought, or feeling. On this view, one person's kindness, aloofness, or gullibility can, through intuition, co-constitute another person's mind, similar to how an apple's redness, smoothness, or sweetness does through sensory perception.
There are metaphysical obstacles to this idea, but it also promises ethical and epistemological rewards; Michael strives to overcome the obstacles and reap the rewards. Alongside this project, he is also thinking about a cluster of related topics like resentment and love, blame and forgiveness, reputation and acquaintance.
