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People‟s feeling of compassion and willingness to balance cooperation and competition, however, is useless if they do not turn into action. In the private sphere, people help those whom they feel empathy and sympathy for or join in cooperative ventures. In the democratic sphere, the best way to do these things is through supporting and checking the state‟s actions. This behaviour depends on engagement in public debates and elections. Regarding this, though citizens‟ voice in democratic states is normally considered a right, participating in this decision process is also a duty towards co-citizens, since people are masters of the decisions that have impact upon the lives of all. Thus, a certain democratic behaviour is expected from everyone.
However, regarding many aspects, the democratic system produces decisions that are not just, and democratic processes sometimes seem inefficient to deal with this. In these moments, other instances of political engagement, like the involvement in demonstrations and even the practice of civil disobedience are defended as also being civic duties. Nevertheless, these fights for rights can stimulate people‟s anger towards those who seem responsible for promoting injustices. Is anger, in these cases, a vice or a virtue? Does anger help to improve social justice?
From the beginning, it is important to distinguish anger felt at the personal level from political anger, the anger against institutions and individuals that rule society and promote injustices (White, 2012). It is the latter that is in question. Two different views are, then, compared. Nussbaum (2016) considers that people‟s anger is counterproductive in order to promote unity and stability for the right reasons. This thesis is committed to the search for social stability. Thus, Nussbaum‟s argument that sees anger as a vice is promising. Her reasoning associates anger with a retributive attitude that reinforces a social clash in which on side demonises the other (2016, p.207). Nussbaum mainly based on the way that Mandela led South Africa after the end of Apartheid, says:
Significantly, Mandela frames the entire question in forward-looking pragmatic terms, as a question of getting the other party to do what you want. He then shows that this task is much more feasible if you can get the other party to work with you rather than against you. Progress is impeded by the other party‟s defensiveness and anxious self-protection. Anger, consequently, does nothing to move matters forward: it just increases the other party‟s anxiety
172 and self-defensiveness. A gentle and cheerful approach, by contrast, can gradually weaken defenses until the whole idea of self-defense is given up. (2016, p.230)
It is important to reinforce that Nussbaum is not defending that wrongdoing should be simply forgiven. Nevertheless, she express that the development of societies depends on “forward- looking effort of reconciliation”, and that (cognitive) empathy towards those who harm, instead of feel anger towards them, is the best way to unite the whole society in this effort. (2016, p.238) Thus, though Nussbaum agrees that anger has evolutionary roots, she also says that it is partially cultivated. If this is true, societies could cultivate the opposite. In her view, “it seems simply inexcusable to tolerate and even encourage political and legal institutions that embrace and valorize the stupidity of the retributive spirit”, something that, in her view, is in the basis of anger feelings (206,p.249).
Srinivasan (2017), on the other hand, detaches anger from revenge, and identifies such a feeling as a form of appropriate communication for those that, otherwise, never have voice. In this way, she draws attention to the fact that those who defend that avoiding anger is a sign of a more rational and civilised way to lead public debates disregard that certain people are always excluded of the main decisions, and that expressing anger is the only way that they have to express themselves:
The question was whether such men should make themselves into a new kind of man, with the power of a civic ruler rather than a tribal warrior, but powerful nonetheless. […]
Invoking the spectre of the raging Achilles, we condemn anger. But in so doing we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to be angry, the slaves and women who have the power of neither the state nor the sword. (2017, p.20)
In her view, these people have the right to feel anger, since forgiving or understanding the oppressors can be excessively demanding, even painful for them. In this way, Srinivasan claims that is wrong to expect that the “primary locus of responsibility for fixing the problem lies with the victim rather than the perpetrator” (2017,p.11). More than this, since she does not expect that the perpetrators of injustices start this process, she understands that expressing anger is a good way for the oppressed to start:
173 It is historically naïve, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King‟s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X‟s angry defiance. It is perhaps similarly naïve to think anger contains no salutary psychic possibilities for someone whose self-conception has been shaped by degradation and hatred. (2017, p.4)
Regarding this two different points of view, this thesis defends that a certain type of feeling that make people fight for justice is an important civic virtue. As mentioned above, many times protesting is the only way to open a space for dialogue. However, against what Srinivasan says, solid historic changes in Western democracies seem to come from those who protested peacefully. King or Mandela probably felt angry, but they controlled it when they were in the public sphere doing politics. Obviously, it is expected that the dominant class has compassion towards the oppressed and put efforts to improve social justice. However, it is also expected that the oppressed protest, but that they also try to understand that, at the other side, there are people who can be partners in the process of building a better society for all. And anger does not seem the best attitude to establish this partnership.