By: Lubasha Heredia

View/Download PDF Version: In Defense of Anger: Reason, Morality, and the Law (Heredia)

 

Anger occupies an uneasy place in legal discourse. Courts, commentators, and officials routinely valorize calm, neutrality, and restraint, while framing anger as irrational, destabilizing, or corrosive to reasoned judgment. Our legal culture emphasizes objectivity, neutrality, and formal legal reasoning. Anger is often evaluated by conflating the emotion with action, casting it as a destructive force to be avoided. Seneca wrote, “Raging with an inhuman desire to inflict pain in combat and shed blood in punishment, it cares nothing for itself provided it can harm the other: it throws itself upon the very weapons raised against it, hungry for a vengeance that will bring down the avenger.” Yet contemporary psychology offers a sharply different account.

The American Psychological Association defines anger as “an emotion… arising from frustration, real or imagined injury by another, or perceived injustice,” while distinguishing it clearly from aggression, which involves behavior intended to cause harm. Similarly, Merriam-Webster defines anger as a “strong feeling of displeasure and usually of antagonism,” and one of its closest synonyms, indignation, denotes a righteous anger at what one considers unfair, mean, or shameful. These definitions show that anger is not equivalent to violence; it is an internal evaluative state rather than an action.

This post argues that anger is a rational moral response to perceived injustice, inconsistently recognized by the law, and that public outrage at state violence signals the limits of legal legitimacy rather than disorder.

Psychological research supports this claim, showing that anger arises from appraisals (evaluations of situations as unfair) and a desire for equal recognition and respect, not impulse. People get angry when they feel that shared norms have been violated, for example, when a powerful actor harms someone perceived as undeserving. These appraisals necessarily involve judgments about blame, proportionality, and moral boundaries. Far from opposing reason, anger is structured by it. Despite this, legal and political commentary often treats public anger as a problem to be managed rather than information to be examined.

The law’s discomfort with anger is longstanding. Doctrine recognizes anger’s force through concepts such as heat-of-passion mitigation, yet when anger is directed at the state, it is swiftly delegitimized. Families are praised for composure rather than outrage, and anger is recast as disorder rather than critique. In practice, anger is tolerated only when private and politically inert. This asymmetry is particularly visible in cases involving law enforcement. Use-of-force analysis centers on the officer’s perceptions and fears, evaluating whether those fears were “reasonable” under the circumstances. In Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court held that claims of excessive force by law enforcement during a seizure must be evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, recognizing that officers often make “split-second judgments” in tense and uncertain situations. The analysis focused on factors such as the severity of the crime, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat, and whether the suspect was resisting or attempting to flee. In other words, an officer’s fear or stress is treated as a contextual justification rather than a moral failing. Meanwhile, the community’s anger is treated as extraneous — emotional excess rather than moral evidence. For example, a civilian’s anger – expressed as a raised voice, frustration, and refusal to immediately comply with simple commands – is treated as evidence of a threat and justification for escalating force. When community anger manifests as protest after an incident, courts evaluating subsequent police responses often treat that anger as a background disturbance or a public-order problem rather than a moral response. Psychologically, this imbalance is difficult to defend. Fear and anger are parallel moral emotions. Fear signals perceived threat; anger signals perceived violation. A legal framework that validates one while pathologizing the other privileges state perception over civilian judgment.

Anger also serves a crucial social function: it motivates corrective action. Historically, sustained public anger has driven legal reform, from civil rights protections to changes in policing practices. Demanding emotional restraint in the face of perceived injustice weakens one of the primary mechanisms that pressure the law to evolve. Suppressing anger in the name of order risks perpetuating injustice under the guise of stability.

After tragic events, anger often manifests in protests, public mourning, and calls for oversight. Psychologically, these are regulating actions aimed at restoring moral equilibrium when formal legal systems seem slow or biased. They offer emotional support to the community and emphasize actionable steps. In doing so, they prevent state violence from going unnoticed and honor the moral significance of the lost life.

To conclude, reframing anger as rational does not mean endorsing violence or abandoning the legal process. It means recognizing anger as information. It reveals where legal legitimacy is strained, where institutional explanations fail to persuade, and where procedural legality diverges from moral credibility. In law and policy, the task is not to silence anger but to listen to it — to ask what conditions produced it and what failures it reveals. Public anger in response to a tragic event is not evidence of hysteria or disregard for the rule of law – it is evidence of moral engagement with the law. A legal system that cannot tolerate anger in response to its own violence risks confusing order with justice. And a government that demands calm in the face of profound injustice should not be surprised when trust, rather than anger, is what ultimately disappears.