Appeal to Anger-Injury

I hate anger. I'm angry at anger.


Let me specify: I hate how, in the (valuable! necessary!) renaissance of anger-appreciation, we've seen the validation of argumentum ad iram--I am right because I am angry. Emotion--righteous indignation especially--replaces evidence and reasoning. In online discourse, you see a related issue: alignments between one's anger and one's having been injured or harmed (argumentum ad injuriam?). The basic steps involved here might be as follows:

• I was injured (usually by some malicious or neglectful act).
• I am angry (at those I view as responsible for the act).
• Therefore, my stance (in whatever present context) is correct.

Or, to use ground this in a realistic example:

• I was mugged at knifepoint on campus.
• I'm furious at the university for denying me the right to carry a loaded gun.
• Therefore, concealed carry should be legal on campus.

In practice (online forums, mainly), this kind of argument has several negative effects. It skips over a lot of rhetorical ground. (You got mugged because of the campus antigun laws? Having a gun would have prevented your injury? Legalizing concealed carry would remedy your injury and/or prevent future muggings?) It also shifts the locus of debate from the ostensible object (the wisdom of concealed carry laws on campus) to the arguer (the reality of the my injury, my right to feel anger about it). This shift poisons the well of good-faith argument, setting up a field in which taking issues with my argument constitutes a direct or indirect slight against me personally. I protect myself from counterargument, in other words, by wrapping myself in a cloak of injury.

Have I been injured? Of course! Am I angry? Very much so! Am I right to be angry? Not the point!

And yes, my history and emotions inform my stance. My experience is a possible part of a greater argument for concealed carry laws. I was mugged on campus once at knifepoint, an experience that left me feeling scared and furious. I feel like if I had had my gun with me, the mugging would never have happened. Fair enough. But by offering that experience as an argument I open my interpretation of that experience up to questioning. Does evidence show that knifepoint muggings end better when the victim has a concealed gun? Would you have been able to reach for the hidden gun in time? Are the benefits of knife-wielding muggers thinking twice before mugging possible gun-owners greater than the costs of a campus full of people packing heat? It's not fair of me to respond to such questions with, "Well, if you'd been mugged, you'd think differently" or "How dare you suggest I don't have a right to be angry at the university?"

Another negative aspect to argumentum ad iram/injuriam arguments, though, is that they open you to the exact same arguments from the other side:

• I was hit by a stray bullet from some idiot shooting at a mugger.
• I'm furious that idiot was allowed to have and fire a gun.
• Therefore, concealed carry should be illegal on campus.

At that level, the debate becomes less "are concealed carry laws good" and more "whose anger/injury is greater? Whose is more righteous?" I could see variations that would nudge the argument either way: "My child was killed by a stray bullet..." or "My child was killed by a knife-wielding mugger..."

There's no possibility of evidence- or reason-based arguments here, only a clash of righteous indignations. Righteous indignation is by nature resistant to the kind of self-critical vulnerability that argument necessitates.

More tomorrow,

JF