On Not Being “Worth It”

1. Introduction

I’m standing in line at the grocery store, waiting to check out. It’s the express lane, and I have a microwave burrito and a jug of milk. I’m following the rules. But I notice that the person in front of me has brought their whole week’s shopping to the line and is checking out as though that were a completely acceptable thing to do, even though there’s a giant sign at the register: “10 Items or Fewer.” I feel rage start to bubble up inside of me. I hate people who do things like this. But I catch myself. I think: “This just isn’t worth getting angry about.” I calm down and go back to thinking about my lunch.

This paper is about the thought: “This just isn’t worth getting angry about.” It’s a common thought. I have it all the time, in situations like the one just described. I’m sure that you’ve had it too. But, on reflection, it’s a difficult thought to make sense of. I take it that when I think this thought, I’m thinking about a reason not to get angry. The fact that it isn’t worth it is a reason not to get angry. What sort of reason is it? “Well,” I might think to myself, “you can’t just go around getting angry all the time about jerks. You’d be miserable.” That’s a common thought too, and it looks like it expresses an instrumental or prudential reason not to be angry. The reason not to be angry at petty jerks is that it would have bad consequences for me: I’d be miserable.

But that is not quite right. That I would bear considerable costs from being angry may very well be a reason not to be angry and perhaps a good one. But it doesn’t bear on the fittingness of anger. It might simply be that the world is so messed up that fitting anger is indeed very costly. My thought that anger isn’t worth it, though, seems to me to be about fittingness. The fact that anger wouldn’t be worth it shows that it isn’t fitting. And my responses seem to manifest this fact. If you told me you’d give me a million bucks if I ceased to be angry, that seems like a pretty good deal to me. But I couldn’t cease to be angry simply on that basis, and even if I could, it would need to be by some external process, alien to my emotions themselves—perhaps the trick of some future technology. Of course, attempting to get our emotions in line with our considered judgments is often like herding cats. But sometimes our emotions are entirely responsive to judgments about their fittingness, in a way that seems completely natural—that is, in a way that our emotions are not usually responsive to judgments about instrumental or prudential reasons. And this appears to me to be exactly what is happening when I notice that I’m getting angry, think “It’s not worth it,” and then calm down.

OK, then, let’s say my thought is about a reason that it is not fitting to be angry. In what sense is anger’s not being “worth it” a reason that anger would not be fitting? Here we flounder. There is an obvious way in which anger is quite fitting: the jerk ahead of me in line has wronged me—and everyone else who follows the rules!—and anger is a fitting response to wrongdoing. If we try to elaborate on “worth it,” however, we’re back where we started, with a metaphor that invites unpacking in instrumental terms and with some obvious considerations—like the misery of being angry—that are natural to construe in those terms. But instrumental or prudential considerations are standardly opposed to reasons of fittingness. That it would be instrumentally good to have some attitude or emotion is often taken as a paradigm example of the wrong kind of reason—a consideration that counts in favor of the attitude or emotion, but not in what is intuitively taken to be the right sort of way.¹ Further, this distinction is quite obvious in the case of anger itself. Again, if you told me you’d give me a million bucks not to be angry, that counts against anger in the sense that it shows not being angry to be beneficial for me. But it’s the wrong sort of reason not to be angry, because it doesn’t show my anger to be unfitting in the way that, say, the fact that I had not really been wronged would.

So, we’ve got a puzzle: an ordinary thought about anger seems to be about its fittingness, but it is not clear how this could be. What I’ll call my motivating question is this: how could the fact that anger is costly to its subject be a reason that it is unfitting? The task of this paper is to give a non-skeptical answer to this question—to explain “not worth it” thoughts about anger in a way that illuminates their connection with fittingness. The example of wrongdoing I began with may seem trivial—easy to recognize because it is commonplace, but perhaps barely more than a breach of etiquette. But the phenomena I have in view are far from trivial; they include the kinds of anger that we must come to terms with in our intimate relationships and the kinds of anger that color the emotional lives of many oppressed people. And my conclusions are not narrow; they include upshots for how best to understand distinctively human notions of importance and appropriate concern, the difference between the right kinds of reasons for belief and for emotion, and the sorts of dilemmas faced by oppressed people. My official topic is anger, but if I am right in what I say here, my account applies to the emotions generally. In the end, anger is a vivid test case for how “not worth it” thoughts can be understood wherever they show up.²

I hope to convince you of all this in the following way: In §2, I introduce in more detail some basic ideas about fittingness in general, and the fittingness of anger in particular, which will frame the rest of my argument. I also highlight the way in which the existing literature on anger is not helpful for understanding “not worth it” thoughts. In §§3 and 4, I set up and develop an answer to my motivating question. There are, in fact, two distinct difficulties in understanding how the costliness of anger could be a reason that it is unfitting highlighted in the preceding paragraphs: (a) the right kinds of reasons for anger are standardly taken to be facts about the object—the wrongdoing—and not the subject of the state. But the costliness of anger is a fact about its effects on the subject. Thinking about costs of anger, then, may look like it involves an illicit turn to the subject. In addition, (b) conceptualizing the way anger affects one in terms of costs looks paradigmatically prudential or instrumental. In §3, I address problem (a), arguing that not all turns to the subject are illicit, in light of the way we access the content of anger and the way that anger often portrays wrongdoing in relation to its subject. In §4, I use the ideas developed in §3 to address problem (b) and provide a complete answer to my motivating question. In brief, I argue that the thought that anger is “not worth it” has to do with the sense of “importance” that the anger manifests. That anger portrays its object as more important than it actually is shows it to be unfitting, but also—I argue—shows why seemingly instrumental considerations bear on fittingness, insofar as they bear on importance.³

In developing this answer to my motivating question, I consider a number of examples that show how my account applies beyond the confines of the grocery store. Moreover, §5 is devoted to a particularly important kind of case illuminated by my account: the anger of the oppressed. Ironically, the case suggests itself as an objection to my entire approach. The anger of the oppressed is often extremely costly to the oppressed. But surely that does not show it to be unfitting. To suggest otherwise is to fail egregiously in doing justice to the gravity of their oppression. I argue, however, that not only does my account not imply that the costly anger of the oppressed is unfitting, but it also helps us to articulate a familiar but overlooked emotional dilemma—a dilemma I call “absurd anger”—which is bound up with oppression. Finally, in §6, I conclude by very briefly discussing a few other, broader implications of the account of “not worth it” thoughts developed in this paper.

2. Fitting Anger: The Basics

3. Problem (a): The Inward Turn

Unfortunately, though, a head-on approach to size and shape may appear to be a non-starter. Fittingness, as characterized in the previous section, is about the object of anger, not about the emotion’s subject. This thought is familiar too from discussions which take the right kind of reasons for an attitude or emotion to be “object-given” reasons.¹⁰ Attempting to understand “not worth it” thoughts as being about reasons of fit may seem doomed, then, because they commit the cardinal sin of changing the subject to the subject—of making things about costs to me rather than the matter of wrongdoing at hand. This is problem (a) that I highlighted in the introduction.

This is not, I think, the right lesson to draw from my discussion of fittingness. In this section, I’m going to discuss two different ways in which facts about the subject of anger may be reasons that bear on the fittingness of anger. First, I want to argue that facts about the effects of an attitude on a subject may give the subject reason to think that the attitude has an unfitting content. This is especially important in the first-personal case, given the distinctive kind of access we have to the content of our own attitudes. Furthermore, this is particularly significant with emotions like anger, which have pronounced phenomenologies that allow for access to their content in a way that is unavailable for belief. Second, I want to argue that the properties portrayed by anger are very plausibly relational, such that anger can be unfitting by incorrectly portraying the subject’s relation to the wrongdoing. Neither of these points provides a ready-made answer to my motivating question. But together they motivate my move to the topic of “importance” and enable my treatment of problem (b) in §4.

4. Problem (b): Importance, Concern, and Costs

If what I’ve argued is correct, when we’re comparing our anger to our judgments about the importance of wrongdoing, several different sorts of judgments of importance are in play: judgments about how important the wrongdoing is absent any important connection, judgments about how different important connections to the wrongdoing might alter its importance, and judgments about whether we in fact have any such important connection to the wrongdoing. But what is this notion of importance? What is it for a connection to wrongdoing to be important such that it would alter the importance of wrongdoing? To get traction on this intuitive idea of “importance,” I want to start with a rich passage from Thomas Nagel’s essay, “The Absurd”:

We take ourselves seriously whether we lead serious lives or not and whether we are concerned primarily with fame, pleasure, virtues, luxury, triumph, beauty, justice, knowledge, salvation, or mere survival. If we take other people seriously and devote ourselves to them, that only multiplies the problem. Human life is full of effort, plans, calculation, success and failure: we pursue our lives, with varying degrees of sloth and energy. (1979: 14)

Nagel speaks here of “seriousness,” but I take the phenomenon he is interested in to be the same as what I am calling “importance.” Nagel is concerned to argue that we cannot help but take our lives seriously in a crucial sense: in living our lives, we decide where and on what to expend our energy, time, and effort. We cannot help but live our own lives—expending time, energy, and effort somewhere—and where we decide to direct our finite resources makes it the case that we take certain things more seriously than others and some things not seriously at all.

Nagel’s point might seem to trade on an equivocation between a perfectly familiar notion of seriousness and a quasi-technical, philosophical concept. Surely a completely disaffected and aimless person might fail to take their life seriously, in any ordinary sense of “seriously.” And surely such a person might claim that they regarded nothing in or about their life as really important and speak truly, on any ordinary interpretation of “important.” Nevertheless, I cite this passage from Nagel, because it suggests four points: (1) importance is a relative notion; (2) judgments of importance are connected to judgments about appropriate concern in action; (3) judgments that something is particularly important to me are connected to judgments about how its role in my life makes special concern in action appropriate; and (4) judgments of importance play a distinctive role in human practical reasoning in light of the fact that our powers to act are finite. I’ll take these points in turn.

First, (1) importance is a relative notion. It is hard to make sense of the notion of importance simpliciter—to understand what it would mean to think that, for example, fame was important, if one were not also committed to judgments that, say, it was more important than virtue. Different good or valuable things give us different reasons for action, and when we think about these goods or values in terms of their importance, we are thinking about how the reasons that they give us compare.¹⁶ This point comes out in Nagel’s examples. The person who thinks that fame is important takes themselves to have stronger reasons to pursue fame than other things that they take to be less important.

Second, (2) judgments of importance are connected to judgments about appropriate concern in action. This point is closely related to the first. Reasons for action are reasons for what action inevitably involves—“effort, plans, calculation,” etc. And, directing what I’ll call our “agential resources” in action towards some object is part of manifesting what philosophers have variously called valuing, care, or (as I’ll generically call it) concern for the object in action.¹⁷ The judgment that one thing is more important than another is connected to judgments about the way that the reasons for action they generate compare, which amount to judgments about how the kinds of concern appropriate for the different objects are different. Judging that fame is more important than virtue, then, is connected to judgments that the kind of concern that it is appropriate to have for fame is more demanding or weighty than the kind of concern it is appropriate to have for virtue.

Third, (3) judgments that something is particularly important to me are connected to judgments about how its role in my life makes special concern appropriate. All thinking about the importance of valuable things seems relative in the sense that it involves positioning the valuable things in relation to one another and comparing the reasons they generate. But some thinking about importance is more thoroughly relative than that. Sometimes, we justify various pursuits not just in light of judgments of importance that we take to apply to everyone, but judgments about their specific importance to us. I’ll speak of these as judgments that employ a notion of “importance to me” or “importance to us.” So, for example, I think that my friendship with Greg is important, and that it is also specifically important to me. In unpacking my judgment that the friendship is important, I would talk about how whatever is good about friendship generates certain reasons for everyone—that there is a kind of appropriate concern for everyone to have towards friendship, wherever it shows up.

What does the idea of “importance to me” add? This idea seems to be at the heart of the passage from Nagel. Nagel seems interested in making the claim that we can’t help finding certain things to be particularly important to us, because we can’t help making choices about where we direct our agential resources. But Nagel seems to run two ideas together in the passage above in a potentially problematic way. On the one hand, Nagel seems to suggest that people make things important to them by directing their agential resources in pursuit of them. On the other hand, we often justify our pursuits of various things by citing the fact that they are important to us. These two ideas illuminate what citing “importance to me” adds by way of justification: in citing “importance to me,” I’m appealing not simply to the reasons generated by the valuable thing itself, but to reasons generated by my past engagement with the valuable thing—my history of past concern. Or, in more concrete terms, when I judge, for example, that the importance to me of my friendship with Greg justifies my spending time with him this evening, I’m appealing not just to what is good about friendship in general—wherever it appears—but to the actual connection that I have to Greg through a history of past concern in an instance of friendship.

Nagel might seem to conclude from the fact that we can’t avoid acting and the fact that a history of acting can make available an “important to me” justification for further action that we cannot help but end up with such justifications, regardless of where we directed our agential resources in the past. That seems to me to be too quick. Sisyphus chooses to push the boulder up the hill. But boulder pushing isn’t important to him and having done it doesn’t make it so. What else was he supposed to do? But, although the direction of our agential resources towards certain pursuits doesn’t always make them important to us, sometimes it does. Sometimes the fact that we’ve engaged in a pursuit gives that pursuit a role in our lives which can justify present and future direction of agential resources towards that pursuit. In these cases, importance to us can serve as a justification—past concern can give a pursuit a role in our lives that makes it “important to us” in a familiar sense that justifies ongoing special concern.

To make this claim clear and as plausible as possible, I want to illustrate it with two examples. First, consider a hobby—my hobby. I like to play and think about historical board games. I was initially attracted to these games—and not towards other more or less equally valuable pursuits—because of features of playing and thinking about the games. They allowed me the pleasures of abstract thinking, of learning about history, of appreciating different ways of modeling the dynamics behind historical events, and of viewing historical situations from an actor’s point of view. These attractive features gave me reasons to engage with these games—to spend time, energy, and effort looking for new games, reading reviews, and tinkering with rules on my own. This history of concern made historical board games important to me in the following way: I now have a connection with these games, developed through devoting time, energy, and effort playing them, that gives me new reasons to continue to devote further time, effort, and energy on them.

Sometimes, of course, one’s past engagement with a hobby gives one reasons that are no different from the kind that initially attracted one to the hobby. My past of playing these games means I’ve developed the skills to appreciate the good features of these games with ease and at a depth that makes continuing the hobby more attractive than starting a new one. And sometimes, of course, taking past engagement as a reason for future engagement is irrational—sunk cost fallacy and all. But such reasoning is not always irrational, nor is it always based on the thought that past engagement makes current engagement more fruitful or enjoyable than the alternatives. Through past engagement, I’ve made this hobby my hobby—part of who I am or a part of my life. I can think that the role the hobby has come to play in my life through past engagement gives me reason to continue engaging even as more attractive alternatives present themselves, because I’m a historical gamer. I can think that it would fail to do something like honor to the hobby—fail to respect its importance to me—if, for example, I fail to read and think about a current scandal rocking the hobby, even though doing so is not particularly rewarding or edifying.

This might seem to inflate ridiculously the significance of hobbies. But consider a second example, closer to the heart of the issues at stake in this paper: loving relationships. Niko Kolodny has argued both that relationships are partially constituted by love and that such relationships are reasons for love. And Kolodny thinks that love is a kind of concern that, in part, involves taking there to be special reasons to engage with the beloved and act on their behalf. In my terms, love in part involves taking the role that your relationship with the beloved plays in your life to be important—to be such that it justifies directing your agential resources towards the beloved and not other people. This might seem circular if the relationship is at once constituted by love and a reason for love. But the circularity is only apparent and can be resolved by distinguishing the reasons for beginning a relationship from the distinct reasons that an existing loving relationship generates—in much the way that I distinguished the reasons for taking up a hobby and the distinct justificatory role that something’s being my hobby can play. Our reasons to begin a relationship stem from the value of engaging in joint activities with another person and the attractive qualities of the other person. A history of engagement can then go on to constitute not simply a relationship, but one that is important to those in it; the relationship provides a justification for continued direction of agential resources towards the beloved.¹⁸

And here it is perhaps clearer than it is with hobbies that the role of a relationship in one’s life plays a distinct justificatory role. Of course, we often “get more” from spending time with people who know us than we do from spending time with complete strangers. But it is not a sunk cost fallacy to think that my past with my best friend Greg gives me reasons to hang out with him, even when Greg is irritable and I have more pleasant alternatives. My justification for spending time with Greg is that he is my best friend—the importance of the role that our relationship plays in my life. To choose otherwise would be disrespectful to Greg, a failure to register the importance of that relationship.

In summary, a history of concern can make things important to us in a familiar sense—it can grant the object of past engagement a role in our lives that generates new reasons for continued concern. When we make judgments about the relative importance of various things to us, we’ll be making judgments about how those roles justify different sorts of concern involving different investments of agential resources—relative to one another, and relative to other valuable things we think are important but with which we have no historical connection that gives them a role in our lives. We don’t, of course, accept all “important to us” claims as genuine justifications; past engagement does not justify anything and everything. Nagel’s fame-seeker might claim that stardom is really important to them, citing their history of past obsession—not simply to render their current behavior intelligible, but to justify it. We should remain justly skeptical. This is just to say that people can be mistaken about the reasons that a history of engagement generates, just as they can be mistaken about the reasons that values generate more broadly.

But sometimes “important to me” judgments do serve as genuine justifications and understanding when and why they do leads me to the fourth and final point that I want to draw out from Nagel’s passage above: (4) judgments of importance play a distinctive role in human practical reasoning in light of the fact that our powers to act are finite. Nagel was interested in arguing that the human condition—being forced to act—makes “seriousness” unavoidable. A nearby claim seems true: the human condition involves choosing where to direct our finite agential resources, and this shows up in the kind of justificatory role judgments of importance play.

To see this, consider how our situation is different from that of gods with infinite agential resources. As a quick gloss on “infinite agential resources,” I just mean that as I’m imagining them, these gods have infinite life spans; no limits on their powers for action; no limits to the amount of energy and time that they can devote to planning and calculating, etc.; and they can do everything that they want all at the same time.¹⁹ Just like us, these gods find a world with a multitude of valuable things in it: other agents, art, knowledge, relationships, hobbies, careers, etc. Like us, they might think about how these valuable things relate to one another in terms of importance. They might think that art is more important than a career, in the sense that the value of art makes a more substantial kind of concern appropriate—generates reasons for more effort, plans, and calculation—than the value of a career.

But in having infinite agential resources, these gods are not like us in one crucial regard: in acting, they do not incur costs. To see this point and its importance, consider the contrast between the task of thinking about how to live well as it presents itself to these gods and as it presents itself to finite creatures like us. Thinking about how to live well is, at the very least, thinking about how to respond correctly to all of the reasons for action generated by all of the valuable things that there are. For the gods, it looks like this task amounts simply to trying to figure out what all these different reasons are. But for us, the task is different—and harder—because we are finite. We lack the capacity to respond to all of the reasons for action generated by all the valuable things. For us, reasons for action can pull in different directions, and thinking about how to live well involves figuring out what to do when that happens. Figuring out how to correctly respond to all the reasons for action requires figuring out how to compare them in some way when they pull in different directions.

In light of the account so far in this section, we can put this point in terms of appropriate concern. For the gods, the appropriate kind of concern for different objects of value is just whatever efforts are required to respond to all the reasons for action generated by those objects. Reasoning about appropriate concern is little different from reasoning about what reasons for action there are. But for us, manifesting concern in action for one thing inevitably comes at the cost of manifesting concern in action for another. So, for us reasoning about the appropriate sorts of concern for different objects of value requires reasoning about what sorts of tradeoffs we can make while still being appropriately concerned—reasoning, that is, about the costs that one can incur to the ability to be concerned with something of value while nevertheless still counting as appropriately concerned.

The claim that I just made is abstract, but it can easily be made concrete—and in fact is made concrete in familiar debates about reasonable partiality and the demandingness of morality. We all come to philosophy with a sense of how to live well, sensitive to the fact that we are finite, which involves a sense of how appropriate concerns for different valuable things fit together in the shape of a human life. Our sense is often simply inherited uncritically from our social world. A certain picture of how appropriate concerns for different things fit together in a human life appears as the starting point for these debates: we are required to have a certain moral concern for other humans generally, but we are also allowed to have special concern for our friends and families, and for personal projects like careers and hobbies. We might have the sense, for example, that appropriate concern for a friendship is manifested by helping a friend move, even at the expense of being able to promote aggregate human wellbeing. If we think this, we are implicitly committed to thinking that, given our inability to respond to everything of value, appropriate concern for a friend and appropriate concern for human beings generally fit together in the following way: when our ability to be concerned with a friend in helping them move comes into conflict with our ability to be concerned with humans generally by promoting aggregate wellbeing, we can still be appropriately concerned with human beings generally while incurring costs to our ability to manifest that concern in this instance. We might even think something stronger: that appropriate concern for a friend requires incurring these costs to general moral concern; if we thought we had a choice, we’d not be appropriately concerned with our friends.

Commonsense views of how appropriate concerns for different things fit together in a human life are not immune from criticism. We often think that we can pursue our hobbies at the cost of pursuing loftier moral goals without ceasing to be appropriately morally concerned. But this kind of thinking has come in for moral criticism: to think that this sort of tradeoff is acceptable is to fail to be appropriately concerned with humans generally. It manifests a morally warped and selfish sense of the value of human beings and the value of trivial pursuits. This is one way of endorsing the idea that morality is much more demanding than commonsense suggests, which amounts to the claim that the way that appropriate concerns for different things fit together in a human life is quite different than is often assumed.²⁰ On the other hand, certain conceptions of morality have been criticized for being overly demanding, for failing to make room for “reasonable partiality.” Thinking that being appropriately concerned with human beings meant always incurring costs to one’s ability to manifest concern for things one enjoys like hobbies presents an inhuman picture of what it is to be appropriately concerned with oneself and the kinds of intrinsically valuable pursuits that make life worth living.²¹

But, although the claim I’m making is intuitively illustrated in terms of familiar debates about the demandingness of morality and reasonable partiality, it is much more general. Being concerned with one thing comes at the cost of being concerned with another, given that we are finite in our ability to act, and so coming to terms with how to be appropriately concerned with different valuable things requires figuring out the kinds of costs that can be appropriately incurred when conflicts occur. If the roles of things like friendship and hobbies in our lives make a different kind of concern—special concern—appropriate, this will be because these roles render justifiable incurring costs to our ability to be concerned with other things—like pursuing impartial moral goals—while still counting as appropriately concerned with those other things, costs which would not be justified absent such roles. Settling disputes about appropriate concern will, of course, also require settling disputes between different views about the values that such concern is responsive to, but such disputes must take place against the background fact of our finitude.

Notice how our finitude makes us different from the gods with regard to the role that judgments of importance play in our practical reasoning. Insofar as we invoke our judgments of importance to justify action, and insofar as they are connected to judgments about appropriate concern, our judgments of something’s importance play the role of justifying certain costs to our ability to be concerned with other things. Judgments about the importance of particular things to us play the role of justifying costs to our ability to be concerned with other things that would not be justified absent the important connection. We can reason about what sorts of actions the particular importance of something to us justifies by considering what sorts of costs to other forms of concern its role in our lives justifies. The gods’ judgments of importance work nothing like this, because they do not incur costs. It might in fact be strange to describe the gods as having things that are particularly important to them in the way that things are particularly important to us, because our sense of things being particularly important is tightly connected to the sense that costs are justified that would not be otherwise, but the gods do not incur costs at all.

What does all of this have to do with anger? We started this section with the thought that anger portrays wrongdoing’s importance, and that the importance of wrongdoing often depends on important connections to the wrongdoing. I’ve developed an account of what this intuitive notion of importance amounts to, an account which stresses the connection between judgments of importance and judgments about the costs involved in appropriate concern. And I’ve developed this account at length because it will enable me now to address problem (b) and provide an answer to my motivating question.

To begin, I first want to pull together the various claims that I’ve made so far and show how they illuminate a kind of “not worth it” thought that applies to action. Suppose that I find myself, day in and day out, fighting with random people on social media about politics, trying to correct their moral errors. This behavior is really taking a toll—I’m neglecting my friends, my family, my hobbies, my work, and my sanity by spending all this time on the internet. One day, I break. I think to myself, “This just isn’t worth it. Random people who are wrong on the internet don’t deserve all my time.” I decide to quit social media.

My account of importance in this section allows us to give a particular diagnosis of how my reasoning might be functioning here. These strangers on the internet are doing something wrong in promulgating toxic political views. But how important is their wrongdoing? Asking this question amounts to asking: what is the appropriate sort of concern to manifest in responding to their wrongdoing? Since I am finite, the kind of concern that is appropriate to manifest in response to this wrongdoing imposes costs on my ability to manifest concern for other things, like my friends, family, and hobbies. If all the time that I’m spending on the internet responding to strangers manifests appropriate concern for their wrongdoing, then this has implications for the shape of appropriate concern for my friends, family, and hobbies. If this were appropriate concern, it would imply, for example, that I could be appropriately concerned with my best friend Greg while neglecting to spend any time with him, because I’m spending all my time fighting on the internet. And this implication seems absurd. This is just not a plausible conception of appropriate concern for a friend. That the concern I am manifesting in fighting on the internet involves incurring such costs shows that it must be an inappropriate form of concern, because accepting these costs is not consistent with being appropriately concerned with, among other things, my friendships.

When I think that my behavior on the internet is not worth it because of its costs, then, I am thinking about a reason that the concern my behavior manifests is inappropriate. The reason that it is inappropriate is that incurring its costs implies inappropriate forms of concern for other things in my life. Perhaps appropriate concern for a friend would involve incurring such costs, but certainly not appropriate concern for any and every random person who happens to have noxious political views. Notice, finally, that when I am thinking about costs here, it does not seem that I am thinking about a reason that is merely prudential. If the concern that I’m manifesting on the internet were appropriate, this would imply that a kind of concern for friendship is appropriate that looks warped in a way that is natural to describe as disrespectful to my friend. I disrespect my friend if I neglect them whenever a random stranger needs correction on the internet. If I thought that this were an appropriate form of concern for a friend, I would have a disrespectful conception of the appropriate kind of concern due a friend. And this is what I recognize in thinking about costs.

Now, I want to argue that we can reason to the conclusion that anger is unfitting on the basis of costs in much the way that I’ve just argued that we can reason to the conclusion that a kind of concern in action is inappropriate on the basis of costs.

The first step in this argument is to observe that appropriate concern is manifested not simply in action, but in emotions like anger. This point has been stressed in important work by Samuel Scheffler.²² I’ve also already noted this fact in discussing the example that motivated my treatment of importance in this section; my anger at Brutus’s betrayal seems to get the importance of the betrayal wrong—seems unfitting—because it manifests an inappropriate or warped sort of concern with the betrayal. Judgments about the importance of friendship will be connected to judgments about the kind of concern in action in response to wrongdoing that the role of friendship in a life merits, and this difference will be portrayed as well in different kinds of anger which are themselves manifestations of concern. And we can reason to the conclusion that the anger is unfitting because it manifests a kind of concern that is inappropriate absent some important connection—like friendship—linking me and the betrayal.

The second step in this argument is to notice that anger itself imposes costs. Just as we have finite resources for action, we have finite emotional resources. To see the relevance of this fact for assessing fit, however, we need to be careful. As Scheffler has noted, there are limits on our capacities for emotional vulnerability (2011: 31). Given that fact, becoming emotionally vulnerable to Greg in the way that is appropriate for friendship, for example, may come at the cost of being able to begin friendships with others, because I am limited in the number of people to whom I can become appropriately emotionally vulnerable. Our emotional limits, in this case, impose costs on rational action, but it is not clear these sorts of costs have anything to do with the fittingness of, for example, a particular state of anger. They are costs incurred by engaging in actions that will lead to the development of dispositions to anger that will be manifested in particular states.

I think Scheffler’s observation is correct, but I introduce it to distinguish it from a different way in which being angry involves incurring costs. It is not just dispositions but the felt effects of anger, of the kind that I discussed in §3, that impose costs on us. I’ll gloss what I mean by “finite emotional resources” with some paradigmatic examples. Consider: feelings of rage characteristically block out any other emotions we might be able to feel. Being in a rage is detrimental to our own peace of mind. Being in a rage can distract us from helping others or sap our motivation to do anything constructive at all. It is not that these are costs in the sense that choosing to be enraged is ipso facto choosing to accept costs to one’s peace of mind, etc. We don’t choose to be enraged at all, at least not in any straightforward sense. Rather, rage’s effects impose costs in the more general sense of excluding alternatives. A species of cost shows up with regard to action. Because we are finite, choosing one option excludes others. But feeling one emotion, or a certain degree of one emotion, excludes possibilities as well, albeit not by choice. Because we are emotionally finite, the effects of being enraged exclude peace of mind. Being enraged excludes feeling overjoyed for someone. And the costs, although not incurred by choice, interact with choice and the costs we incur there. Being enraged excludes making a clearheaded decision in a few moments about the best way to teach my class.

Putting these two steps together shows how reasoning about the costs of anger can be reasoning about its fittingness, and not simply reasoning about its instrumental or prudential value. An instance of anger will be fitting only if it manifests appropriate concern. And, because anger imposes costs, it is connected to other kinds of concern in much the way action is. If an instance of anger is fitting, then the costs that it imposes on our ability to manifest other sorts of concern will be merited. But just as we can conclude that some view about appropriate concern in action is warped because of what it implies about other appropriate forms of concern, we can reason that the kind of concern expressed in anger is inappropriate, because of what it implies about other appropriate forms of concern. And, since an instance of anger’s manifesting inappropriate concern entails that it is unfitting, this amounts to concluding that the anger is unfitting. The costs to other forms of concern show that the anger must be mis-portraying the importance of its object.

The easiest way to see this is, I think, to consider how things would be different if we were not emotionally finite. Imagine this time a demigod. The demigod is like us in that they have limited time, attention, and energy to invest in action. But they are unlike us in having unlimited capacities to be affected emotionally. For the demigod, importance will play a justificatory role in practical reasoning towards action just like ours. But the demigods would have very different emotional lives from ours. They can experience all emotions at once. Rage does not block joy or make them miserable or sap their concentration.

This difference looks like it will show up in the way that “importance to them” justifies responding to wrongdoing in action and in anger. Since a demigod has limited resources for action, it can be particularly important to them that a friend wronged them, in the sense that the role of that friendship in their life can justify accepting certain costs to respond to that wrongdoing that would not be justified absent the friendship. But with unlimited emotional capacities, such a creature could become enraged at everyone’s betrayal by their friend. What grounds, then, would there be for thinking that it is unfitting for the demigods to become enraged by every betrayal? Why shouldn’t we think that it is perfectly fitting for a demigod to be enraged, for instance, by Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar?

We might try to answer these questions by appeal to the kinds of considerations we gave in our case—that such rage looks like it manifests the psychology of a groupie or stalker, as Scheffler put it, given that the demigods have no important connection to the wrongdoing. But why should we think that their rage manifests this sort of inappropriate concern? Why not think that their rage is quite fitting, because it portrays Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar in light of how important it is to Caesar? If we think that rage is unfitting in my case, it is because the importance of Caesar’s friendship with Brutus to Caesar doesn’t make the betrayal important to me in the way it does for Caesar, because the role of friendship in Caesar’s life justifies certain responses on Caesar’s part that it wouldn’t on my part. We seem to think that this applies both to action and to emotions like anger. But why think that friendship functions for the demigods as it does for us?

One of the core reasons for thinking that it functions as it does for us is our finitude—both emotional and agential. As Scheffler puts it: “I cannot value the friendship in the same way that the participants can; it cannot play the same role in my emotional life and practical deliberations” (2011: 37). Perhaps we still have reason to think that rage from the demigods would manifest a warped kind of concern with a relationship to which they have no important connection. But we cannot appeal to their emotional finitude. We can, however, appeal to emotional finitude in our case. In virtue of our emotional finitude, particular instances of anger have implications for the shape of appropriate concern for other things, in a way that they do not for the demigods. And this makes the costs of anger relevant for assessing its fit in a way that they would not be for the demigods.

Consider, again, my being enraged by Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar. If I did find myself enraged at this betrayal, I would think something had gone awry—that my rage was a manifestation of concern that bordered on obsession with Brutus’s and Caesar’s friendship. But I would not deny that Caesar could experience fitting rage. This is because I think, at least implicitly, the important role friendship plays in a life makes betrayals important in a way that that is fittingly portrayed in rage by the betrayed friend, but not others. Why think this? Well, consider what I would need to think in order to think that my rage at Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar was fitting. I would need to think that my anger portrayed the importance of the betrayal accurately. That is, I would need to take the anger’s portrayal to match my judgments about the importance of the wrongdoing and the importance to me of my connection with the wrongdoing. But if I’m not mistaken and am aware that I have no particularly important connection to the wrongdoing, I will have to think that simply being connected to Brutus and Caesar by very thin moral bonds makes betrayal as important as my rage portrays it. Thinking this amounts to thinking that these very thin ties make betrayals of friendship important such that no different kind of concern is appropriate from a friend than it is from anyone.

This seems like a warped conception of the relative importance of friendship and basic moral relations in a human life, and not simply because it is inhumanly demanding. Consider the costs that such rage would impose on my ability to manifest other forms of concern. To think that rage is fitting in response to any betrayal amounts to thinking that my connection to other human beings is important in a way that makes it appropriate to endure the misery of rage any time I hear about or encounter an instance of betrayal. It means that my attention is appropriately diverted away from things that are particularly important to me—like friends and personal projects—and absorbed by betrayals any time I hear about or encounter them. It means that it is appropriate to be motivationally impaired in the way characteristic of rage whenever I hear about or encounter a betrayal. To think that my rage is fitting, then, is to think that these and other costs are merited by the importance of betrayal simply in light of the importance of a very minimal connection. And this seems to involve a warped conception of the kind of concern that is made appropriate by mere moral connections, because it involves thinking that the appropriate kind of concern for my own self and for the things that are personally important to me is such that they allow for incurring these costs. As with action, the shape of other forms of appropriate concern implied by the assumption that my anger is fitting may plausibly seem to be disrespectful. It is disrespectful to my friends to get distracted from their concerns and be emotionally unavailable simply because a random betrayal happened somewhere on earth. If I thought that this were the form of concern appropriate for friends, I would have a disrespectful conception of appropriate concern for friends. Such anger may seem not merely prudentially unwise, but in fact disrespectful of my own worth, or at least not properly attuned to my own value. If my anger were fitting, it would mean that the appropriate kind of concern for my own emotional wellbeing involves feeling miserable whenever a random betrayal happens anywhere on earth, and this seems like a masochistic conception of appropriate self-concern.

My reasoning may be mistaken here, just as it may be in the case of action. I may get appropriate concern wrong. I may think that the costs that rage places on my ability to manifest other forms of concern implies a warped conception of appropriate concern for other things when in fact it does not. For instance, I think that it is a bad bit of reasoning to conclude from the fact that my rage at being oppressed is costly to me that it is not fitting. The costs of the anger of the oppressed need not reflect an inappropriate kind of self-concern, but rather simply the gravity of injustice in a world hostile to human flourishing. (I’ll discuss this sort of case—and its particular difficulties—in more depth in the next section.) And this sort of reasoning can be hijacked by various social pathologies. The transactional ethos of late capitalism might lead me to think mistakenly that the costs that fitting rage imposes on my ability to get ahead in the workplace show that it is unfitting, because I’ve absorbed a pathological conception of the kind of concern that is appropriate for getting ahead. But these are particular mistakes in reasoning about costs, not grounds for thinking that such reasoning is illicit. And it is hard to see how such reasoning could be illicit generally, given that we need to make sense of how to fit appropriate concern for different things into a single, finite life, concern that shows up in emotions like anger as much as it shows up in action.²³

This, at last, gives us what I take to be the response to problem (b), the full answer to my motivating question, and a proper diagnosis of the grocery store case. In the grocery store, I find a miserable rage bubbling up inside of me. But I stop and reflect. I notice that for my misery to be fitting, I’d need to think that I had some connection to the jerk’s behavior that made it so important as to be fittingly portrayed by the kind of anger that involves such misery. And I think, this just cannot be true. I have no special connection to the jerk or to grocery stores. If my rage were fitting, jerky behavior would be so important that it would merit misery wherever and whenever it occurred. And such a conception of the importance of my connection to jerks (or maybe grocery stores?) seems warped—it involves thinking that the appropriate kind of concern for jerky behavior in the grocery store imposes costs on my concern for my own mental wellbeing and ability to attend to other things I care about. And these are warped conceptions of appropriate concern for myself and the other things I care about. So, I think, my anger must be off. I calm down.²⁴ And my thought that my rage is “not worth it” is not the thought that it is prudentially or instrumentally inadvisable, but rather that its costs to my ability to manifest concern for other things show it to be inappropriate and so unfitting.

To close this section, I want to make a final point. In the grocery store case, I think that my anger is not worth it because jerks don’t play a role in my life that makes fitting anger in response to basic rule-breaking worth being miserable. And I think that they don’t play this role because they couldn’t. Any conception of the importance of jerks that entailed that it was fitting to be miserable over such behavior seems like a completely warped view of importance. But sometimes anger may seem to be “not worth it” in a slightly different way—the costs of the anger may reveal to us that we have in fact given something a role in our lives that merits the costs of our anger, but that we shouldn’t have. I want to illustrate this difference with two examples.

First, take my hobby of playing historical board games and a non-moral analogue of anger: frustration. Imagine that I am burning myself out one night, reading difficult rulebooks and becoming increasingly frustrated with my inability to parse some dense text. But I catch myself and think: “This is not worth it. It’s not worth it to feel so miserable about a mere hobby!” Here, I might be reacting in exactly the same way as in the grocery store case. I think that my frustration portrays my failure to parse the rulebook as important in light of the importance to me of my hobby. But I think that it would be a warped conception of the importance of a mere hobby that it should make failures at parsing rulebooks important in a way that merits incurring the misery of my frustration. I’m just overreacting.

But there is also another possibility. The thought that my frustration is not worth it might express the revelation not that the frustration is unfitting, given the role games do play in my life, but rather that it is not worth giving games a role in my life that makes miserable frustration an appropriate cost of the failure to understand rules—and that is exactly what I have done! Without fully realizing it, I’ve given these historical games a role in my life that is, perhaps, so central to my identity that it does make my failures regarding them important enough for extreme frustration. If I can change the role of a hobby in my life just by fiat, then perhaps I can just calm down. But more likely, I can’t. My frustration is a problem not because it is unfitting, but precisely because it is. I should avoid obsessively reading rulebooks not because I know I’m prone to overreacting in frustration, but because I recognize that my frustration at reading them is an all too appropriate manifestation of the warped role that these games play in my life—and I can only change that role if I stop doing things like obsessively reading rulebooks.

Second, consider a relationship. Imagine that a colleague in my office, Ralph, forgets my birthday. This makes me really angry. I spend most of the day stewing in a rage. But at the end of the day, exhausted in my misery, I think, “This isn’t worth it—it isn’t worth being miserable simply because Ralph is so self-centered.” Again, my thinking here might be identical to the grocery store case. I reflect on my relationship with Ralph and realize that we are simply co-workers. And I think that it is a completely warped conception of the importance of the co-worker relationship to think that fitting anger in response to a forgotten birthday is the kind that involves the costs of being miserable. I recognize that I am overreacting.

But maybe I am closer friends than that with Ralph. My thought that it is not worth being miserable simply because Ralph is so self-centered may, then, be the thought not that the costs of my anger show it to be unfitting, but rather that the very fact that such costly anger is fitting shows that I am in a bad relationship—a relationship that is not worth it, at least not in its current form. And whatever is the case with hobbies, it doesn’t seem that we can change the role of a relationship in our lives by fiat. Here I cannot simply calm down; what I need to do is to talk to Ralph and possibly end our relationship.

5. Dilemma

The anger of the oppressed is often very costly, precisely because the wrongs it responds to are very great. And, it has often been taken to be fitting, although costly, for precisely this reason. Amia Srinivasan notes a trend in which conservative commentators have argued against the anger of African Americans on the grounds that it simply makes their lives go poorly. As she rightly notes, understood as offering instrumental considerations not to be angry, these arguments do not show anger not to be fitting.²⁵ But some of these arguments might in fact be read as arguing that such anger is not fitting, because it just cannot be worth living in misery because of injustice. My account offers a diagnosis of the mistake involved here: the inference is a bad one, premised on the assumption that accurate portrayals of injustice cannot possibly be so costly.

Things get tricky, though, when we use my account to think about the way in which the oppressed may find their rage to be unfitting. It would be wrong to say that the anger of the oppressed is unfitting because so costly—that their anger must have inflated injustice’s importance. In the abstract, my account is not committed to this error. It seems correct to think that very great wrongdoing is important for the wronged, even if the wrongdoer is someone to whom the wronged stands in no important relationship other than being human. Fitting anger may simply merit great costs. It would be common to suppose, then, that “not worth it” thoughts of my kind will not show up or at least not be rational amongst the oppressed; thoughts about anger’s not being “worth it” will be about instrumental reasons not to be angry, or they will give expression to a kind of emotional deadening under the weight of oppression.

However, this is not quite right. It seems to me that oppressed people do have the kind of “not worth it” thoughts I’ve been discussing. Imagine a colonial subject of an empire, filled with rage over their treatment by the viceroy. They reflect on the way that the rage is destroying them inside and think: this just isn’t worth it. The viceroy isn’t important to me. This seems to me to be the kind of “not worth it” thought that I’ve articulated. But, at the same time, the subject may feel that they must respond to the wrongdoing somehow. Their anger may dissipate to some extent, but not in the way that mine does in the grocery store. The situation feels like a bind: anger seems at once fitting and not fitting.

How could these two thoughts be true? The answer here lies, I think, not in attempting to resolve the tension between these two thoughts, but in admitting that it is a genuine dilemma that agents may face, a dilemma that my account has the resources to articulate. There is something natural in the thought that the anger of the oppressed has a paradoxical character: getting worked up into a rage seems to grant the oppressor the power to ruin one’s life further; not getting worked up into a rage lets the oppressor off the hook. And the fact that oppressed groups can face something like emotional dilemmas has been remarked upon in the philosophical literature—by Amia Srinivasan on African American anger and by Talbot Brewer on the “emotional labor” of those working in the service industry. But they look for the source of emotional problems in the conflicts between instrumental reasons and reasons of fittingness for emotions, and so the examples that they hold up as exemplars have a different shape from the one that I’m pointing to.

For example, Srinivasan presents the case of James Baldwin, considering whether to express his anger over the unjust treatment of African Americans. Srinivasan holds that to fully embody his anger—to fully achieve the kind of appreciation she takes to be constitutive of anger—Baldwin must express it. But the expression of anger would also be counterproductive to the cause of Civil Rights. White Americans are frightened when African Americans express their rage, and so expressing his anger would make many in his audience less sympathetic to his cause. So, Baldwin’s reasons cut in different directions. He has instrumental reasons not to express his anger. He has reasons of fittingness to express his anger—the fact that such anger, and its expression, is merited by injustice. According to Srinivasan, the choice situation that Baldwin faces is a manifestation of what she calls “affective injustice,” in virtue of the causes of the dilemma he faces. The reason that his anger would be counterproductive is because of the attitudes of many Americans toward African American rage—attitudes which stem from the very thing that makes anger appropriate in the first place: an ideology which casts the anger of African Americans as frightening or illegitimate springs from and feeds off of the historical and enduring injustices perpetrated against African Americans. In light of this fact, Srinivasan argues that the difficulty of the choice that Baldwin faces is in fact wrongful: Baldwin is wronged in having to make this choice, because the reasons that expression of anger is counterproductive stem from the very wrong that it targets.²⁶

In such cases, the agents may feel a kind of upsetting tension in reflecting on their emotions, and the tension stems from the fact that the instrumental reasons the agent has not to get angry stem from wrongful treatment. There is no thought that the emotion might not be fitting. But I think that we can just as easily imagine the kind of puzzling “not worth it” thoughts as cropping up in these sorts of cases, as a distinct phenomenon. We might imagine James Baldwin sitting across the stage from William F. Buckley during their debate, filling with rage at the smirk on Buckley’s face. He might think: “My rage isn’t worth it. Bill Buckley doesn’t deserve it.” This seems to me to invite interpretation in terms of fittingness: Bill Buckley isn’t the sort of person for whom this kind of anger is appropriate. But at the same time, Baldwin’s rage seems supremely fitting: Buckley’s smirk is infuriating. A tension remains, but it is not a tension between instrumental reasons and reasons of fittingness.

It seems to me, then, that there is an important kind of emotional dilemma or bind that is missed by Srinivasan and others, and which is not amenable to interpretation by an instrumental strategy. The kind of dilemma I’ve pointed to involves it seeming that anger is at once demanded and forbidden—that it is fitting and not fitting. And the recognition that it is not fitting primarily goes by way of costs—of the kind of misery that the anger generates in oneself.

To make this articulate, I want to introduce the following thought: sometimes regarding wrongdoing as having a certain kind of significance can feel demeaning to an agent, and rightly so. This becomes particularly salient if we think in terms of costs: being willing to accept certain great emotional costs as merited seems to manifest a lack of self-respect. This is especially so when the anger comes in response to a manifest lack of mutual recognition. Anger at failures of recognition frequently has a unique feature: the state of anger is one more manifestation of its own content. The wrongdoer will wrongfully fail to recognize the anger as what it is. The misery of anger will seem like the misery of participating in one’s own ongoing wrongdoing. It can’t be that the costs of one’s anger are merited, because accepting those costs amounts to a demeaning form of humiliation. There just is no way that rage can be fitting, because it seems to entail a completely degraded conception of appropriate self-concern.

Here is what I have in mind: return to Baldwin and Bill Buckley. Imagine Baldwin thinking that Buckley’s smugness isn’t worth making himself miserable over, although his smugness is, nevertheless, infuriating. This is a disorienting thought. There’s something wrong with letting Bill Buckley make you miserable; but there’s also something wrong with letting Bill Buckley off the hook. What makes this disorienting thought possible, and fundamentally correct, is the following: Buckley wrongs Baldwin by condescending to him. He fails to recognize his point of view or take it seriously. But for this very reason, Buckley will not recognize Baldwin’s anger for what it is. He will not recognize the costs Baldwin incurs as being merited. As Srinivasan points out, Baldwin will come off to Buckley as just another angry African American. And it is natural and illuminating to explain what is particularly upsetting in experiencing this kind of anger by appeal to the special kind of misery it involves. It’s the misery of being forced at gunpoint to dig your own grave. To get angry at Buckley’s condescension in the recognition that the anger will be met with more condescension leads to the anger seeming not merely passively miserable, in the way the grief at a death can be passively miserable, but actively miserable: the misery of not merely reliving a traumatic experience, but reliving it by reenacting it. And if the anger seems like the response to a demand, then the metaphor of gunpoint is quite apt: the misery is the misery of being forced by your wrongdoer to reenact your own wrongdoing. Metaphors of power are apt here: one feels that in one’s anger one is granting the wrongdoer power to compel one to participate in one’s own wrongdoing.

It seems to me often quite rational to conclude that enduring this kind of misery is not worth it. It is not that this kind of misery is completely off the table. We endure it properly sometimes in relationships in which it we take it to be proper to have a substantial kind of special concern. A comparison with friendship is useful here: the thought that anger is costly because not recognized by the other is not at first a recognition that one has made a local mistake to invest so much in the relationship, but rather, perhaps, that the relationship needs to be abandoned. But in the general moral relationship, these things can pull apart. It can feel as if one would lack self-respect in enduring misery, in light of the fact that one doesn’t care about any special relationship with the wrongdoer. Nevertheless, the wrong can seem so significant that it cries out for some emotional response. One’s situation then seems “absurd” in the following way: one is damned either to demean oneself in getting angry or to fail to emotionally register the wrongdoing in the way that it seems to call for.

One may balk at this thought. Surely if anger is called for, there must be some fitting kind of anger available. Surely we can’t be stuck being inappropriately concerned. But this assumption seems to me unmotivated, called into question by the familiarity of the phenomenon that I’ve just tried to illuminate. And there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that our emotional resources are so fine-grained as to allow us always to be in a position to find a fitting response when one is called for. Our emotions are often inchoate and crude, presenting us with tools that are much duller than are needed. We refine them over time and with experience, finding ways of feeling subtle enough to meet the demands of particular situations. Perhaps the situation I’ve described admits of resolution by subtle reflection upon and honing of one’s own anger. But until we find a way, we can be stuck in an absurd situation: to fail to be angry is to fail to take wrongdoing seriously enough, to fail to properly acknowledge its importance, to fail to manifest appropriate concern. To be angry is to fail to take our own self-worth seriously enough, to fail to have appropriate concern for ourselves, by investing too much importance in the wrongdoer.

6. Conclusion

I started this essay with a puzzle: how could “not worth it” thoughts be about reasons that anger was unfitting? How could the costs of anger show it to be anything other than prudentially or instrumentally bad? The argument for my answer took some twists and turns, addressing complexities—some familiar, some not—along the way, but in the end my answer to these questions is fairly straightforward: we can conclude that our anger is unfitting on the basis of costs because, as emotionally finite creatures, the costs of anger have implications for the shape of other sorts of appropriate concern. If we reject these implications, we can conclude that our anger is unfitting. My argument aimed to show why this straightforward answer is plausible, and it also allowed us to articulate a dilemma that agents can face regarding their anger. In concluding, I just want to briefly note three implications of my account. First, it is general enough that it will apply to different accounts of anger. If anger is essentially communicative, for instance, it will allow us to articulate how the costs of communication bear on fittingness. Second, the account also generalizes to other emotions. Although the subject of this paper has been anger, I have often argued at a more general level—about anger and emotions that are like it. Given the shape of my account, this should not be surprising; our emotional finitude is not narrowly confined to anger. Wherever “not worth it” thoughts about the emotions show up, my account should apply. Third, it can explain why “not worth it” thoughts only show up for some attitudes. I suspect, for example, that “not worth it” thoughts do not show up for beliefs, at least not in the way they do for both action and emotion. My account has the resources to illuminate this fact: whatever we think about how our finitude impacts the rationality of belief, it seems clear that the connection between truth and the costs of belief is quite different.