Introduction - Moral Outrage: The Generative Power of Political Emotions (original) (raw)
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MORAL OUTRAGE Introduction The Generative Power of Political Emotions
2018
Moral outrage has until now been conceptualized as a call to action, a reaction to injustice and transgressions, and a forceful motor for democratic participation, acts of civil disobedience, and violent and illicit action. Th is introduction goes beyond linear causality between trigger events, political emotions, and actions to explore moral outrage as it is experienced and expressed in contexts of political violence, providing a better understanding of that emotion’s generic power. Moral outrage is here understood as a multidimensional emotion that may occur momentarily and instantly, and exist as an enduring process and being-in-the-world, based on intergenerational experiences of violence, state histories, or local contexts of fear and anxiety. Because it appears in the intersubjective fi eld, moral outrage is central for identity politics and social positioning, so we show how moral outrage may be a prism to investigate and understand social processes such as mobilization, coll...
Moral Outrage: the generative power of political emotions
Conflict & Society, 2018
Moral outrage has until now been conceptualized as a call to action, a reaction to injustice and transgressions, and a forceful motor for democratic participation, acts of civil disobedience, and violent and illicit action. This introduction goes beyond linear causality between trigger events, political emotions, and actions to explore moral outrage as it is experienced and expressed in contexts of political violence, providing a better understanding of that emotion’s generic power. Moral outrage is here understood as a multidimensional emotion that may occur momentarily and instantly, and exist as an enduring process and being-in-the-world, based on intergenerational experiences of violence, state histories, or local contexts of fear and anxiety. Because it appears in the intersubjective field, moral outrage is central for identity politics and social positioning, so we show how moral outrage may be a prism to investigate and understand social processes such as mobilization, collectivities, moral positioning and responsiveness, and political violence.
Conflict and society, 2018
This article analyses the social construction of moral outrage, interpreting it as both an extemporaneous feeling and an enduring process, objectified in narratives and rituals and permeating public spaces as well as the intimate sphere of social actors’ lives. Based on ethnography carried out in Istanbul, this contribution focuses on the assassination of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. This provoked a moral shock and led to an annual commemoration in which thousands of people—distant in political, religious, ethnic positions—gather around a shared feeling of outrage. The article retraces the narratives of innocence and the moral frames that make Dink’s public figure different from other victims of state violence, thus enabling a moral and emotional identification of a large audience. Outrage over Dink’s murder has become a creative, mobilizing force that fosters new relationships between national history and subjectivity, and de-reifies essentialized social boundaries and identity claims.
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology , 2008
A survey (N = 120) examined variables that contribute to the willingness of people to engage in silent marches against violence in the Netherlands. As argued in Sacred Value Protection Model (SVPM) of Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, and Lerner (2000) and moral mandate theory of Skitka, Bauman, and Sargis (2005), moral threats that are triggered by violent incidents, may indeed drive people to protest against such incidents. Our findings indicated dual pathways to such protests, that are all associated with reactive, angry empathic concerns. These concerns involve people's outrageous, punitive reactions towards offenders on behalf of the victims. These concerns are directly or indirectly related to people's participation intentions. That is, they directly influence the participation intention variable, or indirectly, through (re-)establishing the belief in a just-world, or through more fearful, self-directed moral cleansing reactions. These latter reactions aim at reinforcing community-shared moral standards.
Violent Fury: Can Third-party Outrage Manifest Cyclical, Mimetic Violence?
Political Theology, 2018
Public articulations of outrage about wrongdoing and its perpetrators seem ubiquitous, especially on social media, and often seek worthy objectives such as justice for the wronged. However, expressions of outrage can sometimes lead to an innocent person’s career being destroyed or even the endangering of their life. How might we understand such devastating outcomes from a phenomenon that seeks to respond to violence? This paper sees outrage as an emotion whereby one appraises that someone has harmed another and/or violated moral norms. It evaluates how third parties’ public articulations of their outrage can manifest the cyclical violence of Girardian mimetic theory. By engaging with Mark Brewin’s claims about the revelatory function of texts, the paper proposes a nuanced understanding of the relation between social media and the prominence and prevalence of contemporary outrage. It seeks to contribute to analyses of outrage using Girardian theory, especially in political emotion research.
A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one's moral identity
Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account of outrage in five studies examining outrage at corporate labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment. Ingroup (vs. outgroup) wrongdoing elicited outrage at corporations through increased guilt, while the opportunity to express outrage reduced guilt (Study 2) and restored perceived personal morality (Study 3). Study 4 tested whether effects were due merely to downward social comparison and Study 5 showed that guilt-driven outrage was attenuated by an affirmation of moral identity in an unrelated context.
This article seeks to contest the frequently repeated assertion that anger poses the greatest threat to transitional societies moving from authoritarianism to democracy. Against suggestions that victims of past injustices should forswear their 'negative emotions' lest they spark a renewed cycle of violence, it argues that it is important to recognize the moral legitimacy of their anger. While anger is notoriously (though contestably) vulnerable to excess and needs to be moderated in reference to shared norms of reasonableness, it represents an appropriate response to wilful harm and needs to be afforded a central role in any conception of justice.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2018
A debate has emerged across disciplines about why people engage in costly helping. Empathy is one mechanism. We highlight a second , more controversial motivator: moral outrage. Integrating findings from moral psychology and inter-group literatures, we suggest outrage is a critical force for collective action and highlight directions for future research. One of the most vigorously disputed questions across several fields is why people engage in costly helping. A debate has ignited around the utility of empathy, in particular, as a driver of costly helping. Empathy, a response to others' emotions (including sharing others' experiences), has been viewed by many as a moral force, but by others as too unreliable and biased to ground effective helping behavior [1]. Empathy has taken center stage in these debates, in part because of the common intuition that empathy is for helping victims. By contrast, outrage (anger at violation of one's subjective moral standards) is often characterized as a negative, corrosive emotion in part because it predicts disproportionately spiteful or retributive behavior toward transgressors [2]. By this account, outrage constitutes a barrier to moral progress [3]. One consequence of this characterization is that potential positive effects of outrage (e.g., cohesive collective action) are overlooked and underinvestigated. However, a growing literature has examined the mobilizing effects of outrage in the context of inter-group relations, some of which we review here. We call for an integration of the moral and intergroup psychology literatures on outrage for two reasons: (i) to highlight the utility of outrage for motivating collective action; and (ii) to suggest novel avenues for research at the intersection of emotion , morality, and costly helping behavior. We begin by reviewing how outrage has been studied in the moral and intergroup literatures, then turn to examining the different reactions people exhibit in response to outrage.