Lee A. McBride III

Martha Nussbaum argues that “garden-variety anger” is normatively irrational, politically unnecessary, and inevitably destructive (Nussbaum 2015). Anger, on this account, is portrayed as a primitive vestige of bygone days, an impediment to the genuine pursuit of justice and the honoring of obligations. Yet, on Nussbaum’s account, there is one exception: “transitional anger” – anger that quickly transitions into compassionate hope, focusing on future welfare. Martin Luther King, Jr. is evoked as an exemplar here. In response, this paper revisits Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to point out that (even-tempered) anger was listed among the virtues, and to discuss the practical wisdom required to approximate the mean in these cases. A case is made for the approbation of anger (in relation to the right person(s), in the right amount, at the right time, with the right aim in view, and in the right way). The argument hinges on the persistence of institutionalized oppressions, situated ignorance, and the role anger plays in galvanizing social agency among those who suffer social injustice.

This paper offers an account of leftist democratic politics, one that seeks insights and new possibilities in the confluence of liberal-reformist thought and radical democratic post-Marxist thought. An interpretation of the renascent liberalism of John Dewey is compared to the radical democracy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, exposing shared commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and continued struggles to combat the varied intersectional manifestations of subordination. The author argues that this confluence of thought offers a tenable leftist democratic politics, one that remains open to transnational perspectives, critiques, and insights.

This paper discusses racism and the liberation of racially oppressed peoples. An account of insurrectionist ethics is offered, outlining the types of moral intuitions, character traits, and methods required to garner impetus for the liberation of oppressed groups. For illustrative purposes, the core tenets of insurrectionist ethics are highlighted in the work of Angela Davis. It is argued that insurrectionist ethics and its militant posture of resistance is crucial to human liberation and social amelioration in the face of racism.

This chapter draws questions of race into food ethics. Appropriating a conception of race articulated by Alain Locke (1885‒1954), it is suggested that racial imperialism and the attending drive to claim proprietary ownership of racialized cultural products is responsible for much of the intercultural strife and race-based injustice in the modern world. Foods and foodways, understood as cultural products, are then discussed against the backdrop of racial partisanship in the exchange and consumption of foods and cuisine. Notions of authenticity and cultural appropriation are discussed in this light. It is argued that there is a place for race in the discussion of food ethics and that racial imperialism and racial partisanship in the exchange and consumption of foods should be repudiated.

In “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” Robert Gooding-Williams offers an insight. He writes: “Our sense of ourselves and of the possibilities existing for us is, to a significant degree, a function of the descriptions we have available to us to conceptualize our intended actions and prospective lives. . . . ‘Hence if new modes of description come into being, new possibilities of action come into being in consequence.’” In this article, I discuss the philosopher’s role in the articulation of new descriptions and thus new possibilities. I argue that potential modes of bold and assertive comportment are conjured when new insurrectionist descriptions are articulated within oppressed populations. To bring this to a higher resolution, I discuss the pervasiveness of dialectical conflict, the need to creatively reorient the descriptions of oppressed groups toward liberation, and the need for more than one prescriptive mode of social amelioration.

The American philosophical tradition is often portrayed as a genteel tradition that is committed to democracy and the incremental expansion of democracy through suasionist means. In an attempt to complicate this narrative, the author articulates the basic features of Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist ethics, then attempts to locate this insurrectionist ethics in the work of Henry D. Thoreau. It is argued that this insurrectionist ethos is a fecund addition to the American philosophical tradition and that insurrectionist character traits and modes of comportment offer appealing resources to those faced with oppression and hegemony.