David O'Brien

The eternal anger puzzle invites us to explain how fitting anger about a past event (e.g., an injustice, a betrayal) can cease to be fitting, even though the reason that makes it fitting is constituted by an unchangeable fact about the past. The responses that receive the most attention tend to require revisions to philosophical orthodoxy or pre-theoretical intuition. They attribute fittingness-regulating powers to processes that are not standardly presumed to have them, change the directionality of anger from looking backward to looking forward or sideways, bite the bullet and affirm that all fitting anger remains fitting forever, or deny that the puzzle’s explanandum can be explained at all. I defend a more conservative solution. According to it, backward-looking anger simply ceases to be fitting when and because its duration makes it disproportional to how infuriating its object was. I argue that this solution follows from assumptions that no party to the debate can easily reject. I also highlight virtues that adjudicate in its favor. Chief among them are that it respects the puzzle’s own terms and that it stays true to the trend of explaining facts about fittingness by reference to qualities that reside in the attitudes’ objects.

It has become increasingly common to endorse and implement anonymous grading as a way of promoting fairness or equality of opportunity in the classroom. The American Philosophical Association currently recommends anonymous grading, as do the Canadian Philosophical Association, the British Philosophical Association, the Society for Women in Philosophy, and Minorities and Philosophy. Despite its increasing prevalence, the practice has received surprisingly little attention in applied ethics. This paper begins filling this gap. I start by clarifying the ‘Standard Argument’ from fairness or equality of opportunity for anonymous grading. I then argue that the Standard Argument fails to support current models for anonymous grading. The issue: current models for anonymous grading are practically self-undermining if the aim is to reduce violations of equality of opportunity or fairness. So, if we want to address bias in grading because we care about equality of opportunity or fairness, we need to change how we do it.