In moments of anger, we often feel certain that our position is right, both morally and factually. Sometimes we even imagine we are right because we are angry. But as philosophers have long noted, anger is as prone to exaggeration, distortion, and self-justification as it is to truth. Philosopher Benjamin Matheson examines how anger can both reveal and obscure moral reality—and why treating anger as reliable, simply because it feels righteous, is a mistake.

When we’re wronged, we often get angry. If someone cuts you off in traffic, you might angrily swear at them. If a friend betrays you, you might resent them and refuse to treat them with the same affection you once did. If a friend is violently attacked, you might feel indignant at the attackers. If your government is complicit in an atrocity, you might join with others in anger by protesting outside government buildings.

But is such anger ever justified?

It might at first seem strange to ask whether an emotion like anger can be justified. Emotions might just seem like things that happen to us, and not things we do. Emotions, it might seem, are no different from natural events that force us to do things: anger may seem no different from a gust of wind that moves us. Just as we can’t justify moving because of the wind, it might seem we can’t justify feeling angry.

But we also commonly consider people to be insufficiently or excessively angry. If you become so incensed at the person who cut you off that you try to run the other driver off the road, your anger seems excessive. And if you shrug off the violent attack on your friend without feeling angry, you seem to be insufficiently angry. In both cases, your anger is implicitly being evaluated as unjustified.

In the first case, you might well be right that being cut off merits anger, but you are mistaken that it merits so much anger. In other words, you’ve accurately identified that there’s something worthy of being angry—being recklessly cut off—but your anger hasn’t accurately reflected the extent to which being recklessly cut off (at least in this instance) is worthy of anger. To borrow some useful terminology from philosophers Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, your anger is the correct shape, but it doesn’t have the correct size.

In the second case, because you do not feel any anger, your feelings about the attack on your friend have both the wrong size (you feel insufficient anger) and the wrong shape (you do not feel anger at all when you have reason to). So, justified anger is at least anger that has the right shape and size.

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We should be cautious about being angry precisely because it can sometimes distort rather than illuminate the world around us.

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There are many cases where anger is justified in this way: we feel angry about what merits anger and we feel angry to the correct extent. This leaves us the impression that anger is a reliable guide to truth: when we feel it, we are accurately identifying the facts of a situation. For example, when we feel angry at the person who cut us off, we have the thought that this person’s actions justify us being angry, and so the person has done something wrong (otherwise our anger wouldn’t be justified). So, our anger seems to point towards facts—in this case, that someone else has done something wrong. At least, that’s how our anger can feel to us.