Forthcoming in Ratio – Please cite published version.
ON BEING ANNOYED
Tom Roberts
Abstract
What is it that unites episodes of the emotion of annoyance? The paper considers
possible analyses of the content of the state of annoyance, and concludes that this
emotion should be understood to involve a negative construal of an object, event,
or state of affairs as having failed to exemplify one of a suite of kinds of
everyday quality or excellence. This account permits us to see what is common
to a varied range of superficially-disjointed emotional responses, and to make
sense of the conditions under which annoyance is appropriate or inappropriate.
Moreover, it reveals something of what we care about in everyday and social
contexts, in our ordinary dealings with persons and artefacts.
Analysing individual kinds of emotional state can, in addition to being
philosophically interesting in its own right, provide a useful testing ground for
theories that aim to characterise the constitutive essence of the emotions in general, or
that provide conditions for individuating one emotion type from another. In this
paper, my concern is the hitherto-neglected emotion of annoyance, and I consider the
circumstances that do (and those that ought to) give rise to this phenomenon, before
offering an analysis of this emotion that distinguishes it from its close cousins, anger
and disappointment. Annoyance is worthy of our scholarly attention – despite being
further from core emotional concerns than, say, anger, love, or resentment, and
perhaps less ethically significant – due to its pervasive occurrence in our everyday
lives; because a successful philosophical account of it may lend support, however
incremental, to a broader overall picture of the emotions; because individual emotions
can reveal something about underlying human values; and because picking out the
defining dimension of annoyance is unexpectedly difficult. I shall argue that
annoyance should be understood as a particular concern-based construal, in which the
annoying object or event is viewed, critically, as violating a certain standard of (what
I shall call) everyday excellence.
1. The Annoying
The things which annoy us1 are many and varied, and we would want our
philosophical account to capture what our reactions to different vexatious situations
have in common, and to enable us to distinguish annoyance from other affective states
from which it may be only subtly different. The things which annoy us can be
encountered by way of any perceptual modality (a sound, a smell, an itch, a bright
light can annoy us2); they can be animate (a pecking bird), or inanimate (a fire alarm),
rational agents (an aggravating colleague), or arational creatures (a pestering seagull);
things which were not annoying can become annoying over time (a once-charming
1
Note that I do not intend to ascribe a property of 'being annoying' to the things which annoy us,
although I shall at times speak, as ordinary talk permits, of objects and events as being annoying.
2 Gustatory examples are more difficult to come by, but it seems reasonable to talk of the annoying
aftertaste of the soup spoiling one's enjoyment of the fish, say.
speech pattern, joke, or musical refrain); they can be highly determinate properties of
a situation (the rising inflection of this person's utterances), or general or inchoate
features of the world around us (the traffic; a damp summer). Whereas certain
emotions are, of necessity, targeted at other individuals – for instance envy or
gratitude – annoyance can be directed at various aspects of our own condition: our
too-hot feet; our inability to solve a crossword clue; our failure to find a set of lost
keys; our being too unwell to make a social engagement.
An episode of annoyance may be continuous with one of anger, but, or so I shall
argue, the former should not be viewed simply as a milder variety of the latter.
Similarly, annoyance may evolve into disappointment, or dissipate into boredom or
resignation. An account of annoyance, then, should be mindful of the dynamics of this
emotion – its relation to other states with which it bears similarities but from which it
also diverges.
Attending simply to the phenomenology of our emotions, we might believe that
what is distinctive of the episodes exhibited in encounters with objects or events of
the sort just listed is a characteristic qualitative character; a peculiar, hot-under-thecollar phenomenology of annoyance. While I am open to the view that instances of
emotion do tend to involve patterns of felt (perhaps bodily) experience, I am sceptical
that this is the best approach to individuating the emotions, both in general and in the
specific case of being annoyed, for quite familiar reasons.3 Firstly, there appear to be
cases in which an emotion persists over time, despite its subject undergoing its felt
quality for only some of this period: one can be annoyed (angry, envious, anxious) all
day, without feeling annoyed all day. Secondly, it isn't clear that all of the emotions
have a unique phenomenal signature; annoyance may feel scarcely different from
anger, for example. Thirdly, as will be explored more fully below, it is difficult to
make sense of the rationality and irrationality, reasonableness and unreasonableness
of the emotions if they are treated only as episodes of phenomenal character, and
independently of any intentional object.4 It is for these reasons that I set aside the
simple phenomenological diagnosis of annoyance, albeit whilst acknowledging that
these considerations may not count decisively against it.
Instead, I approach the question of the essential characteristics of annoyance from
the family of perspectives that treat the emotions as states that bear a certain
intentional content, and which understand the individuation of discrete emotions as
depending upon these contents. Thus my analysis of annoyance is intended to be
consonant with the judgement theory of emotions;5 the appraisal theory;6 and with
related models that view emotions as essentially involving construals, evaluations,
seeings-as, or beliefs about objects, events, or states of affairs.
While I do not seek to defend this general approach exhaustively in the current
paper, it is worth commenting not only that it is a dominant view in contemporary
philosophy of emotion, but that it has had notable success in characterising individual
emotion types. For instance, anger can be conceived of as a negative attitude which
3
See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); Robert Solomon, ‘Emotions and Choice’ (in Explaining Emotions, edited by
Amélie Rorty. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980, 251-281).
4
See Gabriele Taylor, ‘Justifying the Emotions’, Mind 84: 335 (1975).
5
See, for example, Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry Into Emotional Justification
(New York: Routledge, 1988); Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1987); Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (New York: Doubleday,
1976).
6
E.g. Richard Lazarus, ‘Cognition and Motivation in Emotion’, American Psychologist 46:4 (1991);
Nussbaum, Upheavals.
includes the content that a subject has unjustly harmed or offended us; fear as a
representation of a situation as perilous; embarrassment as a construal of an episode
as one of interpersonal exposure to which one is averse;7 envy as an evaluation of
another person as having something which we desire for ourselves; and so on.
Thinking of annoyance as an intentional state, and so akin to paradigm emotional
phenomena such as anger and envy, has several explanatory benefits. Firstly, it
permits us to vindicate common sense talk of annoyance as having an object at which
it is directed – the thing at which, or the person at whom, one is annoyed. Moreover,
one's annoyance can typically be justified by appeal to its contents; it can be explained
and rationalised by reference to what it depicts in the world.8 Finally, the
representationalist interpretation of annoyance gives us the resources to conceptually
distinguish individual episodes of this affective type, both from one another, and from
other emotional kinds.
Here, I intend to analyse annoyance in intentionalist terms: as essentially involving
a subject's construing the object of her annoyance as bearing upon her concerns in a
particular way; ultimately, as involving its failing to meet one of a suite of everyday
standards of quality or excellence.
2. How are things construed in annoyance?
A successful analysis of the construal involved in annoyance will deliver a unified
story about what it is that different instances of this emotion have in common, and
enable us to demarcate annoyance from distinct but related emotional episodes. Let us
consider the features that all or many of the items on the short list of annoyances
given above appear to have in common, with a view to charting the considerations
that bear upon an annoyed subject's construal of her circumstances.
2.1 Enjoyment
At first pass, we can note that many annoying things prevent one's enjoyment of a
situation or activity. A buzzing wasp draws and captures one's attention in an
unwanted way, and the noise it emits is disagreeable; a nagging itch or a persistent
headache detracts from the pleasure one takes in (say) one's surroundings, and may
provoke an unwelcome expenditure of physical effort; one's too-hot feet present a
barrier to the luxuries of sleep; an interlocutor's tiresome affectation of speech
hampers one's enjoyment of the conversation; and so forth. Similarly, there are cases
in which annoyance is inspired by something which blocks one's future or predicted
enjoyment, as when unexpected rainfall curtails a much-anticipated trip to the beach.
There is often a correlation, furthermore, between the degree or intensity of one's
annoyance and the actual or predicted level of enjoyment one receives from the
pursuit in question: it tends to be more annoying to be prevented from one's favourite
pastime than from a less entertaining undertaking. Perhaps, then, it suffices to say that
annoyance is the evaluation of an object or event as impeding, or interrupting, one's
enjoyment of a certain project or state of affairs.
This simple analysis does not suffice to capture all and only cases of annoyance,
however. Firstly, there are instances in which a subject is annoyed even though the
activity in which she is at the time employed is not obviously an enjoyable one. A
surgeon, for example, may be annoyed at the lack of promptness with which she is
passed a surgical instrument, though the operation itself is not naturally described as a
See Luke Purshouse, ‘Embarrassment: A Philosophical Analysis’, Philosophy 76:4 (2001).
In contrast, moods – which are traditionally understood to lack a determinate intentional content –
cannot be so justified, although it may be possible to identify their causes.
7
8
pleasurable activity. A student may become annoyed at the intrusive hubbub of her
housemates whilst she is writing an essay, even though that task is one to be endured
rather than relished. Thus it would be a mistake to tie annoyance too closely to actual
or predicted enjoyment. Conversely, there are competing emotional states whose
content also appears to present an object as an impediment to one's enjoyment of an
activity, showing that this analysis lacks sufficient determinacy. Disappointment, for
instance, may be characterised by a negative evaluation of a situation in which one's
(expected or actual) gratification is thwarted. As Brady puts it, ‘received views
suggest that disappointment is a negative reaction or response to the non-occurrence
of a desirable and expected event.’9 Our account of annoyance, therefore, must be
adequately determinate to disambiguate this emotion from that of disappointment. In
a case of two prospective beach-goers, we want our analysis to mark the difference
between one who is annoyed, versus one who is disappointed, at the rain. In addition,
anger is sometimes inspired by, and directed at, something's being an obstacle to
one's enjoyment, and so this emotion, too, involves a construal with a closely related
content. One's anger at a colleague, for instance, can involve construing her as an
impediment to one's fully taking pleasure in one's working environment. Again, if we
seek to do justice to common sense categories of emotion, our treatment should have
the resources to distinguish annoyance from anger, where suitable. It follows from
these observations that an appraisal of a situation as involving a disruption to an
enjoyable activity is neither necessary nor sufficient for the emotion of annoyance,
even though many everyday annoyances do have this structure.
2.2 Agency
A second feature that is held in common by a range of the situations that we find
annoying, and which can be specified without reference to enjoyment, is their
impingement upon a subject's agency: where her trying, striving, or attempted
completion of a pursuit is frustrated. The bombination of a wasp may be annoying to
one who is reading a novel intently, or following a recipe, or practising the piano.
Being unable to find one's shoes is annoying when one is in a hurry to get to the
shops. A stuck zip or an out of reach jar on a high shelf are annoying because they
confound one's physical endeavours. Once again, there is a reliable correspondence
between the intensity of one's attempted exertion – psychological or bodily – and that
of one's annoyance at this exertion's obstruction: one's annoyed reaction escalates in
proportion to the amount of force one tries to apply in freeing the stuck zip, and
similarly to the mental effort expended in attempting to remember an elusive piece of
trivia. In cases such as these, then, it seems natural to think of the state of annoyance
as involving a construal whose content depicts the situation as one in which one's
agency has been obstructed. The emphasis on agency rather than enjoyment
accommodates scenarios in which the annoyed subject's activity is not clearly a
pleasurable one: the surgeon's annoyance, for instance, may be seen as a negative
construal of the temporary interruption to her continuing, deliberate performance of
the medical procedure.
Many examples of annoyance, however, resist this classification,10 on the grounds
that the subject of the emotion is not at the time engaged in any truly active behaviour
or, if she is, that this behaviour is not blocked or under threat. A stranger's loud,
public telephone conversation does not impede one's agentive strivings in a
9
Michael Brady, 'Disappointment', Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (2010), p.183.
And related formulations of this option, such as that annoyances frustrate the satisfaction of one's
goals or desires.
10
meaningful way, and nor does a clumsy piece of expository dialogue on a television
drama, but both can annoy. Conversely, there are emotions whose contents pertain to
an obstruction of agency, but which ought to be distinguished from the state of
annoyance – self-reproach at one's inability to succeed in some task; embarrassment
at one's public weakness; anger at another person's recalcitrance. We can observe, in
consequence, that although annoying objects frequently impinge upon one's agency,
appraisals with this content are neither necessary nor sufficient for the emotion of
annoyance.
2.3 Entitlement
Thirdly, it is a pervasive feature of episodes of annoyance that the subject of the
emotion regards the relevant object or event as preventing her from having something
to which she is, in one way or another, entitled. Most straightforward are those cases
in which the subject has a financial stake in the situation. It is mildly annoying when
one's home-cooked evening meal isn't hot enough, but it is much more aggravating to
be served an expensive restaurant dish that is similarly unsatisfactory. Other
entitlements include the right11 to enjoy one's living space free from noisy
interruption; the right to watch a theatre production undisturbed by fellow audience
members' conversation; the right to be offered good professional service; the right to
expect one's associates to be punctual; and so on. Such 'rights' are relatively minor in
that they bear little moral significance and are not enshrined in law. As we can see,
the degree of one's annoyance often goes hand in hand with the extent to which one
has an entitlement – someone's public telephone conversation is more annoying when
held on the dedicated 'quiet coach' of a train than on the station platform, while one's
annoyance at an invasion of personal space is more minor when encountered in a
crowded elevator than on one's own property. A third possible analysis of annoyance
evaluations is thus that this emotion's contents depict, negatively, an obstruction to
that to which one has an entitlement.
There are counterexamples to this story, too, however. Many of the targets of
annoyance do not participate in transactions that are suitably described in the
language of entitlement. The behaviour of inanimate objects, young children, and
non-human animals, for instance, is not bound by the rules and expectations of adult
conduct, and nor do these things engage in contracts, make promises, and so on. The
rain; the sun in one's eyes; the yapping of a dog; the pestering whine of an infant; all
of these can annoy, without violating anything in the way of an entitlement. Likewise,
the cases which fall neatly under the two categories considered above tend to resist
this third analysis, when it is not clear that the subject of the emotion has a right to
enjoy herself or to exercise her agency. The problematic feature is the element of
desert implied by an entitlement: there are many annoying objects upon which the
subject of the emotion has no special claim.
3. Annoyance and Excellence
The three suggested contents of the construals that characterise annoyance each see
this emotion as representing objects or events as interfering with, or obstructing,
certain outcomes: things that we enjoy; things for which we strive; things to which we
are entitled. Each option appears to capture a central feature that a range of familiar
episodes of annoyance have in common, and to enable us to explain the varying
11
I use 'right' and 'entitlement' interchangeably here simply for ease of exposition, and mindful that a
complete account of the everyday entitlements mentioned in this section, which I will not offer, would
have to probe this distinction more fully.
degrees in which this attitude is found, yet each is susceptible to counterexample. One
solution is to settle for a disjunctive account of annoyance: to treat this emotion as
essentially trifurcated, with any of the suggested contents sufficing for (the intentional
component of) a mental state of this type. I suggest, however, that there is an
alternative to this disjunctive solution that is capable of accommodating the full range
of episodes of annoyance with greater unity and elegance, and which explains the
relevance of the three classes of obstruction considered above. On the model to be
offered in this section, annoyance represents its object as having failed to exemplify a
certain quality or excellence that is expected of it by the emotion's subject. These
qualities come in a variety of guises, and they reflect the diversity of values that we
place upon everyday objects, events, and interactions.
In many instances, the relation between a thing's being annoying and its
transgressing an articulable standard is straightforward. Items that are designed to
fulfil a particular role, for example, can plausibly be held to a standard of well- or
poor-functioning; there is a specified way that they ought to behave. One's annoyance
at a ball-point pen that only intermittently distributes ink onto the page, on this
account, involves construing the object as failing to suitably carry out its job. One's
annoyance at poor restaurant service, similarly, construes the staff as underperforming
in their professional duties. Elsewhere, the excellence in question is a standard of
social conduct – annoyance at a lack of punctuality, at an invasion of personal space,
or at rude workplace behaviour all depict their targets as having breached a code of
acceptable interpersonal behaviour. Other minor codes like those of grammar and
spelling may also provide the background to an episode of annoyance. There are
personal standards to which one holds oneself, and one's failure to meet them can be a
source of annoyance, as when one's poor sporting performance costs one a game, one
misses a deadline, or one lacks the nerve to make a bold romantic move. Often, this
will involve one's offending against a conception of oneself as possessing certain
qualities and abilities – a conception that contributes to one's self regard. An
individual who prides herself on being quick thinking, or having a sound memory,
will be annoyed when these powers let her down, and her emotion will construe this
lack of success in a critical light. Considerations of this nature may combine when,
for instance, one's annoyance is directed at the junction of a person-object interaction,
such as one’s clumsy attempts at mastering a piano piece.
In some cases, annoyance is a response to the violation of an aesthetic norm; a
reaction to an artefact's being banal, trite, or unfulfilling. Clichéd plotting or dialogue,
for example, can be annoying, as can poorly performed or out of tune singing. I
suggest, furthermore, that annoyance can be understood as a quasi-aesthetic12 reaction
in a range of encounters that goes beyond those in which our response is to an
artwork. Here, annoyance is akin to a construal of something as ugly; but whereas
judgements of ugliness are made sense of in the traditional aesthetic domain by appeal
to contrasting attributions of beauty, proportion, harmony, elegance and so forth, the
features that inspire annoyance stand in contrast to quotidian analogues of these
12
Only quasi-aesthetic, because annoyance and related attitudes retain important differences from true
aesthetic responses as traditionally construed. Annoyance does not require connoisseurial expertise, or
a detached or disinterested perspective. The objects of annoyance, too, outstrip those that are
standardly permitted into the domain of the aesthetic, as they include ordinary objects in everyday
contexts, bodily feelings, animals, and so forth. For arguments in favour of the expansion of the
aesthetic realm to encompass the everyday, see Sherry Irvin, ‘The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in
Ordinary Experience’, British Journal of Aesthetics 48:1 (2008), Thomas Leddy, ‘Everyday Surface
Aesthetic Qualities: "Neat", "Messy", "Clean", "Dirty"’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:3
(1995).
features. Such qualities include an action's being skilful or graceful; an event's being
convenient or fortuitous; a person's being accommodating or charming. When these
excellences are exemplified, we respond to them with emotions that are the natural
antithesis of annoyance – the kinds of positive critical appraisal that one performs
when witnessing a well-taken backhand in tennis; when the sun comes out in time for
a picnic; when one finds a forgotten ten pound note in one's pocket; when the traffic
light turns green just as one reaches the junction; or when any of a range of everyday
delights, gratification, and good fortune occurs in the natural and social world.
Annoyance can be located at the far end of this spectrum, with its objects being
appraised as graceless, inconvenient, infelicitous, and otherwise ugly relative to some
quasi-aesthetic benchmark. People, and their habits, can offend this sensibility,
knowingly or unwittingly. A high-pitched laugh or a tendency to tell the same jokes
over and over are annoying to someone who holds that these traits are not conducive
to personal excellence. The natural world, too, can contravene a person's sense of the
way things should be, for instance when the rain arrives in time to spoil a holiday, or a
bee invades one's office. Here, the standard, which may be less easy for the subject to
articulate, is her sense of the best way the world could be at a time: a world in which
holidays remain un-rained-upon, and offices are free from insect invasion.13
Annoyance is a non-moral emotion, in that it does not impute agential responsibility
to its objects (although it may ascribe merely causal responsibility, as other non-moral
emotions such as surprise may do). The standards which the annoyed subject holds to
have been broken are not moral standards, and the emoter need not treat their
transgression as willful or deliberate.14 This is exemplified by annoyed attitudes
whose object is some natural event or state of affairs – such as the weather – which
show that the subject has an underlying perspective on what counts as excellence even
in the environmental domain. Some standards, like public or institutional codes of
etiquette, are the subject of consensus, with many individuals agreeing upon which
things embody good and bad behaviour. Others have greater idiosyncrasy, and
demonstrate individuals' varying levels of tolerance for infractions such as messiness,
tardiness, or rudeness.
The notion that annoyance involves a construal of something as having failed to
embody a certain kind of excellence also explains the relevance of the three categories
– enjoyment, agency, and entitlement – considered above. We value many everyday
things to the degree that they afford enjoyment: obstructions to enjoyment are thus
negatively evaluated as preventing a situation from being as good as it could be.
When we've paid for something, or have otherwise invested in it, we can reasonably
expect it to live up to certain standards, and our annoyance when it fails to do so is a
negative appraisal of this failure. Many obstructions to our agency involve artefacts
malfunctioning, thwarting our efforts to perform an intended task efficiently.
Annoyances such as a jammed zip or stuck bottle cap are thus construed as defective,
relative to expected standards of well-functioning. Where the object of annoyance is a
failure of one's own bodily or psychological agency, parallel considerations apply:
13
In cases like these, the content of the emotion may depict the subject's wider circumstances, and her
place within them: 'that events are such that one cannot find one's shoes', for instance, rather than the
shoes themselves; or 'that the universe has conspired to slow the traffic into the city'. In lacking a
determinate object, these phenomena might be thought to resemble mood states, rather than emotions
proper. This is no barrier to thinking of annoyance as an emotion in more standard cases, however, and
many other paradigm emotions can bear contents of these less determinate sorts (e.g. anger or sadness).
14
Whereas anger is apt to dissipate upon learning that someone's action was not deliberate, annoyance
is not.
one is critical of one's own memory, or one's ineptitude on the sports field, for
instance. The degree of one's annoyance, moreover, appears to correlate with the
extent to which something has offended against an everyday model of excellence.
Most aggravating are cases where the transgressor – oneself, or another person, or an
object – has egregiously defied a common code of behaviour, with more minor
breaches warranting a lesser degree of annoyance. Our own shortcomings, moreover,
may become more salient to us in our emotional response in proportion to the effort
we expend in trying, and failing, to perform some task.
4. The Norms of Annoyance
One way to better understand the contents of an emotional state type is to examine the
conditions under which the having, or failing to have, of the emotion is appropriate
and inappropriate. Reflecting upon episodes of annoyance reveals that they are
governed by norms of appropriateness, and by understanding these we can see the
pattern of evaluations that underpin occurrences of this emotion.15
As a preliminary, we can note that emotions are subject to norms of fit: their
intentional contents purport to present the world as having certain salient features, and
emotional states can perform this role with accuracy or inaccuracy. For some
emotions, such as fear, it is easy to see what counts as a fitting response: the
representational content of fear is that some object or state of affairs is dangerous, and
the accuracy or otherwise of the state is determined by the actual threat posed by the
situation – fear of a real bear is fitting, fear of a teddy bear unfitting. If we treat
annoyance as representing a transgression of some standard of excellence, then an
episode of this emotion will be fitting, in this basic sense, when its target is a genuine
transgressor. Annoyance at someone is fitting when they have broken a code of social
conduct, for example, but not when they are innocent of any such violation.
Annoyance at an artefact is fitting when it fails to do the job for which it was
designed, but not when it carries this out smoothly and effectively.
More interesting cases of inappropriate annoyance reveal that an individual is,
perhaps implicitly, holding the target of her emotion to an unreasonable standard.
Becoming annoyed at a small child who is unable to remember her lines in the school
play, for example, is inappropriate, and we can diagnose this lack of propriety in
terms of the underlying attitudes that a subject reveals in undergoing such an episode.
The child cannot reasonably be expected to meet exacting standards of theatrical
performance, but a subject whose annoyance is directed at the child is naturally
understood as holding her to these expectations. Elsewhere, one's standards of
expected adult conduct can be too fastidious: excessive annoyance at a very minor
failure of punctuality, for example, reflects an unhealthy, nit-picking adherence to a
strict code of behaviour.
Some standards are hypocritical, with this feature being inherited by ensuing states
of annoyance. Being annoyed at one's partner for forgetting to buy milk, for instance,
is unreasonable when one has forgotten the milk oneself. Here, one's emotion
suggests that one is, unfairly, holding somebody to a higher standard of behaviour
than that to which one holds oneself. There are scenarios in which a subject's
annoyance reveals a misguided expectation; a standard that the subject ought to know
better than to demand of the emotion's target. Becoming annoyed at the ocean when
the incoming tide demolishes one's sandcastle is inappropriate, because this behaviour
15
For an examination of the ways in which emotions and other attitude are capable of revealing
(sometimes objectionable) underlying judgements and evaluations, see Angela Smith, ‘Responsibility
for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life’, Ethics 115:2 (2005).
is completely predictable and foreseeable – demanding otherwise of the unstoppable
forces of nature is not a sensible position.16 Finally, there are cases in which a
subject's failure to undergo annoyance reflects standards and values that are set
unreasonably low. There are times when one ought to be annoyed at a breach of a
code of social conduct, and where a contrary emotional reaction indicates a failure to
take matters seriously enough: reacting with delight or amusement to a noisy
interruption to a funeral, for instance, signifies a failure to grasp the standards of
decorum that are warranted by the occasion.
In each of these cases, the inappropriateness of annoyance is best explained by
reference to an intentional content, a content that depicts an object or event as failing
to meet a standard of everyday excellence, with the reasonableness or otherwise of
this standard, and of holding a certain target object to this standard, being the deciding
factor in the legitimacy of the annoyed reaction.17 The inappropriateness of
annoyance in these scenarios is not readily captured by competing analyses of the
content of this emotion. Were it simply a matter of construing the object as presenting
an obstacle to one's enjoyment (of the play, the milk, the sandcastle), it wouldn't be
clear that the emotion reveals any objectionable underlying attitudes. The enjoyment
in each case, the anticipation of which is itself perfectly reasonable, has been
thwarted, and this account of annoyance treats it simply as representing this fact.
Similarly, a construal of a situation as one in which one's agency has been obstructed
lacks the relevant evaluative dimension that would provide space for the kinds of
inappropriateness to which annoyance appears to be subject. Although the entitlement
interpretation of this emotion fares better in this regard, in that we can understand
certain inappropriate episodes of annoyance as underpinned by an inappropriate sense
of entitlement, it is less successful as a general model of this emotion.
5. Conclusions
What would it take for the world to be free of annoyances? Three simple answers
appeal to its being free from obstacles to human endeavour: persons' pursuit of
enjoyment; their exercise of bodily or mental agency; or their receipt of something to
which they are entitled. Individually, these analyses fail to capture the full range of
annoyances with which we are familiar. The alternative model I have defended holds
that episodes of the emotion of annoyance are critical appraisals of things that fail to
exemplify certain everyday kinds of excellence. Given the subjective, and sometimes
idiosyncratic, nature of an individual's standards and preferences, it is not clear that
the world could be arranged in such a way as to eradicate every annoyance.18
Not only does this treatment give a plausible and unified characterisation of the
content of a wide spectrum of (superficially disjointed) annoyed attitudes, it does so
16
Does this mean that any episode of annoyance that is directed at natural events is misguided? No. In
high summer it is reasonable to be annoyed at the rain that spoils the beach excursion; in autumn less
so, because the weather at that time of year cannot reasonably be expected to live up to optimum
conditions. Analogously, it is unreasonable to be annoyed that an artefact fails to do a job for which it
was manifestly not constructed.
17
Compare these cases to those of inappropriate anger, for example. We think of anger that is directed
at inanimate objects as being inappropriate, and this reflects the fact that part of the content of anger
ascribes to its target moral responsibility for some offense or transgression (see Taylor, Justifying, for
further discussion). Objects that are not moral agents are thus inappropriate targets for this attitude.
Annoyance, meanwhile, is inappropriate insofar as its targets ought not to be expected to meet some
standard of excellence.
18
Whereas we can, with some effort, conceive of what it would take for there to be no (rational) fear,
anger, or embarrassment.
in a way that permits us to distinguish this emotion from its siblings, anger and
disappointment. Whereas annoyance has no distinctively moral character (it does not
depict a failing of moral excellence), states of anger do impute a degree of moral
responsibility to their objects. It follows that annoyance can be appropriately directed
at objects and events whose activity is unintentional, or merely the operation of
natural forces. Disappointment, meanwhile, can be marked off from annoyance by
considering these emotions' respective objects. The objects of annoyance are the
things that have failed to exemplify an excellence (perhaps by interfering with one's
enjoyment of a situation), while the objects of disappointment are losses suffered as a
result of these failings. One is annoyed, for example, at the rain, but disappointed at
there being no trip to the seaside.
That the emotion of annoyance can be individuated via its intentional content is a
victory for representationalist theories of the nature of emotion, although I have said
little about the type of cognitive state that might bear the content of annoyance, be it a
judgement, a perception, or an appraisal. The content also reveals something of what
we care about in everyday contexts: the values that we place upon quotidian social
engagements, our interactions with functional artefacts, and our commonplace
dealings with the world.19
Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology
University of Exeter
Amory Building
Rennes Drive
Exeter, EX44RJ
tom.roberts@exeter.ac.uk
19
For helpful discussion, and for suggesting (but not exemplifying) annoyances, I wish to thank
Giovanna Colombetti, Shane Glackin, Jonathan Davies, Joanne O’Hara, and Tracy Costello. Thanks
also to an anonymous reviewer, whose comments improved the paper. This work has been funded by
the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007-2013), project title "Emoting the Embodied Mind (EMOTER)", ERC grant agreement
240891.