This dissertation explores philosophical issues related to meaning, praise and anger. The first chapter highlights cases in which one is causally responsible for something that alters the meaning of their life, but seemingly not morally responsible for doing so. In this type of case, the agent nonetheless takes themself to be responsible. I sketch an account—grounded in meaning in life as a distinctive value— to make more sense of these experiences from the perspective of the agent. The second chapter concerns private praise, private blame and the symmetry thesis about praise and blame. The chapter addresses the question of whether praise can be done privately and what that privacy would have to look like. I argue that the possibility of private praise should be used in the evaluation of newly emerging theories of praise. The third chapter highlights the way praise and blame function together to manage informal social groups. These groups determine how social goods are distributed, what ideas are taken seriously, the meaning of one’s utterances, and a person’s identity. The fourth chapter explores issues of praise in Shantideva’s Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra and highlights some puzzles that emerge from Shantideva’s seemingly conflicting advice about how we should praise others freely yet avoid being praised ourselves. Using the tools developed in the previous chapters, we can make sense of some of these Shantidevan suggestions about praise if we understand praise as changing one’s group and if we take seriously the possibility that the best thing to do is to praise something, but to do so privately. Finally, the fifth chapter is about anger. In it, I highlight how expressions of anger get their power from anger’s deviant nature. As such, insofar as theorists are successful in establishing or changing norms about anger, critics of anger give it power and defenders of anger defang it.