Many object-directed emotions change in intensity over time. Importantly, this sometimes happens even though the emotion’s object remains unchanged: grief over the tragic loss of a loved one, for instance, fades even though the loss remains tragic. Can a changing emotion continue to fit its unchanging object? Existing answers to this question tend to vindicate strikingly narrow visions of fitting emotional change: some, for instance, consider it uniquely fitting for grief to diminish, while others consider grief fitting only when it (...) maintains, or returns to, its originally-fitting intensity. I argue for a permissive view that can make sense of both fitting diminished emotion and fitting resurgent emotion. This view is also uniquely positioned to address the most pressing contemporary challenge for views that embrace fitting emotional change in unchanging-object cases, one forcefully pressed by Christopher Howard. (shrink)

The permissible and the forbidden are privative opposites: each is a lack of the other. The good and the bad are, by contrast, polar opposites: badness is anti-goodness, not non-goodness. What about the fitting and the unfitting, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the apt and the inapt, the warranted and the unwarranted? Is unfittingness non-fittingness or anti-fittingness, inappropriateness non-appropriateness or anti-appropriateness? This essay argues that each of these “aptic” categories stands in a privative rather than a polar relation to its (...) opposite. More generally, there is no coherent notion of anti-fittingness, no inversely charged flipside to aptness, to be found. In order to establish these claims, a taxonomy of different types of oppositeness is proposed, and several tests for distinguishing distinct varieties of opposites are developed. What emerges is a better appreciation of the structural characteristics of fittingness and the other aptic categories, as well as an argument for taking up the nature of oppositeness as a serious philosophical topic that is ripe for further exploration. (shrink)

According to what may be called the Debt Model, blameworthiness is defined in terms of deserved suffering. The Debt Model has a significant implication: one is less blameworthy if one has experienced some of the suffering one deserves, and no longer blameworthy once one has experienced the full amount of suffering one deserves. Blameworthiness, according to the Debt Model, is not forever. In recent papers, Clarke (2022) and Howard (2022) independently criticize the Debt Model and argue for the opposite conclusion: (...) if one is blameworthy, one will remain blameworthy forever. In this paper, I respond to this criticism as well as a recent argument against the Debt Model from Tierney (2022). I then present a prima facie case for the Debt Model. I argue that Clarke’s attempt to accommodate the intuitions elicited by this and similar cases has unwelcome implications. I will end the paper with some remarks about what roles we want our conceptions of blameworthiness to play. If Clarke’s account were right, the fact that an agent is blameworthy would play a far less significant role in our moral life than we often tend to assume. The Debt Model, I will suggest, makes better sense of our blaming practices. (shrink)

Emotions are open to various kinds of normative assessment. For example, we can assess emotions for their prudential or moral value. Recently, philosophers have increasingly attended to a distinct form of normative assessment of emotions – fittingness assessment. An emotion is fitting when it is merited by its object. For example, admiration is fitting when it is felt towards the admirable, and shame towards the shameful. This paper defends a hybrid account of emotional fittingness. Emotions are complex, and typically involve (...) various elements. As well as involving representations that can be assessed for accuracy, emotions typically motivate their subjects in characteristically urgent ways. The fittingness of an emotion as a whole is a function of the fittingness of both its representational and motivational aspects. (shrink)