This article will discuss the difficulties of providing a plausible account of rule following in the social realm. It will show that the cognitive model of rule following is not suited for this task. Nevertheless, revealing the inadequacy of the cognitive model does not justify the wholesale dismissal of understanding human practices as rule-following practices, as social theorists like Bourdieu or Dreyfus have argued. Instead it will be shown that rule-following behavior is best understood as being based on a set (...) of complex dispositions. In this manner one is able to account for the causal explanatory role of the notion of a rule. Key Words: rules • norms • explanation • Bourdieu • Winch. (shrink)

I argue that there is a continuum of judgments ranging from those that are affectively rich, what might be called passionate judgments, to those that are purely cognitive and nonaffective, what might be called dispassionate judgments. The former are akin to desires and other affective states and so are necessarily motivating. Applying this schema to moral judgments, I maintain that the motivational internalist is wrong in claiming that all moral judgments are necessarily motivating, but right in regard to the subset (...) of passionate moral judgments. This picture of moral judgments has implications for related debates in metaethics between cognitivists and non-cognitivists and between Humeans and anti-Humeans. (shrink)

Philosophers of sport have debated whether supporting one team over others is commendable or morally suspect. We show how Stoicism sheds light on this controversy. Several caricature views of Stoic sportsmanship are studied. Stoics learn how to enjoy the blessings that come their way without mistakenly judging challenges to be hardships that detract from their happiness. Stoic sportsmen celebrate the successes of their teams while exercising the virtues of patience, endurance, loyalty, and appreciation of athletic excellence when their teams flounder. (...) The Stoic ideal is not to be an indifferent, disinterested spectator, but rather a calm, polite, and engaged sportsman. (shrink)

In this response, we clarify several misunderstandings of the understanding/acceptance principle and defend our specific operationalization of that principle. We reiterate the importance of addressing the problem of rational task construal and we elaborate the notion of computational limitations contained in our target article. Our concept of thinking dispositions as variable intentional-level styles of epistemic and behavioral regulation is explained, as is its relation to the rationality debate. Many of the suggestions of the commentators for elaborating two-process models are easily (...) integrated into our generic dual-process account. We further explicate how we view the relation between System 1 and System 2 and evolutionary and normative rationality. We clarify our attempt to fuse the contributions of the cognitive ecologists with the insights of the original heuristics and biases researchers. (shrink)

Although cognitively oriented theories of emotion are now dominant in the psychological study of emotion, there remain issues upon which these theories do not agree. Central among these are questions regarding the minimal cognitive processes necessary to have an emotion. A potentially productive approach to such questions is the study of the relation of cognitive development and the development of emotions in infants. Such an approach was featured in ancient philosophical and psychological treatises, some of which formed the very foundations (...) of later cognitive theories. However, the recent literature has been nearly indifferent to just these foundations. Ancient commentators, especially Aristotle and the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, understood emotions as fundamentally sociomoral constructs. Owing to a lack of socialisation and moral understanding, infants are not fully capable of experiencing emotions as they are typically understood. Contemporary work in the area of emotion, including that of Michael Lewis, as well as work in other emotion-related areas, is shown to address only inadequately the sociomoral components of emotion and thus to address only inadequately the emotion-cognition relationship. (shrink)

Deonna and Teroni’s The Emotions is both an excellent introduction to philosophical work on emotions and a novel defence of their own Attitudinal Theory. After summarising their discussion of the literature I describe and evaluate their positive view. I challenge their theory on three fronts: their claim that emotions are a form of bodily awareness, their account of what makes an emotion correct, and their account of what justifies an emotion.

Deonna and Teroni’s The Emotions is both an excellent introduction to philosophical work on emotions and a novel defence of their own Attitudinal Theory. After summarising their discussion of the literature I describe and evaluate their positive view. I challenge their theory on three fronts: their claim that emotions are a form of bodily awareness, their account of what makes an emotion correct, and their account of what justifies an emotion.

In his well-known 1994 work Descartes’ Error, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes his work with patients suffering from damage to the prefrontal cortex, a center of emotion processing in the brain. The accidents or strokes that had caused this damage had spared these patients’ “higher” cognitive faculties: their short- and long-term memories, abstract reasoning skills, mathematical aptitude, and performance on standard IQ tests were completely unimpaired. They were also perfectly healthy physically, with no apparent motor or sensory disabilities. Nonetheless, these (...) patients had been brought to Damasio’s attention as a physician because, despite their apparent lack of physical or cognitive impairment, they .. (shrink)

We introduce the working concept of “affective arrangement.” This concept is the centerpiece of a perspective on situated affectivity that emphasizes relationality, dynamics, and performativity. Our proposal relates to work in cultural studies and continental philosophy in the Spinoza–Deleuze lineage, yet it is equally geared to the terms of recent work in the philosophy of emotion. Our aim is to devise a framework that can help flesh out how affectivity unfolds dynamically in a relational setting by which it is at (...) the same time modulated in recurring ways. With this orientation, this article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of situated affectivity and to the theoretical and conceptual unification of distinct strands of research from several disciplines. (shrink)

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I (...) analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind. (shrink)

Recent conceptual developments in the psychology of gender can be productively applied to understanding two facets of emotion: the biological manifestation of emotion and the psychological embodiment of emotion. Gender researchers distinguish between sex, the biologically based categories of female and male and gender, the psychological features that are often associated with biological states and that involve social categories rather than biological categories. In other words, the term sex is used to refer to the physical fact of primary and secondary (...) sex characteristics; the term gender is used to refer to a psychological and cultural construct, a loose translation of sex into social terms. It is proposed that two analogous facets of emotion can be identified, namely, one which is comprised of emotion's hardwired, pan-cultural, developmentally persistent qualities, the analogue to sex. The second, constructed aspect of emotion is the analogue to gender. Six dimensions on which sex and gender can be contrasted are described, and the application of each to the study of emotion is discussed. (shrink)

Humor is a surprisingly understudied topic in philosophy. However, there has been a flurry of interest in the subject over the past few decades. This article outlines the major theories of humor. It argues for the need for more publications on humor by philosophers. More specifically, it suggests that humor may not be a well-understood phenomenon by questioning a widespread consensus in recent publications – namely, that humor can be detached from laughter. It is argued that this consensus relies on (...) a cognitivist account of emotion, one that is open to debate, and that it becomes unclear what sorts of phenomena a theory of humor is supposed to explain when one questions this assumption. (shrink)

In this article I propose to reframe debates about ideals of emotion in medicine, abandoning the current binary setup of this debate as one between ‘clinical detachment’ and empathy. Inspired by observations from my own field work and drawing on Sky Gross’ anthropological work on rituals of practice as well as Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythm, I propose that the normative drive of clinical practice can be better understood through the notion of attunement. In this framework individual types of emotions (...) are not, as such, appropriate or inappropriate, but are evaluated depending on their synchronicity with the specific rhythms of the practice. To set up this proposal, I show how typical arguments about emotions in medicine—what I call emotion-entity focused frameworks—are insufficient. I then draw on ethnographic observations from two orthopaedic departments and interviews with medical practitioners to show (1) how clinical practice is driven by rhythmicity, shaped in the case of orthopaedic surgery by a clinical aim of efficient, controlled intervention, and (2) how clinicians continuously refer to this drive and the flow of rhythms when evaluating inappropriate or problematic emotion. I argue that the use of a rhythm framework rather than ideals of detachment or empathy allows for a sensitivity to the complexity and situation-dependent elements of emotional ideals in clinical practice; and I end by proposing the term ‘attuned concern’—which stresses the importance of regulation and adjustment to circumstances rather than of maintaining a constant distance/involvement—as a more fitting alternative to ‘clinical detachment’. (shrink)

Expanding the debate about empathy with human beings, animals, or fictional characters to include human-robot relationships, this paper proposes two different perspectives from which to assess the scope and limits of empathy with robots: the first is epistemological, while the second is normative. The epistemological approach helps us to clarify whether we can empathize with artificial intelligence or, more precisely, with social robots. The main puzzle here concerns, among other things, exactly what it is that we empathize with if robots (...) do not have emotions or beliefs, since they do not have a consciousness in an elaborate sense. However, by comparing robots with fictional characters, the paper shows that we can still empathize with robots and that many of the existing accounts of empathy and mindreading are compatible with such a view. By so doing, the paper focuses on the significance of perspective-taking and claims that we also ascribe to robots something like a perspectival experience. The normative approach examines the moral impact of empathizing with robots. In this regard, the paper critically discusses three possible responses: strategic, anti-barbarizational, and pragmatist. The latter position is defended by stressing that we are increasingly compelled to interact with robots in a shared world and that to take robots into our moral consideration should be seen as an integral part of our self- and other-understanding. (shrink)

The article critically engages Menachem Fisch’s account of normative frameworks, in particular of (rational) transitions between them. I argue, first, that exposure to the normative criticism leveled at us by other human beings is indeed “capable of destabilizing normative commitment” to one’s own underlying framework beliefs and standards, as Fisch holds; however, closer scrutiny reveals that such exposure is neither sufficient nor necessary but rather accidental in this respect. Second, I will try to show that Søren Kierkegaard’s account of how (...) people fundamentally change their mind provides resources for both a substantial critique of Fisch and a more adequate understanding of the transitions in question. The article argues, third, that Fisch’s framework model – though meaningful, in fact heuristically indispensable in and as of itself – has robust transcendental implications which as such are being ignored, if not directly denied by Fisch and, precisely by being ignored or denied, unnecessarily weaken the overall plausibility of his account. Finally, and ex post, I will address an important objection raised by some commentators. (shrink)

Philosophical cognitivists have argued for more than four decades that emotions are special types of judgments. Anti-cognitivists have provided a series of counterexamples aiming to show that identifying emotions with judgments overintellectualizes the emotions. I provide a novel counterexample that makes the overintellectualization charge especially vivid. I discuss neurophysiological evidence to the effect that the fear system can be activated by stimuli the subject is unaware of seeing. To emphasize the analogy with blind sight , I call this phenomenon blind (...) fright . Cognitivists may reply that blindfright is nothing but an unconscious judgment subcortically elicited. This reply is in line with the strategy commonly employed by cognitivists against their critics. I call it the Elastic Strategy, because it consists of ‘stretching’ the notion of judgment in order to accommodate counterexamples. This strategy, I argue, turns cognitivism into a theory that is at worst unfalsifiable and at best trivially true. The final portion of my article aims to rescue cognitivism from the damage done by the Elastic Strategy. I distinguish three varieties of cognitivism, one concerned with what emotions essentially are (Constitutive Cognitivism), one concerned with what causes emotions (Etiological Cognitivism) and one concerned with what emotions represent (Representational Cognitivism). I conclude that what cognitivism has to offer to emotion theory are primarily insights concerning the causes and representational content of emotions. The constitutive identification of emotions with judgments, on the other hand, does more harm than good. (shrink)

Philosophical and empirical moral psychologists claim that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgment. The aim of this paper is to assess the evidence in favor of both claims and to show how a moderate rationalist position about moral judgment can be defended nonetheless. The experimental evidence for both the necessity- and the sufficiency-thesis concerning the connection between emotional reactions and moral judgment is presented. I argue that a rationalist about moral judgment can be happy to accept the (...) necessity-thesis. My argument draws on the idea that emotions play the same role for moral judgment that perceptions play for ordinary judgments about the external world. I develop a rationalist interpretation of the sufficiency-thesis and show that it can successfully account for the available empirical evidence. The general idea is that the rationalist can accept the claim that emotional reactions are sufficient for moral judgment just in case a subject’s emotional reaction towards an action in question causes the judgment in a way that can be reflectively endorsed under conditions of full information and rationality. This idea is spelled out in some detail and it is argued that a moral agent is entitled to her endorsement if the way she arrives at her judgment reliably leads to correct moral beliefs, and that this reliability can be established if the subject’s emotional reaction picks up on the morally relevant aspects of the situation. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Thomas Szanto develops an account of hatred, according to which the target of this attitude, paradigmatically, is a representative of a group or a class. On this account, hatred overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is accompanied by a commitment for the subject to stick to the hostile attitude. While this description captures an important form of hatred, this paper claims that it does not do justice to (...) the paradigmatic cases of this attitude. The paper puts forward a “singularist” view of hatred, the core idea of which is that, in its simpler form, hatred is to aversively target the other qua this individual person, where the adverb “aversively” expresses the subject’s desire for the target to be annihilated. The conclusion develops some general considerations on the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances of an attitude by highlighting its importance for the study of affective phenomena. (shrink)

This paper argues that Deonna and Teroni's attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, the perceptual theory (...) of emotions. (shrink)

El artículo propone poner a prueba la idea comúnmente admitida de que en la concepción aristotélica las emociones tienen una función o fin en el ámbito biológico. Me propongo probar que esta concepción sería más propia de otras posturas, como la tomista y la cartesiana, y especialmente de la darwiniana y neo-darwiniana. Tras presentar en la sección 2 el tipo de explicaciones teleológicas que Aristóteles admite y emplea en biología, analizo en la parte 3 la concepción de las emociones de (...) Descartes y en especial de Darwin y muestro que ellas se adaptan bien al modelo explicativo teleológico aristotélico. En la sección 4, ofrezco varios argumentos con apoyo en los textos biológicos de Aristóteles para mostrar que, en cambio, este tipo de explicaciones teleológicas de las emociones no aparecen con claridad en los escritos biológicos del estagirita, toda vez que lo que encontramos allí es, más bien, explicaciones fisiológico materialistas del carácter de los animales. Por último, sugiero una asimetría con el tratamiento de las emociones desde el punto de vista de la racionalidad práctica que desarrollaré en trabajos ulteriores. (shrink)

There are many advantages to defining emotions as states elicited by reinforcers, with the states having a set of different functions. This approach leads towards an understanding of the nature of emotion, of its evolutionary adaptive value, and of many principles of brain design. It also leads towards a foundation for many of the processes that underlie evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology. It is shown that recent as well as previous evidence implicates the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex in positive as (...) well as negative emotions. The issue of why emotional states feel like something is part of the much larger problem of phenomenal consciousness. It is argued that thinking about one's own thoughts would have adaptive value by enabling first order linguistic thoughts to be corrected. It is suggested that reflecting on and correcting one's own thoughts and plans would feel like something, and that phenomenal consciousness may occur when this type of monitoring process is taking place. (shrink)

Engineers are normally seen as the archetype of people who make decisions in a rational and quantitative way. However, technological design is not value neutral. The way a technology is designed determines its possibilities, which can, for better or for worse, have consequences for human wellbeing. This leads various scholars to the claim that engineers should explicitly take into account ethical considerations. They are at the cradle of new technological developments and can thereby influence the possible risks and benefits more (...) directly than anybody else. I have argued elsewhere that emotions are an indispensable source of ethical insight into ethical aspects of risk. In this paper I will argue that this means that engineers should also include emotional reflection into their work. This requires a new understanding of the competencies of engineers: they should not be unemotional calculators; quite the opposite, they should work to cultivate their moral emotions and sensitivity, in order to be engaged in morally responsible engineering. (shrink)

I examine the nature of human-robot pet relations that appear to involve genuine affective responses on behalf of humans towards entities, such as robot pets, that, on the face of it, do not seem to be deserving of these responses. Such relations have often been thought to involve a certain degree of sentimentality, the morality of which has in turn been the object of critical attention. In this paper, I dispel the claim that sentimentality is involved in this type of (...) relations. My challenge draws on literature in the philosophy of art and in cognitive science that attempts to solve the so called paradox of fictional emotions, i.e., the seemingly paradoxical way in which we respond emotionally to fictional or imaginary characters and events. If sentimentality were not at issue, neither would its immorality. For the sake of argument, however, I assume in the remaining part of the paper that sentimentality is indeed at play and bring to the fore aspects of its badness or viciousness that have not yet been discussed in connection with robot pets. I conclude that not even these aspects of sentimentality are at issue here. Yet, I argue that there are other reasons to be worried about the wide-spread use of ersatz companionship technology that have to do with the potential loss of valuable, self-defining forms of life. (shrink)

I argue that one’s responsibility for one’s emotions has a two-fold structure: one bears direct responsibility for emotions insofar as they are the upshot of first-order evaluative judgements concerning reasons of fit; and one bears derivative responsibility for them insofar as they are consequences of activities of emotional self-regulation, which can reflect one’s take on second-order reasons concerning the strategic, prudential, or moral desirability of undergoing a particular emotion in a particular context.

Although the topic of emotions was long ignored in British and American analytic philosophy and psychology, it remained a rich and exciting subject in Continental Philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche celebrated the passionate life. In phenomenology Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Ricoeur all made major contributions. Heidegger pursued a highly original thesis concerning the vital role of moods in human life, notably angst and boredom. Jean‐Paul Sartre added the tantalizing thesis that our (...) emotions are strategies to help us cope with the difficulties in life. Max Scheler gave us the stunning expression, “the emotional a priori,” the idea that emotions are basic structures of human existence. In this essay, I want to expand on the contributions of the classic phenomenologists and existentialists and do more of what they were doing by way of an “original” project of phenomenological investigation. (This follows publication of the first two volumes of a three‐part study of the emotions, Not Passion's Slave and In Defense of Sentimentality, both published by Oxford University Press.). (shrink)

This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and surprise. Analyzing this material through the lens of passive syntheses helps explain these experiences, as well as the sense of subject–object fusion that occurs in some (...) of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience. These analyses are then contrasted with a potentially contradicting take on aesthetic experience from a recent trend in cognitive science, namely enactive aesthetics, which insists on the active subjective construction and sense-making of aesthetic experience. Finally we show that the two positions are in fact compatible. (shrink)

A person raised in a religious family may have been taught that going to the theater is not allowed, and even if he has rejected this taboo years ago, he still feels guilty when attending theater. These kinds of cases may not be rare, but they are strange. Indeed, one may wonder how they are even possible. This is why an explanation is needed, and in my paper I aim to give such an explanation. In particular, I will first provide (...) a brief review of the explanations of irrational guilt that are compatible with the cognitive theories of emotions, that is, theories that presuppose that there is a causal or a constitutional connection between emotions and cognitive factors, such as judgments, beliefs or thoughts. Following many other reviewers, I found most of the explanations of irrational guilt unsatisfactory, although my reasons for critical conclusions will partly differ from the usual ones. After the review, I will defend a solution according to which it is possible to believe that an act does not have any moral costs and at the same time to have an impression that is has, which explains the guilty feelings. (shrink)

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been put forward as a distinctive kind of intelligence and, by popularizers such as Daniel Goleman, as an indicator of moral and life skills. Critics, however, have been concerned EI-testing measures conformity or the ability to manipulate own or others' emotions, and relies on a problematic assumption that there are definitive, universal “right” answers when it comes to feelings. Such worries have also been raised about the original concept developed by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer; (...) that version is the focus here. While it improves on the largely unreflective reliance on particular belief- and value-systems in Goleman's account, however, it does not entirely succeed in being context- and value-neutral. A useful way forward is to apply Ronald de Sousa's notion that emotions are shaped by ideology: this in turn affects attempts to measure any putative “intelligence” with respect to them. Once the ideological dimension is bracketed, a clearer picture of both the usefulness and the limitations of the EI-concept can emerge—and also a better sense of its possible contributions to value theory and moral psychology. The ideological dimension itself may also be unavoidable; squarely facing this possibility is preferable to ignoring it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to problematise and complexify scholarly accounts of contemporary emotional repression in Western contexts by presenting counterevidence in the form of two examples of post-secular collective affectivity and their ritual expressions. It argues that both narratives of emotional repression and expression fail to capture the non-linear complexity of processes of cultural transformation, which have resulted in the simultaneous expression and repression of ritualistic affects that are products of our evolutionary embodied history. Drawing on insights from affect theory, this (...) paper seeks to illustrate how contingent yet nonetheless residual ritualistic affects have become repressed in the nominally secular public sphere in modernity. This has presented certain obstacles to the open communal display of religious ritual, and, as a corollary, the expression of certain religious affects, which have subsequently re-emerged in post-secular ritual spaces that are both publically private and pr... (shrink)

It is generally maintained that emotions consist of intentional states and /or bodily feelings. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of guilt in severe depression, in order to illustrate how such conceptions fail to adequately accommodate a way in which some emotional experiences are said to be deeper than others. Many emotions are intentional states. However, I propose that the deepest emotions are not intentional but pre-intentional, meaning that they determine which kinds of intentional state are possible. I go on (...) to suggest that pre-intentional emotions are at the same time feelings. In so doing, I reject the distinction that is often made between bodily feelings and the world-oriented aspects of emotion. (shrink)

Stand‐up comedy is often viewed in two contrary ways. In one view, comedians are hailed as providing genuine social insight and telling truths. In the other, comedians are seen as merely trying to entertain and not to be taken seriously. This tension raises a foundational question for the aesthetics of stand‐up: Do stand‐up comedians perform genuine assertions in their performances? This article considers this question in the light of several theories of assertion. We conclude that comedians on stage do not (...) count as making genuine assertions—rather, much like actors on a stage, they merely pretend to perform speech acts. However, due to norms of authenticity that govern stand‐up comedy, performers can nonetheless succeed in conveying genuine insights. Thus, our account accommodates both the seemingly incompatible aspects of our ordinary appreciation of stand‐up comedy and points toward deeper philosophical understanding of stand‐up comedy as a unique art form. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed a sea change in thinking about emotion, which has gone from being seen as a disruptive force in human thought and action to being seen as an important source of situation- and goal-relevant information and evaluation, continuous with perception and cognition. Here I argue on philosophical and empirical grounds that the role of emotion in contributing to our ability to respond to reasons for action runs deeper still: The affective system is at the core of the (...) process of evaluatively modeling situations, actions, and outcomes, which is the foundation upon which rational deliberation and action can be built. Taking up this perspective affords new approaches to long-standing problems in the theory of reason-based action. (shrink)

A resurgence of interest in virtue ethics has engendered new insight into the fundamental link between selfhood and morality. In contradistinction to the currently ascendant justice-reasoning research paradigm, it appears that a virtue ethics approach to moral psychology provides a theoretical framework which is amenable to the empirical investigation of the nature and formation of the moral self. Six primary features of virtue ethics are delineated with a unifying emphasis throughout on the inextricable link between virtue and moral selfhood. Questions (...) and issues concerning the possibility of a psychology of virtue ethics are directly addressed throughout. (shrink)

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and (...) the difficulties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the ‘self‐evaluative view’, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self‐ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self‐evaluative judgments to the case of others. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is unrealistic, but so are rational-choice models of democracy. The elements of reality that rationalistic theories of democracy leave out are the very elements that deliberative democrats would need to subtract if their theory were to be applied to reality. The key problem is not, however, the altruistic orientation that deliberative democrats require; opinion researchers know that voters are already sociotropic, not self-interested. Rather, as Schumpeter saw, the problems lie in understanding politics, government, and economics under modern—and postmodern—conditions. (...) Modernity entails levels of complexity that stymie voters' attempts to be well informed about which political promises will actually solve social problems. Postmodernity adds to complexity an overabundance of fragmented information experienced impatiently and fleetingly by citizens who confuse entertainment with knowledge, and whose political demands are as unrealistic as their personal desire for a unique identity. These factors can be added, one by one, to the minimalist rational-choice model of politics, with each step leading us farther away from deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Probing the vague boundaries and constraints commonly placed on humor, this exploratory essay considers the responsibilities and duties that can guide political humor. Working within a deontological paradigm, the essay establishes the relevance of ethics within society's political humor and considers the importance of ethical political humor. Moreover, this study points to Christians and Nordenstreng's model of global social responsibility theory as providing a parsimonious and flexible framework for orienting ethical political humor.

This paper argues that there is a dimension of human consciousness which allows for a pre-intentional and non-cognitive intuition of sensibility. A sensibility which allows for the vulnerability of the human other is by nature characterized by passivity and receptivity. Moreover, sensibility invokes the significance of relating to the human other in an affective way of being touched by his or her pain and suffering. This capacity of being distressed by the distress of another person opens up for ethical responsibility (...) and even in a fundamental sense is a presupposition for full-fledged clinical knowledge in medical care and health care. (shrink)

Computational models of emotions have been thriving and increasingly popular since the 1990s. Such models used to be concerned with the emotions of individual agents when they interact with other agents. Out of the array of models for the emotions, we are going to devote special attention to the approach in Adamatzky’s Dynamics of Crowd-Minds. The reason it stands out, is that it considers the crowd, rather than the individual agent. It fits in computational intelligence. It works by mathematical simulation (...) on a crowd of simple artificial agents: by letting the computer program run, the agents evolve, and crowd behaviour emerges. Adamatzky’s purpose is to give an account of the emergence of allegedly “irrational” behaviour. This is not without problem, as the irrational to one person may seem entirely rational to another, and this in turn is an insight that, in the history of crowd psychology, has affected indeed the competition among theories of crowd dynamics. Quite importantly, Adamatzky’s book argues for the transition from individual agencies to a crowd’s or a mob’s coalesced mind as so, and at any rate for coalesced crowd’s agency. (shrink)

Given the ubiquity and centrality of social and relational influences to the human experience, our conception of self-governance must adequately account for these external influences. The inclusion of socio-historical, externalist considerations into more traditional internalist accounts of autonomy has been an important feature of the debate over personal autonomy in recent years. But the relevant socio-temporal dynamics of autonomy are not only historical in nature. There are also important, and under-examined, future-oriented questions about how we retain autonomy while incorporating new (...) values into the existing set that guides our interaction with the world. In this paper, we examine these questions from two complementary perspectives: philosophy and neuroscience. After contextualizing the philosophical debate, we show the importance to theories of autonomous agency of the capacity to appropriately adapt our values and beliefs, in light of relevant experiences and evidence, to changing circumstances. We present a plausible philosophical account of this process, which we claim is generally applicable to theories about the nature of autonomy, both internalist and externalist alike. We then evaluate this account by providing a model for how the incorporation of values might occur in the brain; one that is inspired by recent theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of the neural processes by which our beliefs are updated by new information. Finally, we synthesize these two perspectives and discuss how the neurobiology might inform the philosophical discussion. (shrink)

An increasing number of studies indicate that virtues affect brain structure. These studies might shed new light on some neuroethical perspectives suggesting that our brain network activity determines the acquisition and permanence of virtues. According to these perspectives, virtuous behavior could be interpreted as the product of a brain mechanism supervised by genes and environment and not as the result of free choice. In this respect, the neural correlates of virtues would confirm the deterministic theory. In contrast, I maintain that (...) these findings do not undermine the role of willpower and freedom while reinforcing an interactionist view of free will. If virtues affect our neural system, then the predictability of the virtuous behavior follows. The likelihood of our future actions is primarily virtue-dependent; therefore, the acquired naturality of virtuous behavior is a source of predictable behavioral patterns outlining expected actions, which I propose to call Hypotheses of Action. However, the predictability of an action indicates its likeliness and not its certainty or necessity. The neural traces of virtues can be interpreted as major indicators of HAs. It is always possible for the agents to depart from their more likely, virtue-induced actions, but their deviations from the virtuous behavioral pattern are rare, as it is rare for the vicious/non-virtuous person to behave well systematically. This implies a reaffirmation of the notions of veto and consent as they provide a universal practical power affecting the subject’s use of moral virtues. (shrink)

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

I present an overview of emotion theories, organised around the question of emotion causation. I argue that theories of emotion causation should ideally address the problems of elicitation, intensity, and differentiation. Each of these problems can be divided into a subquestion that asks about the relation between stimuli and emotions (i.e., the functional level of process description, cf. Marr, 1982) and a subquestion that asks about the mechanism and representations that intervene (i.e., the algorithmic level of process description). The overview (...) reveals that theories of emotion causation sometimes differ with regard to the kind of process that they hold responsible for emotion causation. More precisely, they hold different assumptions regarding the conditions under which the process is supposed to operate (optimal versus suboptimal), the format of the representations involved (propositional versus perceptual), and the object or input of the central process (stimulus versus responses/experience). Further, the overview reveals that theories of emotion causation sometimes differ with regard to the level of process description that they focus on. Finally, the overview brings to light several similarities among the theories discussed. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Franz Brentano’s theory of emotion. I focus on three of its central claims: (i) emotions are sui generis intentional phenomena; (ii) emotions are essentially evaluative phenomena; (iii) emotions provide the basis of an epistemology of objective value. I argue that all three claims are correct, and I weave together Brentano’s arguments with some of my own to support them. In the course of defending these claims, Brentano argues that ‘feeling and will’ are united into the (...) same fundamental class. I summarize two of his arguments for this claim, what I call ‘the nature of desire’ argument and ‘the transition’ argument. I show how a central plank of these arguments relies crucially on Brentano’s epistemology of value. (shrink)

This article offers an account of moods as distinctive kinds of personal level affective-evaluative states, which are both intentional and rationally intelligible in specific ways. The account contrasts with those who claim moods are non-intentional, and so also arational. Section 1 provides a conception of intentionality and distinguishes moods, as occurrent experiential states, from other states in the affective domain. Section 2 argues moods target the subject’s total environment presented in a specific evaluative light through felt valenced attitudes (the Mood-Intentionality (...) thesis). Section 3 argues some moods are experienced as rationally intelligible responses, and so epistemically appropriate, to the way ‘the world’ presents itself (the Mood-Intelligibility thesis). Finally, section 4 discusses the epistemology of moods. (shrink)