The passing of Nelson Mandela and other figures of contemporary importance may prompt the interesting question of how we might or should understand the psychological, social and moral function of lamentation in human life. This paper aims to show that such responses are not just of emotional and interpersonal significance, but also of serious moral import. To this end, the paper proceeds via exploration of conceptually and morally suggestive correspondences or resonances between the logical grammar of lamentation—which, to be sure, (...) has received almost no latter day analytical attention—and that of gratitude or thankfulness in which there has been an enormous explosion of academic interest in recent years. The paper argues that there is no less case for a moral virtue of lamentation, than for a virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

:Resentment and other hard feelings may outlive their targets, and people often express a desire to overcome these feelings through forgiveness. While some see forgiving the dead as an important moral accomplishment, others deny that genuine forgiveness of the dead is coherent, let alone desirable or valuable. According to one line of thought, forgiveness is something we do for certain reasons, such as the offender’s expressed contrition. Given that the dead cannot express remorse, forgiveness of the dead is impossible. Others (...) see the apparent coherence and moral importance of forgiving the dead as a reason to give up on the idea that forgiveness is conditional upon the offender’s remorse. According to these philosophers, forgiveness of the dead poses no special problems; forgiveness of the dead, like forgiveness of the living, is not contingent upon the offender’s contrition. I steer a path between these two positions in such a way as to bring out an important aspect of forgiveness that is not adequately addressed in the literature: I argue that forgiving the dead may be perfectly coherent and morally valuable even though the dead cannot ask for forgiveness or engage in reparative activities. A full appreciation of the relational character of forgiveness allows us to make sense of forgiving the dead. (shrink)

On an account of virtue as skill, virtues are acquired in the ways that skills are acquired. In this paper I focus on one implication of that account that is deserving of greater attention, which is that becoming more skillful requires learning from one’s failures, but that turns out to be especially challenging when dealing with moral failures. In skill acquisition, skills are improved by deliberate practice, where you strive to correct past mistakes and learn how to overcome your current (...) limitations. A similar story applies to virtue acquisition, as moral failures will be a part of anyone’s life, and we will all have to learn from these experiences. However, despite the importance of being able to learn from our mistakes, this is very difficult in practice, given that failure of any kind can be distressing, and especially so for moral failure. The distress created by a recognition of moral failure often prompts responses of anger, avoidance, or defensiveness; rather than attempts to make amends and when necessary to work on self-improvement. The most potentially distressing response to moral failure is shame, as it is often associated with defensiveness. It is here where emotion regulation will be important to manage that distress, and I focus on the skill of emotion differentiation. I argue that emotion differentiation is a promising strategy for distinguishing the emotions we may experience in the wake of failure, including shame, and to encourage those emotions that motivate self-improvement. Thus, emotion regulation is important for virtue acquisition. (shrink)

A recent trend in moral education, social and emotional learning, incorporates the mantra of emotional intelligence as a key element in an extensive program of character building. In making his famous claim that the good life would have to include appropriate emotions, Aristotle obviously considered the schooling of emotions to be an indispensable part of moral education. However, in this essay Kristján Kristjánsson casts doubt on the assumption that Aristotelians should approve of the clarion call for EI, as understood by (...) Daniel Goleman and the proponents of social and emotional learning, in the classroom. Various marked differences between EI and Aristotelian emotional virtue are highlighted and explored. Kristjánsson argues that the claims of EI lack moral ballast and that when this fact is added to an existing heap of educational problems attached to the implementation of EI programs, educators had better rethink their reliance on EI as a model of emotion cultivation, and perhaps revert to the teachings of Aristotle himself. (shrink)

The question of whether there is such a thing as teachable justified anger encompasses three distinct questions: (1) the psychological question of whether the emotions in general, and anger in particular, are regulatable; (2) the moral question of whether anger can ever be morally justified; and (3) the educational question of whether we have any sound methods at our disposal for teaching justified anger. In this paper I weave Aristotelian responses to those questions together with insights from the current psychology (...) literature on emotion regulation and conclude that there is no good reason for teachers of moral education to shy away from the teaching of justified anger in the classroom, via various means and methods. (shrink)

Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment. Recent research on affordances holds that there are differences in how people experience such possibilities for action. However, these differences have not been properly investigated. In this paper I start by briefly scrutinizing the existing literature on this issue, and then argue for two claims. First, that whether an affordance solicits action or not depends on its relevance to the agent’s concerns. Second, that the experiential character of how an affordance solicits (...) action depends on the character of the concern to which it is relevant. Concerns are conceived of as bodily forms of responsiveness, and solicitations are experienced through this responsiveness. The main aim of this paper is to make clear that an understanding of experiential differences in solicitations has to be based on a phenomenological appreciation of how one experiences one’s responsiveness to those solicitations. In the remainder of the paper I show how such a phenomenological appreciation reveals several characteristics of our responsiveness and I briefly explore three of them: valence, force and mineness. In the final section I discuss the self-referentiality of affordances in light of the current proposal, and argue that this self-referentiality is broader than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

The proliferation of dimensions of appraisal is both welcome and worrying. The preoccupation with sorting out causes may be somewhat otiose. And the ubiquity of emotions in levels of processing raises intriguing problems about the role of language in identifying and triggering emotions and appraisals.

On conçoit souvent la jalousie comme une émotion ayant pour objet les relations de proximité (amour, amitié, fratrie, etc.). Elle a généralement mauvaise presse et est typiquement envisagée comme une émotion moralement condamnable, voire comme un vice. Or, la jalousie ne porte pas uniquement sur les relations de proximité : elle peut également porter sur divers biens (prestige, richesses, biens matériels, privilèges, etc.). Par ailleurs, certains auteurs soutiennent que des cas de jalousie pourraient être moralement justifiés, voire que la jalousie (...) pourrait être une vertu. La jalousie paraît également jouer un rôle dans l’institution et le maintien d’institutions visant à perpétuer des inégalités entre les individus jaloux de leurs avantages et ceux qu’ils envisagent comme des concurrents cherchant à les déposséder de leurs biens. De fait, la jalousie paraît utile pour la théorie politique de par les liens qu’elle entretient avec la justice distributive. Cet article propose, dans la première section, une discussion portant sur la nature de la jalousie où elle est contrastée avec l’envie et l’indignation. Dans la seconde section, on se demandera si la jalousie est un vice, ou si elle peut être parfois moralement justifiée, ou même être une vertu. La troisième section traitera les rôles joués par la jalousie collective dans la justice distributive et la fondation et le maintien d’institutions sociales visant à protéger les intérêts des jaloux. Pour le faire, le cas de la jalousie économique, telle que David Hume et Adam Smith la concevaient dans les relations commerciales entre États européens au XVIIIème siècle, est considéré. (shrink)