Attitudes like shame and contempt seem to be at odds with basic tenets of Kantian moral theory. I argue on the contrary that both attitudes play a central role in Kantian morality. Shame and contempt are attitudes that protect our love of honour, or the esteem we have for ourselves as moral persons. The question arises: how are these attitudes compatible with Kant's claim that all persons deserve respect? I argue that the proper object of shame and contempt is not (...) the humanity within a person, but rather her self-conceit, or the false esteem that competes with love of honour. (shrink)

It is not usually morally permissible to desire the suffering of another person, or to act so as to satisfy this desire; that is, to act with the aim of bringing about suffering. If the retributive emotions, and the retributive responses of which they are a part, are morally permitted or even required, we will need to see what is distinctive about them. One line of argument in this paper is for the conclusion that a retributive desire for the suffering (...) of the wrong-doer, and the aim to bring this about, can (contra recent arguments from Hanna 2008) be morally justified. -/- It has been suggested that by reflecting on the role of the retributive emotions in interpersonal relationships, and the alleged legitimacy of the aim for the suffering of the wrong-doer within them, support can be garnered for retributive practices of punishment by the state (Duff 1986 and 2001, Bennett 2002 and 2003). The conclusion of the second line of argument in the paper is that whilst the retributive responses can permissibly aim at suffering, the way in which this is so in interpersonal relationships cannot provide support for retributive state punishment. (shrink)

How to distinguish emotions such as envy, disgust, and shame from sentiments such as love, hate, and adoration? While the standard approach argues that emotions and sentiments differ in terms of their temporal structures (e.g., Ben-ze’ev, 2000; Deonna & Teroni, 2012; Frijda et al., 1991), this paper sketches an alternative approach according to which each of these states exhibits a distinctive intentional structure. More precisely, this paper argues that emotions and sentiments exhibit distinct forms of affective intentionality. The paper begins (...) by examining the temporal criteria of duration, etiology, and phenomenology widely employed to distinguish between both states. It demonstrates that none of them provides a clear-cut distinction between emotions and sentiments. Next, it presents the intentional approach as an alternative. To this end, it discusses what I call the axiological account (De Monticelli’s 2006; 2020), before introducing my version of the intentional approach according to which emotions and sentiments exhibit different forms of affective intentionality. The main findings are summarized in the conclusion. (shrink)

According to the Strawsonian tradition, a person is responsible for an action just in case it is appropriate to hold them responsible for that action. One important way of holding people responsible for wrongdoing is by experiencing and expressing blaming emotions. This raises the questions of what blaming emotions are and in what sense they can be appropriate. In this chapter I will provide an overview of different answers to both these questions. A common thread in the chapter will be (...) a challenge for the Strawsonian tradition. Given that this tradition understands moral responsibility in terms of the appropriateness of blaming emotions, it must provide a realistic picture of these emotions and the practices in which they take part. On the other hand, it also aims to develop a normatively plausible account of the conditions of responsibility. I will try to show that it is often difficult to strike a satisfactory balance between these two aspirations. (shrink)

Reading a passage in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata—the attempted disrobing of Princess Draupadī after her senior husband has gambled her away (after losing all his wealth, his brothers and himself)—I suggest that we see in her attitude and angry words an expression of contempt. I explore how contempt is a concept that is not thematized within Sanskrit aesthetics of emotions, but nonetheless is clearly articulated in the literature. Focusing on the significance of her gendered expression of anger and contempt, and the (...) positive acceptance of it in the text, I suggest that contempt can be understood as a transformative attitude in a woman (even a high-born one) towards iniquities in a patriarchal culture. (shrink)

Both Confucius and Xúnzǐ take for granted that contempt, in certain situations, is an appropriate and justified response for a person of virtuous character. But Xúnzǐ departs from his predecessor in his insistence on drawing clear boundaries around contempt so as to diminish its destructive and destabilizing potential. This article argues that Xúnzǐ's efforts to circumscribe contempt reflect a shift in the vision of the ritual community from one based on affective ties to one based on an impersonal, universalist state. (...) It also traces the implications of this connection for how we might confront the problem of toxic contempt that has pervaded our political landscape today. (shrink)

This paper argues that hate differs from mere disliking in terms of its “depth,” which is understood via a notion of “othering,” whereby one rejects at least some aspect of the identity of the target of hate, identifying oneself as not being what they are. Fleshing this out reveals important differences between personal hate, which targets a particular individual, and impersonal hate, which targets groups of people. Moreover, impersonal hate requires focusing on the place hate has within particular sorts of (...) communities, enabling a further important distinction between “insider” and “outsider” hate in terms of whether the hater includes members of the targeted group within a particular community or rejects them as “beneath” membership in that community. (shrink)

In this paper, I first argue that sometimes freely and knowingly manipulating oneself does not fully preserve moral responsibility – namely, in cases of practically distinct self-manipulation. However, I argue that practically distinct self-manipulation preserves moral responsibility to some extent because such a self-manipulated person is more morally responsibility than an other-manipulated person. This is an important result: manipulating oneself doesn’t always fully preserve one’s moral responsibility for one’s actions. But in what sense is the self-manipulated person more morally responsible? (...) I argue the self-manipulated person is not a fitting target of the reactive attitudes but continues to have wrongdoing-incurred reparative obligations. This explains the intuitive judgement about the self-manipulated person, provides a better explanation of “tracing” cases, and reveals important requirements for a plausible theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Choosing Freedom is an accessible and accurate introduction to Kant’s moral philosophy that brings a Kantian way of living to life. It’s not a moral instruction manual that provides readers the ten...

There is a curious phenomenon where people from marginalized populations are taken to be arrogant when they show no signs of superiority. In effect, their actions are misconstrued, and their attitudes are rendered unintelligible. Given that arrogance is standardly taken to be a flaw in one’s moral character, understanding such misattributions should give us insight into the affective marginalization many people face. This talk aims to give a thorough exploration of arrogance under oppression. I argue that arrogance is a kind (...) of self-preoccupation that involves projecting one’s values, goals, and concerns onto others as if they were objective values, goals, and concerns. When the affectively marginalized communicate their self-respect through things like protest, people mistake that self-respect as self-preoccupation given how the affectively marginalized are constructed. Furthermore, given how affective marginalization not only inhibits how the marginalized are understood by others, but inhibits their own affective lives, I argue that taking up an arrogant attitude is not always morally vicious, but can be a beautiful form of political resistance but all things considered good. (shrink)

Groups can be epistemically vicious just like individuals. And just like individuals, groups sometimes want to do something about their vices. They want to change. However, intentionally combating one’s own vices seems impossible without detecting those vices first. Self-knowledge seems to provide a first step towards changing one’s own epistemic vices. I argue that groups can acquire self-knowledge about their epistemic vices and I propose an account of such collective self-knowledge. I suggest that collective self-knowledge of vices is partially based (...) on evidence that a group can generate by performing internal promptings. Whereas these promptings are done mentally in individual self-knowledge, these promptings are done by interactions of group members in the collective case. The group can then acquire inferential self-knowledge of their vices based on the evidence generated by the interactions within the group. Groups thereby bring themselves into a position from which they can combat and change those vices intentionally. (shrink)

In discussing the ways in which we hold each other accountable for immoral conduct, philosophers have often focused on blame, aiming to specify adequate responses to wrongdoing. In contrast, theorizing about the ways we can appropriately respond to minor moral mistakes – i.e., criticizable conduct that is bad but not wrong – has largely been neglected. My first goal in this paper is, thus, to draw attention to this blind spot and argue that a separate account of blameless moral criticism (...) is desirable. My second goal is to propose one way to explicate the contrast between blaming and blameless moral criticism in terms of the contrast between moral anger and moral disappointment: while moral anger, as many argue, is an appropriate response to moral wrongdoing, moral disappointment, but not moral anger, is an appropriate response to these minor moral mistakes. (shrink)

When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angry blame and disappointed (...) blame are both condemnatory responses, they have distinct evaluative foci and occupy different but complementary roles in our accountability practices. (shrink)

Bernard Matolino has recently argued that African communitarianism is an ethics grounded in emotion aligned with reason. If he is correct, questions arise about what emotions have value within African communitarianism, especially as emotions like anger or resentment could stand in tension with important communitarian values, such as social harmony. While little critical attention has so far been paid to such emotions within an African communitarian framework, a wider philosophical literature examining the moral value of disruptive emotions could be drawn (...) on to develop analyses of emotion within African communitarianism. In this paper, I explore how such an analysis could proceed. I argue that drawing on the wider emotion literature, and especially the concept of reactive attitudes introduced by P. F. Strawson, provides an initial case for even disruptive emotions to have value. Even so, we must question whether an analysis of emotion plausibly based on individualistic commitments is compatible with relational communitarian commitments. I nevertheless defend the compatibility and argue that, not only can disruptive emotions have instrumental value through their epistemic and motivational roles in the promotion of community but, importantly, they are partially constitutive of the interpersonal relationships within which we are embedded and that form community. (shrink)

Since the early modern period, the vast majority of philosophers who have written on contempt have understood it as a denial of respect. But there has been considerable disagreement about precisely what kind of respect we deny people when we contemn them. Contemporary philosophers who defend contempt as a morally appropriate attitude tend to understand it as a denial of what Stephen Darwall calls appraisal respect, while early modern writers, who all believe that contemning others constitutes a serious moral wrong, (...) seem to understand it more as a denial of recognition respect. In this paper, I argue that neither of these understandings of contempt hits the mark and that we do better to conceptualize it as a denial of recognition in the sense articulated by Axel Honneth and by other critical theorists who have been influenced by his work. (shrink)

Drawing on insights found in both philosophy and psychology, this paper offers an analysis of hate and distinguishes between its main types. I argue that hate is a sentiment, i.e., a form to regard the other as evil which on certain occasions can be acutely felt. On the basis of this definition, I develop a typology which, unlike the main typologies in philosophy and psychology, does not explain hate in terms of patterns of other affective states. By examining the developmental (...) history and intentional structure of hate, I obtain two variables: the replaceability/irreplaceability of the target and the determinacy/indeterminacy of the focus of concern. The combination of these variables generates the four-types model of hate, according to which hate comes in the following kinds: normative, ideological, retributive, and malicious. (shrink)

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some kind of epistemic (...) injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners. (shrink)

Let cognitivism be the view that moral judgments are cognitive mental states and noncognitivism the view that they are noncognitive mental states. Here I argue for moral judgment pluralism: some moral judgments are cognitive states and some are noncognitive states. More specifically, according to my pluralism some judgments are moral because they carry a moral content (e.g., that genocide is wrong) and some are moral because they employ a moral attitude (e.g., indignation, or guilt); the former are the cognitive moral (...) judgments and the latter the noncognitive ones. After explaining and motivating the view, I argue that this kind of pluralism handles quite elegantly several of the core issues that have structured the debate on cognitivism vs. noncognitivism. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that a certain kind of envy is not only morally permissible, but also, sometimes, more fitting and productive than admiration. Envy and admiration are part of our emotional palette, our toolbox of evolutionary adaptations, and they play complementary roles. I start by introducing my original taxonomy of envy, which allows me to present emulative envy, a species of envy sometimes confused with admiration. After reviewing how the two emotions differ from a psychological perspective, I focus (...) in particular on the distinct and complementary roles they play in the ethical and political domains. (shrink)

Spite is typically considered a vicious emotion that causes us to engage in petty, vindictive, and sometimes self-destructive behavior. Even though it has this bad reputation, I will argue that spite is a reactive attitude. Spite is emotional defiance of another’s command: to spite you, I will do something exactly because you told me not to. Our liability to feelings of spite presupposes that we recognize others as having practical authority, which is why it qualifies as a reactive attitude. I (...) conclude by offering conditions under which spite can be justified and unjustified. (shrink)

Creepiness and the emotion of the creeps have been overlooked in the moral philosophy and moral psychology literatures. We argue that the creeps is a morally significant emotion in its own right, and not simply a type of fear, disgust, or anger (though it shares features with those emotions). Reflecting on cases, we defend a novel account of the creeps as felt in response to creepy people. According to our moral insensitivity account, the creeps is fitting just when its object (...) is agential activity that is insensitive to basic moral considerations. When, only when, and insofar as someone is disposed to such insensitivity, they are a creep. Such insensitivity, especially in extreme forms, raises doubts about creeps’ moral agency. We distinguish multiple types of insensitivity, respond to concerns that feeling the creeps is itself objectionable, and conclude with a discussion of epistemic issues relating to the creeps. (shrink)

Moral experience comes in many flavors. Some philosophers have argued that there is nothing common to the many forms moral experience can take. In this paper, I argue that close attention to the phenomenology of certain key emotions, combined with a clear distinction between essentially and accidentally moral experiences, suggests that there is a group of (essentially) moral emotions which in fact exhibit significant unity.

It is common for theorists, drawing on P. F. Strawson, to account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the emotions and feelings that characterize our responsibility practices, in terms of the nature of the so-called “reactive attitudes.” Here, I argue against this attitude-based Strawsonian strategy, and I argue in favor of an alternative, which I call the “concern-based Strawsonian strategy.” On this alternative, rather than account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the (...) reactive attitudes, one accounts for such agency in terms of the concern that leaves us susceptible to those attitudes in the first place. This, I believe, is a more promising way to develop the Strawsonian approach than the attitude-based strategy. The concern-based strategy allows us to better countenance the number and variety of the reactive attitudes that characterize our responsibility practices; it shares the attitude-based strategy’s virtues; and it seems to position us to better understand the distinctive social and moral significance associated with being and being regarded as a morally responsible agent. (shrink)

Is it appropriate to honor artists who have created great works but who have also acted immorally? In this article, after arguing that honoring involves identifying a person as someone we ought to admire, we present three moral reasons against honoring immoral artists. First, we argue that honoring can serve to condone their behavior, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. Second, we argue that honoring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can lead (...) to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. Third, we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honoring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. We end by considering how we might respond to these reasons. (shrink)

When we admire a person, we don’t just have a wow-response towards them, as we might towards a painting or a sunset. Rather, we construe them as realizing an ideal of the person in their lives to a conspicuous degree. To merit admiration, it is not enough simply to do something valuable or to possess desirable character traits. Rather, one’s achievements must manifest commitments and character traits that define a worthwhile ideal. Agential admiration, I argue, is a person-focused attitude like (...) shame, contempt, and hubristic pride, not an act-focused one like gratitude or guilt, not to mention mere evaluation as excellent. Given its holistic focus, its motivational effects permeate our interactions with its target, who is construed as an exemplar. Consequently, even if someone is admirable in some way, admiring them may be all-things-considered inappropriate, if they fall short of other ideals that we ought to care about. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold aim. On the one hand, we will discuss the much debated question of the source of normativity (which traditionally has nature and practical reason as the two main contenders to this role) and propose a new answer to it. Second, in answering this question, we will present a new account of practical wisdom, which conceives of the ethical virtues as ultimately unified in the chief virtue of phronesis, understood as ethical expertise. To do so, we (...) will first criticize the main current view of phronesis and its bearer (the phronimos), then offer another view of the nature of phronesis and of its relation to the other ethical virtues. Our proposal should not be intended as an interpretation of Aristotle’s own view; rather, it should be seen as a broadly Aristotelian theoretical proposal, which we believe can satisfyingly address most of the problems that afflict the more traditional accounts of practical wisdom. In section 2 of this paper, after criticizing first-nature naturalistic views of moral virtue, we take practical reason to be the cornerstone of second-nature naturalistic views; in section 3, we will outline criticisms to which, in our view, the traditional views of phronesis are ill-suited to respond, and, in section 4, we will outline our view of phronesis as ethical expertise – a view which in our view is immune to the above-mentioned criticisms – by spelling out the three main tenets of phronesis as ethical expertise: a conceptual thesis, an epistemic thesis, and the educational implications of the two. Finally, we will support our proposal with some empirical evidence taken from cognitive science. (shrink)

Building on the theory of humor advanced by Yves Cusset in his recent book Rire: Tractatus philo-comicus, I argue that we can understand the phenomenon in terms of what Jean-Luc Nancy, following Roland Barthes, has called the exemption from sense. I attempt to show how the humorous sensibility, understood in this way, is entirely incompatible with the experience of others as contemptible. I conclude by developing some of the normative implications of this, focusing specifically on the question whether it is (...) ever morally permissible to treat others with contempt. (shrink)

Contempt is typically studied as a uniquely human moral emotion. However, this approach has yielded inconclusive results. We argue this is because the folk affect concept “contempt” has been inaccurately mapped onto basic affect systems. “Contempt” has features that are inconsistent with a basic emotion, especially its protracted duration and frequently cold phenomenology. Yet other features are inconsistent with a basic attitude. Nonetheless, the features of “contempt” functionally cohere. To account for this, we revive and reconfigure thesentimentconstruct using the notion (...) of evolved functional specialization. We develop the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion (ASE) model of sentiments, in which enduring attitudes represent others' social-relational value and moderate discrete emotions across scenarios. Sentiments are functional networks of attitudes and emotions. Distinct sentiments, includinglove,respect,like,hate, andfear, track distinct relational affordances, and each is emotionally pluripotent, thereby serving both bookkeeping and commitment functions within relationships. The sentimentcontemptis an absence ofrespect; from cues to others' low efficacy, it represents them as worthless and small, mutingcompassion,guilt, andshameand potentiatinganger,disgust, andmirth. This sentiment is ancient yet implicated in the ratcheting evolution of human ultrasocialty. The manifolds of thecontemptnetwork, differentially engaged across individuals and populations, explain the features of “contempt,” its translatability, and its variable experience as “hot” or “cold,” occurrent or enduring, and anger-like or disgust-like. This rapprochement between psychological anthropology and evolutionary psychology contributes both methodological and empirical insights, with broad implications for understanding the functional and cultural organization of social affect. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.

The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term ‘hate speech’ itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt to understand the general (...) concept hate speech. And it does so using a range of well-known methods of conceptual analysis that are distinctive of analytic philosophy. One of its main aims is to explode the myth that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature of hate speech. It also argues that hate speech is best conceived as a family resemblances concept. One important implication is that when looking at the full range of ways of combating hate speech, including but not limited to the use of criminal law, there is every reason to embrace an understanding of hate speech as a heterogeneous collection of expressive phenomena. Another is that it would be unsound to reject hate speech laws on the premise that they are effectively in the business of criminalising emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred. (shrink)

Crucially, blame can be addressed to its targets, as an implicit demand for recognition. But when we ask whether offenders would actually appreciate this demand, via a sound deliberative route from their existing motivations, we face a puzzle. If they would, their offense reflects a deliberative mistake, and blame’s hostility seems unnecessary. If they wouldn’t, addressing them is futile, and blame’s emotional engagement seems unwarranted. To resolve this puzzle, I develop an account of blame as a proleptic response to indeterminacy (...) in its target’s reasons, yielding attractive accounts of blame’s relation both to internal reasons claims and to free will. (shrink)

In the early modern period, contempt emerged as a persistent theme in moral philosophy. Most of the moral philosophers of the period shared two basic commitments in their thinking about contempt. First, they argued that we understand the value of others in the morally appropriate way when we understand them from the perspective of the morally relevant community. And second, they argued that we are naturally inclined to judge others as contemptible, and that we must therefore interrupt that natural movement (...) of sense-bestowal in order to value others in the morally appropriate way. In this paper I examine in detail the arguments of Nicolas Malebranche and Immanuel Kant concerning the wrongness of contempt, emphasizing the ways in which they depend on conceptions of community and of the interruption of moral sense-bestowal. After showing how each of these arguments fails to comprehend the nature and the wrongness of contempt, I argue that we can find the resources for a more adequate account in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and specifically in his reflections on ontology and on the meaning of community. (shrink)

Gervais & Fessler’s defense of a sentiment construct for contempt captures features distinguishing the phenomenon from basic emotions and highlights the fact that it comprises a coordinated syndrome of responses. However, their conceptualization of contempt as the absence of respect equivocates. Subsequently, a “dignity” culture that prescribes respect does not thereby limit legitimate contempt in the manner the authors claim.

Kristján Kristjánsson, On the Very Idea of Negative Emotions, pp. 351364 As attention has shifted towards the emotions in general, the notion of so-called negative emotions has come in for renewed interest. The author explores this notion and argues that its invocation cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscures all sorts of relevant complexities. There are thus no emotions around to which we can helpfully refer collectively as negative, although there are of course painful emotions, emotions (...) that negatively evaluate states of affairs, emotions that are negatively morally evaluated, and so forth. Furthermore, while attempts are under way to reappraise various (commonly) negatively evaluated emotions, those attempts involve different kinds of argument which cannot and should not be collected together as defenses of negative emotions. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR. (shrink)

Psychopaths are agents who lack the normal capacity to feel moral emotions (e.g. guilt based on empathy with the victims of their actions). Evidence for attributing psychopathy at least in some cases to genetic or early childhood causes suggests that psychopaths lack free will. However, the paper defends a sense in which psychopaths still may be construed as responsible for their actions, even if their degree of responsibility is less than that of normal agents. Responsibility is understood in Strawsonian terms, (...) as a question of our appropriate reactive attitudes toward an agent for what she does, and as distinct from the question of the agent's own motivating attitudes, which lead him to do what he does. The latter is the question more directly relevant to free will, though moral motivation normally depends on the capacity in early childhood to pick up motivating attitudes from others' reactive attitudes. Reactive attitudes based on hatred rather than anger (e.g. disgust or contempt) count as alternative forms of blame that may be appropriately directed toward agents manifesting bad qualities of will, even as a matter of motivational impairment. So psychopaths may still be said to deserve blame, even if they are incapable of modifying their behavior in response to blame. (shrink)

This book is a systematic treatment-perhaps the first-of “attitudes of the heart”-remorse (versus guilt), love, trust, gratitude, personal anger (versus righteous anger), jealousy, and others-and their role in mediating personal relationship, attachment, and connection. This is obviously interesting in its own right, but it also shows how heartfelt attitudes mirror more extensively studied “reactive attitudes” of guilt, resentment, and blame (“attitudes of the will”). Whereas the latter mediate moral relations of mutual respect and accountability, attitudes of the heart are the (...) currency of heartfelt connection and personal relationship. (shrink)

Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response (...) to wrongdoing, there is both instrumental and non-instrumental value in ensuring that those who face similar moral predicaments reason about these predicaments, and the appropriate responses to them, together. Hypocrisy is wrong because it hampers our ability to realise that value. And hypocrites lose standing to blame for a similar reason. Standing depends on the value of particular people engaging in an accountability procedure together, a value which the hypocrite forestalls, by failing to acknowledge wrongdoing in the course of blaming. This account of a duty to blame non-hypocritically helps unpack the relationship between hypocrisy and a range of other defects in a person’s standing. It also responds to a central sceptical challenge to the wrongness of hypocritical blaming. The challenge is that accurate hypocritical blaming can’t be wrong because it is morally good, and indeed is morally better than not blaming others at all. My response: hypocritical blaming is wrong, not because it is morally worse than not blaming at all, but because it is second-best, i.e. worse than non-hypocritical blaming, which enables mutual deliberation about wrongdoing. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by suggesting that Immanuel Kant’s argument for the impermissibility of treating others with contempt seems to be subject to a paradox very similar to the well known paradox of forgiveness first described by Aurel Kolnai. Specifically, either the object of the judgment of contempt is not really contemptible, in which case the prohibition on treating him with contempt is superfluous, or else the person truly is contemptible, in which case the prohibition seems unjustifiable, reducing to (...) a mere condonation of wrongdoing. My goal in the paper is to show that this paradox is only apparent. Making use of the philosophy of phrases that Jean-François Lyotard develops in The Differend—emphasizing especially the ideas of phrase-event, presentation, situation, addressor, and addressee—I argue that the Kantian prohibition on treating others with contempt is rationally defensible, even in cases in which we believe the object of the judgment of contempt truly is contemptible. (shrink)

In this chapter, I defend a novel account of contempt’s evaluative presentation by synthesizing relevant psychological work (Rozin et al. 1999; Fischer and Roseman 2007; Fischer 2011; Hutcherson and Gross 2011) with philosophical insights (Mason 2003; Bell 2005; Abramson 2009; Bell 2013). I then show how a concern about contempt’s status as an emotion involved in holding people accountable can be helpfully addressed. Finally, I gesture at an account of why, when we feel contemptuous toward people, our accountability responses involve (...) withdrawal and exclusion rather than approach and confrontation. (shrink)

Contempt and disgust share a number of features which distinguish them from other hostile emotions: they both present two distinct facets—a nonmoral facet and a moral one; they both imply a negative evaluation of the dispositional kind as well as disrespect towards the target of the feeling; and they trigger avoidance and exclusion action tendencies. However, while sharing a common core, contempt and disgust are in our view distinct emotions, qualified by different cognitive-motivational features. Contempt is felt exclusively towards human (...) targets, and implies sense of superiority over them, pessimistic feelings about their possibility of betterment, detachment from them, and avoidance driven by detachment; whereas disgust can be directed at a wide range of possible targets, and implies contamination sensitivity, fear of contamination, and fear-driven avoidance. The differences between contempt and disgust are related to the different kinds of standard against which the target is evaluated, and the different kinds of disrespect engendered by the negative evaluation. (shrink)

Although there have been a number of recent discussions about the emotions that we bring with us to our epistemic endeavors, there has been little, if any, discussion of the emotions we bring with us to epistemic appraisal. This paper focuses on a particular set of emotions, the reactive attitudes. As Peter F. Strawson and others have argued, our reactive attitudes reveal something deep about our moral commitments. A similar argument can be made within the domain of epistemology. Our "epistemic (...) reactive attitudes" reveal our epistemic commitments. Reflection on the role they play in our practice of epistemic appraisal can contribute to a number of different debates in contemporary epistemology, including the nature of epistemic norms and epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson famously suggested that employment of the objective attitude in an intimate relationship forebodes the relationship’s demise. Relatively less remarked is Strawson's admission that the objective attitude is available as a refuge from the strains of relating to normal, mature adults as proper subjects of the reactive attitudes. I develop an account of the strategic employment of the objective attitude in such cases according to which it denies a person a power of will – authorial power – whose recognition (...) is necessary for sustaining intimacy. This conception of the objective attitude in its strategic employment presses those who urge universal adoption of the objective attitude (perhaps in its nonreactive, emotionally toned species) to confront the costs of their proposal. (shrink)

Although sometimes forgotten in current uses of the term, ?hatred? is a notoriously complex and ambiguous phenomenon. Analyzing and identifying what characterizes hatred and articulating a concept that helps us think more clearly about hatred is difficult. It is not even clear whether hatred is an emotion, an attitude, a sentiment or a passion. This essay departs from the idea that perhaps hatred is analyzable as a retributive reactive attitude. More precisely, it presents a philosophical exploration of what happens if (...) one puts a messy bundle of notions and examples of hatred into the more clear conceptual framework offered by Strawson in ?Freedom and Resentment?. The question whether hatred can be seen as a retributive reactive attitude is examined both with respect to Strawson's division between participant and objective attitudes and with respect to the seemingly most closely related participant attitude, resentment. (shrink)

This article analyzes the wages (costs) of contempt. It argues that the social and political division and dysfunction caused by contempt and imagined content undermines political discussion and creates terrible costs for contemned and contemner in the burdens of shame and guilt they must bear.

My aim in this piece is to understand what kinds of acts sneering acts are. I aim to look at what sneering acts do and what social function they perform. In particular, I want to mark them out as acts of ‘making people feel’. I explore the grounds on which we might criticize sneering acts, and ask whether the thing that we do when we sneer is always vicious.

: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)