Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim , The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. (...) Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases. (shrink)

Designing education policy, curriculum and competences which promote and nourish the values and/or morals believed to underpin democratic culture is both contentious and something which has...

Today, in a Western secular context, the affective phenomenon of religious zeal is often associated, or even identified, with religious intolerance, violence, and fanaticism. Even if the zealots’ devotion remains restricted to their private lives, “we” as Western secularists still suspect them of a lack of reason, rationality, and autonomy. However, closer consideration reveals that religious zeal is an ethically and politically ambiguous phenomenon. In this article, I explore the question of how this ambiguity can be explained. I do so (...) by drawing on Paul Ricœur’s theory of affective fragility and tracing back the ambiguity of religious zeal to a dialectic inherent to human affectivity and existence itself. According to Ricœur, human affectivity is constituted by the two poles of vital and spiritual desires which are mediated by the thymos. As I show, this theory helps us to understand that religious zeal as a spiritual desire is neither plainly good nor plainly bad, but ambiguous. Moreover, it enables us to acknowledge the entanglement of abstraction and concretion that is inherent to the phenomenon of religious zeal. Finally, this theory helps us to understand why religious zeal, as one possible expression of the human quest for the infinite, is both a promise and a threat. In conclusion, human existence is tragic not in that we necessarily fail, but in that no matter which path we take with regard to our spiritual desires—that of affirmation, rejection, or moderation—we are and remain fallible. (shrink)

The negative aim of this paper is to identify shortcomings in received theories. First, we criticize approaching audiences, and large gatherings more general, in categories revolving around the notion of the crowd. Second, we show how leading paradigms in emotion research restrict research on the social-relational dynamics of emotions by reducing them to physiological processes like emotional contagion or to cognitive processes like social appraisal. Our positive aim is to offer an alternative proposal for conceptualizing emotional dynamics in audiences. First, (...) we offer a notion of emotional sharing for studying the social-relational dynamics of emotions. Second, we propose a working concept of audience as a dynamic and dispersed social collective. Finally, we bring these elements together in the description of two scenes of jubilation. (shrink)

Evaluative concepts and emotions appear closely connected. According to a prominent account, this relation can be expressed by propositions of the form ‘something is admirable if and only if feeling admiration is appropriate in response to it’. The first section discusses various interpretations of such ‘Value-Emotion Equivalences’, for example the Fitting Attitude Analysis, and it offers a plausible way to read them. The main virtue of the proposed way to read them is that it is well-supported by a promising account (...) of emotions, namely the Perceptual Theory of Emotions, which emphasises the analogies between emotions and sensory perceptual experiences. The second section considers a worry about whether concepts such as admirable are really evaluative. It is maintained that even though the arguments used to show that thick terms and concepts are not inherently evaluative can be transposed to affective concepts, these arguments can be resisted. So there is no need to abandon the intuitive claim that affective concepts are inherently evaluative. (shrink)

This paper replies to an argument due to Greenspan (1980) and to Morton (2002) against the view that emotions are perceptions of values. The argument holds that this view cannot make room for ambivalent emotions both of which are appropriate, such as when it is appropriate to feel fear and attraction towards something. This would make for a contradiction, for appropriate emotions are supposed to present things as they are. The problem, I argue, is that this line of thoughts forgets (...) that things can have positive and negative aspects: something can both be dangerous and attractive, for instance. (shrink)

In this reply to his three critics, Talbott develops several important themes from his book, Which Rights Should Be Universal?, in ways that go beyond the discussion in the book. Among them are the following: the prescriptive role of human rights theory; the need to guarantee an expansive list of basic rights as a basis for a government to be able to claim recognitional legitimacy; the futility of trying to define human rights in terms of what there can be reasonable (...) disagreement about; and the problems for any proceduralist account of human rights. Talbott also further elaborates his consequentialist defense of basic human rights and his arguments against cultural relativism about human rights. (shrink)

Sentimentalists believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. Epistemic sentimentalists subscribe to what I call the final-court-of-appeal view: emotional experience is ultimately necessary and can be sufficient for the justification of evaluative beliefs. This paper rejects this view defending a moderate version of rationalism that steers clear of the excesses of both “Stoic” rationalism and epistemic sentimentalism. We should grant that emotions play a significant epistemic role in justifying evaluations. At the same time, evaluative justification is not uniquely or (...) especially dependent on emotions. The anti-sentimentalist argument developed in this paper is based on the indeterminacy thesis. The thesis states that the evaluative properties picked out by our emotional responses are too indeterminate to play a central role in our evaluative practices. I argue that while the indeterminacy thesis undermines the final-court-of-appeal view it supports the claim that emotional responses can provide prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs. (shrink)

Many believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. This paper focuses on epistemic aspects of the putative link between emotions and value by asking two related questions. First, how exactly are emotions supposed to latch onto or track values? And second, how well suited are emotions to detecting or learning about values? To answer the first question, the paper develops the heuristics-model of emotions. This approach models emotions as sui generis heuristics of value. The empirical plausibility of the heuristics-model (...) is demonstrated using evidence from experimental psychology, evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience. The model is used then to answer the second question. If emotions are indeed heuristics of value, then it follows that emotions can be an important and useful source of information about value. However, emotions will not be epistemically superior in the sense of being the highest court of appeal for the justification of axiological beliefs (the latter view is referred to as the Epistemic Dependence Thesis, or EDT for short). The paper applies the heuristics-model to celebrated cases from the philosophy of emotions literature arguing that while the heuristics-model offers a good explanation of typical patterns of emotional reactions in such cases, advocates of EDT will have a hard time accounting for these patterns. The paper also shows that the conclusions drawn from special cases generalize. The paper ends by arguing that skepticism about the metaethical significance of emotions is compatible with a commitment to the importance of emotions in first-order normative ethics. (shrink)

Humean externalism is the view that moral motivation must be explained in terms of desires that are “external” to an agent’s motivationally-inert moral judgments. A standard argument in favor of Humean externalism appeals to the possibility of amoral or morally cynical agents—agents for whom moral considerations gain no motivational traction. The possibility of such agents seems to provide evidence for both the claim that moral judgments are themselves motivationally inert, and the claim that moral motivation has its source in desires (...) external to those judgments. This essay makes the case that, rather than providing a compelling argument in favor of Humean externalism, the argument from amoralism can be recast to set up an important challenge to this view. On one hand, it appears that the central methodological considerations and types of evidence that undergird the externalist argument from amoralism are in tension with a central Humean commitment: namely, that desires can be sources of motivation. While it is possible for Humeans to escape this horn of the dilemma, the most plausible strategies for doing so can be co-opted by internalists to resist the argument’s externalist conclusion. (shrink)

This article develops a phenomenology of suffering with an emphasis on matters relevant to medical practice and bioethics. An attempt is made to explain how suffering can involve many different things—bodily pains, inability to carry out everyday actions, and failure to realize core life values—and yet be a distinct phenomenon. Proceeding from and expanding upon analyses found in the works of Eric Cassell and Elaine Scarry, suffering is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her (...) in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about my embodiment, my engagements in the world together with others, and my core life values. Suffering is in essence a feeling , but as such, it has implications for and involves the person’s entire life: how she acts in the world, communicates with others, and understands and looks upon her priorities and goals in life. Suffering-moods are typically intense and painful in nature, but they may also display a rather subconscious quality in presenting things in the world and my life as a whole in an alienating way. In such situations, we are not focused directly upon the suffering-mood—as in the cases of pain and other bodily ailments—but rather, upon the things that the mood presents to us: not only our bodies, but also other things in the world that prevent us from having a good life and being the persons we want to be. Such suffering may in many cases be transformed or at least mitigated by a person’s identifying and changing her core life values and in such a manner reinterpreting her life story to become an easier and more rewarding one to live under the present circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories – biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial – are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of what is called existential feelings, experienced by way of transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects. Health, in such a phenomenologically enacted understanding, (...) is an important and in many cases necessary part of leading a good life. Illness, on the other hand, by such a phenomenological view, consist in finding oneself at mercy of unhomelike existential feelings, such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety and delusion, which make it harder and, in some cases, impossible to flourish. In illness suffering the lived body hurts, resists, or, in other ways, alienates the activities of the ill person. (shrink)

As object-directed emotions, reactive attitudes can be appropriate in the sense of fitting, where an emotion is fitting in virtue of accurately representing its target. I use this idea to argue for a theory of moral accountability: an agent S is accountable for an action A if and only if A expresses S’s quality of will and S has the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. For the sake of argument, I assume that a reactive attitude is fitting (...) if and only if its constituent thoughts are true, and I argue for the above theory by determining thoughts partly constituting resentment and gratitude. Although others have argued that the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons is necessary for accountability, the argument here is significantly better in two respects. First, it does not rely on intermediary ethical principles, supplementary arguments, or assumptions about the nature of reactive attitudes specifically. Instead, it simply assumes that reactive attitudes, like all emotions, have cognitive content. Second, the argument here is more powerful because it brings to light the quality of will condition and has the resources to flesh out the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. (shrink)

Schadenfreude is the emotion we experience when we obtain pleasure from others’ misfortunes. Typically, we are not proud of it and admit experiencing it only sheepishly or apologetically. Philosophers typically view it, and the disposition to experience it, as moral failings. Two recent defenders of Schadenfreude, however, argue that it is morally permissible because it stems from judgments about the just deserts of those who suffer misfortunes. I also defend Schadenfreude, but on different grounds that overcome two deficiencies of those (...) recent defenses. First, my defense accounts for the wide range of circumstances in which we experience Schadenfreude. Those circumstances often involve feelings and judgments that are less noble and admirable than judgments regarding just deserts. Second, it accounts for the sheepish or apologetic feelings that commonly accompany Schadenfreude. The two recent defenses can account for those feelings only by holding that they are mistaken or misguided. In opposition to those who view Schadenfreude as a moral failing, I argue that it is morally permissible unless it is part of a causal chain that produces an immoral act. The moral permissibility of the emotion is necessary in order for individuals to have the emotional freedom that, in turn, is necessary for their well-being. Schadenfreude’s moral status is similar to a sexual fetish’s. Like a fetish, experiencing Schadenfreude is not immoral in itself, but sharing and discussing it with others is immoral in many contexts. (shrink)

In healthcare practice, care providers are confronted with tragic situations, in which they are expected to make choices and decisions that can have far-reaching consequences. This article investigates the role of moral case deliberation in dealing with tragic situations. It focuses on experiences of care givers involved in the treatment of a pregnant woman with a brain tumour, and their evaluation of a series of MCD meetings in which the dilemmas around care were discussed. The study was qualitative, focusing on (...) the views and experiences of the participants. A case study design is used by conducting semi-structured interviews with health care professionals who both played a role in the treatment of the patient and attended the MCD. The results show that MCD helps people to deal with tragic situations. An important element of MCD in this respect is making explicit the dilemma and the damage, demonstrating that there is no simple solution. MCD prompts participants to formulate and share personal experiences with one another and thus helps to create a shared perception of the situation as tragic. The article concludes that MCD contributes to the sharing of tragic experiences, and fosters mutual interaction during a tragedy. Its value could be increased through explicit reflection on the aspect of contingency that characterises tragedy. (shrink)

In healthcare practice, care providers are confronted with decisions they have to make, directly affecting patients and inevitably harmful. These decisions are tragic by nature. This study investigates the role of Moral Case Deliberation in dealing with tragic situations. In MCD, caregivers reflect on real-life dilemmas, involving a choice between two ethical claims, both resulting in moral damage and harm. One element of the reflection process is making explicit the harm involved in the choice. How harmful are our decisions? We (...) investigated how facilitators of MCD experience the importance of addressing harm in MCD and what participants learn from reflecting on harm. The study was qualitative, focusing on the views and experiences of the facilitators of MCD. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with facilitators of MCD. The research focuses on the subjective experiences of facilitators. Grounded Theory was used for analysis. The results show two main categories. The first concerns the awareness of tragedy. Within this category, five themes were discerned: making explicit that there is no solution, visualizing consequences, uncovering pain, focusing on emotion, and exploring perspectives on harm. The second category concerns the support for healthcare professionals in dealing with the tragedy of the choices they face. In this category, five themes came forward: acknowledging, offering comfort, managing harm, consideration through dialogue and repairing harm. Our study shows that addressing harm in MCD in tragic situations provides an important moral learning opportunity for participants. By formulating and becoming aware of harm, MCD aids healthcare professionals in the task they are faced with, namely making difficult and painful choices. MCD helps healthcare professionals to repair moral damage, making clear at the same time that harm cannot be undone. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 2, Page 255-272, Summer 2022.

The concept of empathy has received much attention from philosophers and also from both cognitive and social psychologists. It has, however, been given widely conflicting definitions, with some taking it primarily as an epistemological notion and others as a social one. Recently, empathy has been closely associated with the simulationist approach to social cognition and, as such, it might be thought that the concept’s utility stands or falls with that of simulation itself. I suggest that this is a mistake. Approaching (...) the question of what empathy is via the question of what it is for, I claim that empathy plays a distinctive epistemological role: it alone allows us to know how others feel. This is independent of the plausibility of simulationism more generally. With this in view I propose an inclusive definition of empathy, one likely consequence of which is that empathy is not a natural kind. It follows that, pace a number of empathy researchers, certain experimental paradigms tell us not about the nature of empathy but about certain ways in which empathy can be achieved. I end by briefly speculating that empathy, so conceived, may also play a distinctive social role, enabling what I term ‘transparent fellow-feeling’. (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)

An executive ought to be as informed as possible about the needs and preferences of her constituency and about the most important policy issues that her constituency confronts. This ethical duty, referred to as the informed governance principle, requires that an executive who is not opposed to the death penalty personally carry out at least one execution of a death row inmate. Having an executive act as executioner, even if just once, could also help citizens reflect upon their personal ethical (...) commitments, spur them to monitor the government’s power, and prompt them to contemplate how best to distribute power so that the chance of injustice is minimized. (shrink)

It is commonly suggested that empathy is a morally important quality to possess and that a failure to properly empathize with others is a kind of moral failure. This suggestion assumes that empathy involves caring for others’ well-being. Skeptics challenge the moral importance of empathy by arguing that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient to care for others’ well-being. This challenge is misguided. Although some forms of empathy may not be morally important, empathy with another’s basic well-being concerns is both (...) necessary and sufficient to care for another’s well-being, provided that one’s empathy is both cognitive and affective. I further defend the idea that empathy of this form is a moral virtue. In doing so, I address three challenges to empathy’s status as a virtue: (1) that empathy is unnecessary for being ethical, (2) that it is not useful for promoting ethical behavior, and (3) that an empathetic person can lack other traits central to being virtuous, such as being motivated by the moral good and being disposed to do virtuous things whenever appropriate opportunities arise. I argue that these challenges are mistaken. (shrink)

Despite common assumptions that capitalism and compassion are contradictory, we theorize that compassion can be compatible with capitalism, and may either manifest or be inhibited within capitalistic society through a range of organizational approaches. These, in turn, result in varying consequences for employees’ experiences, feelings, and behaviors. In this article, we examine the perceived support provided to employees by their organizations during the 2011 Brisbane flood. Analysis of interview data identifies a continuum of organizational responses: from neglect to ambiguity to (...) compassionate care, each of which engendered various employee experiences, feelings, and behaviors toward themselves, their organizations, and the community at large. The empirical findings lead to theorizing that the perceived organizational responses are consonant with a range of capitalistic tendencies. Perceived organizational neglect is most consonant with neoclassical capitalism, understood as having a primary focus on self-interest and profit maximization. Perceived ambiguity tends to fit with a supplemental capitalism that adds social responsibility to the baseline of classical capitalism. Organizational compassionate care fits with a transformed or conscious capitalism that considers value creation in society to be an organization’s primary purpose. (shrink)

Macht man sich die anthropologischen Transformationen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts bewusst, dann sind es gewiss nicht zuletzt die Neuformulierungen des Menschen im Zuge des Digitalen. Mehr noch: Das Digitale wird in den folgenden Überlegungen nicht nur ein neuer Appendix des Menschlichen sein, sondern als Einwohner der sog. ‚Digitalgesellschaft‘ erscheint der Mensch selbst als ‚homo digitalis‘. Aus einer kulturwissenschaftlich getränkten pädagogischen Perspektive stelle ich mir die Frage nach den Ver-Änderungen bzw. Um-Formungen menschlicher Beziehungen im Zuge des rasant fortschreitenden digitalen Wandels. (...) Dabei werde ich weder einer nur kulturpessimistischen noch einer nur technikoptimistischen Sichtweise das Wort reden. Beide scheinen zwar mögliche und plausible Wahrnehmungsmuster im Kontext des Anthropologischen zu sein, beide bergen jedoch die Gefahren der Absolutsetzung und der Vereinseitigung. Stattdessen soll der Versuch eine deskriptive Skizzierung darstellen, an deren Ende sich möglicherweise unerwartete anthropologische Betrachtungen des Emotionalen ergeben werden. (shrink)

A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist (...) proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research. (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)

In contemporary discourses, it has become common sense to acknowledge that humans and some species of animals, from their very inception, are embedded in social and intersubjective contexts. As social beings, we live, interact, communicate, and cooperate with others for a range of different reasons: sometimes we do so for strategic and instrumental reasons, while at other times it is purely for its own sake. Moreover, in one way or another, we encounter others not only as rational but also as (...) sentient beings; our interactions with others are shaped by reason, though not exclusively so. They are also affected by our emotions, feelings, moods, and environments. In this way, we seek understanding both for and by others. We are able to recognize, interpret, and categorize others’ expression and behavior; in turn, we express our emotions, desires, and motivations to act towards others and hope that others will react adequately and appropriately. Empathy is usually understood as the capacity to apprehend others’ mental states—especially emotions. In recent decades, it has become one of the most widely discussed concepts, especially in the philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. Although there is a vast array of publications on the topic of empathy, a number of controversies have persisted, particularly in relation to how the process, outcome, and value of empathy should be understood. One recent debate concerns the question of whether we directly perceive others’ mental states or whether we rather imagine their perspective. Another central discussion is ongoing regarding empathy in respect of narratives and fictional characters. The aim of this Special Issue is to interrelate these two branches—fiction and imagination—and to examine the role of imagination in the empathic process, especially in relation to the thesis of direct perception of others’ mental states. Despite the wealth of recent research into empathy that has emerged from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, there is still no consensus about the nature and role of imagination and whether empathizing with fictions should be categorically or just gradually distinguished from empathizing with real persons. (shrink)

Wesley Wildman is one of the foremost philosophers of religion calling for the evolution of the discipline from its present narrow focus on theistic beliefs to become a discipline concerned with religions in all their diversity. Towards this end, he proposes that philosophers of religion understand what they do as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry. This article assesses his proposal.

Hursthouse :57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse :25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Döring’s :214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that (...) it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict. (shrink)

The central contention of this article is that the classificatory scheme of contemporary affective science, with its traditional categories of emotion, anger, fear, and so on, is no longer suitable to the needs of affective science. Unlike psychological constructionists, who have urged the transition from a discrete to a dimensional approach in the study of affective phenomena, I argue that we can stick to a discrete approach as long as we accept that traditional emotion categories will have to be transformed (...) in order to do any scientific work. I conclude by articulating some general rules for turning traditional emotion categories into suitable scientific tools. (shrink)

The philosophy of emotions has long been dominated by the view called «cognitivism». According to it, emotions are characterized not by mere physical impulses but by a cognitive evaluation of their object. However, despite their success, cognitive theories have to deal with various objections and are divided on how to answer to them. In this essay I want to defend the form of cognitivism claimed by Martha Nussbaum from the most common criticisms. After a brief summary of her account, I (...) confront some of the objections that have been raised against it. In Section 2 I deal with the classic problem of emotions in infants and animals, which lack linguistic abilities. Later, I confront the potential problem represented by cases in which one’s emotion and reasoned judgment seem to differ: in paragraph 3 I consider irrational phobias and fears, to show how they can be accounted for in terms of judgments and thoughts, and not only of perceptions; in paragraph 4 I deal with the objection that «judgementalist» theories violate the «principle of charity», for they ascribe an excessive irrationality to people. I argue that experimental evidence suggest that it is not implausible to assume that people have contradictory beliefs under conditions of uncertainty, and that perceptual theories of emotion fail to account for some fundamental aspects of these phenomena. Finally, in paragraph 5, I deal with the objection according to which a cognitive-evaluative theory cannot explain the sense of passivity that we commonly experience in emotions. (shrink)

The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has no clear meaning. There are numerous ways in which one might go astray, morally speaking, and each of these ways, in turn, fragments on further analysis. The concept of moral enhancement is as broad, messy, and mottled as the reasons why people behave badly. This mottled character of moral failure calls into question the feasibility of programmes of moral enhancement.

Carrillo Rowe provides an analysis of Monster's Ball as a cultural narrative of white masculinity's redemption from the atrocities of racism through an interracial love story that erases white masculinity's national history and implication in a racist past while it displaces the black female body from that history and identification with the struggle for reparation. The nexus of sex, race, and desire is used to produce a new whiteness consistent with the emerging national multicultural logics of color blindness by undermining (...) the narrative, memory, identity, and racing of bodies grounding the logic of reparation. (shrink)

The paper starts with reflections on Plato’s critique of the poets and the preference many express for Aristotle’s view of poetry. The second part of the paper takes a case study of analytic treatments of ancient philosophy, including the ancient philosopher poets, to examine the poetics of analytic philosophy, diagnosing a preference in Analytic philosophy for a clean non-poetic style of presentation, and then develops this in considering how well historians of philosophy in the Analytic tradition can accommodate the contributions (...) of philosophers who wrote in verse. The final part of the paper reviews the current enthusiasm for decoding Empedocles’ vague and poetic descriptions of the cosmic cycle into a precise scientific periodicity on the basis of the recently discovered Byzantine scholia on Aristotle. I argue that this enthusiasm speaks to a desire for definite and clear numerical values in place of poetic motifs of give and take, and that this mathematical and scientific poetic is comparable to the preferred poetic of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider the question of whether there exists an essential relation between emotions and wellbeing. We distinguish three ways in which emotions and wellbeing might be essentially related: constitutive, causal, and epistemic. We argue that, while there is some room for holding that emotions are constitutive ingredients of an individual’s wellbeing, all the attempts to characterise the causal and epistemic relations in an essentialist way are vulnerable to some important objections. We conclude that the causal and epistemic (...) relation between emotions and wellbeing is much less strong than is commonly thought. (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)

One of the key ethical and political issues in South Africa today is the decolonization of education. In 2015, a movement called Rhodes Must Fall was born in South Africa precisely with the purpose of engaging in activism to promote this decolonization. The Rhodes Must Fall movement to further this purpose engaged in some violent protests. The objective of this article is to assess whether South Africans are justified to believe that these protests can or cannot be morally justified from (...) the perspective of Ubuntu. To explore this question, I assess the morality of the actions using a consequentialist interpretation of African values. I contend that the symbolic violent protests of the Rhodes Must Fall movement were morally justified, whereas its indiscriminate violent protests were not. Hence, I do not myself mean to defend the position they are morally justified; instead, I wish to show that it is a moral implication of African values. (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)

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)

The evidential value of moral intuitions has been challenged by psychological work showing that the intuitions of ordinary people are affected by distorting factors. One reply to this challenge, the expertise defence, claims that training in philosophical thinking confers enhanced reliability on the intuitions of professional philosophers. This defence is often expressed through analogy: since we do not allow doubts about folk judgments in domains like mathematics or physics to undermine the plausibility of judgments by experts in these domains, we (...) also should not do so in philosophy. In this paper I clarify the logic of the analogy strategy, and defend it against recent challenges by Jesper Ryberg. The discussion exposes an interesting divide: while Ryberg’s challenges may weaken analogies between morality and domains like mathematics, they do not affect analogies to other domains, such as physics. I conclude that the expertise defence can be supported by analogical means, though care is required in selecting an appropriate analog. I discuss implications of this conclusion for the expertise defence debate and for study of the moral domain itself. (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)

Memories and emotions are both vital parts of everyday life, yet crucial interactions between the two have scarcely been explored. While there has been considerable research into how emotions can influence how well things are remembered, whether or not emotions themselves can be remembered is still a largely uncharted area of research. Philosophers and scientists alike have diverging views on this question, which seems to stem, at least in part, from different accounts of the nature of emotions. Here, I try (...) to answer this question in a way that takes an intuitive notion of emotion and includes both scientific as well as philosophical aspects of both emotions and memory. To do this, I first distinguish between two different ways emotions can be expressed: as certain physiological responses, or as certain conscious experiences. Next, I show how each of these expressions of emotions can be remembered. Finally, I bring these two ways of expressing emotions, and the ways of remembering each of them, together into an explanation that also includes aspects often ascribed to emotions such as cognition. This interdisciplinary endeavor aims to serve as a starting point on what it could mean to remember emotions, and in doing so tries to build a bridge between scientific research and philosophical investigation of the memory of emotions. (shrink)

En este ensayo se examina el tratado De subventione pauperum del humanistaJuan Luis Vives como una narrativa humanitaria de la modernidad temprana. De forma contradictoria, el plan para auxiliar a la población indigente presenta una visión despectiva de la pobreza que refleja las contradicciones del proyecto civilizador del humanismo cristiano renacentista y revela las biopolíticas del naciente Estado moderno y la razón imperial humanitaria. En el primer apartado se analiza el tratado como una narrativa humanitaria, prestando atención al papel de (...) las emociones en la interpelación al lector, especialmente la ambivalente presencia del discurso del asco -un aspecto poco explorado en el humanitarismo-. En el segundo apartado se examina el plan para regular la caridad pública y controlar a la población indigente en relación con las nuevas formas de gobernabilidad de la modernidad temprana, en diálogo con los aportes de Foucault en cuanto al surgimiento de lo que en la época se entendía por “la policía”, una serie de tecnologías del poder para regular la vida y el trabajo de la población en conjunto. El estudio se centra en las contradicciones internas de las narrativas humanitarias a partir del análisis del texto de Vives. (shrink)

In this article, I will look into the Zhuangist views on emotions. I will argue that the psychological state of the Zhuangist wise person is characterized by emotional equanimity accompanied by a general sense of calmness, ease, and joy. This psychological state is constitutive of and instrumental to leading a good life, one in which one wanders the world and explores the plurality of daos. To do so, I will first provide an overview of the scholarly debate on this issue (...) and unveil the disconcerting disagreement that underlies it. Then, I will survey some passages in the Zhuangzi and sketch my interpretation of the Zhuangist views on emotions. Next, I will examine the theoretical foundation for this interpretation by referencing the Zhuangist pluralism and their conception of the good life. Finally, I will look into some potential objections to the Zhuangist views on emotions and attempt responses to them. (shrink)

William James's theory of emotion is often criticized for placing too much emphasis on bodily feelings and neglecting the cognitive aspects of emotion. This paper suggests that such criticisms are misplaced. Interpreting James's account of emotion in the light of his later philosophical writings, I argue that James does not emphasize bodily feelings at the expense of cognition. Rather, his view is that bodily feelings are part of the structure of intentionality. In reconceptualizing the relationship between cognition and affect, James (...) rejects a number of commonplace assumptions concerning the nature of our cognitive relationship with the world, assumptions that many of his critics take for granted. (shrink)

Care theorists have yet to outline an account of how the concept of toleration should function in their normative framework. This lack of outline is a notable gap in the literature, particularly for demonstrating whether care ethics can appropriately address cases of moral disagreement within contemporary pluralistic societies; in other words, does care ethics have the conceptual resources to recognize the disapproval that is inherent in an act of toleration while simultaneously upholding the positive values of care without contradiction? By (...) engaging care ethics with John Locke’s influential corpus on toleration, I answer the above question by building the bases for a novel theory of toleration as care. Specifically, I argue that care theorists can home in on an oft-overlooked aspect of Locke’s later thought: that the possibility of a tolerant society is dependent on a societal ethos of trustworthiness and civility, to the point where Locke sets out positive ethical demands on both persons and the state to ensure this ethos can grow and be sustained. By leveraging and augmenting Locke’s thought within the care ethical framework, I clarify how care ethics can provide meaningful solutions to moral disagreement within contemporary pluralistic societies in ways preferable to the capability of a liberal state. (shrink)

Some ideas are at the heart of the world’s great ethical and religious traditions, yet they play little or no role within certain debates in modern philosophical ethics. One such idea is that most of us have unreliable moral intuitions and we must transform ourselves into better people before we can reliably judge how to behave. This paper explores that idea by focusing on a transformative experience that I will call the moral experience. In the paper’s initial sections, I describe (...) the moral experience and explain why it constitutes a genuine transformation in ethical outlook. I then argue that the moral experience could thereby affect our views on certain contemporary ethical debates, illustrating those points with a discussion of the debate about global poverty. (shrink)

Can we feel emotions about abstract objects, assuming that abstract objects exist? I argue that at least some emotions can have abstract objects as their intentional objects and discuss why this conclusion is not just trivially true. Through critical engagement with the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, I devote special attention to awe, an emotion that is particularly well suited to show that some emotions can be about either concrete or abstract objects. In responding to a possible objection, (...) according to which we can only feel emotions about things that we take to matter to our flourishing, and thus cannot feel emotions about causally inefficacious abstract objects, I explore how abstract objects can be relevant to human flourishing and discuss someemotions other than awe that can be about abstract objects. I finish by explaining somereasons why my conclusion matters, including the fact that it presents a challenge to perceptual theories of emotion and causal theories of intentionality. (shrink)