Climate change evokes different emotions in people. Recently, climate emotions have become a matter of normative scrutiny in the public debate. This phenomenon, which we refer to as the normativization of climate emotions, manifests at two levels. At the individual level, people are faced with affective dilemmas, situations where they are genuinely uncertain about what is the right way to feel in the face of climate change. At the collective level, the public debate reflects disagreement about which emotions are appropriate (...) to feel in the climate context. The aim of this paper is to examine the normative reasons in favour of different climate emotions by combining normative criteria from philosophy and psychology, such as rationality-based and consequentialist ones. We conclude that these criteria provide partial reasons for or against different climate emotions and that the suitability of each criterion will depend on various considerations, including the specific object that the emotion is directed to. We suggest that emotional disagreement in climate contexts may generate distrust, potentially hindering cooperation for climate action. We propose that we can ease challenges like this if we come to terms with the complex nature of climate emotions and their normative justification. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate how distressing background feelings can be subject to social injustice. We define background feelings as enduring feeling states that condition our perceptions of everyday situations, interpersonal dynamics, and the broader social milieu. While phenomenological psychopathology has long addressed such affective phenomena, including anxiety, guilt, and feelings of not belonging, the intersection with social injustice remains largely unexplored within the framework. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of existential injustice into phenomenological psychopathology. Existential injustice (...) pertains to the unjust formation, perpetuation, and treatment of background feelings. We contend that distressing alterations in these feeling states can stem from, or be perpetuated by, unjust social structures and practices. Existential injustice manifests as a felt inadequacy of one’s background feelings, reflecting broader societal disparities and inequities. Drawing on themes from social psychiatry, we illustrate the utility and explanatory power of the concept through two concrete examples. By shedding light on the ways in which societal dynamics shape distressing affective experiences our analysis underscores the importance of integrating aspects of social injustice into the study of affective phenomena in phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)