Liberal-contractarian philosophies of justice see the unjust systems of slavery and autocracy in the past as being based on coercion—whereas the social order in modern democratic market societies is based on consent and contract. However, the ‘best’ case for slavery and autocracy in the past were consent-based contractarian arguments. Hence, our first task is to recover those ‘forgotten’ apologia for slavery and autocracy. To counter those consent-based arguments, the historical anti-slavery and democratic movements developed a theory of inalienable rights. Our (...) second task is to recover that theory and to consider several other applications of the theory. Finally, the liberal theories of justice expounded by John Rawls and by Robert Nozick are briefly examined from this perspective. (shrink)

The word ‘cosmopolitan’, which derives from the Greek word kosmopolitês (‘citizen of the world’), has been used to describe a wide variety of important views in moral and socio political philosophy. The nebulous core shared by all cosmopolitan views is the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated. Different versions of cosmopolitanism envision this community in different ways, some focusing on (...) political institutions, others on moral norms or relationships, and still others focusing on shared markets or forms of cultural expression. The philosophical interest in cosmopolitanism lies in its challenge to commonly recognized attachments to fellow citizens, the local state, parochially shared cultures, and the like. (shrink)

Ambition is a curiously neglected topic in ethics. It isn’t that philosophers have not discussed it. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Santayana and a number of others have discussed ambition. But it has seldom received more than a few paragraphs worth of analysis, in spite of the fact that ambition plays a central role in Western politics (one cannot be elected without it), and in spite of the fact that Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke and Rousseau each considered (...) it to be among the greatest threats to political security. The aim of this paper is to provide a long overdue analysis of ambition. The first part of the paper explores what ambition is. The second seeks to answer the question, “Is ambition a virtue or a vice?”. (shrink)

Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...) for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people? -/- In the course of exploring these questions, the book also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research. (shrink)

Negative emotions are often thought to lack value—they’re pernicious, inherently unpleasant, and inconsistent with human virtue. Taking anxiety as a case study, I argue that this assessment is mistaken. I begin with an account of what anxiety is: a response to uncertainty about a possible threat or challenge that brings thoughts about one’s predicament (‘I’m worried,’ ‘What should I do?’), negatively valenced feelings of concern, and a motivational tendency toward caution regarding the potential threat one faces. Given this account of (...) what anxiety is, I show it can be instrumentally valuable: in sensitizing us to uncertainty and prompting caution and risk assessment efforts, it’s an emotion that can help us better recognize and respond to uncertain threats and challenges. But anxiety can also be aretaically valuable—that is, it’s an emotion that can contribute positively to one’s character. For instance, your anxiety about how best to care for your aging mother not only prompts helpful brainstorming about what you should do, but also reflect well on you—your unease demonstrates both an admirable sensitivity and emotional attunement to what’s at stake. (shrink)

Hume’s “impressions of reflection” is a category made up of all our non-sensory feelings, including “the passions and other emotions.” These two terms for affective mental states, ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’, are both used frequently in Hume’s work, and often treated by scholars as synonymous. I argue that Hume’s use of both ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ in his discussions of affectivity reflects a conceptual distinction implicit in his work between what I label ‘attending emotions’ and ‘fully established passions.’ The former are the (...) transient, changeable, valenced feelings that flow between perceptions and constitute their felt nature and impulse. The latter are the particular passions fully realized, with characteristic valence, and analyzed by Hume in terms of their particular belief structures and relations between ideas and impressions understood to be constituent of particular passions. The term ‘emotion’ for Hume generally denotes either the attending feeling, sometimes distinct from the passion (particularly as ‘passion’ is being used to include the associated beliefs, causes and objects), or as a synonym for a particular passion, typically when Hume is primarily referring to the felt nature of the passion. Generally speaking, ‘passion’ is a more cognitive category of affective mental state, while ‘emotion’ is more sensationalist. I will further argue that when we grant Hume the emotion/passion distinction, he can accommodate both highly sensationalist and highly cognitivist understandings of affective mental states. I finish with the application of my distinction to two key topics in Hume studies: his sympathy mechanism, and his theory of belief and motivation. (shrink)

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

In his later writings, Kant distinguishes between autonomy and self-mastery or self-command. My article explains the relation between these two ideas, both of which are integral to his understanding of moral agency and the pursuit of virtue. I point to problems with other interpretations of this relation and offer an alternative. On my view, self-command is a condition or state achieved by those agents who become proficient at solving problems presented by the passions. Such agents are able to stick to (...) the results of self-legislation over time and thereby achieve a form of temporally extended freedom. (shrink)

The emotion of anger has a long love–hate relationship with morality. On the one hand, anger often motivates us to sanction wrongdoing and uphold demanding moral standards. On the other hand, it can prompt aggression behaviors that are at odds with morality and even lead to moral disasters. This article describes this complex relationship. I argue that the intensity of anger elicited by moral transgressions is highly sensitive to key variables, including the identity of the person wronged, the nature of (...) the wrongdoing, and expectations about what should and will be done. Depending on the context, we sometimes experience more anger than would be commendable and sometimes less. These characteristics of anger, in turn, explain the ubiquity of norms and discourses aimed at governing the expression of this emotion. (shrink)

Claims that emotions are or can be rational, and crucially enabling of rationality, are now fairly common, also outside of philosophy, but with considerable diversity both in their assumptions about emotions and their conceptions of rationality. Three main trends are worth picking out, both in themselves and for the potential tensions between them: accounts that defend a case for the rationality of emotions A) by assimilating emotions closely to beliefs or judgements; B) in terms of the very features that traditional (...) views of emotions as irrational/a-rational emphasized; C) by arguing that emotions exhibit a more sui generis kind of rationality, often one based on a narrative or dramaturgic “inner logic”. (shrink)

The article asks whether political anger has a legitimate place in a democracy, as this is a political system designed to resolve conflicts by peaceful negotiation. It distinguishes personal from social anger and political anger, to focus explicitly on the latter. It argues that both the feeling and expression of political anger are subject to normative constraints, often specific to social status and gender. The article examines arguments, including those of Seneca, in favour of an anger-free society. It concludes, however, (...) that a democracy cannot dispense with political anger, which has a vital role to play in protecting things of value. This role demands a civic education such that when democratic values are under threat citizens will not feel apathetic or simply fearful, but angry and possessed of a repertoire of ways of expressing democratic anger. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative to classical hermeneutics, which focuses on discursive products and grasps meaning as the play of difference between linguistic signs. Pragmatist hermeneutics reconstructs meaning through an indefinite triangulation, which brings symbols, icons, and indices to bear on each other and considers a meaningful occasion as an embodied semiotic process. To illuminate the word-body-action nexus, the discussion identifies three basic types of signifying media: (1) the symbolic-discursive, (2) the somatic-affective, and (3) the behavioral-performative, each one marked by (...) a special relationship between signs and their objects. An argument is made that the tension between various type-signifying media is unavoidable, that the pragmatic-discursive misalignment is an ontological condition, and that bridging the gap between our discursive, affective, and behavioral outputs is at the heart of ethical life. (shrink)

Medical analogies are commonly invoked in both Indian Buddhist dharma and Hellenistic philosophy. In the Pāli Canon, nirvana (or, in Pāli,nibbāna) is depicted as a form of health, and the Buddha is portrayed as a doctor who helps us attain it. Much later in the tradition, Śāntideva described the Buddha’s teaching as ‘the sole medicine for the ailments of the world, the mine of all success and happiness.’ Cicero expressed the view of many Hellenistic philosophers when he said that philosophy (...) is ‘a medical science for the mind.’ He thought we should ‘hand ourselves over to philosophy, and let ourselves be healed.’ ‘For as long as these ills [of the mind] remain,’ he wrote, ‘we cannot attain to happiness.’ There are many different forms of medical analogy in these two traditions, but the most general form may be stated as follows: just as medicine cures bodily diseases and brings about physical health, so Buddhist dharma or Hellenistic philosophy cures mental diseases and brings about psychological health—where psychological health is understood as the highest form of happiness or well-being. Insofar as Buddhist dharma involves philosophy, as it does, both renditions of the analogy may be said to declare that philosophy cures mental diseases and brings about psychological health. This feature of the analogy—philosophy as analogous to medical treatment—has attracted considerable attention. (shrink)

Gratitude is usually conceived as a uniquely appropriate response to goodwill. A grateful person is bound to reward an act of goodwill in some appropriately proportionate way. I argue that goodwill, when interpreted as love, should require no reward. Consequently, the idea of gratitude as a proportionate response to love is not intelligible. However, goodwill can also be understood merely as a disinterested concern. Such forms of goodwill are involved in reciprocal relationships. But gratitude has no place in these relationships (...) either. (shrink)

Rather than reading Shaftesbury in anticipation of later forms of disinterestedness, this essay seeks to unpack the larger significance of his aesthetics by tracing his ideas back to their ancient sources. This essay looks to the venerable tradition of world contemplation. It argues that Shaftesbury advances a specifically Stoic model of world contemplation in The Moralists. The text’s principal concern is not with this or that beautiful object but with the whole of which it and the viewer are indivisibly a (...) part; its aim is not so much to account for how we perceive beauty as to foster a characteristically Stoic orientation toward the world, one in which we overcome our egocentric view of things and align ourselves with the natural workings of the world or universe in its entirety. Far from being ‘autonomous’ from the rest of life, the Stoic world contemplation Shaftesbury advocates entails a robust affirmation of existence, clear-eyed gratitude for being part of the universe, whatever the challenges and however fleeting our time in it may be. (shrink)