It is widely acknowledged that susceptibility to suitable emotional responses is part of what it is to value something. Indeed, the value of at least some things calls for such emotional responses – if we lack them, we don’t respond appropriately to their value. In this paper, I argue that susceptibility to anger is an essential component of valuing other people, ourselves, and our relationships. The main reason is that various modes of valuing, such as respect, self-respect, and love, ground (...) normative expectations towards others and ourselves. And holding someone accountable for violating legitimate normative expectations involves emotions from the anger family, such as resentment and indignation. I hold that such forms of anger, which aim at getting the target to conform to expectations or lower their unduly elevated status, are neither inherently problematic or dispensable parts of the package of attitudes involved in valuing. Finally, thinking about anger’s role in valuing also helps see when it is out of place or immature – roughly, it is often excessive, because we easily exaggerate the magnitude of the value involved, the harm or threat to it, or the degree of the target’s moral responsibility. (shrink)

This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles (...) about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved? (shrink)

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev carries out what he calls "a careful search for general patterns in the primeval jungle of emotions.".

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel are a great collection of sermons by Joseph Butler, the famous English theologian and philosopher.

It is argued that at the center of Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness is the notion that experience is shaped by identification and sacrifice. Experience is the process of self - constitution and self -transformation of a self -conscious being that risks its own being. The transition from desire to recognition is explicated as a transition from the tripartite structure of want and fulfillment of biological desire to a socially structured recognition that is achieved only in reciprocal recognition, or reflexive recognition. (...) At the center of the Hegelian notion of selfhood is thus the realization that selves are the locus of accountatibility. To be a self, it is concluded, is to be the subject of normative statuses that refer to commitments; it means to be able to take a normative stand on things, to commit oneself and undertake responsibilities. Key Words: commitments • desire • experience • G.W.F.Hegel • identity • recognition • risk • sacrifice • self -consciousness • self - constitution. (shrink)