Despite contemporary moral philosophers' renewed attention to the moral significance of emotions, the attitudinal repertoire with which they equip the mature moral agent remains stunted. One attitude moral philosophers neglect (if not disown) is contempt. While acknowledging the nastiness of contempt, I here correct the neglect by providing an account of the moral psychology of contempt. In the process, I defend the moral propriety of certain tokens of properly person-focused contempt against some prominent objections -- among them, objections stemming from (...) Kantian worries that contempt is incompatible with the respect we owe to persons as such. (shrink)

The doyen of living English philosophers, by these reflections, took hold of and changed the outlook of a good many other philosophers, if not quite enough. He did so, essentially, by assuming that talk of freedom and responsibility is talk not of facts or truths, in a certain sense, but of our attitudes. His more explicit concern was to look again at the question of whether determinism and freedom are consistent with one another -- by shifting attention to certain personal (...) rather than moral attitudes, first of all gratitude and resentment. In the end, he arrived at a kind of Compatibilist or, as he says, Optimist conclusion. That is no doubt a recommendation but not the largest recommendation of this splendidly rich piece of philosophy. (shrink)

Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to philosophical debates on the conditions of its possibility. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these issues. On the practical side, discussions of cooperation address what makes society possible—of how it is that life is not (...) a Hobbesian war of all against all. On the epistemic side, discussions of cooperation address what makes the pooling of knowledge possible—and so the edifice that is science. But trust is not merely central to our lives instrumentally; trusting relations are themselves of great value and, in trusting others, we realize distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust. They develop and extend existing philosophical discussion of trust and will provide a reference point for future work on trust. (shrink)

Expressions of gratitude abound. Hardly a book is published that does not include in its preface or acknowledgments some variation on, “I am grateful to…for…” Indeed, most achievements come to be only through the help of others. We value the benevolence of others, and when we—or our loved ones—are the recipients of benevolence, our emotional response is often one of gratitude. -/- But, are we bound to the requirement of ‘repaying’ our benefactors in some way? If we are, and there (...) are—as ordinary language suggests—debts of gratitude, what kind of debts are these? Does the appropriateness of my gratitude require that my benefactor in fact intended to benefit me (in just the way she did)? Is there a difference between feeling grateful and being grateful? Is a precondition of my being grateful to another that I respect her? Do we owe a special sort of gratitude to those who have shaped us into the persons we are? What are the psychological and normative relations between gratitude the emotion, and gratitude the virtue? -/- These are among the questions carefully addressed in The Moral Psychology of Gratitude. This volume provides readers with the state-of-the-art in research on gratitude. It does so in the form of sixteen never-before published articles on the emotion by leading voices in philosophy and the sciences of the mind. (shrink)

Life, on a day to day basis, is a sequence of emotional states: hope, disappointment, irritation, anger, affection, envy, pride, embarrassment, joy, sadness and many more. We know intuitively that these states express deep things about our character and our view of the world. But what are emotions and why are they so important to us? In one of the most extensive investigations of the emotions ever published, Robert Roberts develops a novel conception of what emotions are and then applies (...) it to a large range of types of emotion and related phenomena. In so doing he lays the foundations for a deeper understanding of our evaluative judgments, our actions, our personal relationships and our fundamental well-being. Aimed principally at philosophers and psychologists, this book will certainly be accessible to readers in other disciplines such as religion and anthropology. (shrink)

Bell argues that contempt has an important role to play in confronting and addressing immorality, and in that respect is essential to moral relations. Her book is not just a defense of contempt, but an account of the virtues and vices of it, providing a model for thinking more generally about the negative emotions as a response to vice.

This volume is the first to bring together original work by leading philosophers and psychologists in an examination of the moral psychology of contempt.

This book brings together new essays that explore the connection between love and reasons. The observation that considerations of love carry significant weight in the deliberative process opens up new perspectives in the classic discussion about practical reasons, and gives rise to many interesting questions about the nature of love’s reasons, about their source and legitimacy, about their relation to moral and epistemic reasons, and about the extent to which love is sensitive to reasons. The contributors to this volume orient (...) questions related to love within the broader context of the contemporary discussion on practical reasons, and move forward the conversation about the normative dimensions of love. _Love, Reason and Morality _will be of interest to philosophers working on issues of normativity, meta-ethics and moral psychology, and especially those interested in the source of practical reasons and the role of attachments in practical deliberation. (shrink)