25 found
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  1. The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties and Virtues of Anxiety.Charlie Kurth - 2018 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    This book is about the various forms of anxiety—some familiar, some not—that color and shape our lives. The objective is two-fold. The first aim is to deepen our understanding of what anxiety is. The second aim is to re-orient thinking about the role of emotions in moral psychology and ethical theory. Here I argue that the current focus on backward looking moral emotions like guilt and shame leaves us with a picture that is badly incomplete. To get a better understanding (...)
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  2. Moral Anxiety and Moral Agency.Charlie Kurth - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 5:171-195.
    A familiar feature of moral life is the distinctive anxiety that we feel in the face of a moral dilemma or moral conflict. Situations like these require us to take stands on controversial issues. But because we are unsure that we will make the correct decision, anxiety ensues. Despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, surprisingly little work has been done either to characterize this “ moral anxiety” or to explain the role that it plays in our moral lives. This paper (...)
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  3. Anxiety, normative uncertainty, and social regulation.Charlie Kurth - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (1):1-21.
    Emotion plays an important role in securing social stability. But while emotions like fear, anger, and guilt have received much attention in this context, little work has been done to understand the role that anxiety plays. That’s unfortunate. I argue that a particular form of anxiety—what I call ‘practical anxiety’—plays an important, but as of yet unrecognized, role in norm-based social regulation. More specifically, it provides a valuable form of metacognition, one that contributes to social stability by helping individuals negotiate (...)
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  4. Emotion.Charlie Kurth - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    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 (...)
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  5. Cultivating Disgust: Prospects and Moral Implications.Charlie Kurth - 2021 - Emotion Review 13 (2):101-112.
    Is disgust morally valuable? The answer to that question turns, in large part, on what we can do to shape disgust for the better. But this cultivation question has received surprisingly little attention in philosophical debates. To address this deficiency, this article examines empirical work on disgust and emotion regulation. This research reveals that while we can exert some control over how we experience disgust, there’s little we can do to substantively change it at a more fundamental level. These empirical (...)
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  6. Emotion, deliberation, and the skill model of virtuous agency.Charlie Kurth - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (3):299-317.
    A recent skeptical challenge denies deliberation is essential to virtuous agency: what looks like genuine deliberation is just a post hoc rationalization of a decision already made by automatic mechanisms (Haidt 2001; Doris 2015). Annas’s account of virtue seems well-equipped to respond: by modeling virtue on skills, she can agree that virtuous actions are deliberation-free while insisting that their development requires significant thought. But Annas’s proposal is flawed: it over-intellectualizes deliberation’s developmental role and under-intellectualizes its significance once virtue is acquired. (...)
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  7. Inappropriate emotions, marginalization, and feeling better.Charlie Kurth - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-22.
    A growing body of work argues that we should reform problematic emotions like anxiety, anger, and shame: doing this will allow us to better harness the contributions that these emotions can make to our agency and wellbeing. But feminist philosophers worry that prescriptions to correct these inappropriate emotions will only further marginalize women, minorities, and other members of subordinated groups. While much in these debates turns on empirical questions about how we can change problematic emotion norms for the better, to (...)
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  8. Are Emotions Psychological Constructions?Charlie Kurth - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):1227-1238.
    According to psychological constructivism, emotions result from projecting folk emotion concepts onto felt affective episodes (e.g., Barrett 2017, LeDoux 2015). Moreover, while constructivists acknowledge there’s a biological dimension to emotion, they deny that emotions are (or involve) affect programs. So they also deny that emotions are natural kinds. However, the essential role constructivism gives to felt experience and folk concepts leads to an account that’s extensionally inadequate and functionally inaccurate. Moreover, biologically-oriented proposals that reject these commitments are not similarly encumbered. (...)
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  9. Anxiety: A Case Study on the Value of Negative Emotions.Charlie Kurth - 2011 - In Christine Tappolet, Fabrice Teroni & Anita Konzelman Ziv (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Emotions: Shadows of the Soul. New York: Routledge. pp. 95-104.
    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 (...)
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  10. Eco-anxiety: What it is and why it matters.Charlie Kurth & Panu Pihkala - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13:981814.
    Researchers are increasingly trying to understand both the emotions that we experience in response to ecological crises like climate change and the ways in which these emotions might be valuable for our (psychical, psychological, and moral) wellbeing. However, much of the existing work on these issues has been hampered by conceptual and methodological difficulties. As a first step toward addressing these challenges, this review focuses on eco-anxiety. Analyzing a broad range of studies through the use of methods from philosophy, emotion (...)
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  11. What Sentimentalists Should Say about Emotions.Charlie Kurth - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42.
    Recent work by emotion researchers indicates that emotions have a multi-level structure. Sophisticated sentimentalists should take note of this work—for it better enables them to defend a substantive role for emotion in moral cognition. Contra the rationalist criticisms of May 2018, emotions are not only able to carry morally relevant information but can also substantially influence moral judgment and reasoning.
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  12. Centering an Environmental Ethic in Climate Crisis.Charlie Kurth & Panu Pihkala - 2024 - In Sheron Fraser-Burgess, Jessica Heybach & Dini Metro-Roland (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Ethics and Education. Cambridge University Press. pp. 734-757.
    This paper sketches an emotion-aware model of environmental ethics education. The proposal draws on insights from feminists scholars, moral sentimentalism, as well as work in the pedagogy of discomfort traditions. It identifies and defends four core elements of climate change ethic, noting how they shed new light on the aims and challenges of environmental ethics education.
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  13. Should Doctors Care about their Patients?Charlie Kurth - 2022 - Philosophy of Medicine 3 (1):1-2.
    Should doctors care about their patients? Understanding this as a question about the proper role of emotion in medical practice—that is, should doctors feel empathy and sympathy for their patients?—a clear answer is hard to find.
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  14. What do our critical practices say about the nature of morality?Charlie Kurth - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):45-64.
    A prominent argument for moral realism notes that we are inclined to accept realism in science because scientific inquiry supports a robust set of critical practices—error, improvement, explanation, and the like. It then argues that because morality displays a comparable set of critical practices, a claim to moral realism is just as warranted as a claim to scientific realism. But the argument is only as strong as its central analogy—and here there is trouble. If the analogy between the critical practices (...)
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  15. Are we virtuously caring or just anxious?Charlie Kurth - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e69.
    According to Grossmann, the high levels of cooperation seen in humans are the result of a “virtuous caring cycle” on which the increased care that more fearful children receive brings increased cooperative tendencies in those children. But this proposal overlooks an equally well supported alternative on which children's anxiety – not a virtuous caring cycle – explains the cooperative tendencies of humans.
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  16. An Evolutionary Account of Guilt?Charlie Kurth - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    . Grant Ramsey and Michael Deem argue that appreciating the role that empathy plays in posttransgression guilt leads to a more promising account of the emotion’s evolutionary origins. But because their proposal fails to adequately distinguish guilt from shame, we cannot say which of the two emotions we are actually getting an evolutionary account of. Moreover, a closer look at the details suggests both that empathy may be more relevant for our understanding of shame’s evolutionary origins than guilt’s, and that (...)
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  17. Compassion without Cognitivism.Charlie Kurth - 2019 - Humana Mente 12 (35).
    Compassion is generally thought to be a morally valuable emotion both because it is concerned with the suffering of others and because it prompts us to take action to their behalf. But skeptics are unconvinced. Not only does a viable account of compassion’s evaluative content—its characteristic concern—appear elusive, but the emotional response itself seems deeply parochial: a concern we tend to feel toward the suffering of friends and loved ones, rather than for individuals who are outside of our circle of (...)
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    Fear, Pathology, and Feelings of Agency: Lessons from Ecological Fear.Charlie Kurth & Panu Pihkala - forthcoming - In Ami Harbin (ed.), The Philosophy of Fear: Historical and Interdisciplinary Approaches. Bloomsbury.
    This essay examines the connection between fear and the psychopathologies it can bring, looking in particular at the fears that individuals experience in the face of the climate crisis and environmental degradation more generally. We know that fear can be a source of good and ill. Fears of climate-change-driven heat waves, for instance, can spur both activism and denial. But as of yet, we don’t have a very good understanding of why eco-fears, as we will call them, shape our thoughts (...)
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  19. Moral Anxiety: A Kantian Perspective.Charlie Kurth - 2024 - In David Rondel (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Anxiety. New York: Lexington Books.
    Moral anxiety is the unease that we experience in the face of a novel or difficult moral decision, an unease that helps us recognize the significance of the issue we face and engages epistemic behaviors aimed at helping us work through it (reflection, information gathering, etc.). But recent discussions in philosophy raise questions about the value of moral anxiety (do we really do better when we’re anxious?); and work in cognitive science challenges its psychological plausibility (is there really such an (...)
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  20. Logic for morals, morals from logic.Charlie Kurth - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 155 (2):161-180.
    The need to distinguish between logical and extra-logical varieties of inference, entailment, validity, and consistency has played a prominent role in meta-ethical debates between expressivists and descriptivists. But, to date, the importance that matters of logical form play in these distinctions has been overlooked. That’s a mistake given the foundational place that logical form plays in our understanding of the difference between the logical and the extra-logical. This essay argues that descriptivists are better positioned than their expressivist rivals to provide (...)
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  21. Apprehending anxiety: an introduction to the Topical Collection on worry and wellbeing.Juliette Vazard & Charlie Kurth - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-17.
    The aim of this collection is to show how work in the analytic philosophical tradition can shed light on the nature, value, and experience of anxiety. Contrary to widespread assumptions, anxiety is not best understood as a mental disorder, or an intrinsically debilitating state, but rather as an often valuable affective state which heightens our sensitivity to potential threats and challenges. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, learning about anxiety can be relevant for debates, not only in the philosophy (...)
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  22. Shame, selves, and morality.Charlie Kurth - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (1):122-140.
    This essay critically examines the account of shame and its moral value that Krista Thomason develops in her book, Naked.
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  23. Are Emotions Perceptions of Value (and Why this Matters)?Charlie Kurth, Enter Author Name Without Selecting A. Profile: Haley Crosby & Enter Author Name Without Selecting A. Profile: Jack Basse - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    In Emotions, Values & Agency, Christine Tappolet develops a sophisticated, perceptual theory of emotions and their role in wide range of issues in value theory and epistemology. In this paper, we raise three worries about Tappolet's proposal.
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  24. Being realistic about motivation.Charlie Kurth - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2751-2765.
    T.M. Scanlon’s ‘reasons fundamentalism’ is thought to face difficulties answering the normative question—that is, explaining why it’s irrational to not do what you judge yourself to have most reason to do (e.g., Dreier 2014a). I argue that this difficulty results from Scanlon’s failure to provide a theory of mind that can give substance to his account of normative judgment and its tie to motivation. A central aim of this paper is to address this deficiency. To do this, I draw on (...)
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  25. Expressivism and Innocent Mistakes.Charlie Kurth - 2014 - Ethics 124 (2):370-383.
    Allan Gibbard maintains that his plan-based expressivism allows for a particular type of innocent mistake: I can agree that your plan to X makes sense (say, because it was based on advice from someone you trust), while nonetheless insisting that it is incorrect (e.g., because you chose a bad advisor). However, Steve Daskal has recently argued that there are significant limitations in Gibbard’s account of how we can be mistaken about the normative judgments we make. This essay refines Gibbard’s account (...)
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