Norms for emotions: biological functions and representational contents
Introduction
Are there normative standards for emotions? If there are, where do they come from? These are difficult questions. One sub-question is whether there are any normative standards for emotions entailed solely by facts about the nature of emotions. This sub-question is the topic of the present essay. I argue that there are no normative standards that apply to emotions just in virtue of their nature. This means that either there are no normative standards for emotions or these normative standards have their origin in something other than facts about the nature of emotions.
To believe that there are normative standards that apply to emotions just in virtue of their nature is to believe that there are genuine oughts that apply to emotions just in virtue of their nature. An instance of this view is someone who believes that, simply in virtue of the nature of fear, one ought to be in a state of fear only when one is seriously threatened; or that, simply in virtue of the nature of guilt, one ought to feel guilty when one has done something for which punishment is deserved. In order to decide whether there are normative standards that apply to emotions solely in virtue of their nature, we need to have some theory about the nature of emotion. Section 2 contains the outlines of such a theory. According to this theory, emotions are representational brain states with various kinds of biological functions. From this theory, it follows that, if there really are normative standards that apply to emotions in virtue solely of their nature, these normative standards must be due to the representational properties of emotions or to their biological functions. Section 3 explains and rejects the view that there are normative standards that apply to emotions in virtue of their biological functions. Section 4 explains and rejects the view that there are normative standard that apply to emotions in virtue their representational properties. If what argued in these two sections is correct, then there are no normative standards that apply to emotions in virtue solely of their nature.
Section snippets
The nature of emotions
There are two different kinds of theories of emotion: cognitivist and noncognitivist. Cognitivist theories say that the tokening of an emotion necessarily entails the tokening of a judgement or the tokening of something judgement-like, such as a belief, a construal, or a thought.
Emotions, biological functions, and norms
According to the account given in the previous section, emotions have many different functions: a function to track relations, a function to be triggered in a certain way, a function to be valent and intense in a certain way, a function to generate certain kinds of dispositions, and so on. These are all intended to be ascriptions of biological functions. Someone who wants to argue that there are normative standards that apply to emotions just in virtue of their nature may do this by arguing
Emotions, representations, and norms
We saw in Section 2 that emotions are brain states with a representational content. According to many authors, there are norms that apply to mental representations just in virtue of the fact that they are representational. According to these authors, facts about meaning are normative facts.
Conclusions
In Section 4, we saw that there are no norms that apply to emotions solely in virtue of their representational properties. In Section 3, we saw that there are no norms that apply to emotions solely in virtue of their biological functions. It follows that, if the theory of emotions outlined in Section 2 is correct, there are no norms that apply to emotions solely in virtue of facts about their nature. So, either the theory of emotions given in Section 2 is fundamentally mistaken or there are no
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Paul Griffiths, Tim Lewens, David Papineau, Jesse Prinz, Neil Manson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Finn Spicer for comments and discussion.
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