Online research in philosophy

Abstract Some recent theorists have relegated the emotions to a rather negligible role in moral education. This article is designed to show why the emotions should have a more central place and what this role should be. The characteristics and functions of the emotions are briefly outlined. Those emotions involved in moral judgement and action are of two types: constitutive and regulative. In terms of the former, three ways are presented which show how a person has grasped a moral concept. Whereas constitutive emotions not only regulate but may help rectify wrong action, regulative emotions are less reliable because they can prevent as well as promote moral action. Fear and guilt are used as paradigms to explain how emotions are learned. Three character traits are chosen ?? conscientiousness, compassion, and benevolence ?? and the associated emotions and supporting principles are shown. Outlined is a three?tier development based on these traits along with suitable curriculum content.

Deliberation about personal, non-moral values involves elements of both invention and discovery. Thus, we invent our values by freely choosing them, where such distinctively human freedom is essential to our defining and taking responsibility for the kinds of persons we are; nonetheless, we also discover our values insofar as we can deliberate about them rationally and arrive at non-arbitrary decisions about what has value in our lives. Yet these notions of invention and discovery seem inconsistent with each other, and the possibility of deliberation about value therefore seems paradoxical. My aim is to argue that this apparent paradox is no paradox at all. I offer an account of what it is to value something largely in terms of emotions and desires. By examining the rational interconnections among emotions and evaluative judgments, I argue for an account both of how judgments can shape our emotions, thereby shaping our values in a way that makes intelligible the possibility of inventing our values, and of how our emotions can simultaneously rationally constrain correct deliberation, thereby making intelligible the possibility of discovering our values. The result is a rejection of both cognitivist and non-cognitivist accounts of value and deliberation about value.

Anger, disgust, elevation, sympathy, relief. If the subjective experience of each of these emotions is the same whether elicited by moral or nonmoral events, then what makes moral emotions unique? We suggest that the configuration of moral emotions is special—a configuration given by the underlying structure of morality. Research suggests that people divide the moral world along the two dimensions of valence (help/harm) and moral type (agent/patient). The intersection of these two dimensions gives four moral exemplars—heroes, villains, victims and beneficiaries—each of which elicits unique emotions. For example, victims (harm/patient) elicit sympathy and sadness. Dividing moral emotions into these four quadrants provides predictions about which emotions reinforce, oppose and complement each other.

The moral status of emotions has recently become the focus of various philosophical investigations. Certain emotions that have traditionally been considered as negative, such as envy, jealousy, pleasure-in-others'-misfortune, and pride, have been defended. Some traditionally "negative" emotions have even been declared to be moral emotions. In this brief paper, I suggest two basic criteria according to which an emotion might be considered moral, and I then examine whether envy, anger, and resentment are moral emotions.

Although much research on emotion and morality has treated emotion as a relatively undifferentiated construct, recent work shows that moral transgressions can evoke a variety of distinct emotions. To accommodate these results, we propose a multiple-appraisal model in which distinct appraisals lead to different moral emotions. The implications of this model for our understanding of the relationship between appraisals, emotions and judgments are discussed. The complexity of moral emotional experience presents a methodological challenge to researchers, but we submit that a complete understanding of human morality must acknowledge the differentiated nature of moral emotions.

The two main goals of this paper are to question the possibility of the existence of moral emotions and to decipher the notion of moral emotion. I start with a brief critical analysis of various philosophical understandings of moral emotions before setting out an evolutionary line of approach that seems promising at first glance: according to the functional evolutionary approach, moral emotions have the evolutionary function of sustaining cooperation. It turns out ultimately that this approach has its own drawbacks. I finally propose to give up the idea of moral property intrinsic to some emotions; “moral” seems instead merely to label emotions (or more precisely emotional episodes) when they occur in morally relevant contexts.

Abstract In his paper ?Moral education and the emotions? (JME, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 81?7) John Martin Rich argues that emotions should have a more central place in moral education than is normally given to them. I am sympathetic to the attempt to give more prominence to the role of the emotions in moral education, but in this paper I shall contend that the particular arguments employed by Rich cannot be sustained.

The role of emotions in ethics is often taken by philosophers and others as antithetical to rationality. On the most basic level (in undergraduate philosophy exams and elsewhere), stating an opinion in the form "I feel that p" can be a way of sidestepping the demand for reasons. But emotions can sometimes also be seen as supplying reasons for moral judgment to the extent that they involve evaluations--and a way of communicating them across different moral perspectives.

Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions and on that of their objectivity as revealers of value: emotions are neither simply natural nor socially constructed, and they apprehend objective values, but those values are multi-dimensional and relative to human realities. The "axiological" position I defend jettisons the usual foundations for ethical judgments, and grounds these judgments instead on a rationally informed reflective equilibrium of comprehensive emotional attitudes, tempered with a dose of irony.

Abstract ?Lovelessness? and ?guiltlessness? are often seen as the distinctive features of the psychopath. These characteristics can be interpreted as a failure to have two sub?classes of moral emotions, the (moral) rule?emotions and the altruistic emotions. For a better understanding of this moral defect, a more detailed analysis of these types of moral emotions is given. The analysis indicates that the disorder is caused by the absence of the second component of both types of emotions. The psychopath misses a positive commitment to both moral rules and to the well?being of fellow man. The psychopath is characterized as a moral imbecile, and it is assumed that his moral development is stagnated in an early developmental stage. As a young child, the psychopath has not acquired the disposition to feel sympathy. This insight makes us aware of the utmost importance of early childhood (moral) education.