Moral States and Processes

In this paper, I present an account of forgiveness as a process of emotional distancing. The central claim is that, understood in these terms, forgiveness does not require a change in judgment. Rationally forgiving someone, in other words, does not require that one judges the significance of the wrongdoing differently or that one comes to the conclusion that the attitudes behind it have changed in a favorable way. The model shows in what sense forgiving is inherently social, why we should (...) be pluralists about it, and provides a basis for arguing against the existence of necessary conditions of forgiving. (shrink)

This article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political (...) absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the study of the emotions in Edith Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy. After presenting her work embedded in the tradition of the early phenomenology of the emotions, I shall elaborate the four dimensions of the emotional experience according to this authoress, the link between emotions and values and the phenomenon of the living body. I argue that Stein’s account on empathy remains incomplete as long as we ignore the complex phenomenology of emotions (...) underlying her work. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of forgiveness has mainly focused on cases in which victims and offenders are known to each other. But it commonly happens that a victim brings an offender under a definite description but does not know to which individual this applies. I explore some of the conceptual and moral issues raised by the phenomenon of forgiveness in circumstances in which identification is incomplete, tentative or even mistaken. Among the conclusions reached are that correct and precise identification of the offending (...) individual is not essential for forgiveness to take place; that an offender can, under certain strict conditions, be said to be forgiven by proxy where the victim has misidentified the offender and ‘forgiven’ the wrong person; and that proxy forgiveness of this sort is not subject to the objections commonly levelled against ‘proxy’ or ‘third-party forgiveness.’. (shrink)

Do we insult, offend or slight a speaker when we refuse her testimony? Do we compliment, commend or extol a speaker when we accept her testimony? I argue that the answer to both of these questions is “yes”, but only in some instances, since these respective insults and compliments track the reasons a hearer has for rejecting or accepting testimony. When disbelieving a speaker, a hearer may insult her because she judges the speaker to be either incompetent as a knower (...) or insincere as a teller. However, there are many instances where we reject testimony without making this negative evaluation of the speaker, and as such, without paying her an insult. Testimonial compliments are fewer in number, and are not constitutive of “everyday” testimonial exchanges, since, speakers who are competent as knowers and sincere as tellers are merely behaving correctly in accordance with the norms of testifying. Nevertheless, deferring to an authority on belief can be complimentary to that speaker if by doing so we judge her to have some mastery in a particular domain. Testimonial insults and compliments have important moral implications, particularly with regard to epistemic injustice and therapeutic trust. (shrink)

The normativity of emotions is a widely discussed phenomenon. So far embodied accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the various aspects of the normativity of emotions. In this paper it shall be pointed out that embodied accounts are constrained in the way they can account for the normativity of emotions due to their commitments to naturalism, externalism, and anti-vehicle-internalism. One way to account for the normativity of emotions within a naturalist framework is to describe the intentional objects of emotions (...) as affordances that are of value for the organism. These affordances are part of a biological and social environment we are situated in, and they stand in complex relations to each other and to skillful organisms. I suggest that describing these relations can replace vehicle-internalist approaches but still account for the normativity of emotions within a naturalist framework. (shrink)

Trust is central to our social lives in both epistemic and practical ways. Often, it is rational only given evidence for trustworthiness, and with that evidence is made available by communication. New technologies are changing our practices of communication, enabling increasing rich and diverse ways of ‘being there’, but at a distance. This paper asks: how does telepresent communication support evidence-constrained trust? In answering it, I reply to the leading pessimists about the possibility of the digital mediation of trust, Philip (...) Pettit and Hubert Dreyfus. I also rebut Media Richness Theory, which proposes a linear relationship between the volume of mediated information and the quality of communication. Positively, I develop a speech-act theory of digitally mediated communication, drawing on Austen’s identification of the illocutionary act. The choice of a particular technology of communication constitutes part of what is communicated, including a setting of the social ‘frame’, and thus the possibilities for trust to be sustained or eroded. How something is said is part of what it is that is said. (shrink)

Some of the greatest harms perpetrated by human beings—mass murders, for example—are directly caused by a small number of individuals, yet the full force of the transgressions would not obtain without the indirect contributions of many others. To combat such evils, Larry May argues that we ought to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility within communities. More specifically, we ought to develop a propensity to feel ashamed of ourselves when we choose to be associated with others who transgress. Grant that (...) we ought to assume greater moral responsibility for contributing to harms that we do not directly commit. My goal is to challenge May’s claim that we should move towards a shame culture, and to argue that we ought to focus on cultivating empathy-based care and guilt instead. An established research program spearheaded by June Tangney has shown that individuals who are disposed to feel shame are more likely to hide from scrutiny, blame others, get angry, and become aggressive. Cultivating shame, in short, is a recipe for increasing antisocial behavior. Policies that promote feelings of empathy-based care and guilt, however, seem better designed to achieve the desired result, namely, minimizing the harms caused by groups. (shrink)

Do we directly perceive physical objects? What is the significance of the qualification ‘directly’ here? Austin famously denied that there was a unique interpretation by which we could make sense of the traditional debate in the philosophy of perception. I look here at Thompson Clarke’s discussion of G. E. Moore and surface perception to answer Austin’s scepticism.

Education and cognition research today generally recognize the tri-dimensional nature of reasoning processes as involving cognitive, social and emotional phenomena. However, there is so far no theoretical framework articulating these three dimensions from a descriptive perspective. This paper aims at presenting a first model of how group emotions work in collective reasoning, and specifies their social and cognitive functions. This model is inspired both from a multidisciplinary literature review and our extensive previous empirical work on an international corpus of videotaped (...) student debates. The cognitive function of emotions is defined in reference to the process of schematization and associated emotional framing. On the other hand, the social function of emotions refers to recognition-oriented behaviors that correspond to engagement into specific types of group talk, implying specific politeness rules or face-preservation systems. We believe that our multi-dimensional and multi-level approach to group reasoning, which mostly employs a linguistic perspective, can be applied to a diversity of contexts. We hope it will serve as a basis for further discussion on the role of emotions in reasoning among the interdisciplinary community of argumentation studies. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that forgiveness involves the cancellation of a moral debt. This way of speaking about forgiveness exploits an analogy between moral forgiveness and economic debt-cancellation. Call the view that moral forgiveness is like economic debt-cancellation the Economic Model of Forgiveness. In this article I articulate and motivate the model, defend it against some recent objections, and pose a new puzzle for this way of thinking about forgiveness.

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little (...) about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours. (shrink)

The adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)

Research on guanxi is conducted principally within the disciplines of anthropology, business studies and sociology. It typically takes the form of empirical case studies, applications of extrinsic theory and literature reviews cum trend reports. The present paper, on the other hand, provides an analysis of guanxi in consideration of its elemental relations, components and properties. Discussion indicates the limitations of treatments of guanxi in terms of trust, guanxi bases, tie-strength and the conveyance of influence and information. Having established the characteristic (...) features of guanxi discussion then turns to how it may be an option or choice of commitment for persons and groups in contemporary China, its form and role in marketized exchanges, and how the efficiency of guanxi may be characterized. (shrink)

: The problem of intersubjectivity has undergone multifold discussions in the philosophical, neuroscientific and psychological fields. Currently, the predominant theories in this ongoing debate contend that simulation or explicit reasoning must ground other-understanding. Yet this contention confines the subject to solipsistic self-projection without actual communication. I will provide an analysis suggesting that the roots of the concept of “empathy” reveal not only a dualistic inner-outer distinction but also an emerging reference to the bodily dimension. I claim that, by examining the (...) verifiable-in-experience ideas of expressivity and dynamical value-based perception, the limits of the Theory Theory and of the Simulation Theory are resolved by means of a direct perceptual encounter that implies a unitary and never-isolated subject. I aim at showing that perception-based empathy provides an adequate basis for considering social dimensions from intersubjectivity to shared agency, since it allows for both direct embodied communication in cooperation and for the autonomy of agents involved in a collective domain. Keywords : Empathy; Expressivity; Embodiment; Perception; Collective Intentionality Esperire l’altro. Come espressività e percezione fondata sul valore forniscono un approccio non solipsistico all’empatia Riassunto : Il problema dell’intersoggettività è stato oggetto di diversi dibattiti in ambito filosofico, neuroscientifico e psicologico. Le teorie oggi dominanti si interrogano se debba essere la simulazione o il ragionamento esplicito il fondamento della comprensione dell’altro. Tuttavia, questa discussione confina il soggetto in una solipsistica proiezione di sé, priva di reale comunicazione. Proporrò un’analisi che suggerisce come le radici del concetto di “empatia” rivelino non solo una distinzione dualista tra interno ed esterno, ma anche un riferimento emergente alla dimensione corporea. Sosterrò che, esaminando concetti verificabili nell’esperienza quali espressività e percezione dinamica fondata sul valore, i limiti della Theory Theory e della Simulation Theory vengono dissolti dall’incontro percettivo diretto, che considera il soggetto come unitario e mai isolato. Intendo mostrare come l’empatia fondata sulla percezione costituisca una buona base per considerare dimensioni differenti, dall’intersoggettività all’agentività condivisa, poiché riconosce in entrambe una comunicazione diretta incarnata, che rispetta la cooperazione, ma anche l’autonomia, degli agenti coinvolti in dominio collettivo. Parole chiave : Empatia; Espressività; Embodiment; Percezione; Intenzionalità collettiva. (shrink)

In the epilogue to Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur introduces an overlooked “vertical” axis into the problem of forgiveness. This verticality runs from the “depth” of fault to the “height” of forgiveness. For Ricoeur, forgiveness only appears an impossible “exchange” if one excludes this verticality from the question. Instead, he calls forgiveness “difficult” because it traverses from height to depth. This article argues that Ricoeur’s notion of the horizontal and the vertical in Memory, History, Forgetting is best understood as an (...) allusion to his account of time and eternity in Chapter 1 of Time and Narrative, volume 1, even though Ricoeur himself does not explicitly make this connection. In light of the ontological tenor of this connection, the author also suggests a slight modification of Ricoeur’s account, calling forgiveness “improbable” rather than difficult. (shrink)

I will connect the literature on deep disagreements with the literature on trust to construct a two-dimensional picture of the limits of argument. Argumentation and trust are important to the functioning of society, but each sets different expectations for when arguments can and should be used to resolve disagreements. When trust is factored in, we see a more nuanced picture of which disagreements will remain too deep for objective argument. Affective and social aspects of argument are not independent of procedure (...) and content. (shrink)

As a moral principle toleration is universal, but only in the sense that potentially it is addressed to every rational and moral agent. The question is whether this principle is appropriate in all situations and what are those moral agents who recognize its practical actuality for them? Toleration is not an absolute ethical principle, but one among others in the context of a particular moral system. It should be given a proper place in the hierarchy of principles. Understanding toleration as (...) the absolute or even overriding principle may lead in the face of obvious and directly threatening wrong to its use as an umbrella for adoptive or escapist behavior. The limits to toleration are given by basic and minimal ethical task to resist evil. The principle of active opposition to evil by all possible means is prior to the principle of toleration. (shrink)

This article examines the historical background, proliferation, and later internationalization of public declarations of forgiveness and remorse, first made in Europe a few decades after the end World War II. The author suggests that these declarations should be understood as a political practice, and bases her claim on three premises: after 1945, politicians began apologizing not only for their own crimes but mainly for those perpetrated by the communities they represented; these declarations implied a tacit acceptance of responsibility of both (...) the group that declares its remorse and of the group that accepts and possibly forgives the former for its past crimes; apart from representing a shared collective moral responsibility, declarations of forgiveness and remorse imply the continuity of a nation. These three premises apply if declarations of forgiveness and remorse are not banal and conventional, but function as a political ritual. The au... (shrink)

This article examines Teresa of Avila's understanding of the relationship between spiritual dryness, intellectual frustration, and shame. It argues that Teresa presents these experiences as interconnected, as well as spiritually and intellectually valuable. This aspect of Teresa's thought provides important resources for theologians in the contemporary age in its insistence on the necessarily dynamic relationship between the spiritual and the intellectual in the life of the theologian. The article concludes with an examination of shame and its impact on theological developments (...) in our time, as well as the possibilities for integrating shame productively. (shrink)

Three studies examined the construct of forgiveness. Participants responded to 12 or 24 focus phrases in both forgiver and forgiven modes. The focus phrases were associated with seven components derived from the literature. A large percentage of participants agree with phrases in the components of relationship, new beginning, healing, and guilt release, legal and religious components tend to attract a mixed response, and condoning disagreement. Results suggest that participants have a core construct of relationship, new beginning, healing and guilt release, (...) some also include the legal or religious components but most exclude any idea of condoning. Participants seem to have a cognitive representation of forgiveness that is fairly robust and is relatively independent of gender, religiosity or mode. However, the emphasis placed on each component may vary with the situation or whether one is in the forgiver or forgiven mode. (shrink)

Development of interpersonal trust among children and adolescents The main purpose of the present article is to introduce a topic related to the development of interpersonal trust among children and adolescents. Although this subject, since the beginnings of psychology considered as an academic discipline, has been regarded as an essential component of human functioning, there are still very few theoretical and empirical studies that approach the issue from a developmental point of view. In this paper the three-dimensional conceptualization of interpersonal (...) trust is provided. Furthermore, the article highlights the past and current theoretical and empirical research on the development of interpersonal trust in infants, preschool and school-age children. Finally, some challenges are presented in the field of interpersonal trust studies. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between gratitude and certain components of well-being which are conducive to affirming life. Additionally, we also compared how experiencing joy impacts those components of well-being. A randomly chosen 1/3 of the participants was asked to recall an event from their past when they felt grateful. Another 1/3 was asked to recall an event from their past when they felt joy. The final 1/3 of the participants was the control group. Next, (...) all participants filled in the Satisfaction With Life Scale. Then they completed the Social Ties Scale and the Social Trust Scale. Finally, all participants estimated the amount of beneficiary experiences and gratitude they had received in life. The results of the study indicate that both gratitude and joy enhance happiness, and that gratitude and joy play an important, although different in some respects, role as contributing factors to happiness. The results indicate a positive relationship between the balance in gratitude experiences and the examined aspects of well-being. (shrink)