We often assess emotions as appropriate or inappropriate depending on certain evaluative aspects of the world. Often using the term ‘fittingness’ as equivalent to ‘appropriateness’, many philosophers of emotion take fittingness assessments of emotions to be a broadly representational matter. On this sort of view, an emotion is fitting or appropriate just in case there is a kind of representational match between the emotion and the object, a matching analogous to truth for belief. This view provides an account of the (...) relationship between emotion and value that many have found plausible. In this paper, I argue that the fittingness of emotions should not be understood in representational terms. Rather, as is common in the literature on fittingness, we should interpret the notion in normative terms. After providing four arguments against the representational interpretation, and for a normative interpretation, of emotional fittingness, I discuss two ways to develop the normative picture of emotional fittingness. I also clarify the relevant issues that will have to be tackled by philosophers of emotion in the future, issues which cannot be tackled without attending to action theory and the philosophy of normativity. (shrink)

According to a historically popular view, emotions are normative experiences that ground moral knowledge much as perceptual experiences ground empirical knowledge. Given the analogy it draws between emotion and perception, sentimental perceptualism constitutes a promising, naturalist-friendly alternative to classical rationalist accounts of moral knowledge. In this paper, we consider an important but underappreciated objection to the view, namely that in contrast with perception, emotions depend for their occurrence on prior representational states, with the result that emotions cannot give perceptual-like access (...) to normative properties. We argue that underlying this objection are several specific problems, rooted in the different types of mental states to which emotions may respond, that the sentimental perceptualist must tackle for her view to be successful. We argue, moreover, that the problems can be answered by filling out the theory with several independently motivated yet highly controversial commitments, which we carefully catalogue. The plausibility of sentimental perceptualism, as a result, hinges on further claims sentimental perceptualists should not ignore. (shrink)

Can love be an appropriate response to a person? In this paper, I argue that it can. First, I discuss the reasons why we might think this question should be answered in the negative. This will help us clarify the question itself. Then I argue that, even though extant accounts of reasons for love are inadequate, there remains the suspicion that there must be something about people which make our love for them appropriate. Being lovable, I contend, is what makes (...) our love for them appropriate, just as being fearsome is what makes our fear of certain situations appropriate. I finally propose a general account of this property which avoids the major problems facing the extant accounts of reasons for love. (shrink)

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

Although some still advance reductive accounts of emotions—according to which they fall under a more familiar type of mental state—contemporary philosophers tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state. Agreeing with this claim, however, is compatible with attempting to find commonalities between emotions and better understood things. According to the advocates of the so-called ‘perceptual analogy’, thinking of emotion in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding even though emotion may not be reducible to (...) ordinary perception. In this paper, I spell out and motivate a different analogy—that between emotion and action—an analogy which I think can do some important theoretical work. In particular, it constitutes a theoretically fruitful way to think about core aspects of emotions and might in fact be employed to provide a better account of certain aspects of emotions than the one based on the perceptual analogy. Emotions might not be a matter of seeing the world a certain way, but a matter of behaving internally in response to it. In a slogan form: Emotion is the inward counterpart of bodily movement. (shrink)

According to a popular view, emotions are perceptual experiences of some kind. A common objection to this view is that, by contrast with perception, emotions are subject to normative reasons. In response, perceptualists have typically maintained that the fact that emotions can be justified does not prevent them from being perception-like in some fundamental way. Given the problems that this move might raise, a neglected alternative strategy is to deny that there are normative reasons for emotions in the first place. (...) The aim of this paper is to offer the first sustained discussion of arguments for skepticism about normative reasons for emotions. I argue that none of the obvious ways to argue against reasons for emotions casts genuine doubt on them, and thus that unless another argument is given an appeal to reasons for emotions continues to constitute a legitimate strategy to assess various theories of emotion. (shrink)

On a naive reading of the major accounts of love, love is a kind of mental event. A recent trend in the philosophical literature on love is to reject these accounts on the basis that they do not do justice to the historical dimension of love, as love essentially involves a distinctive kind of temporally extended pattern. Although the historicist account has advantages over the positions that it opposes, its appeal to the notion of a pattern is problematic. I will (...) argue that an account of love as disposition, suitably construed, is superior to the historicist account in that it has the advantages the historicist account has without its problems. In addition, the dispositional account has advantages of its own. (shrink)

Studying the folk concept of intentional action, Knobe (2003a) discovered a puzzling asymmetry: most people consider some bad side effects as intentional while they consider some good side effects as unintentional. In this study, we extend these findings with new experiments. The first experiment shows that the very same effect can be found in ascriptions of intentionality in the case of means for action. The second and third experiments show that means are nevertheless generally judged more intentional than side effects, (...) and that people do take into account the structure of the action when ascribing intentionality. We then discuss a number of hypotheses that can account for these data, using reactions times from our first experiment. (shrink)

The question whether there are reasons for loving particular individuals, and what such reasons might be, has been subject to scrutiny in recent years. On one view, reasons for loving particular individuals are some of their qualities. A problem with crude versions of this view, however, is that they both construe individuals as replaceable in a problematic way and fail to do justice to the selectivity of love. On another view, by contrast, reasons for loving particular individuals have to do (...) with our relationship with them. Even if it might accommodate the selectivity of love, the view—like crude quality views—ultimately faces worries stemming from replaceability. I argue for a view which combines the two views in a way that accommodates both the irreplaceable aspect under which individuals are loved and the fact that love is a selective response to them. On my view, reasons for loving particular individuals are some of their qualities as manifested in the context of a relationship with one. After spelling out the view, I discuss an important challenge facing it: what’s so special about actually being in touch—via a relationship—with certain qualities of an individual that would explain why we have special reasons to love them in particular? I consider inadequate answers to this question before putting forward my own. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Alex Grzankowski sets out to defend cognitivism about emotion against what he calls the ‘problem of recalcitrance’ that many contemporary theorists take as a strong reason to reject the view. Given the little explicit discussion we find of it in a large part of the literature, however, it is not clear why exactly recalcitrant emotions are supposed to constitute a problem for cognitivism in the first place. Grzankowski outlines an argument that he thinks (...) is at play in theorists’ widespread rejection of cognitivism, and goes on to answer it on behalf of the cognitivist. In this reply, I argue that Grzankowski is concerned with the wrong argument. (shrink)

I discuss the intuitive distinction between emotions and sentiments, and argue that sentiments cannot be reduced to emotions (and hence constitute their own category of affective state). ​.

According to the judgment theory of emotion, emotions necessarily involve evaluative judgments. Despite a number of attractions, this theory is almost universally held to be dead, for a very simple reason: it is overly intellectualistic. On behalf of the judgment theorist, I defend a simple strategy, namely, to claim that her view is restricted to a special class of emotions, a strategy that is rooted in a plausible distinction between two broad classes of emotion. It turns out that, if the (...) judgment theory is to be rejected, such rejection cannot be based on the charge that it overintellectualizes emotions. (shrink)

Sripada has recently advanced a new account for asymmetries that have been uncovered in folk judgments of intentionality: the ?Deep Self model,? according to which an action is more likely to be judged as intentional if it matches the agent's central and stable attitudes and values (i.e., the agent's Deep Self). In this paper, we present new experiments that challenge this model in two ways: first, we show that the Deep Self model makes predictions that are falsified, then we present (...) cases that it cannot account for. Finally, we discuss how the Deep Self model could be modified to accommodate these new data. (shrink)

The moral error theory holds that moral claims and beliefs, because they commit us to the existence of illusory entities, are systematically false or untrue. It is an open question what we should do with moral thought and discourse once we have become convinced by this view. Until recently, this question had received two main answers. The abolitionist proposed that we should get rid of moral thought altogether. The fictionalist, though he agreed we should eliminate moral beliefs, enjoined us to (...) replace them with attitudes that resemble to some extent the attitudes we have towards pieces of fiction. But there is now a third theory on the market: conservationism, the view that we should keep holding moral beliefs, even though we know them to be false. (According to a fourth theory, ‘substitutionism’, we should modify the content of our moral claims in such a way that they become true.) Putting abolitionism (and substitutionism) aside, our aim is to assess the plausibility of conservationism as an alternative to the – relatively dominant – fictionalism that we find in the literature. Given the difficulty of finding a conservationist view that is both (i) plausible and (ii) not merely a terminological variant of fictionalism, we will argue that conservationism fails to constitute a plausible alternative to fictionalism, at least insofar as it purports to be an alternative view as to what we should do with our moral thoughts. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that gratitude is not necessarily affective or motivating. Against a common trend in recent philosophical treatments of the notion, indeed, I argue for the introduction of an important but neglected kind of gratitude that is simply a matter of believing that one has been benefitted by a benevolent benefactor. I will call this non-affective, non-motivating kind of gratitude “generic,” and the kind – taking center stage in the literature – that is affective and motivating “deep.” (...) After defending the distinction, I explore the connection between these kinds of gratitude. (shrink)

This chapter proposes that the question “What is love?” be given an ontological treatment. Rather than asking whether love can be identified with a familiar mental phenomenon (desire, emotion, etc.), it suggests that we should first ask what kind of phenomenon love is, where a kind should here be understood as the most general category to which a given phenomenon belongs, an inquiry that is largely missing from contemporary discussions about love. After motivating this project, the chapter discusses and rejects (...) a view according to which love is a certain kind of pattern or process, and then argues that love should be conceived of as a certain kind of state, namely a dispositional state. (shrink)

In a recent article, Sven Nyholm argues that the use of biomedical enhancements in our romantic relationships would fail to secure the final value we attribute to love. On Nyholm's view, one thing we desire for its own sake is to be at the origin of the love others have for us. The satisfaction of this desire, he argues, is incompatible with the use of BE insofar as they are responsible for the attachment characteristic of love. In particular, the use (...) of BE in order to create and sustain the sort of attachment characteristic of love would be less desirable than the creation and sustainment of it by more ordinary means. If one needs such enhancements in order for one's love to be created or sustained, then one's love is of lesser quality than the love we want. In this reply, I raise doubts about the argument. (shrink)

According to the action analogy, emotions and actions have certain structural and normative similarities that no theory of emotions should ignore. The action analogy has recently been used in an objection against the so-called perceptual theory of emotions, often defended by means of an analogy between emotion and perception. Beyond the dialectical significance of the action analogy, one might wonder whether it can support a picture of emotions as fundamentally action-like—what I call an agential theory. This article is a first (...) step in answering this question. After discussing various ways to formulate the agential theory, I sketch a version of it. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to provide an initial defense of a neglected epistemology of value according to which a fundamental mode of access to evaluative facts and properties is constituted by a distinctive kind of feeling, sometimes called ‘value feeling’. The paper defends the appeal to value feelings against some objections that have been leveled against it, objections intended to show that it is a nonstarter. The paper argues that these objections can be met and that the view (...) that there are such value feelings constitutes a reasonable hypothesis. (shrink)

Vous pensez peut-être que la peine de mort est injuste ? Ou que l’avortement est moralement acceptable ? Se pourrait-il alors que vous vous trompiez ? C’est en tout cas l’avis des théoriciens de l’erreur. D’après ces philosophes, tous les jugements moraux sont faux parce qu’ils présupposent à tort l’existence de faits moraux à la fois objectifs et non naturels. Organisé autour de ce défi nihiliste, le présent ouvrage aborde les principales théories métaéthiques comme autant de tentatives, plus ou moins (...) fructueuses, de sauver la morale. Les théories qu’on y rencontre combinent invariablement une thèse psychologique (sur la nature des jugements moraux) et une thèse ontologique (sur l’existence d’une réalité morale conforme auxdits présupposés). Dans le style argumentatif sobre et précis qui caractérise la philosophie analytique, ce manuel de métaéthique – le premier en langue française – entreprend d’évaluer minutieusement un ensemble de théories sur la morale. Bien que destiné en premier lieu aux enseignants de philosophie et à leurs étudiants, il se veut accessible à tous ceux qu’intéresse l’éthique. (shrink)

Cet article explore la viabilité de la conjonction de trois thèses : (1) qu’il existe des valeurs objectives ; (2) que certaines émotions ont pour fonction de les représenter ; (3) que de telles émotions représentent ces valeurs de manière fiable. Nous cherchons plus particulièrement à réconcilier la troisième thèse avec l’observation que les émotions ont un aspect subjectif ou personnel qu’il n’est pas possible d’éliminer. -/- This article explores the viability of the conjunction of three claims: (1) that there (...) are objective values; (2) that some emotions have the function of representing them; (3) that such emotions represent these values reliably. In particular, we will be concerned with the project of reconciling (3) with the simple observation that emotions have a subjective or personal aspect that cannot be ignored. (shrink)

What is an emotion? No one will seriously doubt that it is a psychological entity of some sort. Rich and lively philosophical debates have failed to generate any stable picture regarding the nature of emotions that extends much beyond this platitude, however. At most, a bare majority of philosophers would agree that emotions exemplify the following features. First, emotions are characterized by a certain phenomenology: they are felt. Second, they are intentional phenomena and, as such, are in one way or (...) another directed to various sorts of entities in the world (one is amused by the joke, sad at the death of a dear friend or proud that one is a self-made man). Third, they are closely connected with evaluations of these entities Ð amusement connects with a positive evaluation of the joke, sadness with a negative evaluation of the death. Fourth, emotions are relatively short-lived: unlike other phenomena that are closely related to them, such as character traits and sentiments that may endure for substantial stretches of one's life, emotions endure at most for some hours. Beyond that, disagreement reigns and the debates, which have become increasingly important in the past two decades or so, have almost exclusively revolved around the identification of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the emotions. (shrink)

“Frankfurt-style cases” are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy has recently argued that FSCs fail because our intuitions about cases involving counterfactual interveners are inconsistent, and this inconsistency is best explained by the fact that our intuitions about such cases are grounded in an internalist prejudice about the location of mental states and capacities. In response (...) to this challenge, we argue that there is no inconsistency in our intuitions about cases involving CIs, as soon as we draw the comparison properly, and that intuitions about such cases do not rest on an internalist prejudice, but on a more basic distinction between two kinds of dispositions. Additionally, we discus... (shrink)

A common distinction in emotion theory is between ‘occurrent emotions’ and ‘dispositional emotions’, ‘emotional episodes’ and ‘emotional states’, ‘emotions’ and ‘sentiments’, or more neutrally between ‘short-term emotions’ and ‘long-term emotions’. While short-term emotions are, or necessarily comprise, experiences, long-term emotions are generally seen as states that can exist without experience. Given the theoretical importance of experience for emotion theorists, long-term emotions are often cast aside as of secondary importance, or at any rate as in need of separate treatment. In this (...) paper, I cast doubt on the distinction. I argue that the considerations that support a view of long-term emotions as non-experiential states equally support a view of short-term emotions as non-experiential states, and so long-term and short-term emotions are ultimately the same sort of thing. If I am right, the dominant experience-centered accounts of emotions are at best accounts, not of emotions per se, but of some closely related phenomenon. (shrink)

A short entry on the nature of social power, in particular on the question whether it can be understood in terms of powers as discussed in the metaphysics literature (in French).

This chapter contains sections titled: Sexual Selection, Women's Preferences, and Mating Intelligence The Seduction Community: Human Excellence and Empowering Social Art in a Post‐Scarcity Era Is It Wrong to Try to Raise Your Mating Intelligence? Is Raising Your Mate Value a Good Thing? A Deflationist Solution to the Problem Conclusion: What About Women?

The nature of emotion is an important question in several philosophical domains, but little attention has so far been paid to identifying the general ontological category to which emotions belong. Given that they are short-lived, are they events? Since they often have components or stages, are they processes? Or does their close link with behaviour mean they are dispositions? In this volume, leading scholars investigate these basic ontological issues, contributing to current discussions about emotions and paving the way for new (...) research into an underexplored area of philosophy. With chapters addressing issues including the temporal profile of emotions, the distinction between emotions and other affective states, and the epistemology of emotion, this highly original book will be valuable for students and specialists of philosophy, and particularly for those working in the metaphysics of mind and emotions. (shrink)

Contemporary emotion research typically takes the phenomenon of emotion to be exhausted by a class of mental events that are intentional, conscious, and related to certain sorts of behaviour. Moreover, other affective phenomena, such as moods, are also considered to be relatively short-term, episodic, or occurrent states of the subject undergoing them. Emotions, and other putative emotional phenomena that common-sense takes as long-lasting, non-episodic, or dispositional are things that both philosophers and scientists sometimes recognise, but that are relatively neglected in (...) comparison to emotional episodes. This thesis aims at showing that this neglect is unjustified. I will argue that there is a class of entities, 'sentiments'—broadly characterised as dispositions to undergo emotional episodes—that are irreducible to emotional episodes or collections thereof and have properties that make them a suitable target of study by the emotion researcher.In the first chapter, I argue that an analysis of caring as a pattern of emotional episodes, while more plausible than alternative, non-emotional accounts, faces a number of counterexamples that motivate the search for an account of caring as related in a certain way to emotions but as irreducible to them. I argue that a dispositional account, according to which dispositions are conceived as distinct from their manifestations, is an account for which a strong case can be made.The second chapter is dedicated to defending a modest form of realism about dispositions in general and psychological dispositions in particular. According to realism, dispositions are genuine properties that, although perhaps reducible to non-dispositional properties, cannot be re-described in terms of events only. In the third chapter, I show in what ways emotional dispositions can positively contribute to the explanation of the occurrence of emotional episodes. In the fourth chapter, I argue that caring, understood as a species of sentiment, is not to be construed as a mere disposition to produce certain events; rather, we should allow that certain dispositions are genuinely mental or psychological. Assuming realism about the mental, I argue that some dispositions are mental in a way that others are not. I suggest that being intentional is the property that makes psychological dispositions genuinely mental. I end the chapter by drawing a connection between caring and the notion of character. On my view, caring is at least a necessary ingredient of certain character traits, in particular the virtues. In chapter five, I tackle a recent form of empirically informed scepticism about character and argue, on the basis of general considerations about psychological dispositions, that the sceptic’s case is not as strong as she makes out. Finally, in chapter six, I argue that at least certain forms of sentiment, for example romantic love, can be genuinely supported by reasons, thereby suggesting a way they can contribute to the value of our lives. Overall, the aim of this thesis is to establish the respectability of sentiments in a sophisticated account of the mind. (shrink)

A survey of some of the major issues surrounding our emotional responses to artworks. Topics discussed include the paradox of fiction, the paradox of tragedy, and the nature of emotion in response to music.

Dans cet essai, je me concentre sur le débat entre nativistes et empiristes au sujet des origines de la morale : la morale serait-elle innée, là depuis la naissance, ou serait-elle un produit de la culture, acquise par le biais d’un conditionnement social ? Nous verrons que cette question soulève d’importants problèmes conceptuels, notamment celui de savoir ce que l’on entend ici par ‘morale’. Des considérations méthodologiques seront également soulevées : quels types de données peuvent montrer que le nativisme (ou (...) empirisme) moral est vrai ? Quelle forme une théorie nativiste doit-elle prendre afin de rendre compte de la complexité du phénomène moral ? En conclusion, je suggère qu’étant donné le caractère double de la morale (à la fois produit de l’évolution et de la culture), il serait peut-être envisageable de laisser tomber la bonne vielle dichotomie entre inné et acquis. (shrink)

If we take conceptual art seriously, that is, if we consider that art does not have clear-cut boundaries and that it is not limited to the production of aesthetic objects, then a whole spectrum of possible artworks is open to us. Not only can random objects be conceived as artistic, but cognitive states and behaviors can also be meaningfully conceived as pieces of art by their producer and by any sensitive observer. If one is to take one’s life as a (...) piece of conceptual art, one then faces the question of what kind of life would count as a worthwhile piece of art, i.e., what kind of life can have any artistic worth. In this paper, I discuss the possibility that the pursuit of a worthwhile life in the Aristotelian sense, more particularly the meticulous design of a character as a set of good emotional, conative, and behavioral dispositions, can count as an artistic endeavor. My aim is to show how this can be the case, and to show that this bears on major issues in contemporary philosophy of art concerning the relation between ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

The Rationality of Love addresses the question whether love belongs, paradoxically enough, to the realm of reason, whether love belongs to the class of responses, such as belief and action, that admit of norms of justification and rationality. Are there normative reasons to love someone? Can love be an appropriate or fitting response to an individual? Or is love, like perceptual experiences, sensations, and urges, the sort of thing we just have and for which we cannot be normatively criticizable? Ordinary (...) thinking about love seems to pull us in different directions. On the one hand, love—involving as it does lots of non-rational elements—seems to be a good example of a response we shouldn’t assess in terms of rationality. On the other hand, we find it appropriate or fitting to love certain things and not others, and we are not reluctant to ask ourselves why we love certain people. This book defends the view that love is subject to normative standards by carefully assessing the various answers to the normative question about love and by providing its own solution. An extensive critical discussion of the so-called ‘no-reasons’ view of love is given, which helps uncover important issues to be tackled by any advocate of the rationality of love. In addition, the discussion is informed by the philosophy of normativity, an area often neglected in the debate. All in all, this book provides a systematic and up-to-date discussion of a central issue in the philosophy of love. (shrink)

© The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] is widely accepted that emotions have something to do with values. The major task of contemporary philosophy of emotion is to say precisely what that something is. How exactly are emotions related to evaluative properties? Unsurprisingly, there are various ways they may be related. First, emotions might themselves be bearers of value. It might be a good thing (...) to be afraid, sad, or joyful in certain circumstances. And of course, there are various ways emotions might be valuable. One way – but probably not the only way – they might be valuable is in providing us with information about the world, and in particular about further values. A second way, therefore, emotions might be related to values, is by helping us apprehend such... (shrink)