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 (...) for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people? -/- In the course of exploring these questions, the book also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research. (shrink)

The experience of ‘moral distress’ is an increasing focal point of contemporary medical and bioethics literature, yet it has received little attention in discussions intersecting with ethical theory. This is unfortunate, as it seems that the peculiar phenomenon may well help us to better understand a number of issues bearing both practical and theoretical significance. In this article, I provide a robust psychological profile of moral distress in order to shed a newfound light upon the longstanding problem of ‘dirty hands’. (...) I argue that moral distress offers evidence of the existence of dirty hands situations. By examining moral distress and its relationship to cases of dirty hands, it appears that few of us are completely immune to susceptibility to these sorts of troubling experiences. With this concern in mind, I provide various recommendations to help alleviate our morally distressing personal and professional lives. (shrink)

In a landmark essay, Andreas Matthias claimed that current developments in autonomous, artificially intelligent systems are creating a so-called responsibility gap, which is allegedly ever-widening and stands to undermine both the moral and legal frameworks of our society. But how severe is the threat posed by emerging technologies? In fact, a great number of authors have indicated that the fear is thoroughly instilled. The most pessimistic are calling for a drastic scaling-back or complete moratorium on AI systems, while the optimists (...) aim to show that the gap can be bridged nonetheless. Contrary to both camps, I argue against the prevailing assumption that there is a technology-based responsibility gap. I show how moral responsibility is a dynamic and flexible process, one that can effectively encompass emerging technological entities. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that certain hard moral choices constitute tragic moral dilemmas in which no available course of action is justifiable, and so the agent is blameworthy whatever she chooses. This paper criticizes a certain approach to the debate about moral dilemmas and considers the metaethical implications of the criticisms. The approach in question has been taken by many advocates as well as opponents of moral dilemmas who believe that analysing the emotional response of the agent is the key (...) to the debate about moral dilemmas. The metaethical position this approach is most naturally associated with is sentimentalism. Sentimentalists claim that evaluation, and in particular moral evaluation, crucially depends on human sentiment. This paper is not concerned with the question whether moral dilemmas exist, but rather with emotion-based arguments used on both sides of the debate. The first aim of the paper is to show that emotion-based arguments by friends or foes of moral dilemmas cannot garner support from sentimentalism. The second aim is to show that this constitutes a serious problem for sentimentalism. (shrink)

Hursthouse :57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse :25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Döring’s :214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that (...) it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

“Sentiment” is a term of art, intended to refer to object-directed, irruptive states, that occur in relatively transient bouts involving positive or negative affect, and that typically involve a distinctive motivational profile. Not all the states normally called “emotions” are sentiments in the sense just characterized. And all the terms for sentiments are sometimes used in English to refer to longer lasting attitudes. But this discussion is concerned with boutish affective states, not standing attitudes. That poses some challenges that will (...) be my focus here. Rational sentimentalism is a cousin of fitting attitude theories of value, but other fitting attitude theories appeal to attitudes that are widely assumed to be governable by certain kinds of judgments. The basic challenge is this: are these boutish sentiments the sorts of things that we can and do regulate in the ways that are required for treating ‘shameful’, ‘funny’, ‘disgusting’ and the like as values? In what follows I briefly sketch some necessary conditions on treating something as a value, from which it emerges that treating sentimental values as values requires regulating the sentiments for fittingness. The rest of the paper is devoted to two ways of understanding how such regulation might work. I argue first that sentiments are susceptible to regulation by evaluative judgment, though perhaps not in quite the same way that philosophers have thought “judgment-sensitive attitudes” are regulated by judgment. I then suggest more tentatively that sentiments are also susceptible to regulation for fittingness in a different way: by educating sensibilities. (shrink)