Abstract

Moral philosophers have long believed, what moral agents have long known, that there is a tension between morality and happiness. Impersonal moral theories make it very difficult---if not impossible---for the perfect moral agent to have intimate friends and deep commitments. Awareness of this insight has led many moral philosophers to argue that these aspects of the good life constrain morality. But in many cases this is misguided. Rather I think that the appropriate constraints on morality must come as themselves moral constraints: the appropriate account of morality must be able to accommodate the moral value of, for instance, love or friendship. I argue that no faithful account of Kantianism can hold that motives of love and friendship have moral value---so called neo-Kantians who claim that they can, are more "neo" than Kantian. Furthermore, moral emotions can and, indeed, must play a broader role in morality than has previously been understood, and I argue for two such roles. First, I defend the view that emotions can motivate morally worthy actions. Second, I argue that even in virtue theory the role for proper emotions must be broadened. Virtue theorists hold that having the proper emotional state is partly constitutive of virtue. And some virtue theorists have held that this proper emotional state is one in which the virtuous person's emotions are fully unified, such that the courageous person, for instance, feels confidence only and no fear. Against this, I argue that it is necessary for the fully virtuous person to experience apparently conflicting emotions: the courageous person, in some cases, must feel both confidence and fear as she proceeds into battle. Only then can the virtue theorist fully explain the extent of the goodness that virtue is. In all, then, my view is that we continue to have an inadequate understanding of the role of emotions in morality. In coming to understand this better, I believe that we also come to understand that individuals can both be morally good and have intimate friends and deep commitments