Where scholarship meets technological innovation . . .
Author's Replies
Michael Brady
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
Brady, Michael. 2021. “Replies to Ben-Ze’ev, Starkey, Reyes Càrdenas, Bloomfield, LaGuardia-LoBianco, and Mendonça.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 3, no. 1: 49-61. https://doi.org/10.33497/2021.summer.8.
Abstract: In these replies, I respond to all six of my commentators. I acknowledge a number of areas where the book could be improved—not least in terms of the categorisation of theories of emotion; the emphasis on the positive value of emotion as opposed to emotion’s negative aspects; and the need to consider how emotions function in a broader range of circumstances. Alongside this, I welcome the defences of the perceptual model and new perspectives on the relations between emotion and virtue that a number of commentators present.
Keywords: theories of emotion, morality, virtue, perception, history, and art
RESPONSE TO AARON BEN-ZE’EV
Ben-Ze'ev identifies two main worries with my view in his generous and typically erudite and rigorous commentary. One of these is classificatory, the other concerns the role of emotions in morality. Both are important and raise very interesting points for me to think about, and for further investigation on my part, and I am grateful to Ben-Ze'ev for encouraging me to do so.
[page 49]
Components and Theories
Ben-Ze'ev highlights worries with both my identification of the components of emotion, and the categorisation of theories of emotion. He is right to do so. With respect to the former, I agree that more things might be explicitly included here, such as memory and imagination, and also that some of the categories appear to overlap. In response, I think that in a much more developed account, I would explain the kind of perception involved (the non-evaluative perception of an object or event, such as the smell of the contaminated meat), and also that the thinking component can (and perhaps always does) include memory and imagination. So there is room for the elements that Ben-Ze'ev thinks are essential in my classificatory scheme. One of the valuable things about this kind of classification into different components (however we do it) is to show the complexity of emotion, and that is one of the main things that I was wanting to do here—to illustrate that they are not brute impulses or reactions, but have structure, i.e., elements that are related in a particular way. (This foreshadows some of the things that Starkey will say later about binding between elements.) I guess that there is always an element of artificiality when it comes to such things however—given the complications that Ben-Ze'ev rightly points out.
Similarly, I happily accept Ben-Ze'ev’s worries about dividing the theories of emotion as I do into feeling, cognitive, and perceptual theories. These overlap to a significant degree—as I point out in my book here, but go into greater detail in Emotional Insight—and so again there is an element of artificiality when dividing things up in these ways. Ben-Ze'ev’s own classificatory approach seems very helpful here. But note that here too there is some overlap: feeling theories can be a form of evaluative approach, as (e.g.) Jesse Prinz argues in his 2004 book Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Feeling theories can also be perceptual theories, since the latter need not be merely cognitive—as Starkey points out below in his proposal for a new perceptual model. So it isn’t clear that there is a neat division into four distinct theories, at least on Ben-Ze'ev’s identification of the four modes of reference.
Ben-Ze'ev’s worries here—about how to identify components and about how to classify theoretical approaches—raise a number of very interesting questions about what is really at stake when we use these terms and engage in philosophical theorising about emotion. Suppose that we agree with Ben-Ze'ev that all four elements are present in emotional experience. Does he—do we—think that any element has priority here? Indeed, what does the claim about “priority” here mean? Might this depend upon disciplinary interests, so that moral philosophers are more interested in the evaluative elements of emotion, while psychologists and neuroscientists about the affective elements? So Ben-Ze'ev’s critical comments generate very interesting questions about what we are doing when we theorise about emotion, especially if we are (roughly) in agreement about the kinds of elements that emotions typically involve, and the importance of each in emotional experience. I want to thank him for making me think some more about these issues and questions.
Emotion and Morality
Like Bloomfield below, Ben-Ze'ev questions whether knowledge of moral value is merely emotional, and whether we can rely on emotions themselves to know. Like Bloomfield and Ben-Ze'ev, I think not, and it is instructive to consider why. Part of my view here—which I discuss in response to Bloomfield—is rather more sceptical about the epistemic value and outputs of emotional experiences themselves. For we might well doubt that emotions themselves give us knowledge, or even genuine justificatory reasons when it comes to evaluative belief or judgement. Nevertheless, emotions are important as sources of evaluations, understood as appraisals of our evaluative landscape, and as sources of motivation for us to seek out reasons that bear on their accuracy. As a
[page 50]
result, emotions help to promote and facilitate—at least when under the control of virtuous habits of attention—evaluative understanding.
I am very interested in reading and learning more about what Ben-Ze'ev says about emotional intuition, deliberative thinking, and intuitive reasoning, and about what it means to claim that the first two feed into the third. I agree that emotions are essential but not exclusive, and I want to think much more about this topic.
RESPONSE TO CHARLES STARKEY
Starkey presents a rich, sophisticated, and very interesting response to the book, and I’m very grateful to him for this and his care and attention in looking at my views. His response aims to do two things. The first is to present a version of the perceptual model which doesn’t succumb to my criticisms. The second is to highlight a range of ways that emotions are important for virtue, in a way which complements my own account. Let’s look at these in turn.
A New Perceptual Model?
Starkey’s account proposes that emotional perception involves emotional binding between three elements: affective arousal, specific cognitions about some object (including a complex understanding of the situation), and relational theme information (about the relation of the situation to one’s concerns, and which need not involve complex cognition). These are experienced as unified in emotional experience, and emotional binding mirrors the psychological binding that occurs in perception. For example, “In an episode of anger while driving, physiological changes are associated with the driver of another car rather than with the air freshener hanging from one’s rear-view mirror. And, the arousal and the cognition of the driver are also bound with the relational theme information of a demeaning offense (i.e., the core relational theme on which anger is based).”
I think that the notion of emotional binding is a very important one for the philosophy and psychology of emotion, and as Starkey points out, is well-placed to capture the experiential association involved in emotional experience. It is one that I need to think more about. I wonder, though, whether Starkey’s theory can indeed avoid the two difficulties I raise. Starkey argues, first, that this kind of perceptual model does not collapse into a feeling theory, since an “informationally robust cognition” is part of a normal emotional event; and nor does it collapse into a cognitive theory, since the affective element is bound up with the cognition of the object. Now this looks like it won’t collapse into the other theories by stipulation, and that’s fine as far as it goes. What we might need is an argument that all three of the elements are always necessary for and bound together in emotional experience. But I wonder how Starkey might respond to the kind of (earlier) line pushed by Jesse Prinz, that it is the affective element that carries relational theme information. Is there any advantage of Starkey’s account over a more parsimonious perceptual model?
I’m less convinced by Starkey’s attempt to avoid the second worry. He argues that emotions might be a kind of rationally-assessable perception, because they are not rigidly tied to a narrow set of stimuli, but are more flexible responses: “For this reason emotions are not domain-specific modules, but general evaluations that can be activated in a wide variety of contexts.” As a result, he holds that they are more flexible and more prone to error than perceptions. This is an intriguing suggestion, but it might not be entirely convincing. Pain sensations are
[page 51]
(notoriously) prone to error, capable of top-down influences and cognitive penetration, and are not rigidly tied to a narrow set of stimuli. (The softest touch can be painful, on an injured part of the body.) Still, pains are not rationally assessable. In addition, I’m not sure that I agree that the difference between the rational assessment of emotions and perceptions is grounded in practical reasons. One response would be to say that we have the practice of holding people responsible for their emotions but not their perceptions, because emotions are responsive to reasons, whereas perceptions are not. A second reason—and this is related to one of the things that Bloomfield says in his commentary below—is that there are many different ways in which we assess emotions normatively, only some of which are related to their practical and social importance. It might be socially vital to respond with fury when insulted, in some historical cultures, and yet this doesn’t speak to the fact that fury would not be a fitting response to a minor insult. So I think that it is unlikely we can explain the range of normative assessment of emotion just on practical lines.
Emotion and Virtue
Starkey discusses a range of important ways in which emotions can make a positive contribution to our virtuous traits, and can be “operative in virtue,” apart from their effects on motivation. There are fascinating and important points raised here, and I agree with much of what he has to say about the specific ways in which emotions affect perception and influence character traits: by influencing how we attend to important objects and events; by affecting how we see ambiguous figures; by increasing processing of the object of the emotion; by affecting the import an object has for a subject; and by conveying the significance of action possibilities. As he rightly points out, “This has implications for character traits because collectively emotions significantly alter our perception of our environment as we move through the world.”
However, I particularly want to focus on Starkey’s claim that “on a fundamental level, emotions underlie the persistence of character traits by preventing ‘axiological entropy’—the diminishment over time of the sense of the importance of values on which character traits are based. Without emotions the significance of values related to those emotions would fade and the character traits that involve those values would diminish.” There is something that is obviously right about this. To take a timely example: emotional engagement at conferences reminds us of the value of philosophical discussion and community; the importance of such things might diminish when we spend most of our time working alone in our offices, or recuse ourselves from teaching because of administrative roles, and so on. Emotions can also highlight how much things mean to us, which becomes apparent when certain values are under threat. (To take a small-scale example of environmental values: when the developers propose building on a nearby green site, feelings of concern for that site bring home to us how valuable that site is.) However, one question here for Starkey (and others) concerns how compatible all of this is with the idea that emotions themselves suffer entropy, without any apparent diminishment of value. I thus wonder about the scope of Starkey’s claims here. For example, think of how depth of love usually co-occurs with the diminishment of emotions of passion. Here it does not seem true that the value of one’s beloved diminishes without passionate emotions; often it is the opposite. And there is such a thing as compassion fatigue, for those (e.g.) in the medical profession. But here too we might think that feelings of compassion often fade with experience, with no loss of—indeed, often with an increase depth of—appreciation of the relevant value. Ditto for high court judges and the value of justice, art critics and the value of artworks, and so on. As a result, I think that the interplay between different forms of the appreciation of value, and the waxing and waning of emotion, is probably very complex, and at least a two-way process. It is certainly a topic that merits a
[page 52]
lot of thoughtful discussion, and yet another point I hope to devote more time to, thanks to Starkey’s comments.
RESPONSE TO PANIEL REYES CÀRDENAS
I’d like to offer my thanks to Reyes Càrdenas for the extremely kind and generous words, and especially about how enjoyable he found the experience of reading the book.
One of the points raised by Reyes Càrdenas is that I could have a more substantial connection to a longer historical tradition. I think that this is both true and a welcome charge: the book could indeed be better informed by history, and the lack of engagement here is a fault of much contemporary philosophy. I often feel embarrassed by the degree to which my writing fails to pay attention to the history of the subject, and the history of (thinking about) emotion in particular. (I tried to rectify this a little in Suffering & Virtue, but not enough). Reyes Càrdenas is right again to highlight an omission, when it comes to the role of emotions in self-knowledge; this, as he writes, is “the important place of emotions in the knowledge of the convergence of emotions and thought in our intellectual lives, and the need of this to achieve a positive grasp of the meaning of our own selves.” As it happens, I think that negative emotions, and especially forms of suffering, often play a central role in enabling us to find meaning in our lives. This seems especially true when we consider negative emotions that occur in illness, or at the end of life. The book would have benefited from a deeper discussion about this, and about the inward turn to knowledge and understanding of oneself that Reyes Càrdenas emphasizes.
Likewise, Reyes Càrdenas is right to think that more attention could have been paid to the role of emotions in the formation of a moral conscience, and how vital this is in our lives. (I might do well to consider, should there be a second edition of the book, where an account of emotion and conscience would fit in the account of moral development that I do give.) So Reyes Càrdenas’s remarks here will stimulate me to do some reading on this historical tradition and deepen my understanding here. Equally, his remarks on William James, and the epistemic role that passions and affections have, are food for considerably more thought on a Jamesian model than I have given the topic thus far.
Perhaps Reyes Càrdenas’s greatest worry concerns a lack of clarity in my discussions of the role that emotion has in meta-ethics, and the danger that what I say here (or don’t say clearly enough) might support dichotomous thinking about emotion and reason, rather than - as I’ve tried to do throughout the book - undermine such thinking. I suspect the worry here is that in dismissing emotivist/sentimentalist approaches, I buy into the view of emotion that such approaches embody, and that this is a view in which emotion is opposed to reason. (I guess even Hume doesn’t think this is the case; only that moral distinctions are not grounded in reason, but in passion or desire.) This raises the possibility—to which I think Reyes Càrdenas might be sympathetic—that more sophisticated versions of expressivism might acknowledge the central role that emotion plays in our rational lives. Consider the sophisticated rational sentimentalist accounts developed by Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, for one prominent example. But I’m happy to accept that my relatively quick move through metaethical possibilities might well cause worries of this sort; again, something I would hope to address in another edition of the book.
[page 53]
RESPONSE TO PAUL BLOOMFIELD
Bloomfield raises a host of very interesting points in his detailed, generous, and subtle response; at the same time, he puts pressure on various aspects of my positive account of the value of emotion with respect to our knowing, our acting, and our virtue. He has my gratitude for all of this. I think he is exactly right on some points—about the functional role of emotion in blocking thought, for instance—and I have a lot of sympathy with his more general criticisms, viz., that the book is too focused on a positive picture of what emotions do, that I don’t focus enough on the normativity of emotion. But as I’ll explain, I’m not sure we differ too much on some central issues about the epistemic and motivational benefits that emotion can bring. In what follows, I want to address some of the central places where we differ, and offer a number of tentative responses.
Emotions We’d Be Better Off Without
Bloomfield rightly points out that there are many negative emotions that I don’t discuss, and that we would be better off without: “ugly emotions which all humans would always be better off without: apathy, hopelessness, despair, dread, loneliness, bitterness, spite, greed, jealousy, covetousness, vindictiveness, vengefulness, arrogance, condescension, hubris, wrath, malice, and the granddaddy of all negative emotions: hate.” Now later on when discussing LaGuardia-LoBianco’s comments, and the notion of emotion and virtue in non-ideal circumstances, we’ll encounter some emotional responses that might typically be seen as bad and as non-conducive to flourishing, and yet which might be virtuous in some circumstances. Hyper-vigilance, hubris, anger, cynicism, distrustfulness can all serve us extremely well when (e.g.) we are oppressed or suffering from illness and have to cope. And it is possible at least that arrogance and bitterness might be amongst these. So one option here is to say that we can always identify non-ideal circumstances in which some humans wouldn’t be worse off as a result of these.
But a second point is to highlight the fact that many/all of these are chronic or malfunctioning types of genuinely helpful and valuable emotions. Think of dread as an extension of fear, when things are truly dreadful. What is true is that all humans would be better off without having to face truly dreadful things, without this implying that there is something wrong, intrinsically, with feeling dread. (And wouldn’t this be fitting when things are truly dreadful?) Similarly with lonesomeness: it can be utterly miserable to be without someone, and lonesomeness brings this home to us. But it’s not clear that it is lonesomeness that is something we would be better off without, as opposed to the situation in which we are alone. (Clearly we’d be better off without that being so.) In any case, isn’t it the price that we have to pay—as a part of a suite of relevant responses—for having attachments in the first place? By the same token, arrogance stems from a surfeit of pride, and is to this extent problematic. But it might be the price that we pay for having the capacity for pride. So I’m not entirely sure that these cases of negative emotions identify particular distinct emotion types that we would be better off without.
Emotions are Much Less Helpful and Reliable Than I Suggest
Bloomfield is certainly right to highlight the many ways in which we can be too emotional, to the detriment of our believing and acting. He writes: “Emotions and passions, strong and uncontrolled as they are, typically distort perception and judgment and only rarely lead to a deep, veridic, and insightful understanding of the world.” He is also right that it is rare that the virtuous person relies on emotions alone in their judging and acting, and that “reliable emotional reactions, suitable for providing epistemic and moral justification, [are]
[page 54]
more rare than it is typically assumed.” But I’m not sure that we disagree on any really substantial issue here. For I also think that emotions alone do not suffice for justification, indeed I have argued that emotions by themselves do not constitute sufficient reasons or sufficient evidence for evaluative belief, and so can’t suffice to justify. In typical cases, we seek out reasons and considerations that bear on the evaluative situation that emotion presents to us. It’s only when we can’t seek out the reasons and considerations—when we have nothing else to go on—that we put our trust only in our emotion, this being better than nothing. What I disagree with Bloomfield about, I suspect, is the extent to which emotions are epistemically helpful, if not sufficient, for our believing and acting. And here I genuinely do want to be positive. For think of how inquiry, believing, or acting would go if people were non-emotional. Thomas Reid makes the point nicely: we need some degree of curiosity, or emotion more broadly, to fix attention and come to considered judgement. Similarly with the motivational story: feelings of compassion are surely central to genuinely compassionate behaviour, and indeed motivate such behaviour, even though we need reason and reflection to tell us what the behaviour is, to determine the right kind of response to the circumstances. So I agree that emotion is not sufficient for the justification of action and belief; but it is often at the heart of the story that we do tell.
Is Curiosity An Emotion?
I certainly think that it has certain features that are characteristic of an emotion—in terms of components. It also comes in episodic, state, and trait forms. I might, for instance, be intensely curious about the note she passed to him; or curious for some time about who committed the crime; or it could be true of me that I’m a curious person. Now Bloomfield thinks curiosity is an intellectual desire, like lust is a carnal desire. I guess this depends on how much we think a particular kind of evaluation—of the interesting, the curious—is bound up with curiosity. I think (and psychologists like Paul Silvia (2006) agree) that curiosity has a certain kind of appraisal structure that seems missing from (mere) intellectual desire, i.e., an urge to find out for the sake of finding out. That kind of desire seems itself too coarse-grained, too indiscriminate. So the need to respect the evaluative structure of curiosity suggests to me that it is an emotion.
Can Emotions Tell Us About Value?
Bloomfield also questions any quick move from the claim that emotions give us information about what we value, to information about what is valuable. The former does not involve any implication of objective or stance-independent value of course, since (as he rightly points out) you might find someone charming and I might find them annoying, and for exactly the same features. Now one quick response is that in some cases the distance between what we value and what is valuable is rather modest or small: the charming might be one example, the amusing might be another. Likewise, there might well be values that depend upon our relations and yet seem objective—cases of agent-relative value might be like this. And once again, I don’t think I’m committed to the view that emotions by themselves tell us about what is objectively valuable, at least in the sense of giving us an understanding of our evaluative landscape. For that, we need access to the reasons that are in play, and (as noted) emotions are often very important in motivating the search for such reasons. A more positive claim is that emotions raise the question of what is valuable for us, and also confirm our evaluative stances: think of how fragile our evaluative view might be without emotional support, something that Thomas Reid also emphasizes. So without emotion we might not have access to the possibility of something’s being valuable; and without emotion, we might not have a safe and secure judgement that something is valuable. Even if emotions don’t suffice for evaluative knowledge, they are nevertheless very important for it.
[page 55]
What Role Do Emotions Play For The Virtuous?
Bloomfield argues that virtuous people are guided by virtues rather than emotions. The virtuous have trained themselves to be virtuously (motivated) and are guided by emotion only if they have no better decision procedure. Indeed, he suggests that emotions complete virtuous thought rather than guide it. Now I think that part of the training that the virtuous undergo is training of emotion, to be emotionally moved in the right kind of way. Perhaps the emotions of such trained people then are backgrounded, ready to kick in should something go awry. (Think of the fear experienced by a novice vs. an experienced driver.) I also think that feelings of love and compassion are genuinely motivational in the virtuous person, rather than merely completist, such that they act with and out of feeling. This raises a worry with Bloomfield’s view that emotions complete rather than guide virtuous behaviour, if we think that certain forms of virtuous behaviour express emotion: compassion again seems prominent here, but also think of forms of love. So I think that emotions play more of a role in virtuous behaviour than Bloomfield does.
Still, the fact that each one of these points is important and merits a lot of further discussion—added to the fact that nothing I say here will do much to settle any disputes between us—are evidence of the depth and quality of Bloomfield’s responses. I am very grateful to him for them, and look forward to discussing these and other issues with him on future occasions.
RESPONSE TO ALYCIA LAGUARDIA-LOBIANCO
LaGuardia-LoBianco writes that my analysis “assumes a certain sort of life—that which is shaped by the usual upsets and successes, griefs, and loves; a certain sort of world—that which is safe, trustworthy, and ready to reveal its information; and a certain sort of agent—one who is oriented to this world as an eager discoverer and willing social participant.” But in so doing, my account “circumscribes the theory to ideal agents and circumstances. This is worrisome if we think the philosophy of emotions (perhaps more so than some other subfields of philosophy) should capture and explain human experiences as they are actually lived.” An important, unfortunate aspect of lives as they are actually lived is that they commonly involve non-ideal conditions. To make this point, LaGuardia-LoBianco focuses on “traumatic experiences and their fallout." What LaGuardia-LoBianco does in her fascinating response is to look at how trauma complicates, challenges, and expands my account of the value of emotion. This is interesting and impressive philosophy, and I’m very grateful to LaGuardia-LoBianco for her care and consideration in her comments.
Now I agree with LaGuardia-LoBianco that the focus is primarily on the positive; and here her views line up nicely with Bloomfield’s. But while Bloomfield is sceptical about the reliability of emotion and the extent to which it is typically helpful for believing, acting, and virtue, LaGuardia-LoBianco’s point is that my book has too narrow a focus, and what we need is to consider how emotions function in a broader range of circumstances. As it happens, this worry mirrors something that Ian James Kidd has raised about my recent book Suffering and Virtue, in a paper titled “Suffering, Vulnerability, and Vices” (MS), in which he takes me to task (in a nice way) because I focus too much on what suffering can do in the promotion of virtue, and not what it can do and actually does in the promotion of vice. And, like LaGuardia-LoBianco, Kidd considers the possibility that appropriate responses in non-ideal circumstances—responses we have a good pragmatic reason to have—are not responses that would promote our flourishing, and look rather far from virtues.
[page 56]
I think that LaGuardia-LoBianco is right to highlight the fact that emotions which have significant value in relatively ideal circumstances—curiosity, pride, humility, and the general emotional tendency to motivate the search for reasons—can be disastrous for those in abusive relationships, or in conditions of political and other forms of oppression. So emotions that can help to bring about epistemic, motivational, and social goods, and which can facilitate the development of intellectual virtue, can lead to significant disvalue in non-ideal circumstances, and when they are functioning as they typically do. What the traumatized person needs to rely on, in many instances, are the kinds of traits that either come at a significant cost, or run counter to the flourishing of the person. They need, in other words, what Lisa Tessman calls burdened virtues.
Interestingly, I think that the account of emotion and virtue I favour can accommodate these points, in a way that suggests that my account need not be as oriented to the ideal as LaGuardia-LoBianco proposes. To see this, I might emphasise the fact—and more so than I did in the book—that emotions can play their positive roles and hence contribute towards other goods only under certain conditions. But when they do, they might be viewed as forms of or akin to faculty virtues. The notion of a faculty virtue was introduced into the philosophical lexicon by Ernest Sosa (1991). On his view, a faculty is defined as the ability or power to attain certain accomplishments. He writes:
Now of course an accomplishment attainable in given circumstances may be unattainable in other circumstances. Therefore, abilities correlate with accomplishments only relative to circumstances. There is for example our ability to tell (directly) the color and shape of a surface, so long as it is facing, ‘middle-sized,’ not too far, unscreened, and in enough light, and so long as one looks at it while sober, and so on. (Sosa 1991, 235)
What kinds of things can we identify as faculties or abilities in this sense? Sosa notes that “the most general faculties traditionally recognized are . . . perception, introspection, and memory” (Sosa 1991, 225).[1] John Greco’s (1993, 520) examples are “sight, hearing, introspection, memory, deduction and induction.” Now for Sosa, a faculty will be virtuous in light of “its performance of powers” (Sosa 1991, 227): it must demonstrate the ability to attain the set of accomplishments—i.e., to do the things it does—to a high degree. And what this means, for Sosa, is “that it outperform feasible competitors” in its “delivery” of the relevant goals or ends that constitute the accomplishments (Sosa 1991, 227).
In Suffering and Virtue and Emotion: The Basics, I expand the class of faculty virtues to include pain and nociception, and systems governing hunger, thirst, and sleep. But I also argue there that remorse can be a faculty virtue, just as pain is. And I’m inclined to think that curiosity can be as well, since it enables us to reliably achieve certain epistemic goods and goals, in the right circumstances. One possibility is to bring the kinds of emotional responses that LaGuardia-LoBianco highlights as important for enabling survival in non-ideal conditions—hyper-vigilance, closed-mindedness, mistrust, self-doubt, intellectual hubris—under the banner of faculty virtues. That is, we might think that emotional responses that we would typically regard as antithetical to flourishing, or that we think are vicious, count as faculty virtues in non-ideal circumstances, and so bring the kind of line that I propose and that LaGuardia-LoBianco supports closer together. There is certainly precedent for such a move, both in the views of Lisa Tessman, and in the work of Ian Kidd and Havi Carel, and which I endorse in Suffering and Virtue. Both Kidd and Carel highlight certain emotions and traits as having significant pragmatic importance and value as a response to a different kind of trauma, that related to serious physical
[page 57]
illness; these include anger, bitterness, cynicism, defensiveness, distrustfulness, evasiveness, and rudeness (read, for instance, Kidd’s [2012] paper “Can Illness Be Edifying”; and Carel’s [2019] book Illness.) These need not simply be viewed as merely useful emotions in the circumstances. Instead, it might well be the case that these can be the motivational components of genuine faculty virtues, given that they constitute abilities to attain certain accomplishments (survival, maintaining esteem, to protect us against pathophobic attitudes) and do so more efficiently than feasible competitors. Since I am happy to expand the range of virtues to include the dispositions associated with pain, hunger, thirst, and the feelings involved in these and in remorse, then I’m inclined to accept that such responses can be faculty virtues (and so to deny Bloomfield’s point that everyone will always be better off without these emotions and dispositions). If so, then this expansion will bring my views closer to those championed by LaGuardia-LoBianco, which—given the importance of her arguments—is from my perspective a very good thing.
RESPONSE TO DINA MENDONÇA
In the final commentary, Mendonça raises a number of interesting issues that my book generates. These are, in turn, (i) the issue of the relation between theories of emotion, empirical work, and theories of mind; (ii) the relation between pride and self-constitution; and (iii) the relation between pride and pain.
On the first issue, I share Mendonça’s scepticism as to whether empirical work by itself can prove decisive in settling major philosophical disagreements and disputes, not least because one needs philosophical reflection to assess the adequacy of the concepts being deployed in such work, and such reflection is often itself open to further debate. Think, for instance of the difficulties encountered if we try to get a handle on what it means to “like” something, or “want” something, or to be “motivated” to get something - to take just three that are prominent in areas of psychological research focusing on hedonics. Is it obvious that psychologists have an adequate conception on these terms--or an understanding that would satisfy philosophers who work on the nature of desire, or in action theory? Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that empirical work has a clear bearing on the directions in which philosophical thinking and progress can go. Witness, for instance, the importance of the phenomenon of pain asymbolia for philosophical questions about what pain is. Prior to empirical discoveries about asymbolia, it was a philosophical given, or a platitude, that pains are necessarily painful. Asymbolia cast doubt upon this idea, and in a way that has led to philosophical progress. Or so, at least, it seems to me. I am not entirely convinced, however, by Mendonça’s suggestion (inspired by Amelie Rorty) that different theories of emotion seem to reflect different theories or pictures of mind - although clearly, developments in philosophy of mind can have a bearing on our theorising about emotions. But there is not enough space here to delve deeper into this particular issue, fascinating though it is.
On the second issue, Mendonça is right to suggest that a deeper understanding of pride and its importance would have emerged if I had looked at the literature that she cites, which elaborates Hume’s proposal. The same is true of many other writings and traditions on pride, contemporary and historical. However, in addition to limits of space when writing a book of this kind, there are limits imposed by the point I was trying to make by looking at pride, which was to provide an illustration of the communicative value that expressions of pride can have. There is of course much more that pride can do. By the same token, I could have illustrated emotion’s communicative value by looking at other emotions as well - given that many emotions have recognisable facial
[page 58]
expressions, and that these can, in certain circumstances, serve important group needs. So depth and detail in explanation when writing about pride here was limited by at least two factors. In a longer work, I would hope to be able to do pride justice, in part by tackling some of the ideas and traditions that Mendonça cites.
On the third issue, Mendonça thinks that there might be some tension between my account of pride, the thought that sometimes we intentionally engage in activities which are painful because this enables us to communicate our virtue to others, and the claim that pain provides a model for how feelings motivate us. On that latter account, presented in Chapter 3, I argue that unpleasant feelings have an important motivational force, and this is true for both negative emotions and pains. It is important that they have such force, in helping us to do what we usually have good reason to do. Mendonça thinks that this runs counter to the idea that people are sometimes moved, intentionally, to do difficult and arduous things. I think that Mendonça is right to note a potential tension here. But I think that it is one that we can overcome by paying attention to the motivational force that pains can have at the first-order, so to speak, and the higher-order attractions that we can have towards pains. This phenomenon of ambivalence is familiar from other experiences: when we are scared and tempted to not go on the roller-coaster, but strongly desire both this ambivalent feeling and the thrill of being on the roller-coaster. Here we both desire not to take the ride, and also want, at a higher-level, the experience of excitement and thrill that is partly consequent upon the fear that we feel. So too with pain, which provides some motivation to stop whatever it is that we are doing, but which can also be desired from a higher-level, and where the object of the desire is an experience that has pain at its heart. To illustrate, think of the common experience of wanting to eat food that is so spicy that it hurts. The pain of the spicy food provides some motivation to stop eating, but the pleasure we get from the endorphin rush from experiencing something which is painful motivates us to keep on eating. So I think that there is tension here, but no worrying conflict or contradiction.
There are a lot of other interesting points that Mendonça raises, and which merit a longer and more detailed response. But I am grateful to her for her comments, and for the opportunity to address those that I could in this space.
[page 59]
Notes
[1] We might also include the faculty of reason, which is “a single faculty with sub-faculties . . . [of] intuitive reason and inferential reason.”
[page 60]
References
Sosa, E. 1991. Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greco, J. 1993. “Virtue Epistemology.” In A Companion to Epistemology, edited by J. Dancy and E. Sosa, 75-81. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
[page 61]
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev © 2021
Author email: aaron.benzeev[at]gmail.com.
