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Philosophy of emotions

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Emotion: truth/fittingness. Rationality as appropriateness or fittingness of an emotion to its object ... the standard of fittingness: fear & dangerous, anger ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Philosophy of emotions


1
Philosophy of emotions
  • Emotions, agency, and responsibility
  • 3.12.08
  • Mikko Salmela
  • mikko.salmela_at_helsinki.fi

2
A contested idea
  • On the one hand, there is a long tradition
    holding emotions as passions that fall beyond
    control and responsibility.
  • Concepts of emotion pathe (Greek) passiones
    (Latin) Western philosophy until the 18th
    century.
  • The notion of passion combines the ideas of
    passivity and suffering.
  • On the other hand, another long tradition has
    emphasized our ability to indirectly control our
    emotions through the cultivation of appropriate
    dispositions and skills.
  • Aristotle the Stoics
  • Nussbaum and Solomon we can exercise some
    control over our emotional life by thinking and
    willing

3
Emotional Agency
  • Nancy Sherman Taking responsibility for our
    emotions (1999)
  • Emotional agency is based on the fact that from
    earliest infancy, we regulate many of our
    emotions not an either-or thing but develops in
    degrees.
  • Greenberg Paivio (1997 28) emotion
    experience is initially primordially regulated by
    caretakers, but over the course of normal
    development it becomes increasingly
    self-regulated as a result of development in
    neurophysiology, cognition, language, and
    self-understanding
  • Sherman psychoanalysis can meet Aristotle in
    explaining how we can transform our emotions into
    virtuous ones.

4
Emotion regulation
  • Definition (Gross 1998) ER is the process by
    which people influence which emotions they have,
    when they have them, and how they experience and
    express them.
  • A continuum from automatic, unconscious and
    effortless processes to controlled, conscious and
    effortful ones.
  • Intrinsic vs. extrinsic regulation
  • Not inherently good or bad usefulness depends on
    the context and on the persons goals.
  • The general aim is to downregulate negative
    affect and to upregulate positive affect
    (positivity and negativity understood in hedonic
    terms).
  • Cultural values also important in determining
    appropriate responses.
  • ER can be distinguished from related concepts
    coping and defences

5
Forms of emotion regulation (Gross)
  • Situation Situation Attentional
    Cognitive Response
  • Selection Modification Deployment
    Change Modulation
  • EMOTION
  • o o
    o o
    o
  • Gross Thompson 2008, figure 1.5
  • Situation selection choosing a situation that
    one expects to give rise to desirable emotions.
  • A problem the accuracy of affective forecasting.
  • Situation modification modification of external,
    physical environment
  • Attentional deployment distraction or
    concentration
  • Cognitive change reappraisal of the emotional
    significance of the situation or our ability to
    cope with it.
  • Permits the modification of the entire emotional
    response without notable physiological,
    cognitive, or interpersonal costs.
  • Response modulation influencing physiological,
    experiential, or behavioural responses
  • Suppression consumes more energy than other forms
    of ER


6
Emotional labor
  • ARLIE R. HOCHSCHILDThe Managed Heart (1983)
  • Definition emotion management according to
    specific feeling or display rules in order to
    create a publicly observable facial and bodily
    display.
  • External purpose and motivation
  • Surface and deep acting
  • surface acting faking of emotions that are not
    actually felt
  • deep acting evoking or suppressing of actual
    emotions through exhortation or trained
    imagination
  • Mixed evidence about consequences
  • On the one hand, EL is associated with negative
    consequences, such as sense of inauthenticity,
    emotional exhaustion, job dissatisfaction,
    stress, depression, absenteeism and turnovers,
    drug and alcohol abuse, burnout, and other health
    problems, esp. in bad working conditions.
  • On the other hand, there is evidence that emotion
    management at work may facilitate job
    satisfaction, feelings of personal
    accomplishment, self-efficacy and
    self-expression, and even a sense of
    authenticity.

7
Responsibility for emotions
  • A problem
  • Responsibility entails free choice.
  • Free choice requires intellectual deliberation
    about alternatives.
  • Intellectual deliberations are absent from
    emotions.
  • 4. We are not responsible for our emotions.
  • gtlt Yet, in many circumstances we impute
    responsibility for emotions.
  • What are the conditions of responsibility for
    emotions?
  • Responsibility and doing or having at will
  • Cannot be necessary for responsibility
  • Responsibility and avoidability
  • Arriving at situation where some result is
    unavoidable is relevant.
  • Responsibility, foresight and the cultivation and
    control of emotions
  • Aristoteles people are responsible for their
    present characters in so far as their previous
    voluntary acts foreseeably resulted in the
    emergence of those characters.
  • Beliefs mind-to-world direction of fit truth as
    condition of satisfaction
  • Desires world-to-mind direction of fit
    fulfillment as condition of satisfaction
  • Emotions no/zero direction of fit truth and
    fulfillment as conditions of success for
    constitutive belief and desire, respectively

8
Direct and indirect moral responsibility
  • Direct moral responsibility (Ben-Zeev 2000)
  • (1) intending to do and doing X freely
  • (2) the ability to avoid X
  • (3) the ability to foresee the consequences of X
  • Indirect responsibility when the three conditions
    are not satisfied at the moment of doing X but
    they have been satisfied before that moment.
  • Responsibility for emotions indirect and partial.
  • Not for particular emotional responses, but for
    the creation of the mechanism underlying those
    responses
  • Nevertheless, responsibility is not necessary for
    the moral evaluation of emotions.

9
Article 5 Robert Solomon On the Passivity of
the Passions, in Manstead, A., Frijda, N. and
Fischer, A. (eds) Feelings and Emotions.
Cambridge Cambridge University Press (2004), pp.
11-29.
  • Questions for readingĀ 
  • What obstacles are there to seeing emotions as a
    matter of choice?
  • What aspects can we distinguish in emotions?
    Which aspects can be liable to control and
    responsibility?
  • How can we cultivate emotions?
  • What is Solomons view about the duration of
    emotions?
  • What sources are there for our responsibility for
    our emotions?
  • What does the comparison to kinesthetic judgments
    reveal about emotions?
  • What is active in emotion expression?
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