Emotion

Charlie Kurth

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000547771
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

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.

In this book, Charlie Kurth explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the book 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, he 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.

Including suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, Emotion is ideal for those studying and researching the philosophy of emotion as well as ethics, epistemology, and the philosophies of mind and psychology.

1 Introduction: The philosophical significance of emotion

DOI: 10.4324/9780429316678-1

1.1 Introduction

Emotions are cool. As a target of philosophical investigation, emotions are interesting not only because they engage so many philosophical issues—in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, epistemology, and value theory—but also because we are so intimately familiar with them: we see emotions in ourselves, in others, and even in our pets. Emotions are also a topic of significant inquiry across the social and cognitive sciences—not to mention literature and the arts. This makes them an exciting target for interdisciplinary research. In fact, studying emotions in a cross-disciplinary manner has been fruitful—especially with regard to questions about the nature of emotions and their relevance for our understanding of human agency. So, it’s no wonder that we’ve seen a significant increase in interest in emotions from philosophers, scientists, and beyond.

But what’s distinctive about a philosophical investigation of emotion as opposed to the forms of inquiry we might find in other disciplines? Although the answer to this question will become clearer as we progress, we can start by thinking about how the methods and targets of emotion research differ across disciplines. A philosophical investigation of emotion probes at the nature and value of emotion using the tools of conceptual analysis (often as shaped by work in other disciplines). This then contrasts with, for instance, discussions of emotion in literature, linguistics, anthropology, and the cognitive sciences.

Oversimplifying a bit, a central aim of discussions of emotion in literature (and the arts more generally) is to provide us with rich, evocative depictions of both the lived experience of emotional life and the significance that emotions have for ourselves and our connections with others. By contrast, emotion research from anthropologists and linguists uses ethnography and linguistic analysis to uncover the cultural-historic roots of emotion terms and concepts, including things like how languages differ in the ways that they describe and categorize aspects of emotional life as well as how a group’s distinctive emotion terms/concepts might shape the emotions that group members feel and how they understand themselves and the world they’re in. Finally, work in psychology and cognitive science seeks to understand things like the causal mechanisms (e.g., neural structures and chemical pathways) that underlie emotion; they also investigate how emotions are shaped—in the moment and developmentally—by other (non-emotional) systems, learning, and the environment more generally.

Of course, the boundaries between these disciplinary approaches are blurry—in part because each discipline makes use of the findings of the others. Although this overlap brings challenges (e.g., how to make sense of distinctive research methodologies and how to reconcile difference in the ways that emotion terms are used and translated), it also brings exciting opportunities for researchers to advance our understanding of emotion.

In this book, we embark on a systematic philosophical investigation of emotion—though one that’s informed by work in the social and cognitive sciences. To do this, we will focus on two very broad questions: What are emotions? And in what ways might emotions be valuable? More specifically, in Chapters 2–4, we will wrestle with questions about the nature of emotion. When we feel anger or pride, what kind of mental or physiological state are we experiencing? Relatedly, what are the characteristic features of emotions: Is it the way they make us feel? The way they make us think and act? Something else? Adding to this, we can ask what makes emotions like fear, anger, sadness, and grief the distinct emotions that they are as well as what makes emotions different from things like moods or bodily sensations such as hunger and itches. Broadening our discussion, we will also ask how we might explain the differences in the ways that people from different cultures think and talk about emotions. And we’ll explore whether emotions are things that cats, dogs, and groundhogs can experience.

In Chapters 5–8, we turn to our second big project: exploring the ways in which emotions might be valuable. For instance, are emotions like joy and love experiences that make our lives better? What about anxiety and disgust—might these emotions also be valuable? Or are they so unpleasant that we’d be better off not experiencing them at all? Similarly, might emotions like rage and jealousy be too violent to be things we should want to experience? Thinking about the bigger picture, we will explore the role that emotions might play in making us better (or worse) people—be it in the ways that we think and reason (as with curiosity perhaps), the ways we treat others (compassion, disgust, and envy), and how we feel about ourselves (pride and guilt). We’ll also explore the role that emotions might play both in grounding evaluative concepts like the shameful and the amusing and in providing us with epistemic access to the evaluative properties associated with particular emotions (fear and danger, sadness and loss).¹

In the rest of this introductory chapter, we will look at some examples of everyday emotions (Section 1.2) in order set the stage for a more systematic discussion of both what a good theory of emotion should do and what role research in the social and cognitive sciences might play in philosophical discussions about the nature and value of emotion (Sections 1.3 and 1.4). We will conclude with a brief preview of the topics that we’ll cover in the balance of the book (Section 1.5).

1.2 Starting places: emotions and why they matter

To begin to draw out some of the richness and intrigue of emotions, consider the following examples.

1. Fear. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is a glass platform that extends 70 feet out over the Grand Canyon. For those who take the stroll, the Walk provides a view of the Colorado River and the canyon floor far below. It’s a major tourist attraction not just because of the spectacular view it provides but also because of how it provides that view: you see the bottom of the canyon—4,000 feet beneath you!—through the glass panel you’re standing on.

Whereas many find walking the platform thrilling, some are terrified—and these emotional responses bring very different behaviors. The thrilled don’t want to leave the platform and the terrified don’t want to step on it. But there’s a further curiosity: those who are afraid experience their fear even though they know that the Skywalk is perfectly safe. So safe, in fact, that it can survive an 8.0-magnitude earthquake, withstand 100-mph winds, and support the weight of 71 fully loaded 747 airplanes! Consider, as one example of the fear that the thought of walking the platform brings for some, the following comment on the tourist information website, Trip Advisor: “Amazing and scary. Afraid of depth. Walked holding rail … I know it is safe, but … Should try it at least once, if afraid.”

Switching gears a bit, my dog Jake wouldn’t be scared at all to stand on the Skywalk—he’s unfazed by the steep cliffs we explore on our hikes. But thunderstorms … that’s a completely different matter. They leave him a fearful, shaking mess hiding in the basement. Given all this, what can we say about who really feels fear (humans, dogs, fruit flies …) and why they fear what they do (something in their genes, a bad experience …)? And what might answers to these questions tell us about what fear is? Relatedly, these examples suggest that fear is a response to danger. But if we feel it when we’re perfectly safe, is it really a valuable or rational response?

Pushing further, consider, not fears of Skywalks and thunderstorms, but insects. In particular, consider the familiar meme of the housewife terrified of the cockroach in the kitchen. There she is, screaming as she waits for her husband to come and kill the bug. What we have here is an unfortunate, gendered stereotype: woman as fearful and fragile, man as the fearless protector. Of course, we can easily recognize the problems with memes like this when they are pointed out in the context of an academic conversation. But emotion-based stereotypes of this sort often operate under the surface, affecting our interactions with others (how we think about them and how we act toward them). Sometimes the influence of emotion stereotypes is innocuous, but often it isn’t. Stereotyping women as fearful and fragile—and so in need of protection—or Black men as angry and so dangerous has the potential to do real and lasting damage to the lives and livelihood of these individuals. Here we see how questions about fear’s value are complicated by our (stereotyped) beliefs about when emotions should be felt and by whom.

2. Compassion and love. When Ari Mahler heard about the 11 people who were killed in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27, 2018, he was worried that his parents might have been two of the victims. But Mahler was also a trauma nurse at the Allegheny General Hospital. So when the ambulance carrying Robert Bowers—the gunman from the synagogue shooting—arrived, Mahler went to work. He did his job, tending to Bowers’s wounds, and did so from feelings compassion and love. It didn’t matter to Mahler, a Jew and the son of a rabbi, that the man whose wounds he was treating had just killed nearly a dozen others—yelling “Death to all Jews!” as he started shooting. It didn’t matter that Bowers deserved the wounds (he was shot by the police in an effort to stop the rampage). Rather, in explaining why he acted as he did, Mahler pointed to his emotions and the power they have:

   Love. That’s why I did it. Love as an action is more powerful than words, and love in the face of evil gives others hope. It demonstrates humanity. It reaffirms why we’re all here. The meaning of life is to give meaning to life, and love is the ultimate force that connects all living beings.

   (Flynn 2018)

   If you’re like me, you likely find Mahler’s words and actions inspiring. You might also (again, like me) find it difficult to see how you could have done the same thing if in his shoes: how could I feel compassion (much less love) for someone who did something so horrible? In fact, research by cognitive scientists suggests that this isn’t unusual. That is, compassion is an emotion we’re more likely to feel in response to the suffering of someone we know than a stranger. But, equally noteworthy, it also appears that we can broaden the circle of people we feel compassion towards through, for instance, practices like Buddhist mindfulness training where we learn to break down barriers between our thoughts of ourselves and thoughts of others—even strangers and our enemies.

Compassion, then, reveals something both about the moral power of emotions and how empirical work can help us cultivate morally beneficial emotions. But although compassion gives us a glimpse of the good that emotions can do, the picture of emotions’ moral significance is more complex, as we’ll see when we turn to disgust.

3. Disgust. If you’ve ever had food poisoning, you know that the mere sight (or smell) of the food that made you sick can bring back strong feelings of disgust. In fact, researchers have given this phenomenon a name—the Garcia Effect. It refers to our tendency to develop powerful disgust sensitivities to things that have made us sick, sensitivities that we can acquire very quickly. Sometimes just one unfortunate experience is enough. These features of disgust are thought to reveal something about disgust’s evolutionary origins: it’s thought to show that disgust is an emotion we’ve developed in order to protect ourselves against poisons and pathogens in the things we might eat or touch.

But related research suggests that disgust isn’t a very accurate response. For instance, if we’ve developed a disgust sensitivity as the result of the bad tuna salad we ate, we’ll avoid eating it again. But that means we’ll pass up opportunities for all that nutritious (and delicious) tuna salad that hasn’t gone bad. More troubling, it turns out that the things that the Garcia Effect makes us sensitive to aren’t always the things that actually made us sick (e.g., it wasn’t really the tuna salad that made me ill but rather the stomach bug that was going around the office). Thus, in disgust, we have a useful—but flawed—emotion: a tool that imperfectly protects us against biological contaminants.

But disgust also has a moral dimension. As William Miller, professor of law and history, explains,

there are those vices and offenses for which notions of ugliness, smelliness, sliminess readily apply and those for which they do not. Hypocrisy, betrayal, cruelty put us in the swamp of the disgusting, and no other moral sentiment seems as well qualified to express our disapprobation.

(1998: 205)

Given Miller’s observation, it’s no surprise that some of the most commonly mentioned objects of disgust are things like stealing, taking advantage of the elderly, and cheating.

All this seems like good news. But we need to be careful about what conclusions we draw about disgust’s moral value. After all, we’ve seen that the disgust sensitivities we acquire can be inaccurate. This means we can become disgusted by things that are not morally problematic (e.g., disgust toward inter-racial marriage). Additionally, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains, history is full of examples of individuals (e.g., women and Jews) being portrayed as having stock disgust properties—being diseased, dirty, or smelly—for the purpose of eliciting disgust in their persecutors (2004: 107–15). If that’s not bad enough, empirical work suggests that, unlike compassion, disgust resists our efforts to correct it or shape it for the better.

So what are we to make of all this? For instance, what can we say about the value of disgust—is it an emotion that we would be better off without? Moreover, given the contrasts that we’ve seen between compassion and disgust, is there anything we can say about the value of emotions in general?

4. Reactive attitudes: anger, shame, and gratitude. Certain emotions appear to play a distinctive role in our interactions with each other. Notice, for instance, that although we can be afraid or disgusted by inanimate objects (the green, slimy thing we found on bread we’re eating), emotions like anger, shame, and gratitude are things that it seems appropriate to feel only toward people. In fact, emotions like these seem to have been set up to track the moral quality of our actions: we feel grateful when someone helps us out, resentful when they intentionally hurt us, and shame when we fail to live up to other’s (or our own) expectations.

Observations like these suggest that these emotions, which often get called “reactive attitudes,” are central to our thinking about moral responsibility—our assessments of who is worthy of praise and who deserves blame for what they’ve done. But what, more specifically, is the role that these emotions play? Are they just ways that we reward and punish others for their actions (the praise of gratitude, the admonishment of resentment)? Or is the connection deeper? That is, should we understand responsibility itself in terms of these emotions: to be a morally responsible agent just is to be someone who can be the target of reactive ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction The philosophical significance of emotion
• 2 Metaphysics What are emotions?
• 3 Philosophy of science Are emotions natural kinds?
• 4 Comparative cognition Do animals have emotions?
• 5 Epistemology Are emotions epistemically valuable?
• 6 Meta-ethics Are emotions the foundation for value and morality?
• 7 Agency Are emotions the basis of responsibility?
• 8 Virtue Do emotions make us better people?
• 9 Conclusions and extensions Where do we stand, where are we headed?
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index