Abstract
Most agree that, in some special scenarios, prudence can speak against feeling a fitting emotion. Some go further, arguing that the tension between fittingness and prudence afflicts some emotions in a fairly general way. (Perhaps, for instance, it’s best for human well-being that we generally grieve much less than is fitting.) This paper goes even further: it argues that, when it comes to anxiety, the tension between fittingness and prudence is nearly inescapable. On any plausible theory, an enormous array of possible outcomes are both bad and epistemically uncertain in the right way to ground fitting anxiety. What’s more, the fittingness of an emotion is a demanding, not a permissive, normative status. So the norms of fitting emotion demand a great deal of anxiety. For almost any realistic agent, it would be deeply imprudent to feel anxiety in a way that meets the demands set by norms of fitting emotion.
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Notes
It’s common for discussions of fittingness to distinguish between the objective and subjective fittingness of an emotion (see Chappell 2012, 689n10)—or, in other words, between an emotion’s being fitting and its being warranted (see D’Arms and Jacobson 2000, p. 78 and Scarantino and De Sousa 2018, sec. 10.1). The case-pair in the main text illustrates a difference in the subjective fittingness, not the objective fittingness, of envy—the initial episode of envy does not fit the world as it is, but it does fit the world as represented by the subject’s epistemic position. My focus in this paper will be limited to the subjective fittingness of anxiety.
Considerations like this bribe are sometimes called “reasons of the wrong kind.” For introductions to reasons of the wrong kind, see Hieronymi (2005), Gertken and Kiesewetter (2017), and Schroeder (2012). Some hold that “reasons of the wrong kind” are, rightly considered, not reasons for or against emotion; for more on that view, see footnote 22.
This usage follows in the footsteps of some recent philosophical work on anxiety; see Kurth (2015, 2016, 2018). Psychological work on anxiety also often rejects the assumption that anxiety is by definition disproportionate or maladaptive; see Barlow (2001, p. 8), Baumeister and Tice (1990), and Marks and Nesse (1994).
The two traits to which I call attention also take center stage in Kurth’s account, on which the formal object of anxiety is “problematic uncertainty” (2015, p. 174). Kurth (2018, p. 109) adds an extra condition: in order for anxiety to fitting, he claims, one must have “reason to further assess the nature of the threat/challenge and to take steps to minimize exposure to it.” I suspect that some of the examples discussed in Sect. 2, in which a bad unsettled outcome is irrelevant for practical reasoning, offer prima facie grounds for rejecting this third condition, but won’t press the point further here.
It’s not totally clear whether this distinction can be cogently drawn when it comes to anxiety. Discussions of objective fittingness generally abstract away from a subject’s epistemic limits, but once we ignore epistemic limits, there may not be any propositions that are uncertain in the right way to make anxiety objectively fitting. I’ll set this question aside; if there is a distinction to be drawn between the objective and the subjective fittingness of anxiety, my discussion is directed toward the latter property.
Some might prefer to say that, strictly speaking, the object of anxiety is the possibility of a given outcome, not the bad outcome itself. My argument is neutral on this issue.
Benton (2018, p. 5) defends a similar principle regarding the epistemic conditions on fitting hope: “If there is a chance for one that p, and a chance for one that ¬p, then one may hope that p.”
I discuss this view in more depth in my “Hope for Fallibilists” (ms).
I set aside, here, the proposal that only outcomes that are sufficiently bad merit anxiety; for that proposal, see Sect. 3.2.
I discuss this general problem in my “Unfitting Absent Emotion” (ms).
I’ve written, for simplicity’s sake, as if fittingness of an emotion must be either a kind of demand to have it or a kind of permission to have it. But some hold, instead, that fittingness is neither permission-like nor demand-like. (Thanks for Selim Berker for discussion of this view.) But even for those who take this third approach, a question arises about the normative status of missed opportunities for fitting emotion: is the absence of fitting emotion, itself, unfitting? The argument I offer in this section provides some reasons for thinking that failures to have a fitting emotion are unfitting (for just the same reasons that inappropriately weak emotion is unfitting). And this is sufficient for a kind of tension between the fittingness and the prudence of having (or lacking) certain emotions.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion here.
There might be an important difference between cases in which I lack emotion because I simply ignore a given object and cases in which I lack emotion despite fully attending to that object. I return to this idea in Sect. 3.1.
Section 3.2 considers a ‘threshold’ modification for this proposal—one on which fittingness gives rise to demands on some occasions, and not on others. I argue that, even on that proposal, the tension between fitting and prudent anxiety is ubiquitous.
Some (see, for instance, Kelly 2002 and Shah 2006) will claim that the prudential value of feeling an emotion cannot, strictly speaking, provide reasons or obligations to feel an emotion; at most, it provides reasons, or obligations, to get oneself to feel an emotion. I remain neutral on this dispute. I’ll speak, for brevity’s sake, as if prudence directly recommends certain emotional states and forbids others. But this point could be translated into the point that prudence directs us to bring ourselves to feel, or avoid, some emotions.
Parfit (1987, pp. 493–502) influentially classifies theories of well-being as either hedonistic theories, desire-satisfaction theories, or objective-list theories. Hedonists (like Feldman 2004 and Crisp 2006) will universally agree that we have pro tanto prudential reason against feeling unpleasant emotions. So will many desire-satisfaction theorists; see especially Heathwood (2006, 2007), who suggests that an unpleasant emotion just is an emotion that one intrinsically desires not to feel at the time one feels it. And the most plausible “objective list” theorists will also acknowledge that unpleasant emotions always make some difference to welfare. Some, like Fletcher (2013), Hurka (2011, ch. 2) and Rice (2013), claim that pleasure is a basic welfare good. And even those like Griffin (1986) and Murphy (2001), who makes a point of omitting pleasure from the objective list, will often include other basic welfare goods (like Griffin’s “enjoyment” or Murphy’s “inner peace”) that are plausibly frustrated by anxiety. Even these objective-list views, then, can and should accept the weak assumption that anxiety counts pro tanto against well-being.
For work that motivates an asymmetrical approach to the constituents of well-being and the constituents of ill-being, see Kagan (2015).
Things are slightly more complicated: the most plausible view in this territory holds that objectively fitting emotions, not subjectively fitting ones, are of final prudential value. But subjective prudential norms will nevertheless recommend feeling subjectively fitting emotions; roughly speaking, this will be a subject’s best available strategy for getting to the emotions that represent reality.
I do not assume, here, that sadness toward an unchanging object can never fittingly diminish; see Sect. 3.3. I make only the weak assumption that sadness can be unfitting in virtue of coming to an end too quickly.
Some may suspect that a person who always or very frequently distracted herself from feeling unpleasant emotions would be missing something important in a life well-lived. I can grant this point; even if prudence does not speak against avoiding unpleasant emotions too frequently, prudence might still speak against feeling all the anxiety that is fitting.
Kurth (2018, pp. 126–134) responds to a related point, which he calls the “Xanax objection,” by noting that totally eliminating anxiety from one’s mental life might make it impossible (at least for creatures like us) to have fully virtuous moral concern for others. But, even if it’s right, this point about the wholesale elimination of anxiety does not cast doubt on my point: that neither virtue nor prudence speaks in favor of feeling all the anxiety that is fitting.
As an anonymous referee points out, some cousins of the attention-restricted picture can avoid this result. Perhaps, for instance, fittingness-demands arise regarding not only objects that one actually attends to, but also to objects that one ought to attend to. (Or perhaps fittingness-demands arise only regarding the objects that one ought to attend to.) These views raise interesting questions. For instance: what, exactly, is the normative flavor of the ‘ought’ in play here? And can this view be developed in a way that respects the idea that the fittingness of an emotion is a distinctive normative status? I discuss these questions in more depth in my “Unfitting Absent Emotion” (ms). For the purposes of this paper, however, we can set these views, and the questions that they raise, aside. For any recognizable, non-ad hoc way of understanding obligations to attend, there will be a host of cases in which we ought to attend (at least briefly) to some bad unsettled outcome, but anxiety toward that outcome would not be prudentially good.
Recall that my focus in this paper is on the subjective fittingness, not the objective fittingness, of anxiety. See footnote 2.
This evaluative claim about fittingness-demands for anxiety could be, but need not be, coupled with a descriptive claim about anxiety: the claim that anxiety itself only occurs when an agent psychologically represents an outcome as being sufficiently likely, and sufficiently problematic, to clear some threshold. (For discussion of this descriptive claim, see Kurth 2018n65).
Some might feel suspicious of this verdict about the Dangerous Toy case. One source of suspicion might be a sympathy for the view that there are no positive demands for anxiety at all; I argue against that view in Section 1. Another source of suspicion might be the sense that the probability of injury in the Dangerous Toy case is too low to require anxiety. Readers feeling this suspicion should feel free to imagine an analogous case that involves a significantly higher probability of injury; the point in the main text will still hold. A final source of suspicion might be a sense that, even given a significantly higher epistemic probability that it will obtain, the outcome that is salient in this case (partial blindness for a child) is not a serious enough, or a bad enough, outcome to demand anxiety. To put some pressure on this final sort of suspicion, I invite the reader to consider a further development of the case: suppose that the toy actually does slip and blind the child in one eye, causing the child enormous pain. And imagine that I continue to watch, attention firmly and solely trained on the badness of this injury, and as before, I remain totally calm and emotionless. Here, I take it, most readers will agree that my reaction is unfitting; this is now a case where the bad event involved demands, rather than merely permitting, a negative emotional response of some sort. (Perhaps sadness instead of anxiety, since the relevant bad outcome is now settled rather than unsettled.) But the bad outcome in question here is precisely the bad outcome relevant to the original case; though it is now much more probable than it used to be, and no longer epistemically unsettled, it is just as disvaluable. So an injury to one child is a serious enough matter to give rise to a demand for some emotions (like sadness or distress). If that’s true, it’s highly unclear, once we’ve set aside questions about level of probability, why this sort of outcome couldn’t also be a serious enough matter to give rise to a demand for anxiety too.
This move is much more promising when coupled with the attention-restricted proposal canvassed above: if demands for anxiety about p only arise when one attends to p, and it needn’t last forever, then perhaps it’s within an agent’s grasp to feel a fitting bout of anxiety when p first occurs to us.
Compare Na’aman’s criticism of the “object view of fittingness” (forthcoming-a).
Kurth (2018) might be interpreted as adopting this strategy; he claims that anxiety is fitting only when “one has reason to further assess the nature of the threat/challenge and to take steps to minimize exposure to it” (109; cf. his discussion of anxiety regarding the possibility that one has already made a bad decision on p. 132).
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Acknowledgements
For discussion that helped to hone this paper, I’m grateful to Aaron Elliott, Elizabeth Jackson, David Killoren, Zoë Johnson King, Tristram McPherson, Andrew Moon, Oded Na’aman, Richard Rowland, Declan Smithies, Jacob Sparks, Miles Tucker, Mikhail Valdman, Daniel Wilkenfeld, Michael Young, and Yuan Yuan.
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This article belongs to the topical collection on Worry and Wellbeing: Understanding Anxiety, edited by. Charlie Kurth and Juliette Vazard.
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Fritz, J. Fitting anxiety and prudent anxiety. Synthese 199, 8555–8578 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03175-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03175-8