Abstract
If emotions provide reasons for action through their intentional content, as is often argued, where does this leave the role of the affective element of an emotion? Can it be more than a motivator and have significant bearing of its own on our emotional actions, as actions done for reasons? One way it can is through reinforcing other reasons that we might have, as Greenspan (2011) argues. Central to Greenspan’s account is the claim that the affective discomfort of an emotion, as a fact about the agent’s state of being, provides an additional normative reason to act to alleviate the state. This, I argue, is not correct, nor is it the best way to understand emotions as reason-reinforcers. In this paper, I thus do two things: I provide an examination of how and why the affect of emotion could provide reasons to act to alleviate it and I propose that the real way emotions reinforce reasons is through the way they orient our attention onto things that matter, registering them as salient.
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Notes
See Chapter 1 in Deonna and Teroni (2012) for a discussion of the differences between these and other affective phenomena, such as sentiments.
Although see Deonna and Teroni (2012) for a recent challenge to the claim that it is the content of an emotion that is evaluative. Rather, they argue that emotions are evaluative attitudes taken towards non-evaluative content. This challenge, as far as I can see, makes no difference to the issues under discussion in this paper and so I set it aside to focus on the more widespread understanding of emotions as having an evaluative intentional content.
Greenspan focuses on moral reasons and the moral realm in (2011), but the same story would hold for non-moral reasons, as she discusses in her earlier (1988) book.
Greenspan makes use of her ‘critical conception’ of reasons (Greenspan 2005, 2007, 2010, 2011). On this critical conception, giving reasons for action either answers or offers criticism. Favouring reasons answer criticism of an action, whereas critical reasons offer criticism of an action. Favouring reasons are optional and can justify an action, but they do not impose normative requirements on the agent. Critical reasons, in contrast, do impose normative requirements. This critical conception of reasons is not dominant in the literature, where normative reasons are usually said to count in favour of some action and the normative relation is one of favouring rather than one of criticising. However, there are similar approaches to be found, such as those of Raz (1999), Dancy (2004) and Gert (2004). In any event, Greenspan argues that emotions provide additional critical reasons (which she also calls normative reasons in places). While I choose to frame my discussion in terms of normative reasons, my arguments against Greenspan’s claim that discomfort provides a reason – focusing on what makes a state of discomfort unpleasant or bad – serve to show that emotions do not provide critical reasons. This is because being a critical reason requires that the agent is criticisable if she fails to act on it. In order to be criticisable, there must be something about the discomfort as a fact about the agent’s state of being that is bad. If there is nothing inherently bad, as I shall argue, then we are not criticisable for remaining in a state of discomfort.
Thanks to Julien Deonna for the example.
Harmon-Jones et al. (2013), in fact, define affective states along these three dimensions.
A challenge for offering a successful account of pain is to show how the unpleasantness of pain can motivate and rationalise pain avoidance actions by providing motivating reasons for those actions. While the focus for pain is on motivating reasons and mine is on normative reasons, the challenge for pain theorists is similar to the challenge I am tackling here, of showing how an experience of a certain kind is unpleasant (and hence bad for the agent). It is thus useful to draw on this literature for current purposes and I do so, with care, throughout.
And this is not what Greenspan claims, as shall be discussed below.
According to evaluativists about pain, the motivational state of unpleasant pain is one that represents bodily damage as bad, and the experience of that representation of badness is itself bad or unpleasant (Bain 2014). So, it is the experience of something being evaluated positively or negatively that is important.
‘Self-evaluation’ is my term, not Greenspan’s.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank a number of people for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. In particular, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for this journal, Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi, Julien Deonna, Fabrice Teroni, Tristram Oliver-Skuse, and the members of Thumos, the Genevan Research Group on Emotions, Values and Norms. This work was supported by the National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) ‘Affective Sciences’.
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Carman, M. How Emotions do not Provide Reasons to Act. Philosophia 46, 555–574 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9896-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9896-y