Abstract
Sometimes, the fact that an attitude is fitting seems like a demand to have that attitude. But in other cases, the fact that an attitude is fitting seems more like a permission to have the attitude. I defend a proposal that can accommodate both of these appearances. I argue that there is a kind of emotionlessness, which I call apathy, that can be fitting or unfitting in just the same way that emotion can. I further argue that, in some cases, it can be fitting to respond a single object either with emotion or with apathy. When both apathy and emotion are fitting options, the fittingness of the emotion is a permission-like status; failures to have the fitting emotion are not failures of fit. But when an emotion is fitting and apathy is unfitting, the fittingness of the emotion is a demand-like status; failures to have the emotion are failures of fit.
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Notes
The cupboard example appears in Whiting (2021: 414).
Some parts of my paper “Fitting Anxiety and Prudent Anxiety” (2021) are also guilty of encouraging this conflation; in the abstract, for instance, I write that fittingness is “a demanding, not a permissive, normative status.” Now, the main text of that paper walks back from that sweeping claim; it makes space for the possibility that there are at least some cases in which fittingness is not demand-like (see Sect. 3.2). This paper goes further; it offers a positive argument for the view that there are in fact cases of that sort.
Ewing, for example, writes “If we mean by ‘good’ what ought to be desired, approved, or admired, it seems still more obvious to me that we are thinking of ‘ought’ in the sense in which it signifies fittingness” (2012, 151). See also Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2004) and Gertken and Kiesewetter (2017).
Daniel Whiting defends a limited version of this conclusion, writing that, at least “in the aesthetic domain, an affect’s being fitting is a permissive matter, not an obligatory one” (2021, 413–4).
Berker also argues against the proposal that the fitting can be understood in terms of evaluative categories, like good or better than.
See Rowland (2022) for a view on which questions about the authoritative normativity of fittingness are closely connected to questions about non-instrumental value.
In fact, my paper “Unfitting Absent Emotion” (forthcoming) argues that there are some intuitions about fittingness that we must sacrifice for precisely this reason. That paper is especially concerned with cases in which a person simultaneously confronts a wide variety of different objects that all merit different emotional responses, and the person fails to take up all the emotions in question. I argue that it’s very often unfitting to fail to respond to emotion-meriting objects in these cases. This is an austere proposal, and one that may fly in the face of some lenient intuitions. But one can safely set aside some lenient intuitions while also taking seriously the lenient intuitions that I’ve marshalled in this section. This is precisely what Berker does; he notes that, although we should not be moved to leniency by concerns about our cognitive limitations, there are good grounds for favoring a lenient approach that have nothing to do with cognitive limitations. “When someone tells a cringeworthy joke,” he writes, “it is not compulsory for me to cringe, but that is not because cringing would expend crucial emotional resources that could be devoted elsewhere” (2022, sec. 4).
This sort of view is sometimes called “permissivism.” But I avoid that label here to avoid the implication that I am analyzing the fittingness of fine-grained emotions using the deontic property of permission.
Berker (2022, sec. 4) offers a similar conclusion, claiming that fittingness (unlike permission and requirement) is “not alternatives dependent.”.
There are other arguments for uniqueness about rational credence, too, but they also seem ill-suited to support uniqueness about degrees of fitting emotion. Dogramaci and Horowitz (2016), for instance, argue that uniqueness about rational credence is part of the best explanation for why, when we promote the rationality of our community members, we thereby promote the reliability of testimony. This strategy seems unlikely to translate smoothly to fitting emotion; it’s far from clear that there is, or that there could be, a robust social practice of emotional transmission that appropriately parallels the practice of belief-transmission through testimony that is the focus of Dogramaci and Horowitz’s discussion.
I also draw on this point in my (2021) and my (forthcoming).
For a similar argument (about epistemic rationality, not fittingness) see Siscoe (2022).
This exposition elides the distinction between partial absolute gradable adjectives like “wet,” which are associated with scales with minimal endpoints, and total absolute gradable adjectives like “empty,” which are associated with scales with maximal endpoints. If “fitting” is an absolute gradable adjective, it is of the latter variety.
It’s worth noting that Berker and Maguire seem to agree that the natural-language term ‘fitting’ is gradable; Maguire simply insists that the property of fittingness is non-gradable.
Here’s a second one, which faces similar problems: apathy represents its object as being so insignificant that it couldn’t be fittingly responded to with emotion.
For a more prolonged discussion, see my “Unfitting Absent Emotion” (forthcoming).
Clarke and Rawling (forthcoming) argue for a related conclusion about the emotions involved in blame.
There is an interesting question, and one that deserves further discussion, about just how strong one’s epistemic connection to a given object must be before one’s neutrality toward that object is eligible to be considered fitting or unfitting. For the purposes of this paper, I’ll simply propose the following sufficiency claim: if one is aware of, and carefully attends to, the emotionally significant features of an object, one’s neutrality toward that object is evaluable as fitting or unfitting.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the participants at the fourth annual Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop, including Carolina Flores, Christopher Howard, Claire Kirwin, Z Quanbeck, Olle Risberg, Richard Rowland, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, and Keshav Singh. (Apologies to the many other helpful interlocutors whom I’ve failed to name.) Thanks, too, to Andrew Moon, Liz Jackson, and Miles Tucker, and special thanks to Chris Blake-Turner for excellent and detailed written comments.
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Fritz, J. Why fittingness is only sometimes demand-like. Philos Stud 180, 2597–2616 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01971-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01971-1