Abstract
A range of contemporary voices argue that negative affective states like distress and anxiety can be morally productive, broaden our epistemic horizons and, under certain conditions, even contribute to social progress. But the potential benefits of stress depend on an agent’s capacity to constructively interpret their affective states. An inability to do so may be detrimental to an agent’s wellbeing and mental health. The broader political, cultural, and socio-economic context shapes the kinds of stressors agents are exposed to, but it also delineates the hermeneutic equipment they have available to interpret their stress. To explain this specific problem of conceptual deprivation, philosophical theories on wellbeing and anxiety need to move beyond individualist perspectives.
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Notes
According to the “John Henryism” hypothesis in social epidemology: “goal-oriented people who have a strong commitment to hard work and a drive to succeed, but who are confronted with high levels of psychosocial stressors like financial insecurity, familial instability, and discriminatory acts, tend to exhibit significantly worse health outcomes compared to those who are gritty and socially advantaged or those who do not engage in gritty behavior” (Morton and Paul, 2019, p. 202). Designating a related problem, scholars also point to the extra “minority taxation” or “cultural taxation” that disadvantaged and historically excluded groups face in the workplace (Thorsen, 2019).
Ami Harbin (2016) also details how uncomfortable, hard truths may emerge through disorientation in thought and José Medina provides an extended discussion of the beneficial and detrimental outcomes of what he calls epistemic friction, i.e. the conflict (or urge to resist) that some agents encounter when confronted with opinions or positions that counter their beliefs (Medina, 2013, chap. 1).
Importantly, to Kurth practically anxiety is both instrumentally valuable because it strengthens epistemic agency by provoking the agent to deliberate and gather information before they decide on how to proceed (Kurth, 2018, pp. 212–13) and “aretaically, perhaps even intrinsically, valuable […] because of what it reveals about the emotional and evaluative attunement of those who experience it” (Kurth, 2018, p. 104).
Woolman explicitly elaborates on this and related problems: “Tradesmen and Retailers of Goods, who depend on their Business for a Living, are naturally inclined to keep the Good-will of their Customers; nor is it a pleasant Thing for young Men to be under any Necessity to question the Judgment or Honesty of elderly Men, and more especially of such as have a fair Reputation. Deep-rooted Customs, though wrong, are not easily altered; but it is the Duty of every one to be firm in that which they certainly know is right for them” (Woolman, 1774, p. 44).
For a more detailed discussion of the moral dimensions of distress, see Munch-Jurisic (2022).
On this occasion, I do not commit to a specific theory of well-being is, but I merely assume that any theory of well-being must stipulate that individuals have a set of hermeneutic equipment available that they can use to navigate and manage the stressors in their environment.
Similarly, it is equally problematic to assume that discomfort in classroom discussions where students are confronted with their implicit biases or other forms of complicity will necessarily produce worthwhile learning experiences (Applebaum, 2017). Discomfort on these occasions is not necessarily a reflection of compunction or an emerging change of mind, it may also stem from anger or simple disagreement with the arguments that are being put forward (Munch-Jurisic, 2020b).
Ethan Nowak makes a related point in his excellent paper on language loss and linguistic silencing: “…the harm suffered by someone deprived of the ability to realize speech acts in her native language is particularly acute, since the fullest realization of a person’s self-expression depends on her ability to select the speech acts she realizes with the fineness of grain that only a native speaker, speaking with other native speakers, can” (Nowak, 2020).
I thank anthropologist Daniel Lende for making me aware of this research paradigm which can be traced back to Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. For a recent defense of Vygotsky’s famous idea that we become ourselves through others, consult Bolis and Schilbach (2020). Sally Haslanger also advocates the idea of cognition as a social skill: “our mental lives are socially embedded and […] shaped to enable us to coordinate in social practices” (Haslanger, 2020a).
The constructivist movement in the scientific studies of emotions has argued that there is no distinct fingerprint for a specific emotion in the face (facial expression), body (physiology), or the brain (neurology) (Barrett, 2017; Lindquist et al., 2012). The core argument in this paper relies on this foundational work, but I focus here only on the epistemological dimensions of emotion perception, i.e. how agents make sense of their affective states (for an expanded version of my argument, see chapter 4, “The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings” in Munch-Jurisic, forthcoming 2022). It is indeed possible to accept my present argument while still maintaining that emotions have fixed biological signatures; this is for example the position Kurth leans towards in his biocultural account of anxiety (Kurth, 2018).
For an overview of the broader theory of meaning and content sometimes referred to as normativism, i.e. the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content is essentially normative, see Glüer and Wikforss (2020).
For a detailed excavation of the idea of affective, physiological habits, consult Sullivan (2015).
In referring to “space of meaning” Loidolt is citing Steven Crowell (2001).
In Husserl’s own terms, this basic motivational structure of experience is called the ‘pre-predicative’ sphere”, consult Loidolt, 2018 for a full exegesis.
Consult Puddifoot, (2019) for a recent review of the most common stereotypes faced by people with mental health disorders and the forms of discrimination and penalizations faced when open about their condition.
On this theme, consult also Abramsen’s incisive analysis of’gaslighting’ (Abramson, 2014).
Importantly, some offenders are surely aware of the harm they are doing, also on a conceptual level, but they are doing it, nevertheless.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a visiting fellowship at Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Danish National Research Foundation (Grant no. DNRF144). Parts of the analysis in this paper overlap with chapter 4 in my forthcoming book Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings, Oxford University Press, 2022, thanks to Synthese for permission to reuse. Also, many thanks for helpful comments and suggestions for earlier versions of this paper to the guest editors at Synthese, Juliette Vazard and Charlie Kurth, two anonymous reviewers, Rasmus Hoffman Birk, Pedja Jurisic and the members in the research group for Criminal Justice Ethics at Roskilde University: Jesper Ryberg, Thomas Søbirk Petersen, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Sebastian Holmen, Frej Klem Thomsen and Emil Junge Busch.
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This article belongs to the topical collection “Worry and Wellbeing: Understanding the Nature, Value, and Challenges of Anxiety,” edited by Charlie Kurth and Juliette Vazard.
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Munch-Jurisic, D.M. Lost for words: anxiety, well-being, and the costs of conceptual deprivation. Synthese 199, 13583–13600 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03390-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03390-3