Abstract
In this essay, I raise a puzzle concerning rational emotions. The puzzle arises from the fact that a handful of very plausible claims seem to commit us to the idea that whether a subject ought to have a certain emotion at a given time in part depends on the fittingness of the intensity of the feelings it involves, and the fittingness of these feelings in part depends on the intensity of the feelings the subject has at that time. Yet this idea is incompatible with another plausible claim: namely, that the deontic properties possessed by a subject having an emotion with a certain intensity are not counterfactually dependent on her having that emotion with that intensity.
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Notes
I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to make these clarifications.
I take it that pity need not be an exclusively backward-looking emotional response. For example, you might feel pity for an orphan on account of what has already happened, or you might instead be responding to the known hardships in store, or both. The pity in Horrible Birthday mirrors this last option. You are responding to what has already happened but also what you recognize is to come in the moments leading up to midnight.
To press the point, you are not just wondering about how much pity you should feel regarding a particular misfortune—e.g., just your boss making you work overtime on your birthday—nor are you wondering about how much pity you should feel on your birthday up until the time at which you start to feel pity.
These sorts of intensity adjustments constitute a large part of the regulation of our emotions. An interpersonal example makes this feature of our emotional lives vivid. Often our friends think that we should be feeling a particular emotion, but still wonder whether the intensity with which it is felt is off. Suppose, for example, walking home at night makes you feel fear, but not that much. Your friends worry that you don’t fear intensely enough, and so they raise factors for your consideration. They deliberate with you in an attempt to help get the intensity of your emotion appropriately modulated. The same holds for the intrapersonal case.
This leaves open a couple of options. Perhaps you are trying to sort out the intensity prior to having felt it. Or perhaps you already feel pity but you are wondering whether the intensity with which you feel it is the intensity with which you ought to feel it in the moments to come. This second option has an analogue for doxastic states. You might have settled the question whether to binary believe that p but still wonder about the degree to which you ought to believe that p. Here, as in the case of Horrible Birthday, the focus of your deliberations concerns the strength with which the attitude is held. I owe this analogy to an anonymous referee.
Cases with this structure are not confined to pity. Regret, desire, valuing, fear, and envy can also give rise to such cases. Regret affords an especially clean example. You make a choice that you regret on account of its outcome. Since the outcome will include your regret, the feeling of regret with a certain intensity is part of what the emotion is directed toward.
I should stress that I do not mean to endorse Broad’s account in all its particulars. Rather I find its general outlines plausible. That’s sufficient to motivate the puzzle.
This way of putting it comes from Rosen (2015).
For further defense, see Howard (2018).
For further defense, see Na'aman (2019).
For an overview and defense, see Deonna and Fabrice (2012: 14–16).
I should note that many accounts of welfare assume that a subject’s positive (or negative) feelings are non-instrumentally good-for (or bad-for) her. So another way to arrive at Value Depends on Feelings would be to first claim that the value of the emotion’s object depends on the subject’s welfare level at a time, and then claim that her welfare level that time, in part, depends on whether she feels positively or negatively with a certain intensity at that time. For an account of welfare that would deliver this result, see Heathwood (2019). For more on the connection between emotions and well-being, which also would deliver this result, see Alfano (2016: 86–92). Although I am sympathetic to this line of thought, I hope to avoid these added commitments. I shall thus stick to the wider claim that a subject’s positive or negative feelings can influence the amount of good-simpliciter or bad-simpliciter.
This formulation of the principle is modified from Bykvist (2007: 100).
Vessel (2003), for example, takes this principle to be so obvious that he leverages it against Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals. For others who endorse this principle, see Carlson (1995), Hare (2011), Timmerman (2016), and Cohen (2020). For criticism, see Bykvist (2007) and Howard-Snyder (2008).
A more compressed version of the sort of argument I’ll offer below can be found in Carlson (1995: §6.3).
Here I am assuming what is arguably the most popular definition of a normative reason: That such reasons are facts that, absent defeat, make it the case that an agent ought to act in some way. To get a feel of the popularity of this definition of reasons, see Alvarez (2017: §2) and Portmore (2021: 18–20). For a very precise formulation of this view, although using different terminology, see Chisholm (1978).
It is not the only one. For another argument, see Paakkunainen (2017).
You may still deliberate concerning the evaluative question: Is feeling a violent wave of pity good? But you cannot deliberate concerning the normative question: Ought I to feel a violent wave of pity? The Deliberative Constraint explains this difference. For more on this point, see Way (2017).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Winnie Sung, Aldrin Relador, and the reviewers and editors at Philosophia for helpful comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (RG62/19 (NS)).
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Forcehimes, A.T. How Am I Supposed to Feel?. Philosophia 50, 533–542 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00393-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00393-9