Abstract
What does it mean to say that an emotional response fits the situation? This question cannot be answered simply by specifying the core relational theme (loss or risk, say) associated with each emotion: we must also explain what constitutes an emotionally significant loss or risk. It is sometimes suggested that emotionally significant situations are those that bear on the subject’s interests or concerns. I accept that this claim is plausible for some emotional responses, and I propose a particular way of interpreting it. I suggest that, for many emotions, emotional significance is determined by the subject’s likes and dislikes – that is, settled dispositions to find a certain situation pleasant or distressing. I contrast this account with other preference-based accounts and with an account that appeals to the subject’s interests. I argue that we should prefer the likes-based account to these rival views.
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Notes
Fittingness, I shall assume, is one of many standards we might use to assess your response. In particular, to say that fear fits the situation is not to say that it is beneficial or morally commendable: it might sometimes be useful or admirable to be unafraid, even if the situation warrants fear (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000).
There are several ways in which this suggestion might be developed. A tempting possibility is Jesse Prinz’s (2004: 64–7) suggestion that the core relational theme helps to constitute the representational content of the emotional evaluation.
See Mulligan (2010) for a more sceptical view.
We might adopt a robust subjectivism on which emotional significance is in the eye of the beholder, or we might adopt some kind of non-reductive value realism (Mulligan 2010); there are many other possibilities besides.
Intellectual and aesthetic emotions are likely exceptions too.
The line between personal and moral responses is not clear-cut. If Jo is ashamed of her action, her response might involve a mix of personal and moral shame; and these feelings may be hard to disentangle. In anger, the personal and the moral are even more closely intertwined. I am not assuming, though, that it is always easy to make this distinction. I am assuming only that there are some cases that are clearly non-moral cases. These are the cases that I am trying to account for here.
My own view is that these norms are at root biological and historical norms. The idea will be that the processes by which we acquire likes and dislikes is controlled by developmental and psychological mechanisms of some kind; historically, these mechanisms have functioned to ensure that our likes and dislikes develop in a way that (very roughly) promotes our capacity to survive and produce healthy offspring, and they have done this in a particular way. In Kevin’s case, perhaps, these mechanisms have not operated as they (historically) should. This notion of a historical norm derives from Millikan (1983: 33–34); see also Price (2001: 48–49). However, there are other ways in which a likes-based theorist might understand the relevant norms.
Admittedly, people tend to dislike having their desires frustrated. But to say that people like to satisfy their desires does not imply that their desires are necessarily for things that they like.
The likes-based account might be compared to claims that Elijah Millgram (1993) and Robert Audi have made about desire (2002: 86–88). Millgram and Audi both argue that certain kinds of desire are both rooted in and justified by experiences of pleasure or distress. The likes-based account makes a similar claim about certain kinds of emotional response.
de Sousa (2002: 255–56) appeals to the evolutionary, social and personal history of our emotional capacities to define a notion of semantic success for an emotional response. However, he makes no appeal to likes in his account. Compare also Baier (1990), who emphasises the historical character of emotional fittingness.
I am using the term ‘misplaced’ to refer simply to emotional responses that fail to fit the situation.
In what follows, I shall assume that the hiker loves being alone, not merely feeling as if he is alone. The difference, I take it, lies in how he is disposed to respond were he to discover that he is not, in fact, alone.
As I mentioned earlier, this presupposes the existence of norms that govern the processes by which likes and dislikes are acquired. However, to say that Mitch’s love of hoarding has not been acquired as it should does not preclude other ways of evaluating his situation: for example, it might turn out that Mitch benefits from his love of hoarding.
A likes-based theorist might take different views about different cases. It might be suggested, for example, that where an emotional response directly manifests a malformed like, the emotional response is itself at fault, but where an emotional response accords with a malformed like (as in Mitch’s case), it is the subject’s like, and not the emotional response, that has gone wrong. Indeed, this seems to me to be a natural thing to say, but I shall not press this suggestion here.
Perhaps it is simply unclear what we would say. Still, this leaves room for a debate about what we should say. To decide that, though, we would need to appeal to theoretical and empirical considerations that go beyond the scope of this article.
It is tempting, perhaps, to suppose that Linda’s anxiety is due to some unconscious desire to continue working. I am supposing, though, that this is not the case. Perhaps her anxiety stems from an unconscious appreciation of her likes or perhaps it is simply an aberration.
In this case, Linda’s anxiety may signal that she should reconsider her judgment (Helm 2001: 146–147). However, this does not imply that her feelings fit the situation, on Helm’s account. This is because we cannot say how she should resolve the conflict: she might adjust her judgment to fit her likes or her likes to fit her judgment.
Admittedly, Linda might have cause to feel frustrated that her desires have been thwarted.
See Marino (2010) for a sustained discussion.
To be fair, Helm does not present this claim as obviously true, but as an element within a broader theory of value. But if I am right about the cases described here, this theory leaves some of our intuitions about emotional fittingness unexplained.
To do this, Linda does not need to modify her most fundamental likes: perhaps she will continue to take just as much pleasure in social interaction, while learning to like new kinds of social activity. Rather, modifying her fundamental likes (for example, by learning to enjoy a quieter life) would constitute a more radical way of changing the personal significance of the situation. This would, perhaps, be hard to do, though it does not strike me as impossible.
There is, perhaps, scope to develop a hybrid account. In other words, we might take the view that personal significance is determined by a person’s interests, but that it is their likes that determine how much of these goods they need – within certain parameters. This looks like a promising way of resolving the problem. Still, it concedes that the subject’s likes play a crucial role in determining personal significance. Moreover, the hybrid account does not escape my remaining objections to the interest-based account.
An interest-based theorist who took this line might deny that Lee is worse off than Linda: for while Linda socialises more, Lee has more time for hobbies. Still, this theorist must insist that it is in Lee’s interests to extend his social life as far as he can without detracting from his hobbies, regardless of his preferences.
Indeed, it may be this thought that makes it hard to accept that Lee should socialise more, despite the fact that he would not enjoy it.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier drafts of this article were presented at seminars at the Open University and at the University of York. Some of the ideas in the article were presented in a talk at a workshop on ‘Teleosemantics Today’ that took place at Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, in February 2012. I am very grateful to the participants at all those events for very valuable comments. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for some very helpful suggestions.