Philosophy of emotions

1
Philosophy of emotions

• Emotions, agency, and responsibility
• 3.12.08
• Mikko Salmela
• mikko.salmela_at_helsinki.fi

2
A contested idea

• On the one hand, there is a long tradition
  holding emotions as passions that fall beyond
  control and responsibility.
• Concepts of emotion pathe (Greek) passiones
  (Latin) Western philosophy until the 18th
  century.
• The notion of passion combines the ideas of
  passivity and suffering.
• On the other hand, another long tradition has
  emphasized our ability to indirectly control our
  emotions through the cultivation of appropriate
  dispositions and skills.
• Aristotle the Stoics
• Nussbaum and Solomon we can exercise some
  control over our emotional life by thinking and
  willing

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Emotional Agency

• Nancy Sherman Taking responsibility for our
  emotions (1999)
• Emotional agency is based on the fact that from
  earliest infancy, we regulate many of our
  emotions not an either-or thing but develops in
  degrees.
• Greenberg Paivio (1997 28) emotion
  experience is initially primordially regulated by
  caretakers, but over the course of normal
  development it becomes increasingly
  self-regulated as a result of development in
  neurophysiology, cognition, language, and
  self-understanding
• Sherman psychoanalysis can meet Aristotle in
  explaining how we can transform our emotions into
  virtuous ones.

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Emotion regulation

• Definition (Gross 1998) ER is the process by
  which people influence which emotions they have,
  when they have them, and how they experience and
  express them.
• A continuum from automatic, unconscious and
  effortless processes to controlled, conscious and
  effortful ones.
• Intrinsic vs. extrinsic regulation
• Not inherently good or bad usefulness depends on
  the context and on the persons goals.
• The general aim is to downregulate negative
  affect and to upregulate positive affect
  (positivity and negativity understood in hedonic
  terms).
• Cultural values also important in determining
  appropriate responses.
• ER can be distinguished from related concepts
  coping and defences

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Forms of emotion regulation (Gross)

• Situation Situation Attentional
  Cognitive Response
• Selection Modification Deployment
  Change Modulation
• EMOTION
• o o
  o o
  o
• Gross Thompson 2008, figure 1.5
• Situation selection choosing a situation that
  one expects to give rise to desirable emotions.
• A problem the accuracy of affective forecasting.
• Situation modification modification of external,
  physical environment
• Attentional deployment distraction or
  concentration
• Cognitive change reappraisal of the emotional
  significance of the situation or our ability to
  cope with it.
• Permits the modification of the entire emotional
  response without notable physiological,
  cognitive, or interpersonal costs.
• Response modulation influencing physiological,
  experiential, or behavioural responses
• Suppression consumes more energy than other forms
  of ER

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Emotional labor

• ARLIE R. HOCHSCHILDThe Managed Heart (1983)
• Definition emotion management according to
  specific feeling or display rules in order to
  create a publicly observable facial and bodily
  display.
• External purpose and motivation
• Surface and deep acting
• surface acting faking of emotions that are not
  actually felt
• deep acting evoking or suppressing of actual
  emotions through exhortation or trained
  imagination
• Mixed evidence about consequences
• On the one hand, EL is associated with negative
  consequences, such as sense of inauthenticity,
  emotional exhaustion, job dissatisfaction,
  stress, depression, absenteeism and turnovers,
  drug and alcohol abuse, burnout, and other health
  problems, esp. in bad working conditions.
• On the other hand, there is evidence that emotion
  management at work may facilitate job
  satisfaction, feelings of personal
  accomplishment, self-efficacy and
  self-expression, and even a sense of
  authenticity.

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Responsibility for emotions

• A problem
• Responsibility entails free choice.
• Free choice requires intellectual deliberation
  about alternatives.
• Intellectual deliberations are absent from
  emotions.
• 4. We are not responsible for our emotions.
• gtlt Yet, in many circumstances we impute
  responsibility for emotions.
• What are the conditions of responsibility for
  emotions?
• Responsibility and doing or having at will
• Cannot be necessary for responsibility
• Responsibility and avoidability
• Arriving at situation where some result is
  unavoidable is relevant.
• Responsibility, foresight and the cultivation and
  control of emotions
• Aristoteles people are responsible for their
  present characters in so far as their previous
  voluntary acts foreseeably resulted in the
  emergence of those characters.
• Beliefs mind-to-world direction of fit truth as
  condition of satisfaction
• Desires world-to-mind direction of fit
  fulfillment as condition of satisfaction
• Emotions no/zero direction of fit truth and
  fulfillment as conditions of success for
  constitutive belief and desire, respectively

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Direct and indirect moral responsibility

• Direct moral responsibility (Ben-Zeev 2000)
• (1) intending to do and doing X freely
• (2) the ability to avoid X
• (3) the ability to foresee the consequences of X
• Indirect responsibility when the three conditions
  are not satisfied at the moment of doing X but
  they have been satisfied before that moment.
• Responsibility for emotions indirect and partial.
• Not for particular emotional responses, but for
  the creation of the mechanism underlying those
  responses
• Nevertheless, responsibility is not necessary for
  the moral evaluation of emotions.

9
Article 5 Robert Solomon On the Passivity of
the Passions, in Manstead, A., Frijda, N. and
Fischer, A. (eds) Feelings and Emotions.
Cambridge Cambridge University Press (2004), pp.
11-29.

• Questions for reading 
• What obstacles are there to seeing emotions as a
  matter of choice?
• What aspects can we distinguish in emotions?
  Which aspects can be liable to control and
  responsibility?
• How can we cultivate emotions?
• What is Solomons view about the duration of
  emotions?
• What sources are there for our responsibility for
  our emotions?
• What does the comparison to kinesthetic judgments
  reveal about emotions?
• What is active in emotion expression?