Joshua Gert

This article uses a particular view of the basic emotions in order to develop and defend an account of paradigmatic emotion-linked evaluative properties. The view is that felt emotions are constituted by an awareness that one is about to behave in a certain way. This view provides support for a fitting-attitude account of certain evaluative properties. But the relevant sense of fittingness is not to be understood in terms of reasons. The account therefore sidesteps the well-known Wrong Kind of Reasons problem. Throughout the article, a contrast is made with the rational sentimentalism of Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson.

Many philosophers have argued that a necessary condition on an action's being intentional is that the agent has the ability to alter the probabilities of the relevant outcome. These philosophers would hold that this condition is what allows us to deny that an agent, for example, intentionally rolls something other than five fives with a set of dice, despite that agent's being virtually sure that this will be the outcome of the roll. The current paper uses some examples to cast this explanation, and the necessity of the associated condition, into doubt. It then suggests that what actually differentiates intentional from unintentional action – in the examples that falsify the hypothesis about control – is to be found in the agent's representation of the processes by which the relevant outcomes are produced. In particular, the agent must represent the outcome as happening because of what she does.

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality

Many contemporary accounts of normative reasons for action accord a single strength value to normative reasons. This paper first uses some examples to argue against such views by showing that they seem to commit us to intransitive or counterintuitive claims about the rough equivalence of the strengths of certain reasons. The paper then explains and defends an alternate account according to which normative reasons for action have two separable dimensions of strength: requiring strength, and justifying strength. Such an account explains our intuitions in the cases that make trouble for single-value views. The justifying/requiring account is compared with two other solutions that have been offered to justify and explain our intuitions about these sorts of cases. These other solutions appeal to the notions of incommensurability of reasons, and to second-order normative entities called `exclusionary permissions'. It is argued that the justifying/requiring distinction provides a superior solution.