Antti Kauppinen

Affective experiences motivate and rationalize behaviour in virtue of feeling good or bad, or their _valence_. It has become popular to explain such phenomenal character with intentional content. Rejecting evaluativism and extending earlier imperativist accounts of pain, I argue that when experiences feel bad, they both represent things as being in a certain way and tell us to see to it that they will no longer be that way. Such commands have subjective authority by virtue of linking up with a relevant background concern. The imperative content explains but doesn’t constitute world-directed motivation. It also rationalizes action indirectly, by giving rise to an affective seeming that represents the situation as calling for the authoritatively commanded behaviour. One experience feels worse than another if its content tells us to bear a higher opportunity cost to comply with the command. Finally, experience-directed motivation is contingent on our being attitudinally (dis)pleased with the character of our experience.

On a widely accepted view, what gives meaning to our lives is success in valuable ground projects. However, philosophers like Kieran Setiya have recently challenged the value of such orientation toward the future, and argued that meaningful living is instead a matter of engaging in atelic activities that are complete in themselves at each moment. This chapter argues that insofar as what is at issue is meaningfulness in its primary existential sense, strongly atelic activities do not suffice for meaning. Instead, finding one’s life meaningful is warranted both by sustainable success in valuable _prospective_ (future-oriented) projects and by success in _reflexive_ projects that aim to promote or realize a practice-dependent value that can be realized at each moment, but never for good. Activities of the latter kind are only weakly atelic, since their aim remains distinct from the activity, and individual actions gain significance from serving a long-term commitment. Thus, whether our ground projects are prospective or reflexive, what we do at each moment contributes to leading a meaningful life only when it’s connected in the right way to what we do at other moments.

This chapter examines systematically which features of a life story (or history) make it good for the subject herself—not aesthetically or morally good, but prudentially good. The key elements of a life’s shape are events that pertain to the pursuit of long-term projects. The tentative narrative calculus presented here claims that the prudential narrative value of an event is a function of the extent to which it contributes to her concurrent and non-concurrent goals, the value of those goals, and the degree to which success in reaching the goals is deserved in virtue of exercising agency. The narrative value of a life is a simple sum of the values of individual events that comprise it. It is claimed that this view best explains and supports common intuitions about the significance of the shape of a life.

This chapter is concerned with the use of conceptual analysis, particularly _intuitions_, in solving various philosophical problems such as the concepts of knowledge, free will, moral judgment, and intentional action, among others. Experimentalists make use of the Survey Model in conducting their studies since survey feedbacks produce data about which philosophical perspectives can be analyzed. An alternative model is the Dialogue Model of inquiry, which has proven to be more efficient as the philosopher can directly present alternate interpretations and varying examples for the subject to choose from, yielding even more fruitful results.

Recently, many epistemologists have proposed instrumental norms of inquiry, that is, norms that concern taking means to answer the questions we are pursuing. But which questions should we pursue in the first place, and why? In this paper, I offer a novel defense of the radical pragmatist view, according to which there are no epistemic norms of inquiry, and all reasons to pursue questions and take means to answering them are practical. This includes reasons linked with the intrinsic or prudential value of cognitive goods like knowledge or understanding. We can confirm this by observing that fitting reactions to failure to respond to such reasons are practical rather than epistemic in nature (e.g. pity rather than epistemic downgrading). Given that reasons don’t transubstantiate when they are transmitted, any instrumental 'zetetic' reasons to take means to answer questions are practical as well. All of the above is nevertheless compatible with granting that some ways of inquiring do merit epistemic criticism. But that’s not because they violate some specifically zetetic epistemic norm, but because they are based on means-end beliefs that don’t constitute knowledge or lack justification, and thus entail violations of traditional epistemic norms. In the big picture, what this means is that the part of epistemology that concerns norms of inquiry overlaps with value theory and theory of practical rationality.

When we violate an epistemic norm, we may be subject to an epistemic analogue of blame, unless we have a defense against it. In this paper, I offer a novel account of such defenses, in particular of the difference between having epistemic justification and having an epistemic excuse, and apply it to the debate between factivism and nonfactivism about justification. I draw on work in ethics and law to argue that having an excuse, in general, does not require manifesting excellence or virtue, but only meeting reasonable expectations of being responsive to reasons against wrongdoing in spite of acting against them. It is thus a neutral rather than positive status. In the epistemic case, we have an excuse roughly when in spite of violating an epistemic norm, our response manifested the kind of regard for epistemic value and sensitivity to epistemic support relations that it was reasonable to expect of us. When it comes to justification, I argue that it is important to distinguish between vindications that show that there is nothing wrong with one's response and (mere) justifications that show that one's response is all-things-considered permissible and called for in the circumstances, but is nevertheless prima facie wrong and regrettable (like killing in self-defense). If we apply this to the epistemological debate, we can see that contrary to factivist claims, epistemically excellent false beliefs are not merely excused but justified in virtue of being called for in the circumstances, though they are not epistemically ideal.

While friendship, love, and familial bonds at their best are widely regarded as central to human flourishing, it is an open question why they benefit us. Reductionist accounts regard good relationships as only instrumentally or derivatively good for us. However, there may also be a non-contingent connection between good personal relationships and what is good for a person. I focus on three kinds of Anti-Reductionist claim and their implications. First, some philosophers hold that personal relationships can be in themselves good or bad for us, and thus constituents of well-being or ill-being. In particular, some relationships consist in interaction that manifests a kind of mutual recognition or fitting affection. I examine objective list and perfectionist arguments for taking involvement in such relationships to be a basic welfare good. Second, others argue that some relationships change the scope of our self-interest, so that things that happen to our loved ones are also in themselves good or bad for us. I argue that on this issue, a kind of reductionist account appealing to personal investment is more plausible. And finally, it could be that some relationships are a source of or precondition for a form of meaning in life – after all, it’s common to think that our loved ones give us a reason to live. I suggest that this may be because the kind of transformative intimacy involved in deep personal relationships makes us matter to someone who matters in a different way than achievements that produce great intrinsic value.

In his Epistemic Blame (2024), Cameron Boult presents a comprehensive account of epistemic blame as negative relationship modification in response to intellectual conduct that impairs an epistemic relationship. I articulate an alternative conception, according to which the proper basis for a critical epistemic response is violating epistemic normative expectations, and the response consists in holding the target epistemically accountable in a non-blaming way. The key elements of epistemic accountability are non-instrumental downgrading of the target’s standing as a source, partner, and user in social epistemic practices, and endorsement of taking responsibility for the violation. Like blame, this way of holding accountable carries a sting that goes beyond negative judgment, is sensitive to responsibility for the violation (and thus allows for excuses), and is second-personal. In these respects my view is closer to that of Boult than his critics, and can thus be described as a form of moderate rather than radical scepticism about epistemic blame. However, unlike paradigm blame, epistemic accountability is not accusatory or attitudinal, and is only weakly second-personal, since it doesn’t require standing or demand some form of atonement. It is thus best described as an epistemic analogue of blame rather than as a form of blame.

Sentimentalist response-dependence views in metaethics hold that at least some values metaphysically or conceptually depend on affective responses. Some varieties account for values in terms of our dispositions to respond sentimentally under suitable conditions. While they offer a naturalistic account of values and associated motivation, they struggle to explain how values can set a standard for our responses and dispositions. What I label critical sentimentalism avoids this problem by understanding values in term of merited responses. The dilemma for such views is making sense of an emotion being merited without appealing to correctly representing a response-independent property while simultaneously avoiding collapse into dispositionalism. As D’Arms and Jacobson (2023) argue, this means that sentimentalism assumes a non-representationalist, broadly motivational theory of emotion. Building on this proposal, I argue that ‘fit-making’ reasons for attitudes can be reduced to reasons for action of a sort determined by the nature of the emotion. For an evaluative property like being shameful to be response-dependent will then turn out to amount to the relevant reasons of action being ultimately based on our contingent sensibilities. Finally, I suggest that not all sentimental values fit this picture – some evaluative properties, like being funny, are best understood in dispositionalist terms after all. There’s room for pluralism in the metaphysics of value.

Leading a meaningful life characteristically requires committing ourselves to something or someone of value, since valuable achievements and relationships require resolve, persistence, and even sacrifice. But how can we rationally commit to any particular thing when faced with normative uncertainty about the relative value of our options? In his recent work, Paul Katsafanas argues that we can only rationally sustain resolute commitments and a sense of purpose if we render our core commitments invulnerable to the output of critical reflection, and thus in a technical sense ‘devote’ ourselves to something. I raise some doubts about this. First, even if devotion is useful, this doesn’t suffice to make it rational, because the instrumental benefits of devotion don’t support a particular commitment from a first-person perspective. Moreover, rational insulation is prudentially very risky. Second, we can see that devotion isn’t necessary for resolute commitment even if there is some normative uncertainty, if we take an appropriate range of agent-relative or voluntarist reasons into account. And finally, devotion does not suffice for resolute commitment in rational agents, because it is not rational to wholeheartedly endorse a commitment one is aware of merely picking rather than choosing.

It’s plausible that we only fully appreciate the value of something, say a painting or a blameworthy action, when we have a fitting emotional response to it, such as admiration or guilt. But exactly how and why do we grasp value through emotion? I propose, first, that a subject S phenomenally grasps property P only if what it is to be P is manifest in the phenomenal character of S’s experience. Second, following clues from the Stoics, I argue that the phenomenal character of emotional experience is constitutively linked with its having directive content. More precisely, emotional experience directs us both to adopt a maxim for action – take certain characteristic kinds of action for an emotion-specific end – and to treat something about the object as a presumptively decisive reason to take such action for such end. If we assent to what the experience proposes (or rational control gets bypassed), we are motivated to take the relevant action and have a corresponding evaluative belief. This picture of emotional cognition yields a natural conception of the evaluative fittingness conditions of emotions without the problematic assumption that they have a presentational phenomenology. Instead, it is precisely in virtue of the directive and valenced phenomenology of emotion that values are only fully manifest in emotional experience, since values are essentially action- and attitude-guiding properties.

Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best kind of narrativist views actually encourage us to pursue a variety of different projects, as long as they are mutually supportive. I claim that when interpreted in the most plausible way, prudentially good-making narrative coherence arises precisely out of this kind of unity in diversity. Well-roundedness and narrative coherence are thus not inherently in tension, but are both good-making holistic features of our lives.

While suicide is typically associated with personal despair, people do sometimes kill themselves in the hope or expectation that their death will advance a political cause by way of its impact on the conscience of others, or in extreme cases simply as an expression of protest against a status quo felt to be unjust. Paradigm cases of such protest suicide may be public acts of self-immolation. This chapter distinguishes between instrumental and expressive protest suicide, examines the possible motivations behind them, their possible moral justification, and their potential contribution to the meaning of the suicide’s life. It argues that when the value of the aim pursued by way of instrumental suicide is proportionate, killing oneself promotes it sufficiently, and other morally acceptable options are exhausted, instrumental protest suicide can be morally permissible and consistent with human dignity. It can even be an admirable act of self-sacrifice, provided that the agent’s motivations are suitable. Some of the standard moral objections to suicide don’t apply to such cases. But protest suicide remains morally risky, because one might be mistaken about the worth of one’s cause or the availability of alternatives, and because even these extreme acts typically have limited effect.

Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic structure, so that practical reason, for example, constitutively aims at competently realizing valuable ends that are in harmony. According to telic perfectionism, we do well when such formal aims are realized and badly when they’re frustrated. Crucially, our subjective nature is defined not only by how we reason but also by how we feel. And valenced experience, too, has built-in directionality, according to the most plausible views about the nature of pleasure and pain. The phenomenal character of unpleasant pain is inseparable from its setting for us the end of eliminating itself. As long as we are in pain, then, the formal aim of our self-defining capacity for valenced experience is frustrated. For telic perfectionism, unpleasant pain is thus robustly bad for us, and the explanation of its badness makes essential reference to how it feels.

Very plausibly, there is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality – even if, as in a kind of Truman Show scenario, intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive standards. One of these self-defining capacities, or capacities whose exercise reveals who we are, is Reason, our capacity for normative self-governance. I argue that in its practical use, Reason formally aims at competently realizing self-chosen valuable ends that are in harmony with each other, or valuable achievements. In its theoretical use, it formally aims at competently grasping fundamental enough subject matters, or a kind of understanding. Because success by reason’s own standards requires many things to go right, there are many different ways in which we can fall short. Some of them amount to partial success. But some, like incompetent inquiry that fails to yield understanding of its target, or taking inefficient means to a worthless end, are robust failures that amount to epistemic or agential unflourishing, and thus to a form of ill-being.

What should we believe if epistemic and practical reasons for belief point in different directions? I argue that there’s no single answer, but rather a Dualism of Theoretical and Practical Reason is true: what we epistemically ought to believe and what we practically ought to believe may come apart, and both are independently authoritative. I argue in particular against recently popular views that subordinate the epistemic to the practical: it’s not the case that epistemic reasons bear on what we ‘just plain ought’ to believe just to the extent we have practical reason to believe epistemically correctly. Why? Because epistemic reasons give rise to authoritative demands independently of the practical pay-off of believing accordingly. This is shown in particular by the fact that it can be fitting to epistemically ‘blame’ us just because we fail to believe as we epistemically ought, even if we don’t have sufficient practical reason to believe so. I also argue that we don’t need to come up with what we ‘just plain ought’ to believe, because contrary epistemic and practical responsibility responses can be simultaneously fitting in conflict cases, and because epistemic and practical ought judgments give rise to different enkrasia requirements, among other things.

How can we figure out what’s right or wrong, if moral truths are neither self-evident nor something we can perceive? Very roughly, the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) says that we should begin moral inquiry from what we already confidently think, seeking to find a a match between our initial convictions and general principles that are well-supported by background theories, mutually adjusting both until we reach a coherent outlook in which our beliefs are in harmony (the equilibrium part) and we know why and how they support each other (the reflective part). It has been central to the self-understanding of normative ethics and other branches of philosophy in the last half a century. In this chapter, we examine the history of the idea of RE and introduce a schema for generating 256 variants. We explain why RE is subject to serious objections insofar as it purports to yield epistemic justification in virtue of achieving coherence. However, we also develop a new argument to the effect that RE is the best feasible method for us to achieve moral understanding and the ability to justify our judgments to others. It may thus be crucial for responsible moral inquiry, even if coherence among considered judgments and principles is neither sufficient nor necessary for justified moral belief.

Antti Kauppinen Les philosophes se sont efforcés de montrer que nous devons être vertueux pour être heureux. Mais tant que nous nous en tenons à la compréhension moderne du bonheur comme quelque chose de vécu par un sujet – et je soutiens contre les eudaimonistes contemporains que nous devrions effectivement le faire – il peut au mieux exister un lien de causalité contingent entre la vertu et le bonheur. Néanmoins, nous avons de bonnes raisons de penser qu’être vertueux est non accidentellement propice au bonheur. Pourquoi? Premièrement, le bonheur est, sommairement, la condition expérientielle de jouir d’états phénoménaux affectifs principalement positifs concernant des choses qui sont subjectivement importantes pour nous. Je soutiens que ce sentimentalisme à propos du bonheur a plusieurs avantages par rapport à la conception de Daniel Haybron comme état émotionnel. Deuxièmement, dans la mesure où nous sommes vertueux, nous pouvons identifier correctement ce qui vaut la peine d’être fait dans notre situation particulière et nous la poursuivrons habilement. En même temps, nous ne sommes pas dérangés par des choses qui ne valent pas la peine d’être prises en charge ou de s’inquiéter. Par conséquent, les personnes vertueuses sont susceptibles de profiter d’émotions positives centrales liées au succès et à l’approbation des autres, et d’éviter les émotions négatives communes liées à la comparaison sociale ou à l’avarice. Bien que leur bonheur soit encore en partie une question de chance, il l’est dans une moindre mesure que pour le reste d’entre nous.

This chapter offers an overview of four key debates about the roles of emotion in morality. First, many believe that emotions are an important psychological mechanism for explaining altruistic behavior and moral conscience in humans. Second, there is considerable debate about the causal role of affective reactions in moral judgment. Third, some philosophers have argued that emotions have a constitutive role in moral thought and even moral facts. Finally, philosophers disagree about whether affective influence undermines the justification of moral beliefs or, in suitable circumstances, guides us toward moral truth.

Common sense has it that some of the greatest achievements that are to our credit are creative, whether artistic or otherwise. But standard theories of achievement and merit struggle to explain them, since the praiseworthiness of creative achievements isn’t grounded in effort, quality of will, disclosing the agent’s values, or even reasons-responsiveness. I argue that it’s distinctive of artistic or quasi-artistic creative activity that it is guided by what I call aspirational aims, which are formulated in terms of evaluative predicates (like painting something “moving” or engineering something “nifty”) whose descriptive realizers are not known in advance. Aesthetic creativity itself fundamentally consists in perceiving or conceiving of some modification of raw material or a medium as promoting or constituting a novel way of realizing the aspirational aim. Creative achievements like poems and paintings are then to our credit in virtue of being exercises of spontaneity that disclose a deep layer of our selves that is manifest in active perception of affordances, showing that there is something beautiful about the way we experience the world, as a Sally Rooney character puts it. As with other creditworthy achievements, what makes them difficult is that simply trying won’t suffice to make success likely – but unlike in many other cases, neither will trying hard, since we have no direct volitional or rational control over perceptual spontaneity.

Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases highlight the importance of integrity, or living up to one’s commitments, in meaningful living, or dying, as it may be, as well as the risk involved in commitment, since if you die for a bad cause, you have only harmed yourself. However, if leading a more rather than less meaningful life benefits rather than harms you, there are possible scenarios in which you yourself are better off dying for a good cause than living a longer moderately happy life. This presents a version of a well-known puzzle: what, then, makes dying for a cause a self-sacrifice, as it usually seems to be? I sketch some possible answers, and try to make sense of relevant work in empirical psychology.

Recently, psychologists have started to distinguish between three kinds of experience of meaning. Drawing on philosophical as well as empirical literature, I argue that the experience of one’s own life making sense involves a sense of narrative justification, so that not just any kind of intelligibility suffices; the experience of purpose includes enthusiastic future-directed motivation against the background of a global sort of hopefulness, or the resonance of what one does right now with one’s values; and finally, the experience of significance consists primarily of feelings of pride and fulfilment, which construe our actions as making a positive difference to the world or as mattering to someone who matters to us. Mutually exclusive philosophical views of what makes our lives meaningful could all be simultaneously correct about the fittingness of these different kinds of experience.

At the first Online Philosophy Conference back in 2006, I offered some pretty thorough comments on Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder's x-phi studies on valuing. While they suggested that our concept of valuing involves moral considerations, I argue here that we can explain the observed asymmetries in attribution of values by appeal to the Principle of Charity, even if the concept of valuing is purely psychological and descriptive. Roughly, to make sense of people with conflicted attitudes, we tacitly attribute to them background attitudes that make them come out as lovers of the good as well as believers of truths and as rational as possible.