Arina Pismenny

Chronic pain patients frequently encounter not only physical suffering but also emotional dismissal and misrecognition in clinical settings. This paper argues that such experiences reflect a pervasive form of structural harm: emotional injustice. Chronic pain sufferers, especially women and members of marginalized groups, are often subject to emotion policing—the unjust regulation of emotional expression that distorts, suppresses, or discredits their feelings of frustration, sadness, and anger. Stereotypes like “women are emotional” or “boys don't cry” shape how patients' pain is interpreted and whether their emotional expressions are seen as credible, appropriate, or pathological. As a result, patients' emotions are routinely misread, their reports of pain discounted, and their treatment delayed or denied. Through the lens of emotion stereotyping, display suppression, and emotion hegemonizing, I show how dominant emotional norms constrain how chronic pain patients can express distress and advocate for themselves. These practices compromise emotional autonomy—their ability to experience and express fitting emotions in ways that reflect their circumstances, values, and lived reality—and reinforce systemic inequities in healthcare. While these harms intersect with forms of epistemic injustice, I argue that emotional injustice captures a distinct and deeper wrong: the denial of patients' ability to make sense of and communicate their emotional suffering on their own terms. Recognizing emotional injustice in the treatment of chronic pain is crucial for promoting more equitable, respectful, and compassionate care—care that honors the emotional realities of patients' lives.

This paper examines the role of emotion norms in constructing both emotions and social identities. Emotions are not biologically fixed or purely individual states; they are shaped by social expectations about what one should feel, how one should express it, and whose emotions count. These emotion norms do not merely constrain expression—they shape which emotions are intelligible, permissible, and punished, thereby contributing to the formation and maintenance of social categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and disability. I argue that emotion norms are key mechanisms through which social identities are constructed, regulated, and enforced. They naturalize dominant gender roles by prescribing distinct emotional repertoires and by penalizing deviation. These norms also produce emotional double binds, particularly for marginalized individuals, by making all available emotional responses subject to sanction or misrecognition. However, emotion norms are not monolithic. In certain social contexts alternative emotional repertoires emerge—ones that refuse the constraints of dominant expectations and make space for previously illegible emotions and identities. Understanding the mutual construction of emotion and identity clarifies how power operates not only through institutions and discourse, but also through emotions. A feminist philosophy of emotion must take seriously the political stakes of affective life, not only by exposing the workings of emotional injustice, but also by affirming the possibility of constructing new emotional norms that support freedom, recognition, and collective transformation.

This paper examines the role of emotion norms in constructing both emotions and social identities. Emotions are not biologically fixed or purely individual states; they are shaped by social expectations about what one should feel, how one should express what one feels, and whose emotions count. These emotion norms do not merely constrain expression—they shape which emotions are intelligible, permissible, and punished, thereby contributing to the formation and maintenance of social categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and disability.I argue that emotion norms are key mechanisms through which social identities are constructed, regulated, and enforced. They naturalise dominant gender roles by prescribing distinct emotional repertoires and by penalising deviation. These norms also produce emotional double binds, particularly for marginalised individuals, by making all available emotional responses subject to sanction or misrecognition. However, emotion norms are not monolithic. In certain social contexts, alternative emotional repertoires emerge—ones that refuse the constraints of dominant expectations and make space for previously illegible emotions and identities.Understanding the mutual construction of emotion and identity clarifies how power operates through emotions no less than through institutions and discourse. A feminist philosophy of emotion must take seriously the political stakes of affective life, not only by exposing the workings of emotional injustice, but also by affirming the possibility of constructing new emotional norms that support freedom, recognition, and collective transformation.

What is lust? Its classification depends on where we look for its essence. Physiologically, it may appear as an appetite, urge, or drive; phenomenologically, as a desire or emotion; morally, as a sin or a life-affirming force. This chapter argues that the act of classifying lust is itself a normative choice, revealing what we take to matter in human life, whether survival and reproduction, pleasure and freedom, identity and self-expression, or social and moral order. By examining lust as drive, desire, emotion, and social construction, I show how each framework highlights certain dimensions of human experience while obscuring others. The chapter also traces the tension between lust’s biological function and its subjective phenomenology: while rooted in reproduction, lust is often pursued for pleasure alone. Whether condemned as a sin or reclaimed as vitality, lust reflects the values through which we understand desire, the body, and human flourishing.

Chronic pain patients frequently encounter not only physical suffering but also emotional dismissal and misrecognition in clinical settings. This paper argues that such experiences reflect a pervasive form of structural harm: emotional injustice. Chronic pain sufferers, especially women and members of marginalized groups, are often subject to emotion policing—the unjust regulation of emotional expression that distorts, suppresses, or discredits their feelings of frustration, sadness, and anger. Stereotypes like “women are emotional” or “boys don’t cry” shape how patients’ pain is interpreted and whether their emotional expressions are seen as credible, appropriate, or pathological. As a result, patients’ emotions are routinely misread, their reports of pain discounted, and their treatment delayed or denied. Through the lens of emotion stereotyping, display suppression, and emotion hegemonizing, I show how dominant emotional norms constrain how chronic pain patients can express distress and advocate for themselves. These practices compromise emotional autonomy— their ability to experience and express fitting emotions in ways that reflect their circumstances, values, and lived reality—and reinforce systemic inequities in healthcare. While these harms intersect with forms of epistemic injustice, I argue that emotional injustice captures a distinct and deeper wrong: the denial of patients’ ability to make sense of and communicate their emotional suffering on their own terms. Recognizing emotional injustice in the treatment of chronic pain is crucial for promoting more equitable, respectful, and compassionate care—care that honors the emotional realities of patients’ lives.

What makes romantic jealousy rational or fitting? Psychologists view jealousy’s function as preserving a relationship against a “threat” from a “rival.” I argue that its more specific aim is to preserve a certain privileged status of the lover in relation to the beloved. Jealousy is apt when the threat to that status is real, otherwise inapt. Aptness assessments of jealousy must determine what counts as a “threat” and as a “rival.” They commonly take for granted monogamous norms. Hence, compared with jealousy in monogamous relationships, norms of polyamory set the thresholds for what counts both as a “threat” and as a “rival” much higher.

‘What is ‘sexual orientation’ for?’ is a question we need to answer when addressing a more seemingly basic one, ‘what is sexual orientation?’. The concept of sexual orientation is grounded in the concepts of sex and/or gender since it refers to the sex or gender of the individuals one is sexually attracted to. Typical categories of sexual orientation such as ’heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘bi-sexual’ all rely on a sex or gender binary. Yet, it is now common practice to recognize sex and gender categories that transcend the binary. Should our sexual orientation categories be revised to reflect sex and gender diversity? Drawing on the example of pansexuality, I argue that they should. The reason is that one aim of reconstructing the concept of sexual orientation—in addition to the epistemic goal of understanding— should also be political: it should make it easier to argue for the protection of those who have been marginalized or discriminated against because their sexual attraction is other than heterosexual.

In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say why it is useful to distinguish these and also to subsume them under a single concept. Our aims are both theoretical and practical: to provide a unified account of emotional injustice, while recognizing the diversity of this phenomenon; to facilitate further research on this topic; to recognize the political importance of emotions; and to outline some of the ways in which emotional injustice can be combated.

Although trained in the Anglophone analytic tradition, the French education of his formative years seems to have left its mark on Ronnie de Sousa’s thinking and writing. He appeals to temperament as an explanation for fundamental attitudes to life: neither the quest for a source of meaning in God or nature, nor his own tendency to relish life’s meaninglessness can be grounded in reason. To show this, Ronnie has argued that there is no such thing as human nature, and that appeals to evolution can neither guide us in choosing how to live, nor give us good reason to prefer the “normal” to the “deviant”. Instead, aesthetic reasons deserve to be given more weight than is granted by the alleged overriding character of morality.

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, however, friendship can turn vicious when one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought.

In this commentary on Elpidorou‘s book, I first note a certain arbitrariness in his choice, for his purpose of showing the bright side of negative emotions, of boredom, frustration, and anticipation. Many other emotions carry negative valence and might be said to be useful in motivating us to avoid or escape them. I then focus on boredom, and consider four candidates for the role of its formal object. All four turn out to be problematic. I then consider the moral and prudential value of boredom, and conclude that if boredom is to be attributed some sort of intrinsic value, it is more likely to derive it from its complex role in aesthetic experience.

It has been argued that romantic love is an intrinsically moral phenomenon – a phenomenon that is directly connected to morality. The connection is elucidated in terms of reasons for love, and reasons of love. It is said that romantic love is a response to moral reasons – the moral qualities of the beloved. Additionally, the reasons that love produces are also moral in nature. Since romantic love is a response to moral qualities and a source of moral motivation, it is itself moral. This chapter aims to cast doubt on both these claims. By employing the model of emotional rationality it shows that a moralistic fallacy is committed when reasons for love are construed as moral. Reasons of love are also not essentially moral but rather of both moral and nonmoral kinds. Reasons of love are in part determined by cultural narratives and norms pertaining to love. Romantic love is not moral in nature. Morality is extrinsic to love.

What kind of mental phenomenon is romantic love? Many philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folk treat it as an emotion. This chapter argues the category of emotion is inadequate to account for romantic love. It examines major emotion theories in philosophy and psychology and shows that they fail to illustrate that romantic love is an emotion. It considers the categories of basic emotions and emotion complexes, and demonstrates they too come short in accounting for romantic love. It assesses the roles of culture and evolution in shaping the romantic love phenomenon and evaluates the ways in which the norms of rationality that are applied to standard emotions fail to apply to love. It considers the category of sentiments and argue that despite coming close, it does not adequately capture the nature of romantic love. Finally, the chapter makes a case for love being best characterized as a syndrome.