Coleen Macnamara

One of the most widely made claims about resentment and indignation is the “communication claim”: that resentment and indignation have a communicative nature. Many who endorse this claim take it one step further and unpack the communicative nature of resentment and indignation in terms of a specific form of address: demands. Resentment and indignation are often described as addressing, expressing, making, or issuing a demand. In this paper, I argue that while it is apt to characterize resentment and indignation as communicative entities, it is a mistake to characterize them as demands. I sketch an alternative account of blame’s communicative nature, what I call the “mere address” view.

We argue that it has not been adequately appreciated that there are not one but two types of reasons that have been advanced under the rubric of non-requiring reasons. One camp defends the existence of reasons that play what we call a permissibility-conferring role. These are reasons that function to defuse or neutralize, by a certain degree, the force of requiring reasons. Another camp defends the existence of reasons that play what we call a commendatory role. These are reasons that function to normatively endorse an action without placing one in need of justification to decline. We lay out the two camps – their core claims, animating motivations, and, in final section, why they are sometimes confused for one another.

Is the performance of a required action ever praiseworthy? Both the moral worth and moral responsibility literatures address this question. The dominant view in the former holds that all well-motivated required actions are praiseworthy. Zoë Johnson King challenges this view, arguing that only well-motivated required actions that exceed minimal decency are praiseworthy. Themes in the moral responsibility literature suggest a disjunctive answer: either required actions are never praiseworthy, or they are praiseworthy only when they are also good, performed because they are good, and exceed the moral minimum. In this paper, I offer a different answer. I argue that praise is a fitting response to all good actions performed because they are good. Therefore, all required and good actions done because they are good are praiseworthy.

Kindnesses are often met with a grateful response, and this response frequently includes returning the kindness. The most common characterization of a returned kindness is what it is not. We are told that a returned kindness is not a payment or compensation for the original act of kindness. This seems exactly right, but it raises an important question: If a returned kindness is not a form of payment, what is it? How should we construe the “returning the kindness” element of a grateful response? In this paper, I offer a positive characterization of a returned kindness. I propose that a returned kindness is an expression of the emotion of gratitude, in the sense that it demonstrates the reciprocal caring orientation that, in part, constitutes an episode of gratitude.

While theorists tend to agree that we do not owe another gratitude for merely respecting our rights, the literature lacks a compelling explanation of why this is so. In this paper, I fill this gap in the literature. Succinctly put, I argue that requiring one to feel gratitude toward another for respecting her rights amounts to morally forbidding her from representing herself as possessing what morality, itself, has deemed normatively hers. Since this would be a highly implausible result, we have reason to conclude that we do not owe another gratitude for merely respecting our rights

A striking feature of the life of practical agency is the substantial latitude it includes. One suggestion for how to explain this latitude is that such latitude points to pluralism in the very way that reasons favor: some reasons favor deontically, and other reasons only commend. However, there is a critical question about the comparative lives of such reasons. They presumably admit of different strengths, and are thus capable of ordering options. While one might agree that we have latitude to decline following the direction of a reason that merely commends, it seems that once we face two or more such reasons that offer competing recommendations, only the action supported by the better reason is a candidate for action. Against this challenge, this chapter argues that commendatory reasons have the ability to defend, in the cases we care about, the moral and rational acceptability of doing the less worthy.

Emotions are typically dual-faced: they involve both an evaluative and a practical aspect. What is more, an emotion's evaluative and practical aspects tend to exhibit a kind of fit. For example, Sakshi's fear of the bear involves apprehending the bear as a threat to something she cares about, i.e., her wellbeing. And it motivates her to act on behalf of this care: it motivates her to act in ways that protect her wellbeing. Both dimensions of Sakshi's fear are about her wellbeing. Typically, characterizations of gratitude speak to both its evaluative and practical dimensions. Gratitude is described as a way of apprehending the significance of one's benefactor's kindness, and it is said to involve a disposition to thank one's benefactor and to return the kindness. In this article I show that this characterization is incomplete insofar as it leaves us without the resources needed to discern the link between gratitude's two dimensions. I argue that discerning the fit requires an account of gratitude's focus and goal. I urge that the beneficiary's communal relationship with her benefactor is gratitude's focus and that promoting this relationship is gratitude's goal. Both dimensions of a beneficiary's gratitude are about her communal relationship with her benefactor.

Desert-realists maintain that those who do wrong without an excuse deserve blame. Desert-skeptics deny this, holding that though we may be responsible for our actions in some sense, we lack the kind of responsibility needed to deserve blame. In two recent papers, Randolph Clarke (Philosophical Explorations 16:153–164, 2013 and Journal of Ethics 20:121–137, 2016) advances an innovative defense of desert-realism. He argues for deserved-guilt, the thesis that the guilty deserve to feel guilt. In his 2013 paper, Clarke suggests two strategies for defending deserved-guilt: the fitting-guilt strategy and the good-guilt strategy. In his 2016 paper, Clarke issues a challenge to the desert-skeptic: he calls on them to provide a non-desert based account of guilt’s fittingness. In the first two thirds of the paper, I respond to Clarke’s challenge to the desert-skeptic, showing that guilt felt by the guilty is alethic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. None of these notions of fittingness, I argue, are desert based. In the last third of the paper, I show how the work done in previous sections affords us the tools to finely diagnose the failures of both the fitting-guilt and the good-guilt strategies. Here, I draw on one of Clarke’s own insights—namely, that desert is intimately connected to the value of justice. I propose that showing that guilt is fitting, or again non-instrumentally good, fails to show that it is deserved because to show that it is deserved one must show that guilt is fitting or good in a sense that implicates justice.

Most moral theorists agree that it is one thing to believe that someone has slighted you and another to resent her for the insult; one thing to believe that someone did you a favor and another to feel gratitude toward her for her kindness. While all of these ways of responding to another's conduct are forms of moral appraisal, the reactive attitudes are said to 'go beyond' beliefs in some way. We think this claim is adequately explained only when we take seriously the fact that reactive attitudes are emotions. In this paper, we appeal to insights of the emotions literature to highlight one key way in which reactive attitudes go beyond beliefs: beliefs about a person and her morally significant conduct merely ascribe to the person the property of having performed a morally significant action, while reactive attitudes are ways of experiencing that person as having performed a morally significant action. We then suggest that appreciating this is a crucial first step toward understanding why reactive emotions play roles in our practices around responsibility that beliefs do not.

Theorists have spent considerable time discussing the concept of responsibility. Their discussions, however, have generally focused on the question of who counts as responsible, and for what. But as Gary Watson has noted, “Responsibility is a triadic relationship: an individual (or group) is responsible to others for something” (Watson Agency and answerability: selected essays, 2004 , p. 7). Thus, theorizing about responsibility ought to involve theorizing not just about the actor and her conduct, but also about those the actor is responsible to—and specifically about how these people hold the actor responsible for her conduct. In this paper, I give a topology of the terrain of holding others responsible. Over the course of the paper I disambiguate two very broad senses of holding responsible—regarding another as a responsible agent and holding another responsible for a particular piece of conduct. Next, I argue that the latter sense of holding responsible is a genus with two species—what I will call “holding responsible as deep moral appraisal” and “holding responsible as accountability.” Appreciating these distinctions, I argue, sheds considerable light on a number of questions concerning the scope and nature of our practices of holding others responsible. Finally, illuminating these distinct senses of holding responsible and highlighting their features reveals an awkwardness in the most carefully explicated and influential account of holding responsible, namely R. Jay Wallace’s account in Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.

If I do you a good turn, you may respond with gratitude and express that gratitude by saying “Thank you.” Similarly, if I insult you, you may react with resentment which you express by shouting, “Screw you!” or something of the sort. Broadly put, when confronted with another’s morally significant conduct, we are inclined to respond with a reactive attitude and to express that reactive attitude in speech. A number of familiar speech acts have a call-and-response structure. Questions, demands and hails are all call-types, and each seeks a defining response. Questions seek answers, demands seek compliance, and a hail, for example, “Hi Coleen” seeks a “Hi” in return. Many theorists claim that expressions of the reactive attitudes also have this structure. Yet, this insight raises a number of questions. There are, after all, many familiar call-types, not only questions, demands and hails, but also requests, invitations, recommendations and entreaties. Given this, it is natural to wonder whether the expressed reactive attitudes are a sui generis call-type or whether they can be properly assimilated to one of the better-known forms. Further, we might wonder about the response component. It is utterly familiar that the response suited to a demand is compliance, and that the response sought by a question is an answer, but what response do the expressed reactive attitudes seek? The answer to this question is not similarly ready to hand. In this paper, I provide a recognition-based theory of the call-and-response structure of the expressed reactive attitudes. On my account, both the positive and negative expressed reactive attitudes are modes of recognition that seek for their target to give expression to her recognition of having been appropriately recognized. In the negative case, the target does this by feeling and expressing guilt or remorse, and in the positive case, by feeling and expressing self-approbation

Many theorists claim that the reactive emotions, even in their private form, are communicative entities. But as widely endorsed as this claim is, it has not been redeemed: the literature lacks a clear and compelling account of the sense in which reactive attitudes qua private mental states are essentially communicative. In this paper, I fill this gap. I propose that it is apt to characterize privately held reactive attitudes as communicative in nature because they, like many paradigmatic forms of communication, have representational content and the function of evoking uptake of this content in a recipient