Dong An

People can experience emotions towards fictional characters who we know do not exist in the real world. To make sense of this phenomenon, philosophers have proposed various strategies to show that belief is not necessary for feeling genuine and rational emotions. In this paper, I offer a new perspective and argue that we can understand the relevant beliefs in a pragmatist way. According to this view, when engaging with fictions, we pragmatically believe in the existence of fictional objects. The reason for this pragmatist belief is a practical consideration: to enjoy the aesthetic value of the fictional work. This pragmatist belief is more committing and direct than hypothetical attitudes such as pretense, make-believe, supposition, or imagination. It is also more immediate and less deliberative than acceptance. Finally, it recognizes the close connection between emotions towards fictions and emotions in real life, thereby can accommodate both the emotional carry-over effect and the special functions of emotions directed at fictional objects.

Scholars have primarily approached the issue of AI moral agency from the perspectives of consciousness and intentionality (Chalmers, 1997; Johnson, 2006; Searle, 1992) or by considering various functional substitutes for these faculties (Coeckelbergh, 2010, 2020; Floridi & Sanders, 2004; Himma, 2009). In this paper, I add to the existing literature to show the value of exploring the application of the reactive attitudes approach to AI moral agency (Antill, 2024; Rebera, 2024; Sars, 2022; Smith & Vickers, 2021; Tigard, 2021; Tollon, 2023). Reactive attitudes are attitudes we hold towards each other in everyday interactions with respect to our belief about each other’s quality of will. Accordingly, to hold people morally responsible is to adopt and express these attitudes in moral practice. In the existent attempts to use this framework to investigate AI moral agency, scholars have mostly focused on the capacities that AIs must possess to be considered apt recipients of reactive attitude. I adopt the reversal methodology by focusing on AIs as apt expressers of reactive attitudes. This methodology can allow us to draw resources from emotion research across philosophy, psychology, and computer science. My thesis is that because it is possible to attribute reactive attitudes to AIs, allowing them to engage in reactive attitudes exchange with humans in the shared moral community, they may be considered as moral agents and thus held accountable for their actions.

In this paper, I develop an account of appreciation. I argue that appreciation is an epistemic emotion in which the subject grasps the object in an affective way. The “grasping” and “feeling” components implies that in appreciation, we make sense of the object by having cognitive control over it, are motivated to maintain the valuable epistemic state of understanding, and experience the “aha” or “eureka” moment. This account offers a unified account of the many types of appreciation, including the aesthetic, the moral, and the epistemic. In all these cases, appreciation requires some other first-order emotions as prerequisite.

Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued that to evaluate the funniness of a joke based on the consideration of whether it is morally appropriate to feel amused commits the “moralistic fallacy.” We offer a new and empirically informed reply. We argue that there is a way to take morality into consideration without committing this fallacy, that is, it is legitimate to say that for some people, witty but immoral jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral. In our account, one has an intramural moral reason not to feel amused if one focuses on the moral feature itself of a joke rather than the moral consequence implied in one’s reaction to the joke. When one judges a joke as not funny because of the intramural moral reason, one is in a negative emotional state with high arousal, for example, moral disgust or anger. This state is psychologically incompatible with amusement. That one has an intramural reason not to feel amused thus implies that one does not have a reason to feel amused. Moral consideration thus plays an indirect and appropriate role in the evaluation of the funniness of a joke.