Georgina Mills

Celebrities hold affective power—the ability to influence how others feel—because fans form stronger attachments, invest more affectively, and rely more on their parasocial relationship than celebrities do. While prior work highlights celebrities as emotional exemplars, viewing them through affective power reveals that they can also elicit and redirect emotions, and build communities around themselves. From this, we identify positive and negative responsibilities. Negatively, celebrities should try to not misuse their affective power in ways that emotionally harm their fans. Positively, celebrities have strong reasons to redirect affective attention and support towards those in need, especially within marginalized communities.

How might people be wronged in relation to fear? Recently philosophers have begun to investigate the idea that there may be distinctly affective forms of injustice (Archer & Mills 2019; Archer & Matheson 2022; Gallegos 2022; Srinivasan 2018; Whitney 2018). Until now, though, the literature on affective injustice has mostly focused on the emotion of anger. Similarly, while philosophers have investigated both ethical (Döring 2020; Harbin 2023) and political (Ahmed 2004; Nussbaum 2019) questions related to fear, this literature has not yet drawn on the literature of affective injustice to investigate these issues. We will investigate how fear can be a site of affective injustice. We will outline three forms of affective injustice involving fear. We begin by providing an overview of the existing literature on affective injustice. We will then argue that the unfair dismissal of people’s fears can constitute a form of affective injustice. Next, we will argue that being made to live in fear can also constitute a form of affective injustice. Finally, we will outline the last form of fear-related affective injustice, which is being the target of unwarranted fear. In exploring these various forms of fear-related affective injustice we will highlight more general features of affective injustice that have hitherto been underacknowledged.

In many cases of family trauma, victims are left with the burden of rebuilding relationships that have been damaged. This paper illustrates that inappropriate pressure to forgive can harm victims of abuse. This pressure can come from a combination of assumptions. Firstly, often forgiveness is conflated with reconciliation, and those who put pressure on victims to forgive do so to avoid uncomfortable blame or estrangement. Secondly, anger is often inappropriately understood as a morally blameworthy emotion to hold. I draw on Amia Srinivasan’s (2018) work on affective injustice to address this assumption and argue that pressure to forgo anger, forgive, and reconcile stems from a mistaken interpretation of these concepts and is ultimately harmful. I demonstrate this by using examples where victims have found their voices stifled by the mistaken coding of anger as morally blameworthy and forgiveness as morally required.

A familiar debate in the philosophy of sport concerns the question of whether fans should seek to be partisans (those who support particular teams or individuals) or whether they should instead adopt the impartial attitude of the purist. More recently, Kyle Fruh et al. have argued in defense of fair-weather fandom, which they understand as a form of fandom that involves adopting temporary allegiances in response to non-sporting considerations. This paper will add a new form of fandom to this discussion: the foul-weather fan. While fair-weather fans adopt temporary allegiances or strengthen existing allegiances for teams when things are going well, foul-weather fans do so when things are going badly. We will argue that foul-weather fandom can be both instrumentally valuable, as it helps to protect valuable sporting institutions, and non-instrumentally valuable, as these fans display concern, empathy, or support for sporting individuals or teams that are going through tough times. We finish by discussing how a specific form of foul-weather fandom may be associated with a distinctive moral danger in putting people in positions where they may become complicit in a club’s immorality.

Victims of oppression are often called to let go of their anger in order to facilitate better discussion to bring about the end of their oppression. According to Amia Srinivasan, this constitutes an affective injustice. In this paper, we use research on emotion regulation to shed light on the nature of affective injustice. By drawing on the literature on emotion regulation, we illustrate specifically what kind of work is put upon people who are experiencing affective injustice and why it is damaging. We begin by explaining affective injustice and how it can amount to a call for emotion regulation. Then we explain the various techniques that can be used to regulate emotions and explain how each might be harmful here. In the penultimate section of the paper, we explain how the upshot of this is that victims of affective injustice are left with a dilemma. Either they try to regulate their anger in a way that involves ignoring the fact of their oppression or they regulate it in a way that is likely to be harmful for them. Finally, we consider whether there are any good solutions to this dilemma, and how this issue opens up the possibility for further research into emotion regulation and moral philosophy.