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12Fitting emotions and virtuous judgmentAnalytic Philosophy. forthcoming.I discuss a tension between two broadly Aristotelian ideas about the role of emotions in virtue and consider its implications for the original and attractive theory of virtuous judgment that Gopal Sreenivasan develops in Emotion and Virtue. One is the idea that a virtuous person has fitting emotions. The other idea is that the virtuous person has emotions that point her toward performing a virtuous action. I explain the tension between these ideas, and how it arises with respect to both of Sreen…Read more
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1Envy in the Philosophical TraditionIn Richard H. Smith (ed.), Envy: Theory and Research, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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36Rational SentimentalismOxford University Press. 2023.Rational Sentimentalism develops a novel theory of the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are profoundly important because they set standards for emotional responses that are part of our shared human nature. Yet moral philosophers have neglected them relative to their prominence in human mental life. The theory is sentimentalist because it holds that these values are emotion-dependent—contrary to some prominent accounts of the funny and t…Read more
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Sentimentalism and scientismIn Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson (eds.), Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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362Game theoretic explanations and the evolution of justicePhilosophy of Science 65 (1): 76-102. 1998.Game theoretic explanations of the evolution of human behavior have become increasingly widespread. At their best, they allow us to abstract from misleading particulars in order to better recognize and appreciate broad patterns in the phenomena of human social life. We discuss this explanatory strategy, contrasting it with the particularist methodology of contemporary evolutionary psychology. We introduce some guidelines for the assessment of evolutionary game theoretic explanations of human beh…Read more
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4Could Emotion Development Really Be the Acquisition of Emotion Concepts?Developmental Psychology 55 (9): 2015-2019. 2019.Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appe…Read more
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54Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative ForceOxford Studies in Metaethics 9. 2014.The literature on the wrong kind of reason problem largely assumes that such reasons pose only a theoretical problem for certain theories of value rather than a practical problem. Since the normative force of the canonical examples is obvious, the only difficulty is to identify what reasons of the right and wrong kind have in common without circularity. This chapter argues that in addition to the obvious WKRs on which the literature focuses, there are also more interesting WKRs that do not overt…Read more
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44Challenges for the Dynamic Functional Model of JealousyEmotion Review 10 (4): 288-289. 2018.This comment on Chung and Harris presses for a clearer account of the motivational role of jealousy within the dynamic functional model of jealousy. It also calls into question the inclusion of “elaborated” jealousy within the emotion itself. It argues that differentiating emotional motivation from motivation toward the same goal that an emotion has requires additional resources.
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3Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative ForceIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 215-244. 2010.
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64Emotions, Values, and Agency, by Christine Tappolet: New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. xvi + 228, £40 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2): 417-417. 2018.
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92The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of EmotionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 65-90. 2000.Philosophers often call emotions appropriate or inappropriate. What is meant by such talk? In one sense, explicated in this paper, to call an emotion appropriate is to say that the emotion is fitting: it accurately presents its object as having certain evaluative features. For instance, envy might be thought appropriate when one’s rival has something good which one lacks. But someone might grant that a circumstance has these features, yet deny that envy is appropriate, on the grounds that it is …Read more
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48Relationality, Relativism, and Realism About Moral ValuePhilosophical Studies 126 (3): 433-448. 2005.Among the many virtues of Facts, Values and Norms, is the articulation of an especially subtle and detailed form of naturalistic value realism. The theory aspires to vindicate the objective purport of value discourse while granting, indeed insisting, that value is subjective in important respects. Evaluative thought and inquiry are understood to be continuous with empirical inquiry in the human sciences, so that ethical and evaluative conclusions can ultimately be defended on a posteriori ground…Read more
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1Demystifying sensibilities: sentimental values and the instability of affectIn Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Oxford University Press. pp. 585--613. 2009.
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228Sensibility theory and projectivismIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 186--218. 2006.This chapter explores the debate between contemporary projectivists or expressivists, and the advocates of sensibility theory. Both positions are best viewed as forms of sentimentalism — the theory that evaluative concepts must be explicated by appeal to the sentiments. It argues that the sophisticated interpretation of such notions as “true” and “objective” that are offered by defenders of these competing views ultimately undermines the significance of their meta-ethical disputes over “cognitiv…Read more
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113Anthropocentric Constraints on Human ValueOxford Studies in Metaethics 1 99-126. 2006.According to Cicero, “all emotions spring from the roots of error: they should not be pruned or clipped here and there, but yanked out” (Cicero 2002: 60). The Stoic enthusiasm for the extirpation of emotion is radical in two respects, both of which can be expressed with the claim that emotional responses are never appropriate. First, the Stoics held that emotions are incompatible with virtue , since the virtuous man will retain his equanimity whatever his fate. Grief is always vicious, both bad …Read more
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154Two Arguments for SentimentalismPhilosophical Issues 15 (1): 1-21. 2005.‘Sentimentalism’ is an old-fashioned name for the philosophical suggestion that moral or evaluative concepts or properties depend somehow upon human sentiments. This general idea has proven attractive to a number of contemporary philosophers with little else in common. Yet most sentimentalists say very little about the nature of the sentiments to which they appeal, and many seem prepared to enlist almost any object-directed pleasant or unpleasant state of mind as a sentiment. Furthermore, becaus…Read more
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132Prinz’s Theory of Emotion (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3): 712-719. 2008.No Abstract
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36Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character:Moral Knowledge and Ethical CharacterEthics 109 (3): 645-648. 1999.
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141Value and the regulation of the sentimentsPhilosophical Studies 163 (1): 3-13. 2013.“Sentiment” is a term of art, intended to refer to object-directed, irruptive states, that occur in relatively transient bouts involving positive or negative affect, and that typically involve a distinctive motivational profile. Not all the states normally called “emotions” are sentiments in the sense just characterized. And all the terms for sentiments are sometimes used in English to refer to longer lasting attitudes. But this discussion is concerned with boutish affective states, not standing…Read more
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237VIII. The significance of recalcitrant emotionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 127-145. 2003.Sentimentalist theories in ethics treat evaluative judgments as somehow dependent on human emotional capacities. While the precise nature of this dependence varies, the general idea is that evaluative concepts are to be understood by way of more basic emotional reactions. Part of the task of distinguishing between the concepts that sentimentalism proposes to explicate, then, is to identify a suitably wide range of associated emotions. In this paper, we attempt to deal with an important obstacle …Read more
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20Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.This volume examines the implications of developments in the science of ethics for philosophical theorizing about moral psychology and human agency. These ten new essays in empirically informed philosophy illuminate such topics as responsibility, the self, and the role in morality of mental states such as desire, emotion, and moral judgement.
Columbus, Ohio, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Value Theory, Miscellaneous |
Philosophy of Mind |