Logan Wigglesworth

This paper lays out and resolves what I call the paradox of tragedy during tough times: we sometimes pursue sad artworks more when we are sad from life events. Why? In contrast to hedonic based solutions, I argue that our motivations during such times are epistemic. When a tragic life event happens, there is a lot of processing that occurs. We want to make sense of all the events culminating in, say a breakup, to help us answer the questions we have, determine how we feel, and form evaluations. Part of this process is coming to a narrative understanding of the chain of events in one’s life. After describing the complexity of this task, I argue art can help us attain a narrative understanding because it can be utilized as what Elisabeth Camp calls “frames”1, representational vehicles which express open-ended, intuitive, ways of thinking about things. Using art as a frame for our lives helps us make sense of life’s tough moments in two manners. First, art can help us recognize, and shape, how we feel about a significant life event. Second, art can make the task of structuring life events narratively less complex by bringing important aspects to prominence and bracketing other details.

What is the role of affect in moral epistemology? Sentimentalists assert that moral knowledge is rooted in knowledge of specific situational moral truths, which affect is a necessary means for attaining. Rationalists claim moral knowledge is rooted in moral principles, knowledge of which is acquired a priori through reason alone; affect is unnecessary. Note that in this way of framing the debate, the issue concerns solely moral knowledge. Recent epistemology, however, has also highlighted the importance of understanding as an epistemic good separate from knowledge. As such, moral understanding has value over and above mere moral knowledge. In this paper, I first consider a rationalist account of moral understanding that appeals to inferential capabilities due to Allison Hills. I argue by dilemma that the account cannot accommodate the distinction between occurrent and non-occurrent understanding. I then argue for a sentimentalist account of moral understanding. Not only can this account accommodate the occurrent/non-occurrent distinction, it also explains why certain moral truths seem to defy human understanding. The sentimentalist account also illuminates the role of moral understanding in forming our moral character.