Montaque Reynolds

Following Goldie (2009)’s short paper Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and Planning, I consider the representation of emotional expressions of regret, narrative regret. I draw specific attention to the context of the representation of distinct special relationships in fiction. Important here are discourses on the fictional representation of such relationships as a special kind of human agency. I argue that a related concern are the assumptions about what is true and what is fiction in popular fiction, where what is true are expressions of relational sanctification that is grounded in a divine union of love appropriate to friendship.

Adaptive preferences have been extensively studied in decision theory and feminist political theory, but not in experimental philosophy. In feminist contexts, the term is used to discuss cases in which women seem to accept abusive treatment and other conditions of oppression. According to one class of theories, women who accept abusive behavior are cognitively deficient: irrational, lacking autonomy, or not acting in accordance with their identity. Other theories deny this, saying that under certain conditions, accepting abuse can be a sound response, given available alternatives. We survey lay opinions about a case in which a woman endures domestic violence and find that people often attribute adaptive attitudes and tend to see them as rational, free, and reflective of identity. We also examine lay normative judgments, including options about the right course of action, and the locus of blame, finding, for example, some tendency to blame the victim in such cases. Such attitudes are impacts by gender and political orientation. We also manipulated the cultural setting of our vignette, but found no impact.