Morality And The Emotions

Emotions shape our mental and social lives, but their relation to morality is problematic: are they sources of moral knowledge, or obstacles to morality? Fourteen original articles by leading scholars in moral psychology and philosophy of mind explore the relation between emotions and practical rationality, value, autonomy, and moral identity.

Originally published in 1992 this book attacks many recent philosophical and psychological theories of the emotions and argues that our emotions themselves have intrinsic moral significance. He demonstrates that a proper understanding of the emotions reveals the fundamental role they play in our moral lives and the practical consequences that arise from being morally responsible for our emotions.

The author presents a new philosophical theory according to which we need intuitions and emotions in order to have objective moral knowledge, which is called affectual intuitionism. Affectual Intuitionism combines ethical intuitionism with a cognitive theory of emotions.

This book explains how emotions pervade ethical life, affecting our judgments, actions and relationships, and expressing our moral character, for better or worse.

The essays in this collection explore, from philosophical and religious perspectives, a variety of moral emotions and their relationship to punishment and condemnation or to decisions to lessen punishment or condemnation.

This book offers a new philosophical theory of risk emotions, arguing why and how moral emotions should play an important role in decisions surrounding risky technologies.

Winner, 2015 CSCP Symposium Book Award Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in Phenomenology and Mysticism and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. Moral Emotions offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity.

Philosophers and psychologists come together to think systematically about the nature and value of guilt, looking at the biological origins and psychological nature of guilt, and then discussing the culturally enriched conceptions of this vital moral emotion.

“Surprising and remarkable…Toggling between big ideas, technical details, and his personal intellectual journey, Greene writes a thesis suitable to both airplane reading and PhD seminars.”—The Boston Globe Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world’s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (“portrait,” “landscape”) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions—efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain’s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight—sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words—often with life-and-death stakes. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.

What kind of an emotion is regret? What difference does it make whether, how, and why we experience it, and how does this experience shape our current and future thoughts, decisions, goals? Under what conditions is regret appropriate? Is it always one kind of experience, or does it vary, based on who is doing the regretting, and why? How is regret different from other backward-looking emotions? In The Moral Psychology of Regret, scholars from several disciplines—including philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, law, and neuroscience—come together to address these and other questions related to this ubiquitous emotion that so many of us seem to dread. And while regret has been somewhat under-theorized as a subject worthy of serious and careful attention, this volume is offered with the intent of expanding the discourse on regret as an emotion of great moral significance that underwrites how we understand ourselves and each other.