The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Edited by Hugh LaFollette, print pages 1590–1600.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

DOI: 10.1002/ 9781444367072.wbiee290

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EmotionRobert C. Roberts

Introduction

The disciplinary diversity of the recent literature on emotions is indicative of the many

dimensions of human life that emotions touch. Neuroscientists and other physiolo-

gists study them because emotions have rather specific neurological, neurochemical,

and other bodily correlates. Anthropologists and historians study them because their

character and the popular understanding of them can vary significantly from culture

to culture and age to age. Evolutionary psychologists study emotions because at least

the most basic ones have defensive and reproductive functions in supporting species

survival. Experimental and social psychologists study them, often, with respect to

their behavioral outputs, where “behavior” covers a wider class of movements than

what philosophers call “actions,” for example emotions’ spontaneous facial expres-

sions. Clinical psychologists study emotions because they impinge on social function-

ing and psychological well-being. Legal theorists study them because of their

connection to the legal responsibility of defendants and their roles in the judgments of

judges and juries. Specialists in religion study emotions because many or all religious

experiences have emotional characteristics. Emotions interest philosophers in virtu-

ally all of the above connections, and in the ways these interrelate. Each of these

disciplinary domains will tend to favor its own kinds of theories about what an emo-

tion is – neuroscientists neurological models, anthropologists social regulation mod-

els, evolutionary psychologists biological survival models, etc. – but even theorists

sharing the same discipline often offer many competing models. After surveying a few

“scientific” models, Ronald de Sousa comments, “It should be clear from this partial

sampling that … emotions theory has not unequivocally emerged from the methodo-

logical chaos that entitles it to be called philosophy” (2010: 103).

One common dimension of human life that can be fruitfully studied in connection

with the emotions is ethics, and the present essay will focus on emotions’ relevance

to that dimension. I will begin by reviewing four main questions to which major

philosophers have offered answers regarding the relevance of emotions to ethics:

Are human emotions the fundamental source of ethical values? Are emotions

cognitive states? Can emotions be ethically appropriate motives to action? Which

emotion types are relevant to ethics? Surveying the answers to these questions will

put before us some of the main historical positions about emotions and ethics. Then

in the second half of the essay, assuming affirmative answers to the second and third

questions above, I will survey five aspects of the broadly ethical life in which

emotions play a significant role.

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Some Historical Positions

Are human emotions the fundamental source of ethical values? One of the

distinguish ing features of the eighteenth-century “sentimentalist” approach to

emotions and ethics (see sentimentalism; sentiments, moral; shaftesbury,

third earl of; smith, adam; hume, david) is that it seeks to find the source of

ethical and other values in human emotions (see ayer, a. j.). In this feature sentimentalism is analogous to such other modern projects as the grounding of

ethics in pleasure or happiness (see utilitarianism), pure practical reason

(see kant, immanuel), or a social contract (see hobbes, thomas).

It seems highly plausible that emotions are in some sense evaluations of the things

or situations toward which they are directed. If I get angry at a colleague for

something she says about me to the Dean, it seems clear that I take what she said to

be inappropriate, wrong, opprobrious, inopportune, or something else negative; if I

feel grateful to her for what she said, I assess it as appropriate, helpful, or good. It

seems equally clear, however, that not just any emotion is fit to deliver the correct

evaluation. If I am in a personal struggle with my colleague for promotion to

Department Chair, or romantically infatuated with her, my emotions about her

actions may be biased and unreliable. Emotions are not only evaluations; they are

also subject to evaluation. So Hume (1978 [1739–40]: 472) tells us that evaluatively

reliable emotions must be experienced from a disinterested standpoint, and Smith

(1969 [1759]: 139–42) requires that the evaluative emotion be one with which the

“impartial spectator” can sympathize.

But private interest is not the only distorter of our evaluative sentiments, so it is

not enough for the evaluator to be disinterested; he or she must also be mature, wise,

and good. But then we can ask, “Which maturity, wisdom, and goodness?” The one

recommended by Nietzsche? Or that of Mohammed? Or Gandhi? Or Jesus? Or

Socrates? Or Ben Franklin? The trouble with the emotions of all these sages, regarded

as a foundation for ethical distinctions, is that they presuppose definite moral

opinions – the very kind of thing that was supposed to be derived from them. The

foundational sentimentalist project requires the discovery of a class of emotions that

are universally or at least paradigmatically human, are not infected with moral

prejudices, and yet somehow have within them the potential to ground or yield

moral judgments. The search is still under way for emotions answering this

description (D’Arms and Jacobson 2003; Roberts 2010).

The sentimentalist’s foundational project may be hopeless, but emotions are

connected to morality in less problematic ways. Plato (see plato) and Aristotle (see

aristotle) give emotion dispositions a central place in moral education and in the

shape of mature ethical character. Several of the virtues that Aristotle analyzes in his

Nicomachean Ethics turn out to be dispositions to experience emotions of one type

or another “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right

people, with the right motive, and in the right way” (NE 2.6, 1106b21–2). Courage is

a disposition to feel fear and confidence rightly (1107a33–4), gentleness to feel anger

rightly (4.5, 1125b25–34), temperance to feel pleasures of touch rightly (3.10,

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1117b25). Other virtues, such as liberality and justice, are not analyzed with reference

to some particular emotion type, but Aristotle says that one cannot be said to have

the virtue of justice if one does not take pleasure in performing just actions, nor

liberality if one does not take pleasure in liberal actions (NE 1.8, 1099a16–20). We

can perhaps extend this insight by noting that to be a just person also involves a

disposition to be emotionally distressed at injustice, grateful to those who help out

in just causes, to admire people whose commitment to justice is conspicuous, and so

forth. For Aristotle, emotions are significant in the moral life because they make

possible the full engagement of the person in her actions and judgments. It is not

enough merely to act rightly, nor even to act and judge rightly; only with emotional

engagement is the agent fully present in her actions and thoughts.

Scholars do not all agree concerning just what kind of cognitive state Aristotle

took emotions to involve. (For the debate, see Cooper 1996; Nussbaum 1996.) Some

hold that he, like the Stoics, took them to require judgment or belief about the

emotion’s cognitive content. In this view, if fear involves the cognition that some

feature of the subject’s current situation is a threat that attains a certain probability

of eventuating and a certain degree of momentousness, then anyone who fears

something believes or assents to the proposition that her situation contains such a

threat. But the Stoic view does not seem to be true, since phobics sometimes know

that what they fear is harmless and people sometimes feel guilty about actions they

do not regard as really wrong. So it seems likely that the cognitive content of some

emotions, including instances of anger, guilt, shame, and fear, needs only to be an

impression or appearance (Greek phantasia), not a full-fledged judgment. It is

noteworthy that in Aristotle’s “ definitions” of the various emotion types in Rhetoric

2.1–11, the language of appearance dominates in characterizing the subject’s take on

her situation. In any case, whether Aristotle took emotions to require evaluative

judgments or only evaluative impressions, he certainly thought that mature emotions

involve some kind of correct cognition of the situa tions to which they are directed

(see reason and passion).

Because of emotions’ power to orient a person evaluatively, that is, to engage him

with respect to both his actions and his judgments, bad or inappropriate emotions

are a real detriment. They are a major distorting factor in the character defect of

moral weakness or weakness of will (akrasia) (NE 7.1–10; see weakness of will),

and Aristotle says that people who are immature, by deficiency of either years or

moral living, are not suited to hear lectures on ethics, because they “follow their

passions” (NE 1.3, 1095a8). Still, it would be foolish to try to eradicate all emotions.

Not only would the project fail; if it succeeded, it would ruin its subject’s character

as a human being.

By contrast, the official doctrine of the Stoics (see stoicism) is that all emotions

are false value judgments, and that none of them is a feature of moral maturity. On

the official Stoic view, emotions (passions) are judgments to the effect that something

or other that is beyond the subject’s control is very good or very bad. For example,

my anger at my colleague for reporting to the Dean that I went fishing and left a

graduate student in charge of my classes amounts to a judgment that my colleague’s

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report is a very bad thing. However, according to official Stoicism, nothing that is

beyond the subject’s control is very good or bad (though such things can be

“ preferable” or “dispreferable”); the only thing that is really good is good character

and the only really bad thing is bad character, and these are within our control. (One

thing that seems to be good, yet beyond our control, for the Stoics, is the beautiful

rational order of the universe – that to which the sage has conformed his mind.)

I refer above to the Stoics’ “official view,” because in practice they sometimes take

a much more moderate view. In this connection it is interesting to compare Seneca’s

treatise On Anger with his treatise On Favors (see Seneca 1995). In On Anger Seneca,

in orthodox Stoic fashion, criticizes anger across the board and recommends strate-

gies for eradicating it. But in On Favors, he criticizes people who are ungrateful and

commends the feeling of gratitude, and of joy in both the giving and the receiving of

favors. Surely, gratitude and joy are as fully emotions (passions) as anger is! Here

Seneca looks a bit more like Aristotle, in trying to delineate when gratitude is

appropriate and when it is not (except that Aristotle in fact does not commend

gratitude in particular, and seems to think it a rather servile emotion type) (see NE

4.3, especially 1124b10–23; see gratitude).

We have seen that the sentimentalists want to derive moral values from emotions,

but cannot derive them from the ordinary emotions that are shaped from an early

age by our culture and our moral beliefs. Perhaps this explains, in part, why they

tend to work with a rather stark dichotomy between reason and passion. Unlike

the Stoics, who think that emotions are generically rational while mistaken (like

beliefs formed by reasoning from a false premise), the sentimentalists tend to

think of emotions as non-cognitive (see non-cognitivism), as making no kind of

claim at all, as blank impulsive feelings and colorings of experience. This position

is hard to maintain, since people can often give reasons for the emotions they

have, and emotions tend, as Aristotle notes in the Rhetoric, to engender judgments;

and it is easy to detect the sentimentalists saying things that covertly presuppose

these facts.

Immanuel Kant is the last philosopher whose views I will sketch before moving

on to a more substantive analysis of emotions’ moral import. Kant is less critical

of the emotions than official Stoicism, because he does not think that emotions

have to be positively obnoxious, or contrary to normative reason. Though emo-

tions of all types except one (respect for the moral law) lack intrinsic moral value,

he says that if we always just acted from duty and never felt any benevolence for

one another, “a great moral ornament … would then be missing from the world”

(1996 [1797]: 576), and he seems to think that proper emotions can have various

kinds of instrumental value in aid of our doing our duty (1996 [1785]: 49–50; see

also Sherman 1990). Kant appears to inherit the sentimentalists’ dichotomy

between emotions and reason. He strongly associates emotions with sensation,

sensory desire, inclination, heteronomy, self-interest, and passivity, as opposed to

reason, agency, duty, limitation of self-love, and autonomy. Morality falls deci-

sively on the latter side of the dichotomy, preventing most emotions from being

properly moral motives.

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Nevertheless, Kant cannot sideline all feeling from the moral life, and he places

one emotion (Gefühl) firmly at the center of morality (this one is not merely an

ornament and has intrinsic moral value), and gives it an internal relationship to

reason. He says, “[b]ut though respect [see respect] is a feeling, it is not one received

by means of influence; it is, instead, a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational

concept and therefore specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which

can be reduced to inclination [passive attraction] or fear [passive repulsion]” (1996

[1785]: 56 n.). Unlike the other feelings, respect is fully rational and agential, being

respect for the rational law that the practically rational agent gives himself in his

freedom.

Let us turn now to a more systematic account, considering first which emotion

types have moral significance, and then looking at some of the major ways emotions

figure in the moral life. In each of the dimensions that I will expound, emotions can

play either a salutary and positive moral role, or a deleterious, negative one.

Which Emotions Have Moral Properties?

Philosophers tend to think that some, but not all, emotion types have moral

properties. We see two tendencies of restriction. The first is to emotions whose

type-definitions require that they be directed (a) at human beings or (b) even at

human beings in their aspect as responsible agents. We have noted Kant’s restriction

of moral emotion to respect for the moral law (one interpretation of which makes it

respect for humans as having dignity). John Rawls (1971: §§72–4, 472–90) identifies

the special moral emotions as guilt, resentment, indignation, shame, contempt, and

derision, and marks other emotions – regret, fear, anxiety, joy, sorrow, anger, and

annoyance – as (nonmoral) natural feelings. Alan Gibbard (1990: Ch. 7) says the

moral emotions are guilt and anger. Anger (resentment, indignation) and guilt may

be thought to fall in the (b) part of the category (emotions that are directed only at

persons as responsible agents), and shame, contempt, and derision in the (a) part

(emotions that are directed only at persons). But if this is the principle, then regret,

fear, annoyance, and many other emotions that do not necessarily but do sometimes

take human beings or responsible human beings as their objects should count as

moral emotions when they do so.

It is remarkable that both Rawls’s and Gibbard’s lists include only what we might

call “negative” emotions, attitudes of detraction or rejection. This is the second

tendency of restriction. Perhaps the dominance of negative emotions in the lists

comes from seeing morality as restricting, limiting, setting boundaries, on proper

conduct. Kant says that respect has both a detracting and an attracting aspect, but its

strong connection to the moral law would also suggest that it is about restriction

and boundaries. Hume and the ancients have a broader conception of morality, in

which it has as much or more to do with what we love and seek as with boundaries

and  obligations.

In this essay I will suppose that pretty much the whole range of emotion types are

relevant to ethics and have both morally positive and morally negative instances.

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Thus joy can be morally admirable if it is, say, about the healthy birth of one’s

neighbor’s baby, and morally despicable if occasioned by a traitor’s willingness to

hand over an innocent but politically troublesome man so that he can be judicially

murdered.

I turn now to emotions’ five broadly moral functions, hoping that what I have just

claimed will be borne out by the cases.

Five Moral Dimensions

Epistemic

Emotions, when well formed, can mediate to us a special kind of moral knowledge,

which we might call appreciation. Consider the case of a former racist contemplat-

ing an especially egregious action in which he humiliated an innocent member of

the race that he formerly despised. Imagine first that he contemplates the action

with “equanimity.” He is fully convinced that the action was wrong and can easily

explain to others what is wrong with it. He has no inclination to perform such

action again. It would appear that he has “justified true belief ” about the moral

status of the action. But he contemplates it without emotion. Imagine now a con-

trasting case which is the same as above, except that the agent feels ashamed of

himself for having done the action, and feels compassion for the victim. The sub-

ject’s moral knowledge seems better in the second case. The added knowledge is

not more extensive; he does not know any extra moral facts about himself and the

victim. But what he does know, he knows more profoundly, more intensely; he

grasps it more intimately and personally. We might say that he is acquainted with

the truth in a way that the person contemplating it with equanimity is not. We

could also say that, morally speaking, he understands his action better than the

other does. He appreciates better the action’s deplorableness and its significance

for the victim.

Because emotions color their objects in values, they can “misinform” as well as

deepen our understanding. That is why I qualified the claim in the first sentence of

the preceding paragraph with the words “when well formed.” When Huck Finn

feels burning guilt about abetting his friend Jim’s escape from slavery, he sees him-

self as having wronged Miss Watson, Jim’s “owner” (The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn, Ch. 16). Prior to his feeling of guilt, if anyone had asked Huck, in a cool

moment, whether his helping Jim escape was wrong, he could have put a couple of

his beliefs together and inferred the answer that his sense of guilt now burns with

immediacy into his consciousness. So the emotion precipitates this false belief,

makes it explicit, and does so in a very forceful way – so forceful, indeed, that Huck

undertakes, with moral effort, to “correct” his “mistake.” Huck’s emotion disposi-

tions have been partially malformed by the surrounding slave-holding culture, and

to that extent are not reliable guides to moral truth. So some of his moral emotions

are illusory.

The lesson here seems to be that emotions have an important moral epistemic

function – primarily that of enabling an appreciative understanding of the value

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of things – but that, like other human epistemic faculties, they will be oriented

to truth only if they have been properly trained. However, adult human beings

are not helpless victims of their malformed emotions. If we are reflective (as

Huck, being a child embedded in a slave-holding culture, is not), we often know

which of our emotions to trust and which not to trust, as regards the values they

intimate to us.

Motivational

Emotions often motivate, moving their subjects toward actions. Fear moves us to

avoid what we fear, anger or resentment moves us to retaliate against the perpetrator

whose action or omission angers us, remorse or guilt moves us to make amends to the

one against whom we have transgressed and to act better in the future, hope encourages

us to pursue ends that without hope of success we would only wish for, envy moves us

to demean the rival whose superiority threatens our sense of ourselves, gratitude

moves us to return good to those who have blessed us. Other emotions, like joy and

admiration, are less specific in what they move us to, though they too move us.

When an emotion moves us to an action, it features in what we might call the

moral identity of the action. For example, Nietzsche thinks that some actions that

most people would describe as acts of compassion – for example, providing meals

for the homeless in downtown Chicago – are in fact acts of resentment against, or

envy of, powerful, life-affirming, and self-confident people. Perhaps Nietzsche is

right about this, in at least some cases. The very same movements – ladling soup,

soliciting donations at street corners, making beds, and so forth – are very different

actions, varying in moral value, depending on whether they are to be explained as

expressing resentment or compassion.

Another possibility is that they express both emotions. Human actions are often

complicated and emotionally overdetermined, and if my point about emotions’ deter-

mination of actions’ moral identity is correct, some actions may not admit of any sim-

ple moral identification. Novelists and sensitive biographers may be better equipped

than philosophers, by the narrative tools of their trade, for sketching the moral identity

of such actions, for displaying what a person is really doing in doing such-and-such.

Relational

A third way that the moral life, broadly conceived, involves emotions is their partially

constitutive role in our interpersonal relationships. Our friendships and enmities,

our family relations, our collegialities and civic relationships (for example, with our

neighbors) are all what they are, for better or worse, largely because of our emotions.

Emotions can be directed in three relevant ways: at the relational other, toward

oneself, and at other things that have some bearing on the other and oneself.

As examples of the first, consider the roles of gratitude and anger. Friends, family

members, and colleagues who feel grateful to one another for help given tend to be

more generous with their own help, and thus to foster a cycle of gratitude and good will

toward one another. They are bonded in this willing mutual dependency. They value

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one another, and the sense of being valued by the other is gratifying to each. Gratitude

is, in a way, the symmetrical opposite of anger, gratitude being a response to being

given good with a desire to give back good, while anger is a response to being given bad

with a desire to give back hurt. Just as gratitude tends to bond the parties to one

another, anger tends to alienate them, pushing in the direction of enmity and estrange-

ment. Just as we like to be seen as good by others, as proper objects of benevolence and

aid, not necessarily out of vanity or ambition but out of an instinct for friendship, so we

dislike being seen by others as worthy of condemnation and punishment, not just

because we want to be off the hook but out of a desire to be esteemed. Of course, gen-

erosity and gratitude are more than attitudes: we expect them to be expressed in mate-

rial action. But the attitude that such material actions express is at the very heart of the

relationship. No amount of material aid, given in the absence of a benevolent attitude,

will constitute friendship, or good collegial or civic relations.

Our examples have been gratitude and anger, but emotions of many other types

also go into our relationships with one another. We bond also by rejoicing with one

another over successes and regretting and deploring one another’s defeats. Envy of

the other’s accomplishments or invidious pride of our own undermines our

friendships and family love. Sharing one another’s hopes and fears builds our

relationships, while fearing what the other hopes for and hoping for what the other

fears tear them down.

Eudaimonic

It is characteristic of eudaimonistic ethics to suppose that living well morally tends

to coincide with flourishing or happiness (though happiness in this sense is

compatible with some suffering) (see happiness). The application of the foregoing

discussion to the eudaimonistic idea is that emotions that put us in touch with truth

about values, motivate us correctly, and constitute healthy relationships with our

fellow human beings will ipso facto be characteristic of a flourishing human life.

However, in a world that is out of joint, the emotions characteristic of flourishing

will not be uniformly pleasant. When their job is to give us appreciation of evils, they

will be of such distressing types as regret, indignation, sadness, guilt, shame, and

grief. By virtually the same token, painful emotions will motivate the flourishing

person for the frequent corrective actions that he or she will be called on to perform,

though she will also experience hope for their success, gratitude for the help of

others in her work, and gladness when some corrective endeavor succeeds. Since she

is imperfect herself, and her family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors are also

flawed, her relationships will sometimes be marred by resentment, envy, invidious

pride, and ingratitude, either on her part or on the other’s.

Because of these obstacles, it seems unlikely that anybody’s eudaimonia will be

complete in this life. At the same time, eudaimonia is pretty clearly not entirely

beyond our reach. And the gist of the present essay is that those who want to

understand it will want to pay attention to the place of emotions in the moral life.

Those who seek it for themselves and others will also want to attend to the possibility

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of educating the emotions, a topic that I have barely touched on (see moral

development; moral education).

Aretaic

I have noted that Aristotle thought some of the virtues (notably courage, temperance,

and mildness) to be dispositions to respond with emotion that is “right” with respect

to object, occasion, aim, intensity, and duration. Other virtues, such as justice and

liberality, are dispositions to perform the virtue’s characteristic actions with

pleasure – presumably something like emotional pleasure. Aristotle does not regard

the ability to “control” wayward anger, fear, envy, joy, hope, shame, guilt, and so

forth, as fully virtuous, though it is certainly better than being a complete slave to

one’s passions. Most of us will probably be more liberal than Aristotle in what we

allow as virtuous. We will allow that the ability to “master” or “control” our emo-

tions, when they are wayward, is an important part of moral virtue.

What do we mean by “master” or “control”? We can mean either of at least two

things. First, if I find myself enjoying malicious gossip, I may be able to “turn off ”

the emotion, that is, stop myself enjoying the gossip, perhaps by imagining how the

gossipee would feel were she present, or by focusing on my participation under

the description treachery. Second, controlling an emotion may mean withholding

the behavior or action that it motivates. If I find myself angered by what someone

says, but in a situation that I would worsen by expressing my anger, I may be able to

stifle the behavior without much changing the anger itself. In either case, emotional

control requires ongoing evaluative monitoring of one’s emotional state vis-à-vis

one’s larger and smaller social situation, and some managing of either the emotion

or the emotion’s expression (probably both). The ability to do the self-monitoring is

a kind of self-knowledge, and the ability to manage the state or behavior is a kind of

skill. The two combine to make up a kind of virtue different from the ones that

Aristotle stresses. A full account of the virtues in their connection to emotions

would include both of these kinds of virtues, and probably others.

As with the other moral dimensions or connections of the emotions, the

trait-related dimension can be morally deleterious as well as salubrious.

Conclusion

The Kantian narrowing of the field of moral emotions, as well as the Stoic rejection

of all emotions from the life of virtue, have seemed extreme to most recent thinkers

about morality and the emotions; and the tendency that most decisively distinguishes

sentimentalism, namely the project of basing morality on the emotions, has not

eventuated in any clear and convincing version of the theory. Of the major options

in the history of philosophy the oldest, namely the classical view represented by

Plato and Aristotle, is the one that still seems most plausible. That view allows that a

wide range of emotion types (joy, anger, respect, hope, regret, fear, confidence, guilt,

shame, love, and so forth) can have a moral character, and that there can be both

10

morally good and morally bad instances of any of these types. It allows that the

particular moral quality that any particular instance of emotion has is strongly

associated with that emotion’s cognitive content, and therefore that emotions in

general are some kind of cognitive state (taking “cognitive” in a broad sense).

A  person’s anger or fear is typically about or of something, and the object has to be

taken in a certain describable way for the emotion to be anger or fear rather than, say,

envy or hope. On this view, therefore, emotions can be correct or incorrect, fitting or

not, true or false of what they are about.

As to the origin of the standards by which an emotion may be morally appropriate

or inappropriate, that question could be settled in a variety of ways without affecting

the general Aristotelian treatment of the place(s) of emotions in the moral life.

A super-philosopher might generate the standards by simply creating a conception

of human nature, in the way that Nietzsche seems to commend (1966 [1886]: VI,

136). Or the standards might derive from a supposed divine revelation and its

development over many centuries into a unified understanding of human nature, in

the manner of the Hebrew-Christian tradition. Aristotle himself seems, on the

surface of his text (but see NE 6.1, 1138b21–32), to think that his doctrine of the

mean provides the rules of propriety of emotions, but this can’t be right, since he

explains an emotion’s being in the mean by reference to its being “right” in various

ways. If we attend to the way he actually derives the standards for fear and confi-

dence (NE 3.6–9), for example, it looks as though he gets them from consulting what

the wise and the many of his culture think about them, and then processing these

opinions by critical dialectic, applying his own philosophical, psychological, and

social reasoning to them. All in all, a particular conception of human nature emerges

which supplies rough standards of propriety for the emotions.

see also: aristotle; ayer, a. j.; gratitude; happiness; hobbes, thomas;

hume, david; kant, immanuel; moral development; moral education;

non- cognitivism; plato; reason and passion; respect; sentimentalism;

sentiments, moral; shaftesbury, third earl of; smith, adam; stoicism;

utilitarianism; weakness of will

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Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 561–83.

Seneca 1995. Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, ed. J. M. Cooper and P. F. Procopé. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Sherman, Nancy 1990. “The Place of Emotions in Kantian Morality,” in Owen Flanagan and

A. O. Rorty (eds.), Identity, Character, and Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

pp. 149–70.

Smith, Adam 1969 [1759]. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. E. G. West. Indianapolis: Liberty

Classics.

FURTHER READINGS

Ayer, A. J. 1936. Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed. London: Gollancz.

Bandes, Susan (ed.) 1999. The Passions of Law. New York: New York University Press.

Corrigan, John (ed.) 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Deigh, John 2008. Emotions, Values, and the Law. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ellington, J. (ed. and trans.) 1983. [Kant’s] Ethical Philosophy, Indianapolis: Hackett.

Goldie, Peter (ed.) 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Kant, Immanuel 1963. Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Kant, Immanuel 1974 [1798]. Anthropologie from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary

Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Roberts, R. C. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Roberts, R. C. 2009. “Emotional Consciousness and Personal Relationships,” Emotion Review,

vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 279–86.

Rorty, A. O. (ed.) 1996. Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sorabji, R. 2000. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, Bernard 1976. “Morality and the Emotions,” in Problems of the Self. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.