Motivating Apt Emotions

How do we come to have apt emotional expressions? On the one hand, it might be fruitless to criticize another for the lack of an emotion they are not able to produce.

You can’t just decide to be happy, or to have some chosen belief. And if you are experiencing self-punishing remorse when regret would make more sense, it is not enough to simply tell yourself so. )

But how true is this? What power do we have over our emotions? Some possibilities include the following:

• change our states of mind
• attend selectively to evidence
• choose who to associate with

In other words,

we should not conclude that we have no power over what we feel.

Here is the main idea of this book and how this final part will develop it. We can have an enormours range of emtions, in part because our flexible imaginations allow us emotions structured around multiple points of view. So it is a real question which emotions are best for us, and when. And since emotions with multiple points of view are central to moral life, the question allows us to wonder which moral attitudes are harmful, perverse, or counterproductive. One way of making the question manageable is to consider families of moral emotions—one example consists of the much discussed cousins regret, remorse, guilt, shame, and embarrassment — and the ways in which we can slide into one of them when another would make more sense. [157] If we have a concept of a particular emotion, we are then better able to experience that emotion. From families of emotions, we can choose which ones we ought to encourage one another to feel and determine which ones are obstacles to our moral lives [158].

1. Different emotions resemble one another. Some emotions resemble others in the way they subjectively feel whereas others resemble one another in regards to the way that motivate an agent to think or act. The important resemblances are those that relate to our moral lives, for instance shame and disapproval. Here, imagination becomes relevant because we might ask whether a particular emotion was appropriate, e.g., disapproval and anger, in a particular situation.
2. One family of emotions includes sharme, regret, embarrassment and remorse. Embarrasment and regret are the outliers, for instance, embarrassment is more shallow than shame or remorse. We might see shame on one end and remorse on the other. For instance, shame occurs when we “we apprehend a trait as an attribute of ourselves which we take to exemplify the polar opposite of a self-relevant value’.” “In other words, the person experiencing shame feels that she is inadequate in some way that is important, as revealed by some action” [160]. Embarrassment however, is different from shame in that it includes a recognition of the ridicoulusness of your own actions. Further however, this recognition may either be followed by your own amusement or your own disgust [161].
3. Shame-like emotions are similar to someone staringt malevolently at you [164] while regret-like emotions result, sometimes, from events over which you had no control and which you likely had no other real options.
4. Remorse, unlike regret, can continue to feel almost indefinitely.
5. Moral emotions are emotions of appeal, e.g., some emotions like regret or remorse may feel like an appeal from someone affected by some past action taken by us. But each moral emotion involve varying potential perspectives of our own actions, or actions taken by others but through our own point of view.
6. However, there are some emotions which may be hard to hard to fit between the emotion and either the target of that emotion, an attitude to a point of view inferred by that emotion etc [181—182].
7. There are two different emotions which can be expressed in pride. One set might be contrasted against humility while the other can be contrasted with shame.
8. As mentioned, there is a danger that pride can result in smugness which hinders moral development rather then its consequent; self-respect.
9. Absurdity can be contrasted with despair. Given the imagination and our moral emotions, we may imagine a situation we find ourselves in from the perspective of others, and through this realize how absurd our situation is. On the other hand, despair “recognizes the futility of hope” [165]. We might imagine a situation we find ourselves in, however, in imagining, we recognize that our situation really is hopeless.
10. While we cannot decide to feel differently than we do at any given moment, this does not mean that we do not have control over our emotions. “I will give three reasons why having the concept of a particular moral emotion — having it in a full way by having a word for it, being able to describe cases where people experience it, and being able to imagine having it — makes it easier to enter into the emotion” [199].
11. “If we have a name for a pattern of behaviour, then we are more likely to notice it when it occurs, and having noticed it, we are in a better position to imagine being in a state that would lead to it, and being able to imagine it, we are nearer to being able to enter into it” [199]. This is important because as I have shown before, Morton believes that emotions correspond with various pressures. Further, pressures can be seen as a kind of motivation, so some emotion might be important to have because it will pressure a moral agent to perform certain actions in certain situations.
12. “So with moral emotions we have a fixed frame of points of view, which needs just to have different basic emotions attached to it” [200].
13. “The third reason is the vividness and emotional resonance of our imagination of people” [200]. “. . . The concept of the emotion tells one what personalities to imagine, in which roles in the perspective structure of the emotion” [200]. Doing this is a way of “making moral emotions available, by giving them attention, grasping their perspective structure, and imagining occupants of their points of view” [201].
14. Ultimately, moral imagining is a virtue we ought to cultivate [206].