Ethics Finder

Emotions

The word ‘emotion’ derives from terms meaning disturbance, excitement and movement, and it retains some of these connotations but now in relation to psychological responses. It has been common to contrast the emotional with the rational, presenting the former as subjective and the latter as objective, but as a general account this is mistaken. To respond emotionally is to have a positive or negative felt attitude towards something real or imagined. In this respect emotions are different from moods. Someone may be irascible or melancholic, that is have a general disposition to become angry or to be sad, but an emotion itself such as anger or grief is directed towards something. Like thoughts, emotions have ‘objects’ – things, conditions, situations, states of affairs. This feature makes them like judgements and thereby opens them to assessment as appropriate, proportionate, reasonable, warranted and so on. If someone says they are angry it is always relevant (though not necessarily wise) to ask them a) about what? and b) why? Confronted with direct evidence of child neglect or abuse it is common to feel angry: the object of this response is the neglect or abuse, and the reason for the anger is the felt wrongness of the behaviour. By contrast, if someone said they were angry at or about a glass of water or a passing cloud we would struggle to make sense of this without some intelligible explanation such as that the cloud threatened rain which would spoil an outdoor event, and even then it would unreasonable to blame a cloud. The fact that emotions express implicit judgements of value makes them relevant to the domains of ethics, politics and aesthetics and to education and reasoning in these fields. Particularly in the tradition of deriving from Plato and Aristotle and developed by Aquinas that emphasises virtue and vice the issue of emotion is important as a dimension of ethical character, judgement and behaviour.  

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