An Apology for Inapt Emotions

Abstract

This paper examines how we may fail other people in their capacity as affective beings, but instead of looking at failures of justice, I examine failures of love and care. Our evaluative attitudes and emotions—when they are fitting—are affective responses to the world that tell us things about the world: they tell us what is funny, what is blameworthy, what merits despair. They also—both when they are fitting and when they are not—tell us things about the person who has the response. When we ignore the reasons of fit that support someone’s evaluative attitude or emotion, perhaps because we take extrinsic reasons such as prudential reasons to be overriding, we may be participating in a system of affective injustice, or we may simply be failing to care about the importance to that person of having fitting attitudes and emotions. Both justice and care can require that we attend properly to other people’s reasons of fit. Evaluative attitudes and emotions are fitting when they reflect the way in which their object really matters, but because it is in subjective experience that something matters, fittingness is fundamentally subjective. It is only by idealizing in a certain way that we can speak—figuratively— of fittingness as “intersubjective.” Justice does require that we determine what is and is not “intersubjectively fitting,” and so we must rely on the figurative notion of “intersubjective fittingness.” Nevertheless, because the subjective experience of those we love and care for must matter to us in a way that exceeds the requirements of justice, we might fail those whom we love by applying 190 only “intersubjective fittingness conditions”—rather than subjective fittingness conditions—when assessing the reasons of fit for their evaluative attitudes or emotions. Some acts of care—such as helping someone identify what they subjectively value—call for a focus on what is subjectively fitting for them. However, unconditional love requires something entirely different; when we love unconditionally we step outside of any evaluative stance and thus outside of any stance from which reasons of fit are relevant, and step into a stance of acceptance.