Rationality, the Evaluative Attitudes, and Import

Abstract

Understanding communities of respect requires understanding evaluative attitudes like caring, valuing, loving, and respecting. This Chapter sketches the author’s existing background theory of how evaluative attitudes are constituted by rational patterns of emotions: to care about something, for example, is for it to be the focus of a rational pattern of emotions. Different kinds of evaluative attitudes are constituted by patterns of distinct types of emotions and, conversely, we can delineate types of emotions in terms of the sorts of rational patterns they form constituting distinct forms of evaluative attitudes. The result is a revisionist account of practical rationality, in particular of a rationality of import, in terms of a type of commitment implicit in the subject’s emotions and the normative implications of such commitments. This account of rationality and the relationship between evaluative attitudes and patterns of emotions will form the backbone of the account of communities of respect.