Justin D'Arms

Emotions, Values, and Agency, by Christine Tappolet

This excellent, concise, and engaging volume is highly recommended for anyone working in the philosophy of emotion or interested in the relation between emotions and perception, ethics, or agency. It covers a wide range of central topics in emotion theory, situates them within an impressive range of contemporary literature in different areas of philosophy, and offers clearly articulated positions and arguments. Taken together, the views defended here make up a novel and attractively comprehensive package. The book defends an original ‘Perceptual Theory’ of emotion with welcome clarity, primarily through an extended analogy to visual perception. Both emotions and visual experiences are (at least paradigmatically) conscious, involuntary, world-guided, and informationally encapsulated. Both have representational contents that are analogical and non-conceptual, in virtue of which they are subject to correctness assessments. Many significant objections receive thoughtful answers, including the worry that emotions cannot justify evaluative judgments in the way that perceptions justify empirical judgments, and the worry that emotions are assessable as rational or irrational in ways that perceptions are not. The book also defends a role for emotions in the epistemology of evaluative judgment, not on the ground of their reliability but on the ground that they constitute a kind of openness to evaluative features of the world. But access to those evaluative features is mediated through understanding of the non-evaluative features on which they supervene. ‘Sentimental Realism’ in value theory is also developed here. This combines a response-dependent, neo-sentimentalist account of evaluative concepts with a response-independent, objective, and (often) non-relational account of value properties. The appropriateness of emotions is a matter of their correctness as representations. This is held to be a non-normative assessment, so it sidesteps the Wrong Kind of Reason problem. In responding to worries about whether the account captures the normative character of evaluative judgment, it is argued that these judgments can inherit suitable normativity from the objective evaluative properties that they represent. Tappolet favours a reductive naturalistic account of these properties, although this is not developed at length. Other chapters include interesting discussions of relations between emotions and motivation, responsibility, and agency. The appropriateness of reactive attitudes is held to depend on response-independent facts about responsibility, contrary to many Strawsonians. The ‘Agential Virtue Account’ defends reason-responsiveness in having and acting from emotions in a way that is independent of considered judgment.