Peter Goldie

Getting Feelings into Emotional Experience in the Right Way

I argue that emotional feelings are not just bodily feelings, but also feelings directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body, and that these feelings (feelings towards) are bound up with the way we take in the world in emotional experience.

Cognitive Evaluations and Intuitive Appraisals: Can Emotion Models Handle Them Both?

This chapter deals with the complex relationships between cognitive representations and processes (not reduced to “epistemic” representations but including the motivational ones: goals) and emotions. It adopts a belief–desire–intention paradigm (the explicit account of mental representations and of their “reading” in interaction), but psychologically and computationally sophisticated: for example, by a “dual-process” theory, distinguishing the “intuitive thinking” from the “deliberative thinking,” or by a probabilistic approach to the beliefs–goals network. This representation of the mental background of the emotion is also necessary for accounting for emotional interaction, which is based on mind reading, not just on emotional expressions.

Love for a Reason

According to Bob Solomon, love is a human emotion, with a complex intentional structure, having its own kind of reasons. I will examine this account, which, in certain respects, tends to mask the deep and important differences between love and other emotions.

Loss of Affect in Intellectual Activity

In this article I will consider how loss of affect in our intellectual lives, through depression for example, can be as debilitating as loss of affect elsewhere in our lives. This will involve showing that there are such things as intellectual emotions, that their role in intellectual activity is not merely as an aid to the intellect, and that loss of affect changes not only one’s motivations, but also one’s overall evaluative take on the world.

Ethics in Emotion-Oriented Systems: The Challenges for an Ethics Committee

The development of emotion-oriented systems has the potential to raise a range of ethical issues, not all of which were clearly understood at the inception of the project. This chapter discusses these issues and details the practical measures taken and the challenges faced in addressing them. An ethical audit revealed a lack of consistency in ethical procedures across the institutions and disciplines involved in the network, and HUMAINE established its own ethics committee to offer ethical advice and scrutiny when required. In addition, space was provided within the project for discussion of ethical issues – a process that allowed the emergence of a wider understanding of the issues themselves and of the sensitivities of different disciplines and users to them.

Principalism: A Method for the Ethics of Emotion-Oriented Machines

This chapter outlines the ‘four principles’ approach which is prevalent in medical ethics. Principalism was adopted as the ethical method of HUMAINE. This chapter introduces this method and also provides an account of the various criticisms of it. The chapter also includes some discussion of the relationship between ethics and scientific research. The purpose of this discussion is to show how ethics and good ethical research can be embedded in scientific practice. In conclusion, the chapter addresses the importance and the usefulness of considering fears that are embodied in works of science fiction when trying to deal with concerns and fears of the public. Consideration of the ethics of the possible is of massive practical importance and indeed should be a priority for those who are working within research groupings like HUMAINE. It is, however, often important to consider the ethics of what may never be possible – the science fiction if you like. When considering the impossible it will be important to stress the fact that these things are not and may never be possible. The role of this type of consideration lies in the importance of public engagement and showing that possible future scenarios are being taken into account by those who are pushing forward science and technology in this area.

The Ethical Distinctiveness of Emotion-Oriented Technology: Four Long-Term Issues

In this chapter we consider certain long-term ethical issues which are peculiar or special to emotion-oriented technology and which make the topic particularly charged ethically, both for the lay public and for those working in the area. We identify four such issues. First, it is far from clear whether technologies made by humans are conceivably capable of emotionality and, more generally, of phenomenal consciousness. Second, where we are dealing with a technology that simulates emotionality, we have responses that are often far from cool and rational. Third, as discussion of the first two issues will have illustrated, our ethical responses to emotion-oriented technology are often emotionally charged, lending a peculiar reflexivity to our ethical deliberations. This leads to a discussion of the kind of value that such technologies have, and of how they should be ethically treated by humans. Fourth, emotion-oriented technology impinges on many matters of law (such as laws of privacy); we discuss in particular the importance of technology that is used to filter raw emotional data on people for further use.

Comment on Breithaupt’s “A Three-Person Model of Empathy”

Breithaupt’s central claim is that “empathy can be regarded as a mechanism for strengthening a decision” (2012, p. 87). My concern is that it is not clear what is meant by “strengthen.” Does empathy merely give more motivational “oomph” to a decision already made, or does it strengthen a decision in the normative sense—does it give more reason for the decision?

The Moral Risks of Risky Technologies

We have ambivalent or mixed feelings towards technologies that have been designed to make our lives easier: towards computers, robots, avatars, Embodied Conversational Agents, and other kinds of emotion-oriented technologies (EOTs). These mixed feelings are manifested in particular in our emotional responses towards them, and in the other ways in which we interact with them. In particular, we often verbally and physically abuse them rather as if they were animate, shouting and swearing at them, kicking them, and so on. These emotional responses and patterns of behaviour are generally not of the kind that can be seen as rational; they are, rather, more visceral, more primitive. In this chapter, Peter Goldie considers various possible reasons why we ought not to treat technologies in these ways. In the end, he argues that that there is a kind of psychological slippery slope from the way we treat technologies to the way we treat people. Largely as a matter of habit, we move readily from treating technologies merely as means to treating people merely as means. Accordingly, we should cultivate our personality traits to make sure that we do not slide down this slippery slope, and, in order to do this, we should avoid abusing technologies.

Charley’s World: Narratives of Aesthetic Experience

Through directly perceiving an art work – seeing a picture or a sculpture, listening to music, reading a novel – we can come aesthetically to appreciate that art work, and also to gain an understanding of the world – of reality outside or beyond the work itself. A suitably informed critic can help us to do these things – to see what we otherwise would fail to see. This is a view that I accept. I do not intend to argue for it here (see Sibley 2001a; Graham 1995; Young 1999, 2001). I will, however, consider an example from literature which I think nicely illustrates the truth of the view: it concerns the experiences of Charley, a character in a novel by Somerset Maugham called Christmas Holiday. Although fictional, what happens in the fiction illustrates how an art work’s aesthetic properties, and its cognitive value, can come to be appreciated by someone (Charley) through his direct perception of it, in this case in the presence of someone else – a critic we might say. The particular art work that Charley experiences in the novel is a Chardin still life, hung in the Louvre, depicting a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine. I begin by discussing what happens in the novel, and give an account of how, in the novel, Charley is affected through his experiences. I then turn to the reader, and consider how the reader of the novel can be affected by Charley’s experience – more specifically by imagining the experiences that Charley has in the novel, and then by coming to be actually affected by what he imagines. The reader can be affected in at least two respects: first, by gaining a new worldly understanding; and secondly, by coming to have a changed aesthetic disposition – a different way of appreciating art works.