Abstract
A central thesis held by neo-Aristotelian virtue theories is that virtues require robust dispositions to have appropriate emotions. This thesis is challenged by a particular form of situationism, which suggests that human beings cannot develop this kind of emotional disposition because our integral emotions are too easily influenced by morally and epistemically irrelevant incidental affect. If the challenge stands, it implies that human beings cannot be virtuous. In response to the challenge, I propose an agential solution that’s grounded in the affective sciences. Drawing from empirical evidence, I argue that agents can develop ameliorative abilities such as emotion differentiation to guard against the influence of incidental affect, thereby develo** more robust emotional dispositions. My arguments thus defend the psychological plausibility of this key component of virtue.
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Notes
Defenders of neo-Aristotelian virtue theories include Hursthouse, 2002; Battaly, 2008; Code, 1987; Zagzebski, 1996; Montmarquet, 1992; Baehr, 2011; Roberts & Wood, 2007; Hookway, 2003; Sherman & White, 2003. On the appropriate emotion requirement, see Hursthouse, 2002; Kamtekar, 2013; Sherman, 1997; Zagzebski, 1996, 2003; Sherman & White, 2003; Morton, 2010; Brady, 2019.
There is an issue concerning how robust a disposition must be in order to be virtuous. I set this issue aside as this is not the focus of my paper.
“Affect” used throughout this paper is an umbrella term for all affective states, including emotions, moods, feelings, and so on.
It should be noted that situations can be individuated by virtue-irrelevant features or virtue-relevant features. For example, (i) “having a good conversation with a friend and seeing a person collapsing to the ground”, (ii) “having a bad conversation a friend and seeing a person collapsing to the ground”, (iii) “having a good conversation with a friend and learning about children who are suffering from starvation”, and (iv) “having a bad conversation with a friend and learning about children who are suffering from starvation” are four different situations. Whereas (i) and iii) involve a virtue-irrelevant feature which elicits good mood, (ii) and iv) involve a virtue-irrelevant feature which elicits bad mood. Virtue-irrelevant features (or trait-irrelevant features, more generally speaking) are also called “irrelevant situational variables”, which I mention in Sect. 3. All four situations, however, involve compassion-relevant features. Thus, if Adam’s disposition to feel appropriate compassion were robust, he would be disposed to feel compassion across all these situations by responding to the compassion-relevant features.
It’s worth noting that there may be kinds of local traits. For example, “compassion-only-when-seeing-someone-collapsing-to-the-ground” is a local trait, but its situation is individuated by trait-relevant features. In contrast, “compassion-only-when-in-good mood” is also a local trait, but its situation is individuated by trait-irrelevant features. As Alfano (2013) rightly points out, “both trait-relevant and trait-irrelevant features should be allowed to vary if global virtues are being investigated” (p.71).
It should be noted that not all affect misattributions involve integral affect. It’s entirely possible that no integral affect occurs in the judgment or decision-making process, and yet incidental affect is still misattributed to the judgmental target. For example, in the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) proposed by Payne and colleagues (2014), an implicit attitude measure, the typical judgmental target is intentionally designed to be ambiguous items that presumably illicit no affect.
It should be noted that several recent studies have reported failure to replicate the effect that incidental disgust amplifies moral judgments (Landy & Goodwin, 2015; Ghelfi et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2016). Casting doubt over incidental affect’s influence on moral judgments, authors of these replication studies suggest that the situationist’s evidence is empirically ill-founded. This has led philosophers such as Alfano (2018) to argue that virtue theorists need not worry about the situationist challenge anymore. I think that there are still reasons to take seriously the evidence considered in this section. First, these replication studies only tested disgust, so one cannot yet claim the same holds for the role of affective states in judgments and decision-making more generally. On the other hand, there is still a wealth of evidence on affect misattribution that’s been widely acknowledged in the psychological literature. The evidence for replication failure is not conclusive, and the replication project is still an ongoing development. Second, research suggests that many factors could potentially influence whether affective states play a causal role in judgments, but the replication studies thus far have not taken these factors into consideration. For instance, Gasper and Clore (2000) argue that whether affect is used as a basis for judgment in a situation may depend substantially on attention to affective cues and perceptions of their relevance.
What these replication studies suggest is that more nuanced study designs are needed, and researchers on affect misattribution should pay more attention to potential moderating factors that could affect whether an effect turns out to be significant. In fact, there are already some studies showing that certain moderating factors could have such an influence (e.g., Singh et al., 2018; Garg et al., 2005).
Being integral is not sufficient for an emotion to be appropriate. The concept of appropriate emotion also concerns whether an emotion fits a situation in a way that is proper to virtue. Correspondingly, there are ways by which one can fail to fulfill the appropriate emotion requirement other than affect misattribution. For example, some may fail to feel compassion because they simply lack the ability; others may possess vicious emotional dispositions such as feeling hatred towards a certain race. The situationist challenge is different from these issues.
Different moods may respond differently to source awareness manipulations. For example, Schwarz and Clore (1983) showed that the reduction effect of misattribution is greater for negative than positive moods, suggesting that different valenced moods may respond differentially to source awareness manipulations. However, this should not mean that increasing source awareness is not effective for incidental good mood. For example, other studies such as McFarland et al. (2003)’s showed that increasing source awareness is effective for both positive and negative moods.
To be more precise, if misattribution is the only factor that we are concerned here, then we feel about the right object by only taking integral affect to be relevant to our judgment. There are, of course, other ways of failing to feel about the right objects.
There could be other ways by which incidental affect influences judgment, other than interacting with integral affect. In other words, even if we are not making misattribution errors, our judgment process could still be influenced by incidental affect. More specifically, incidental affect could influence judgment through changing our cognition, such as by changing our access to affect-related memories and thoughts, attention/orientation to the environment, process of decision-making, and so forth (Alfano, 2013, p.47). In the same vein, Crippen (2023) argues that negative moods such as sadness or depression may reduce one’s action capacity or cognitive abilities. If these moods become the incidental affect, they may also influence our judgment by having a global effect on our capacities. However, these issues are not the focus of the current paper as they focus on the cognitive, not affective, aspect of a person. How they should be dealt with may be the topic of a different paper.
Emotional clarity is also sometimes referred to as “emotion understanding” in some literature.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Allan Hazlett, Anne Baril, John Doris, and Will Fleisher. Thanks also to Dong An, Zoe Jenkin, Matthew McGrath, Julia Driver, Eric Brown, Carl Craver, Ron Mallon, Michael Brady, Maria Waggoner, Davide Fassio, Lu Teng, as well as audiences at The Emotion Workshop at The City University of New York, The Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and Dissertation Seminar at Washington University in St. Louis. Finally, many thanks to anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04630-y