Justifying Emotions

Pride and Jealousy

Kristjan Kristjansson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415266673
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134500321
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The two central emotions of pride and jealousy have long been held to have no role in moral judgements, and have been a source of controversy in both ethics and moral psychology. Kristjan Kristjansson challenges this common view and argues that emotions are central to moral excellence and that both pride and jealousy are indeed ingredients of a well-rounded virtuous life.

1
MAPPING OUT THE FIELD

1.1 Introduction

My boss’s nephew, and incidentally also a good friend of mine, gets promotion in my company just because he is the boss’s nephew, while I, a much better qualified candidate, am left behind to sweat in a low-ranking post. At the school fair, only Kate’s poster is chosen to hang in the hall although Betsy’s poster was at least equally well done. Cindy, who catches her lover in flagrante delicto with another girl, feels her world has crumbled to dust. Are Cindy, Betsy, and I morally justified in experiencing jealousy or is that emotion invariably the sign of a malicious mind? Jack has made considerable personal sacrifices to help an ailing relative whom others, nearer and closer to the poor fellow, had left in the lurch. Is Jack morally justified in taking pride in his deeds, as well as expecting and demanding some external recognition of his efforts, or would that be the sign of a deadly sin?

This book has two main objectives. The first is to explore what, generally speaking, constitutes a moral justification of an emotion and how such a justification is connected to the notion of moral and emotional excellence. The second is to give the two emotions that figure in the examples above, both traditionally vituperated as psychologically debilitating and morally flawed, a more sympathetic hearing. These emotions are pride – or pridefulness as I shall call it, by focusing on one of the many different uses of the word ‘pride’ – and jealousy. How often have we not heard pride proscribed as the root of all vice, and jealousy as one of its distasteful concomitants? My aim is, by contrast, to show that we have been much too hard on emotions which we have not properly understood, and that both these so-called negative emotions can, in the proper dosage, be seen as virtues or as ingredients in virtues: as parts of a good human life. To put it as succinctly as possible, I challenge the received wisdom about pride by claiming that a certain kind of pride, namely pridefulness, is psychologically necessary for the formation and sustenance of personhood, and also morally necessary for a self-respectful person who wants to live a well-rounded virtuous life. In addition, I argue that jealousy is necessary to maintain pride and self-respect. Although I shall avoid using the cumbersome and semi-technical term ‘pridefulness’ in the sequel, where it is possible to do so without causing misunderstanding, it should be made clear from the start that my ultimate defence is of pride qua pridefulness (see ss 3.3–4.1).

As I noted in the preface, everybody is interested in the emotions. From an early age, our own and others’ emotions take up a substantial part of everyday conversation; they guide our actions, inform our evaluations, and kindle our interest in the mundane and the sublime: in everything from eating porridge to enjoying art. Without emotions there might be a number of Mr Spocks of Star Trek fame around, but surely no human beings. Fortunately, in recent years philosophical interest in the emotions has reached new heights after sinking to its nadir for decades. Although the emotions, in general, have received renewed attention, much less has been written about the ‘negative’ emotions specifically – and by ‘negative’ let me here tentatively mean those emotions typically evaluated negatively from a moral perspective; there are other uses abroad as we shall later learn. A notable exception is Gabriele Taylor’s Pride, Shame, and Guilt, an insightful if somewhat disconcerting study of those three emotions and their interrelationships.¹ A few papers have appeared about specific ‘negative’ emotions, such as Daniel M. Farrell’s important analyses of jealousy and Jerome Neu’s recent reappraisal of pride.² Most of these studies, however, have been primarily conceptual and have not come much to terms with the substantive moral standing of the ‘negative’ emotions in question, except as a side issue. The book which perhaps comes closest to my orientation, and from which I have learnt a great deal, is John Casey’s Pagan Virtue,³ but he is more concerned there with the traditional virtues and vices than with (their connected) emotions. In addition, there is the steadily growing mountain of literature on ‘emotional intelligence’, but it tends, typically, to evade questions of the value or disvalue of ‘negative’ emotions. The imbalance of these evasions must, I think, be rectified.

In the field of emotion research, too many a cobbler has tenaciously stuck to his last: a lamentable state of affairs in a field that cannot and should not by its very nature be the privileged domain of any one discipline. Unfortunately, philosophical and psychological explorations of the general nature of emotions, or even of the same specific emotions, frequently seem to run on parallel tracks with only the barest mutual acknowledgement. The different camps seem, so to speak, to be building similar pyramids on both sides of a huge ocean without much idea of what is happening on the other side.⁴ Since I think of the field of emotions as a buffer zone into which incursions can and should be made from various sides, the focus of the present book is interdisciplinary. I do not intend to hide that I am a philosopher; that will be amply evidenced by the tenor of my discussion and the choice of topics. For instance, I believe that my understanding of emotions has benefited from my earlier engagement with political issues, and that an influx of ideas from political philosophy as well as from ‘pure’ moral theory can aid us in looking at particular emotions from a moral point of view. After all, no moral concerns are completely apolitical and no political ones are extra-moral. This belief will be reflected in the book’s approach. However, I want to bring to bear as many insights from other areas as possible: from psychology, education, literature, and, last but not least, anecdotal evidence from daily life. I believe, like Heraclitus, that even in the kitchen ‘divinities’ are present.⁵ Most of the important lessons of life I have learnt at the kitchen table: first in my parents’ house; later with my wife. It is also more than a half-truth that the best descriptions of emotions tend to be provided by artists rather than academics.⁶ More perhaps can be learnt about the subtleties of emotions by a careful reading of the poetry of Stephan G. Stephansson,⁷ or the novels of Dostoevsky, than through any scholarly treatise. I shall be adding tonal shadings from various literary sources to my arguments. However, among my frequent fellow travellers will also be the academic philosopher par excellence, Aristotle. Generally speaking, the reader will, I believe, gain more from a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach than from a more narrowly-defined focus, even if that may at times mean sacrificing depth for breadth. Moreover, since I consider my exploration of specific emotions and their cultivation to be of general importance, I hope that my book will be accessible to more readers than those who are already well versed in psychology or philosophy.

My interest in the emotions has been heightened by my employment as a professor of philosophy in a recently established department of education with a strong philosophical orientation. In such a department, questions about the emotional schooling of the young are continually relevant and pressing. We need to know what the emotions are, how they are formed and cultivated and, in so far as they are psychologically under our jurisdiction, which of them are morally justified. ‘Is children’s jealousy amenable to any rational control?’, ‘Should pride be nourished or uprooted?’, ‘Under what circumstances, if any, can envy be non-malicious?’ are just a few examples of the questions crowding in. When preparing lecture notes for my classes in moral education, I realised how the old ideal of education as character formation had given way in educational theory to scepticism about moral education in general and schooling of the emotions in particular. This scepticism seemed to be propagated by a wave of psychological theories that either postponed the systematic cultivation of morally commendable emotions to ‘later stages’ in the child’s life, or simply reduced the emotions to steam rising up from internal kettles, mostly, if not wholly, impenetrable to reason. The subject of moral and emotional education had not only not been learnt in recent years, but had rather, in a fundamental sense, been unlearnt by teacher-training students, leading to teacher neutrality and parental uncertainty on these important issues. David Carr aptly refers to this situation as a ‘conspiracy of silence’⁸ (see further in s. 6.4). What the textbooks in pedagogy and educational psychology provided for my students about the nature and cultivation of emotions was so meagre that, without other resources, they were bound to starve on it. That this Spartan diet was not what famous educational theorists such as Piaget or Kohlberg had intended is more or less beside the point. It is often more relevant in practice to consider what the secondary (or even the watered-down ‘tertiary’) literature tells university students about the ideas of important thinkers than to concentrate on what may be revealed by careful scholarly exegesis of these ideas themselves. I would not have written the present book if I did not believe that at least some of the things I have to say are of practical significance for moral education.

Philosophical views tend to be shackled together with the heavy chains of social and personal history. It is probably not just coincidental that my historical background, as an Icelander, is in a proud, assertive ethical tradition of ‘saga morality’⁹ which accepts other-regard and self-regard as necessarily intertwined and understands morality as rules of demeanour and conduct in a society made up of free, sovereign persons. If we bring up the question of the moral justifiability of emotions as a question about what it really means to be a person, that is, one who can make claims, who can incur and acknowledge obligations, can be wronged, can be the object of and can reciprocate love, respect, hatred, contempt, etc.,¹⁰ then a range of interesting considerations starts to emerge that may threaten those accounts which automatically saddle pride and jealousy with a bad name. In this emphasis on the formation, maintenance, and recognition of personhood we can see the glimmering of a point that will be variously explored and pressed in the sequel.

For convenience of exposition, I shelve a direct defence of the emotions of pride(fulness) and jealousy themselves until chapters 4 and 5. The rest of chapter 1 will instead concentrate on a number of preliminaries. A writer wrestling in vacuo with issues such as the moral legitimacy of jealousy, or the various emotional manifestations of love, is likely to encounter severe trials. To make progress with such an inquiry, his general point of departure must be clear; he must have a fair idea of what an emotion is. I proceed in the following section with the briefest of surveys of recent emotion theory, especially of the cognitive kind to which I essentially adhere. Rather than opening new vistas, that section aims at a short survey of the present state of research. A major critical synthesis of current research is to be found in Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s recent book, The Subtlety of Emotions.¹¹ I refer the reader to that work for a clear, interdisciplinary overview of emotion theory and penetrating studies of various particular emotions. To avoid longueurs about general issues in emotion research, I mostly confine my discussion of that area to those points where I take exception, or believe that I have something to add, to Ben-Ze’ev’s treatment. Notice that section 1.2 is primarily written for readers not yet initiated into the basics of emotion theory. I recommend those better versed in the field to browse quickly through it, or simply skip it and go straight to section 1.3 which addresses some of the problems inherent in the cognitive theories of the emotions (concerns about methodology, the components of emotion, etc.). Section 1.4 then aims to clarify what it means to be responsible for one’s emotions, and to classify them according to rationality and moral appropriateness, and as either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, as well as to offer some initial suggestions about the justification of ‘negative’ emotions.

No scholarly treatment of the emotions must stray too far afield from everyday experiences. That is a crucial mission statement for any ‘Aristotelian naturalist at heart’, as I described myself in the preface. In order to understand and evaluate the emotions, we must know what people are like: what they think, say, and do in everyday encounters. In his ethical writings, Aristotle famously synthesised an account of moral virtues and emotions by considering virtue expressed in fine emotion as well as in fine action, and treating emotions as morally evaluable aspects of character. This is why the recent resurgence of Aristotelianism and the current fad for so-called virtue ethics may seem to bode well for the reinstitution of the emotions into moral and educational discourse. Indeed, some writers think that the moral significance of the emotions can only be adequately captured in terms of such a virtue-based conception of morality.¹² I agree that virtue ethics has done a lot of good for emotion research, if only by reintroducing a value-laden focus on the emotions. In the end, however, I shall be tempted to reject virtue-based ethics as a general touchstone by which to judge the moral soundness of our actions and emotions, opting instead for a sophisticated form of utilitarianism.

In spite of my (rather subtle) differences with virtue ethicists, I agree with their presupposition that we need a touchstone before we can start to take measurements. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, one cannot ‘say what role emotions should play in morality […] without defending an overall normative view’.¹³ This is why I have written chapter 2 about the credentials of a general moral theory: a chapter that I hope the reader will not view as a distracting detour from the main line of discussion, but rather as a crucial backdrop for the moral assessment of particular emotions. Perhaps the only serious strategic weakness in Ben-Ze’ev’s monumental work mentioned above is that he does not precede his discussions of the moral standing of different emotions by an argued defence for a substantive moral theory. Thus, the springboard from which his evaluations are launched is unclear. While it may be true that the theoretical differences between general moral standpoints are often over-emphasised and their similarities under-appreciated, there are surely more moral theories to choose from than there are snakes in Iceland. I should not be understood as claiming here that the reader will not glean enough from Ben-Ze’ev’s nuanced account of individual emotions, or from my defence of pride and jealousy, to be able to form his own coherent stance on the morality of emotions without a sophisticated understanding of moral theory; I am not raising a red flag for non-experts based on the intricacies of moral philosophy. Most readers, however, should be aware of enough cases of persons committing evil deeds and thinking evil thoughts because ‘they feel so right’, to sympathise with an attempt to give a moral view of the emotions a firm theoretical grounding.

More specifically, I discuss in chapter 2 the advantages of Aristotelian essentialism and a general naturalist approach to morality and the emotions, an exploration which leads me through the shortcomings of virtue ethics to the untapped sources of utilitarianism. In particular, I consider at length the way in which liberalism fails to guide satisfactorily our emotional life, and the way in which virtue ethics also fails to do so in times of emotional conflict, owing to its insensitivity to the ubiquity of tragic moments in human life.

In chapter 3 I then ponder the nature and conditions of moral and emotional excellence. As the reader will already have seen, my line of argument follows a deductive pattern: I move from general questions about the nature of emotions, via considerations of what constitutes a moral justification of emotions, to a discussion of the virtuous life. Only after having established these general points do I venture to descend to the particularities of the specific emotions under scrutiny. That transition takes place in this chapter. I begin by discussing personhood, integrity, and self-respect, and then, subsequently, shift the attention to an historically important character ideal: Aristotle’s megalopsychia, his crown of the virtues. From the explication of that ideal then flows naturally a characterisat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Mapping Out the Field
• 2. Justifying Emotions: The need for moral theory
• 3. Something to be Proud of: The nature and conditions of moral and emotional excellence
• 4. In Defence of Pridefulness
• 5. In Defence of Jealousy
• 6. Teaching Emotional Virtue
• 7. Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index