Basic desert of reactive emotions

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the idea that someone can deserve resentment or other reactive emotions for what she does by attention to three psychological functions of such emotions – appraisal, communication, and sanction – that I argue ground claims of their desert. I argue that attention to these functions helps to elucidate the moral aims of reactive emotions and to distinguish the distinct claims of desert, as opposed to other moral considerations.

Keywords:

• desert
• blame
• resentment
• emotions
• anger
• moral responsibility

Acknowledgements

I very much appreciate the help of Andrea Scarpino, Antony Aumann, Randolph Clarke, and David Morrow, who all provided valuable comments on drafts of this manuscript. An audience at Loyola University, New Orleans also gave instructive feedback. Finally, many thanks to the two anonymous referees whose comments aided in substantially improving the paper.

Notes

Not all would agree that it is, either because they do not put desert in a central role or think the nature of blame is different. Prominent examples of the latter include Sher (2006) and Scanlon (2008).

In my paper ‘The Three-Fold Significance of the Reactive Emotions’ I propose that anger, resentment, and indignation have three psychological functions: appraisal, communication, and sanction, and I show that different accounts of moral responsibility can be understood as implicitly invoking various of these senses. When writing that paper, I did not yet appreciate that each of the psychological functions can itself serve a legitimate moral aim connected to desert. My aim in this paper is to make that case.

Compare Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson on what they term the fittingness of emotions (2000).

It might be thought that explicating desert of emotions in terms of accurate appraisal has the surprising result that inanimate things can deserve. For example, excitement seems like the fitting response when you get the news that you won the lottery. Therefore is it problematic that my account suggests that things like news can be deserving? I think it is not. First, my theory does not imply that anger, resentment, or indignation can be deserved by even very bad news. News cannot engage in wrongful conduct, which is what I argue makes resentment deserved. Also, we often speak of things that are not agents being deserving, as in ‘the Grand Canyon deserves to be admired’ and ‘the painting deserves praise’. It is possible that such claims invoke a notion of desert other than the one at issue here, but I think it is a felicitous result that my theory can account for such uses. Further, nothing in my theory implies that the features of a painting which deserve praise must be exactly the same as the features of people who are deserving of it. (I thank an anonymous referee for raising this issue.)

In his new book, Conversation and Responsibility, Michael McKenna argues that a person's actions can be seen as the initiation of a conversation to which others may reply by having reactive emotions or blaming (2012). I am not sure whether I am convinced that actions themselves should be seen as conversational moves. However, I am in agreement that the feeling of a reactive emotion toward someone is conversational.

My discussion in the next two sections is indebted to (Macnamara, forthcoming).

Others have also connected the reactive emotions and demands (Strawson 1982; Watson 1993; Wallace 2008) but Darwall distinctively construes demands as analogous to speech acts.

For further discussion of these points, see Section 4 of Macnamara (forthcoming).

I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

Apparently, ‘Life's Little Mysteries’ is really the co-author's name.

It might be objected that someone deserving resentment for doing something wrong is just different from the sense in which a person deserves directions in virtue of asking for them. In response, it is important that my account does not imply deserving resentment is exactly the same as deserving the answer to a question. Rather, the example helps to elucidate the idea that our communications with each other are guided by norms that do not directly appeal to consequentialist or contractual considerations. All I claim is that resentment has a communicative aim, not that it has exactly the same sort of communicative aim that all the conversational examples do. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.)

Saying just what conditions constitute satisfaction of the proportionality calculus is complicated. I leave it as intuitive that proportionality matters; how to cash this out deserves additional attention in another forum.

While there is a vast literature on the deservingness of state punishment, cases of interpersonal punishment are more directly analogous to the blaming attitudes. For a comprehensive and critical discussion of whether state punishment can be justified by the deservingness of wrongdoers, see Dolinko (1991a, 1991b).

I do not have a theory to offer here about how a harmful or unwanted treatment comes to fulfill these roles and so counts as a punishment. This claim also deserves additional attention in further work.

For more on the notion of proper standing, or authority, to blame see Cohen (2006) and Smith (2007).

For concurrence on this point, see Feinberg (1970) and Olsaretti (2003), who claim that the facts relevant to someone's desert exclusively concern facts about that person, not relational ones.

Roy Baumeister's (1990) account of suicidal motivations supports the possibility of such a reaction. I mean to assume that Jesse's depression does not undermine his responsibility for attempting to sabotage your tenure case.