Forever fitting feelings

Abstract

This paper addresses a recent puzzle in the ethics of emotions concerning the fitting duration of emotions. On the one hand, many of our emotions tend to fade with time and can seem to do so fittingly. Think of attitudes like anger, grief, and regret. On the other hand, it's difficult to see how it could be fitting for these feelings to fade since the facts that make them fitting can seem to persist. This is the puzzle in brief; that of explaining how certain feelings can fittingly fade with time. This paper argues that this puzzle has no general solution: in a wide range of true‐to‐life cases our fitting feelings remain fitting forever, until the day that we die. I conclude by exploring the normative significance of this result and its implications for the ethics of attitudes more generally.

In defense of guilt‐tripping

“…Hence my view allows considerations other than one's wrongdoing -such as, for instance, whether one has made sufficient amends for one's wrong -to be among the background conditions that bear on guilt's fittingness. (For discussion of enabling and disabling conditions on our attitudes' fittingness, and of how the content of our attitudes can accommodate such conditions, see Na'aman (2021); Howard (2022); and Achs (fc).) 17 One may, if one wishes, hold that the cognitive commitment internal to guilt is a perception-like "construal" (Roberts 1988) or "seeming" (Rosen 2015).…”

The subtleties of fit: reassessing the fit-value biconditionals

“…6 But, if so, 3 Throughout our discussion, we'll use the terms 'evaluative property ' and 'value-property' interchangeably. 4 Philosophers who endorse the biconditionals include Brandt 1946;D'Arms & Jacobson 2000a, b;Howard 2018Howard , 2022Schroeder 2010;Tappolet 2016;andWiggins 1987. Berker 2022 does too, although he prefers to think of the properties on the left-hand side not as value properties, but rather 'thick-fittingness properties' (45-47).…”