Responsibility of Persons for Their Emotions

Abstract

We sometimes blame persons, and we sometimes give them credit for the emotions they feel. We could, for example, speak of feeling hatred, resentment or envy as “reprehensible” in suitable circumstances, or say “He's to blame for feeling that way.” We could speak of feeling sympathy, affection or indignation as “commendable” in suitable circumstances, or say “He deserves credit for feeling that way.” And it is not just that we are assessing such emotion as somehow good or bad — in addition we may reproach or censure a person for the emotions he feels, or we may regard it as a credit to him that he feels as he does. In short, we apportion or impute responsibility to persons sometimes for the emotions they feel, and one important indication of this fact is in the sorts of judgments we can make about emotions.

Just Kidding: Stand-Up, Speech Acts and Slurs

“…The first thing to note is that the issue here is with the ethics of telling jokes and not the ethics of finding jokes funny. As a result, the view defended above does not in any direct sense address the question of the extent to which audiences are responsible for finding objectionable jokes they are told to be funny (Sankowski 1977, Smuts 2010. Second, the view on offer here has a number of affinities with Bergmann's account of sexist humor.…”

“…It is worth considering how these questions relate to more central questions in the current literature on the ethics of humor. These latter questions include such things as the conditions under which humor is wrong (Benatar 1999), whether or not we are responsible for finding morally inappropriate jokes funny (Sankowski 1977), and the extent to which moral defects in jokes affect whether or not they are in fact funny (Smuts 2010). My concern with the limits of the humor excuse accords nicely with questions about the wrongness of telling jokes and, perhaps less directly, with questions about responsibility for finding jokes funny.…”

Control, responsibility, and moral assessment

“…4 and 5. For a similar view, see Sankowski (1977), p. 838. 4 Wolf (1990), p. 44. sketch of my own non-volitionalist account of responsibility, which I have elsewhere called the rational relations view.…”

Inappropriate attitudes, fitness to practise and the challenges facing medical educators

“…But here two things should be said. First, although we may not have direct control over our attitudes, we are often able to exert indirect forms of control over them—so, for example, we may be able to voluntarily cultivate or suppress our attitudes—and it might be plausibly held that this is all that is needed in order to be blamed or criticised for our attitudes2 3 (see also papers by Robert Adams4 and Angela Smith5 for the view that responsibility doesn’t require any kind of control). But, second, even if it were the case that criticism requires direct control, this does not mean that our attitudes cannot be morally evaluated.…”