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Virtuous Emotions Kristján
Kristjánsson
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Virtuous Emotions
Virtuous Emotions
Kristján Kristjánsson
1
3
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To Nora and Hlér, for being there

Contents
Preface ix
1. Introduction: Developing an Aristotelian Account

of Virtuous Emotions 1
1.1 Why Aristotle? 1
1.2 What an Emotion Is: A Componential View 4
1.3 Character and Virtue: Where Do Emotions Fit In? 14
1.4 ‘Virtuous Emotions’: What Does It Mean? 18
1.5 Emotion Education: The Preliminaries 26
1.6 A Roadmap of Subsequent Chapters 27
2. Emotions and Moral Value 31
2.1 Emotions and Value Epistemology 31
2.2 Four Competing Epistemologies 33
2.3 Complexities regarding Moral Motivation and a Critique
of Soft Sentimentalism 39
2.4 Hard Sentimentalism Revisited 46
2.5 Implications for Emotion Education 48
3. Gratitude 51
3.1 Introduction 51
3.2 Current Discourses on Gratitude 53
3.3 Putting the Aristotelian Pieces Together 57
3.4 Reappraising Aristotle on Megalopsychia and Gratitude 61
3.5 Gratitude and Poetic Justice 65
4. Pity 70
4.1 Introduction 70
4.2 Aristotle on the Desert-Based Emotions 72
4.3 The Conceptual Parish of Fellow-Feelings 75
4.4 Possible Defences of Pity 81
4.5 Concluding Remarks 85
5. Shame 87
5.1 Introduction 87
5.2 Four Discourses on Shame: The Mainstream Interpretation 88
5.3 Critiquing the Canon: The Heterodox Interpretation 93
5.4 Whence Those Contrasting Interpretations?
Conceptual Analyses across Disciplines 99
viii Contents
6. Jealousy 102
6.1 Introduction 102
6.2 Philosophical and Historical Background 103
6.3 Recent Work on Jealousy in Psychology 108
6.4 Recent Work on Jealousy in Philosophy 113
7. Grief 122
7.2 What Grief Is 124
7.3 The Rationality of Grief 130
7.4 A Moral Justification of Grief 133
8. Awe 142
8.2 The Concept of Awe 144
8.3 Towards an Aristotelian Justification 151
8.4 A Presumed Link to Humility—and Is It Fatal
to an Aristotelian Analysis of Awe? 154
9. Educating Emotions 161
9.2 Concepts and Categories 163
9.3 The Seven Discourses Analysed 167
9.4 Strategies of Emotion Education 175
10. Conclusions and Afterthoughts 185
10.1 Some Afterthoughts on the Virtuousness of Emotions 185
10.2 Aristotelian Naturalism: Some Methodological Afterthoughts 191
10.3 Further Afterthoughts on the Methodological Complexities
of Crossover Work on Virtuous Emotions 194
10.4 Some Afterthoughts on the Development and Education
of Emotions 199
10.5 Very Final Words 201
Bibliography 203
Index 221
Preface
I have been thinking about the topic of this book for a long time, indeed ever since
I completed my work on Justifying Emotions (Routledge, 2002). However, most of
the research and writing for the present book was done between 2012 and 2016
while working as Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics in the Jubilee
Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham.
I am grateful to my colleagues at the Jubilee Centre for their advice, support, and
comments on earlier drafts of many of the following chapters. I would especially like
to single out David Carr, Randall Curren, Liz Gulliford, Blaire Morgan, Robert C.
Roberts, and—obviously—the Centre’s director James Arthur. Various other scholars
have offered constructive comments on sections of the present book. I am particularly
grateful to Blaine Fowers who offered extensive comments on Chapters 1 and 10, and
Bruce Maxwell for his incisive comments on Chapter 9. I am indebted to the John
Templeton Foundation for funding the work of the Jubilee Centre. Peter Momtchiloff
at Oxford University Press deserves thanks for being unreservedly supportive of the
book project throughout its gestation. His two anonymous reviewers provided generously
extended criticisms of the initial proposal and later of a final draft, prompting me to
rewrite large chunks of Chapters 1 and 2. Kristian Guttesen provided invaluable
editorial assistance with the Index towards the end.
I have received helpful feedback from audiences at conferences organized by
the University of Munich (2007), University of Geneva (Summer School in Affective
Sciences, 2013), University of Tübingen (2014), Philosophy of Education Society of
Great Britain (Birmingham, 2014; Oxford, 2014), Universities of Chicago and South
Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina, 2015), and the Open University (London, 2016).
Chapter 8, on awe, was written under the auspices of the Virtue, Happiness and
Meaning of Life Project, University of Chicago; I am grateful to Candace Vogler for her
support and invitation.
I thankfully acknowledge permissions to recycle material from the following
articles: ‘Emotion Education Without Ontological Commitment?’, Studies in Philosophy
and Education, 29(3), 2010; ‘Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses – Two
Contrasting Interpretations for Moral Education’, Studies in Philosophy and Education,
33(5), 2014; ‘Pity: A Mitigated Defence’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 44(3–4),
2014; ‘An Aristotelian Virtue of Gratitude’, Topoi, 34(2), 2015; ‘Grief: An Aristotelian
Justification of an Emotional Virtue’, Res Philosophica, 92(4), 2015; ‘Jealousy Revisited:
Recent Philosophical Work on a Maligned Emotion’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,
19(3), 2016; ‘A Philosophical Critique of Psychological Studies of Emotion: The
Example of Jealousy’, Philosophical Explorations, 19(3), 2016; ‘Awe: An Aristotelian
Analysis of a Non-Aristotelian Virtuous Emotion’, Philosophia, 45(1), 2017.
1
Introduction
Developing an Aristotelian Account
of Virtuous Emotions
1.1 Why Aristotle?

One of the most conspicuous and significant developments in latter-day humanities
and social sciences has been the rise of the emotions as a unique object of study. Not
only scholars are interested in emotions; they are also widely discussed in popular
books and among the general public. Academic explorations often take Aristotle as
their starting point: the first Western theorist who paid systematic attention to the
salience of our emotions for lives well lived. Indeed, Aristotle has a lot to say about
commonly discussed emotions such as compassion or anger. He analyses them and
explains if and when they are morally justified. However, with respect to some other
common emotions he remains eerily silent or surprisingly dismissive.
The aim of this book is to offer a revised ‘Aristotelian’ analysis and moral justification
of a number of emotions that Aristotle either did not mention (such as awe, grief,
and jealousy), relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (such as shame), made
disparaging remarks about (such as gratitude), or rejected explicitly (such as pity,
understood as pain at another person’s deserved bad fortune). I will argue that there
are good ‘Aristotelian’ reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or
as indirectly conducive to virtue. The book begins, in the present chapter, with an
overview of Aristotle’s ideas about the nature of emotions and of emotional moral value,
set in the context of current concerns and conceptualizations. The book’s argument
culminates, in the penultimate Chapter 9, with a comparison of Aristotelian emotion
education and other forms of such education—as educational concerns are, for
Aristotle, an integral part of all useful moral theorizing.
There is a reason why I have put ‘Aristotelian’ in scare quotes above. It is because the
analyses and justifications offered are often not Aristotle’s own. But then the question
arises of why I propose to couch the aims in Aristotelian terms at all. A curt answer
might be this. No one has thought more clearly about virtuous emotions than Aristotle.
There is no substitute for clear thinking. Which is why, when we want to think clearly
about virtuous emotions, there is no substitute for Aristotle. The discerning reader,
2 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions
however, deserves something more than this curt answer, and I proceed to flesh it out
in this opening section.
I mentioned at the outset the increased academic interest in emotions. In moral
philosophy, for example, the upsurge of virtue ethics has brought the moral role of
emotions firmly into prominence. Thus, on a widely held current assumption, morally
proper emotions form part of the good life and are implicated in morality at all levels of
engagement—an assumption far removed from the Kantian contention that ‘no moral
principle is based [. . .] on any feeling whatsoever’ (Kant, 1964, p. 33). Moreover, not
being viewed any more as dangerous interlopers in the realms of upbringing and
schooling, emotions have now been invited as guests of honour into those realms as
essential to the development of human beings as morally developing agents. Although
some of the recent enthusiasm for the emotions has been motivated by a ‘hard’ form of
sentimentalism, harking back to David Hume (see e.g. Haidt, 2001), it is fair to say that
most recent emotion theories in moral philosophy and moral education have drawn
inspiration—directly or obliquely—from Aristotle’s ‘soft’ (emotion-imbued) rational-
ist stance. I elaborate upon those different stances in Chapter 2.
There are, in my view, three main reasons why it may be considered wise to rely
upon an Aristotelian account of virtuous emotions. The most general reason is that
many successful latter-day explorations of emotions have been couched in those very
terms (e.g. Nussbaum, 2001, on grief and compassion). Second, the recent surge of
interest in the moral value of emotions, at least within philosophical circles, can most
helpfully be traced to the renaissance of (Aristotle-inspired) virtue ethics. Indeed, there
is reason to believe that many people are drawn towards virtue ethics primarily because
of its facility to make sense of the moral salience of our emotional lives. Third, by offering
an Aristotelian account of a potentially virtuous emotion, one brings it into the fold of
a respectable moral theory, a theory which can explain, inter alia, why—if a proper form
of an emotion is virtuous—not feeling it when the occasion calls for it is evidence of
moral failings. All in all, then, armed with conceptual and moral weaponry from
Aristotle’s arsenal, we can make advances in the understanding of people’s emotional
lives that would otherwise be closed to us—or at least constitute arduous uphill battles.
That said, one can at best be respectful of a general Aristotelian approach to emo-
tions rather than deferential to all its details, since there is often no specific text by
Aristotle to be deferential to. As I explain presently, Aristotle’s account of individual
emotions is at times truncated or flawed—even by his own lights—if not simply miss-
ing. Rather than adding to the already abundant literature on the emotions that
Aristotle explores in most detail, such as anger (orgē) and poetic justice (nemesis)—
literature to which I have contributed in the past (Kristjánsson, 2006; 2007)—I find it
salutary to focus the Aristotelian lens this time on various emotions that Aristotle
either ignored or viewed askance, for different reasons, and to offer reconstructive
analyses of those, faithful to his general approach but informed by recent social sci-
entific findings. I consider this method in line with Aristotle’s own naturalistic
approach, according to which all moral theorizing must pay heed to empirical data.
Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 3
This also means that my exploration throughout the book will be unapologetically
transdisciplinary—drawing on insights from contemporary psychology as well as
from philosophy, old and new. For each of the six emotions to be studied, the variables
that I fasten on in the course of the discussion will be the emotion’s source/cause, inten-
tional object, valence, immediate target, goal-directed activity, and moral value. I explain
these variables one by one in the present chapter. The success of this book depends
largely on how persuasively it succeeds in ‘populating’ these variables in ways that are
reasonably faithful to a general Aristotelian approach.
The aim of this introductory chapter is to set the scene for the exploration to follow
by saying something about my take on emotions in general and an Aristotelian account
of emotions in particular. For the sake of intellectual honesty I want to be forthright
about the dilemma facing me when I pondered what to include in this chapter. I envis-
age the potential readership of this book to fall into two broad categories. On the one
hand, there will be readers interested in the conceptual and moral nuances of the
specific emotions under scrutiny here—and their educational ramifications—but with
a minimal interest in Aristotelian theory. On the other hand, there will be Aristotle
aficionados interested in (or possibly sceptical about) the viability of extending an
‘Aristotelian’ account of virtuous emotions to areas that Aristotle himself bypassed.
Pitching an introductory chapter at these two audiences is a challenge, requiring
compromises on both sides.
To the second group I want to say that I am not an Aristotelian exegete, either by
training or calling. I am a philosopher with an interest in issues that lie at the border-
line between moral philosophy, moral psychology (empirical as well as conceptual),
and moral education. While I would obviously resent being labelled as an Aristotelian
vulgarizer, my aim is neither to root for the historical Aristotle nor to offer novel textual
interpretations of his writings. Rather, my work is motivated by the belief that by pro-
viding generous helpings of Aristotle’s overall approach, and synthesizing those with
contemporary emotion scholarship, one can offer a discerning and persuasive account
of the nature and value of virtuous emotions. With respect to the first group, who come
to this book without a ready-made Aristotelian philosophy in their pockets, I ask them
to bear with me and not to skip those sections of the introductory chapter that deal
specifically with the nuts and bolts of Aristotle’s account; for I aim to lay out here (and
in Chapter 2) various general assumptions that underpin my account of individual
emotions in following chapters. The present chapter thus serves as a platform from
which all subsequent arguments will be launched.
All books are personal odysseys, and this one is no exception. I propose to take readers
with me on a journey motivated by personal insights and academic considerations
they may not share; yet I hope they will come to understand—after reading this opening
chapter—what my destination is and persevere with me, however critically and sceptically,
as I try to approach it.
Here is the first rub. Although Aristotle mentions emotion at various junctures in
his corpus, the first standard port of call is his Rhetoric (2007) which offers a fairly
substantial section on individual emotions (pathē). The list on offer there, however,
seems haphazard and almost arbitrary; it could easily have been longer or shorter (see
Rorty, 1992, p. 84). If one comes to the Rhetoric hoping for the last word on Aristotle’s
account of emotions, one’s hopes will be dashed. There is a simple reason for this: the
Rhetoric was not written predominantly as a treatise on emotions but, rather, as a text-
book teaching orators methods to persuade an audience. Although Aristotle did con-
sider emotions invaluable in that process, and therefore explores them in this book, he
seems to have been highly selective of the sort of emotions he chose to foreground
there, as having persuasive power.
Sometimes, however, the possible explanation of an emotion having been left out
because it does not have enough emotional appeal in rhetorical debates does not quite
wash. It would be difficult to imagine an emotion having more emotional force than
awe, for example. There might even be good (in this case Platonic) reasons to think that
awe possesses strong epiphanic powers of moral conversion (see e.g. Jonas, 2015). Yet
Aristotle has no time for it; and in that case, as I argue later, I think his reasons are
substantive (with respect to his emotion theory) rather than practical (with respect to
the remit of the Rhetoric). Nevertheless, I am generally sympathetic to Fortenbaugh’s
conjecture (2002, p. 106) that in the Rhetoric Aristotle may simply have lifted a few
examples of emotions from a more systematic treatise, known to be lost (perhaps
Diaireseis or On Emotions, Anger), in order to illustrate his points about the persuasive
power of emotions.
All that said, I also agree with Knuuttila (2004, p. 27) that while the survey of
emotions in the Rhetoric is meant to be merely illustrative and to serve the purposes
of a rhetorician, this work can be taken as a source of information about Aristotle’s con-
sidered general account of the conceptual contours and moral nature of emotions. The
Rhetoric thus offers us a broad canvas, but one on which only the general outlines and a
few individual dots have been provided. It gives free rein to someone like the present
author to fill in the missing dots and to touch up, or link up, some of those that are there
already. It is exactly at those places where we find ourselves dissatisfied with the incom-
pleteness and evasiveness of Aristotle’s account that our restoration work encounters its
most crucial trials. Yet, admittedly, respecting the broad outlines already on the canvas
is a prerequisite for any such reconstructions to deserve the label ‘Aristotelian’.
1.2 What an Emotion Is: A Componential View

Contemporary theories on what emotion ‘is’ are too various to be adequately placed by
reference to any single gross distinction (for a clear overview, see e.g. Deonna &
Teroni, 2012); indeed, one theorist identified more than ninety different definitions of
emotion (Plutchik, 2001). Yet, at the risk of undue simplification, one could argue that
two broad and contrasting paradigms, both with distinguished pedigrees, inform
the field of emotion theory, harking back to the trailblazing figures of Darwin and
Aristotle, respectively. According to a Darwinian perspective, emotions are understood
as natural kinds, residing in the hardware of our nervous system. More specifically, they
are conceptualized as bodily feelings of physiological changes, constituted by certain
unique modes of corporeal attention, sensation, and expression (especially through
characteristic facial features; see Ekman, 1989). From an Aristotelian perspective, in
contrast, emotions are viewed primarily as cognitions (of value) although feelings and
other components are also involved.
This physiological–cognitive boundary can be fuzzy and tenuous at times. For example,
some neo-Darwinians limit their theory to so-called ‘basic emotions’ (such as fear)
and acknowledge the existence of other, cognitively layered, emotions (such as shame).
However, the very idea of ‘basicness’ is itself a contested one in emotion theory
(Solomon, 2002). The main challenge for physiological theories is to make sense of the
generally acknowledged fact that emotions are not mere feelings (such as a toothache),
but rather have representational content and involve epistemic discrimination and
discernment. These theories must be able to explain the epistemic role emotions play
in the formation of evaluative reasons (Brady, 2013), as well as how changed beliefs
about the world often change emotion. Neo-Darwinians have come up with various
ingenious ways of meeting those demands (see e.g. Prinz, 2007), but I will bail out
of that discourse here, as the present work is grounded in an Aristotelian cognitive
paradigm. Hence, what matters for present purposes is primarily the discourse on
cognitive theories and their problematics.
Early on during the resurgence of cognitive theories of emotion in the 1960s and
1970s, the standard view was that the cognitive consort that set an emotion apart
was a full-blown belief: for instance, in fear, the belief that you are faced with danger.
However, this view had a hard time explaining frequent cases of ‘recalcitrant emotions’:
emotions such as fear of common spiders felt in default of a belief that common spiders
are harmful. There are two avenues of escape from this difficulty. One is the bullet-
biting one, which I foolhardily adopted in an earlier work (Kristjánsson, 2002), of
insisting that even in the case of recalcitrant emotions, a belief is at work, albeit a
subconscious (or at least a non-self-consciously endorsed) one. However, post-Freud,
a reference to subconscious beliefs is considered a somewhat desperate last-ditch
resort. The other avenue is to grant that emotions do not require belief as their cognitive
component but simply a judgement, which can be a snap one, not endorsed by the agent.
We often jump to judgements about x without really believing x, at least not deep down
or on second thoughts. Yet even talk of ‘judgements’ strikes many theorists as too
psychologically ‘dynamic’: judgements are typically passed by us rather than happening
to us, whereas the latter seems to be the case in some genuine emotional experiences.
This has led some cognitivists to revise their conception of ‘cognition’ from that of a
full-blown belief or even judgement, endorsed and/or passed by the agent, to a more
free-floating thought (Greenspan, 1988). In some cases of fear, for example, a vague
thought of impending danger may simply occur to me and latch itself onto a painful
feeling, thus eliciting the relevant emotion, without any judgement being passed or
belief being harboured.
I explore those issues—which continue to pose threats to those beholden to an

Aristotelian account—in the context of Aristotle’s own texts presently. It suffices to
mention for now that some permissive cognitive theories are willing to relinquish
altogether the requirement that the evaluative content of emotions contains any
propositional content—articulated or in principle articulable—via belief, judgement,
or thought, and make do with a perceptualist account of ‘cognition’, according to which
the cognitive component simply constitutes the affective representation, in perception,
of evaluative content. It is hard, however, to understand cognitions as literal ‘perceptual’
experiences (Brady, 2013, p. 63), because the representational content of a standard
perception typically falls short of the sort of complex evaluative processing that we
see in even the most ‘basic’ of emotions. To be sure, there are ‘doxastic’ accounts of
perception in existence, according to which sense perceptions are essentially beliefs, as
indicated by the idiom ‘seeing is believing’ (see e.g. Heil, 1982). However, this is not the
standard fare in perceptualist accounts of emotion, as those tend to make do without
attributing any propositional content to the evaluative content of emotion, let alone
that of beliefs. To complicate matters, some of the most popular and advanced percep-
tualist accounts of cognitions employ language that is slightly vague or that builds
potential bridges to propositional content; witness Robert C. Roberts’s account of
emotions as ‘concern-based construals’ (2003). Construal (‘seeing something as
something’) is not a simple perception but is taken to include elements of perception,
imagination, and thought (Roberts, 2003; Brady, 2013, p. 62). Moreover, if the evalu-
ative element still seems under-accounted-for, it is added through the ‘concern’ part of
Roberts’s specification. Somewhat ironically, then, the cognitive account that many
people consider the most sophisticated one, and to accord best with our intuitions
about what an emotional cognition really involves (namely Roberts’s), appears to be
somewhat ambivalent about whether to characterize the cognition as more of a
thought or a perception or something in between.
For readers who are mainly interested in moral evaluations of emotions and their
educational implications, this internal debate in the cognitive camp about the nature
of emotion may appear to be a hue and cry about a non-issue. We see in Chapter 9, for
instance, that debates about emotion education rarely invoke questions of the exact
nature of the cognitive content of emotions (whether it is more judgement-like or
perception-like) as a salient consideration for how to cultivate them, although most
emotion educators seem to be at least implicit cognitivists. Perhaps this says more about
the lack of sophistication in that discourse, however, than about the specification of
‘cognition’ being a non-issue for educational purposes. There might be hidden mines
left in the soil here although peace seems to have been declared. In any case, even if
most of what I have to say later about the analysis of individual emotions could proceed,
for practical (moral and educational) purposes, without considering whether their
cognitive component involves a belief, judgement, thought, construal, or perception,
there are certain boundary issues where this controversy does matter. For example,
those who refuse to take the radical perceptualist route (and I argue later that Aristotle
was one of them)—insisting, rather, that the relevant cognition must have propositional
content—will be hard put to impute emotions to infants and animals, except in a
derivative or metaphorical sense.
There is unfortunately no way in which to speak ex cathedra with respect to
Aristotle’s own version of a cognitive account. Different conceptualizations have been
wrenched from his texts by different interpreters. Although I am eager to steer clear as
much as possible from mere exegesis in this book, there is no avoiding some engagement
with this issue in his own writings if one wants to develop an account that is reasonably
faithful to the historical Aristotle, while removing discrepancies and ambiguities where
needed. It is beyond controversy that Aristotle proposes a componential or compos-
itional theory of emotion, with a cognitive component at its core, but that is basically
the point at which the consensus ends.
‘The emotions are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come
to differ in their judgements [kriseis], and are accompanied by pain and pleasure’,
Aristotle says (2007, pp. 112–13 [1378a20–21])—a specification which, at first sight at
least, seems to place him in the judgementalist, rather than the perceptualist, camp. He
also refers repeatedly to cognitions, understood in this way, as the efficient causes of
emotion, with reference to his famous architectonic of the ‘four causes’. There is no pity,
for example, which does not involve judgement about another’s deserved misfortune.
That cognition is, precisely, what distinguishes the emotion of pity from the emotion of
compassion (eleos), pain at another’s undeserved misfortune.
Notably, Aristotle does not use the word ‘belief ’ (doxa) for the cognition, but rather
krisis (judgement), which carries connotations of discernment and logical discrimination
rather than endorsement and persuasion. We do not know whether this means that he
anticipated latter-day worries about a necessary belief-component of emotion; at least
he defines ‘belief ’ as presupposing conviction (pistis)—having been persuaded by a
discourse of reason (1941c, p. 588 [428a19–24])—which for us moderns would entail
misgivings about making doxa a constituent of emotion. Aristotle is far from being
consistent here, however, for when it comes to characterizing individual emotions,
he typically circumvents the word krisis and relies rather on the verb phainesthai (‘to
appear’), or its cognate noun, phantasia (‘appearance’). It seems, then, that to experi-
ence, say, compassion, one does not need to judge another person as having suffered
undeserved misfortune but only perceive of such misfortune as having happened.
Nieuwenburg (2002) makes a strong case for a perceptualist reading of Aristotle’s
cognitivism. His case is textual; he observes that in the overwhelming majority of
cases in the Rhetoric, Aristotle avails himself of perceptualist language. Fortenbaugh
strongly objects to this move, however, for it would open up the possibility of animals
experiencing emotions in the same sense as humans, but that is a recognizably
un-Aristotelian position (2002, p. 94). Fortenbaugh explains Aristotle’s use of phantasia
as referring not to the relevant cognition of the person experiencing the emotion but
to the fact that the object of the emotion is conspicuous and observable by others
(2002, pp. 96–8).
Knuuttila also inveighs against perceptualism and produces various textual and
philosophical considerations in favour of a judgementalist reading (2004, pp. 36–40).
He points out, for example, that Aristotle did not believe we could think without
imagination; this fact may have induced Aristotle to use phantasia rather than krisis
when describing individual emotions, for the former word carries connotations of the
mind imagining and mulling over the implications of the emotion-inducing event,
rather than just passing a judgement about something having happened or being about
to happen. Yet the actual judgement is necessary for the emotion to be elicited. Rorty
(1992) suggests that the whole perceptualist–judgementalist debate about Aristotle
may be based on a misreading of phantasia, as understood via post-Enlightenment
theories of perception and imagination. Aristotle’s use of the term obviously predated
those understandings, and it was not very systematic either, being situated (much
like today’s term ‘construal’) somewhere between the meanings of belief (doxa) and
perception (aesthēsis).
There often comes a point where the consistent Aristotelian needs to depart from
the historic Aristotle, and I see no alternative in this case other than trying to carve out
a position that is reasonably Aristotelian, in trying to preserve as much of his general
approach as possible, but that disambiguates the heterogeneous textual material. I wonder
why Aristotle did not make use of his model of the four causes:
• efficient cause,
• formal cause,
• final cause,
• material cause,
and make a distinction between the (1) efficient cause (that we could call ‘the source’)
of an emotion, and its (2) formal cause (latching onto its formal object, such as ‘the
shameful’ in shame). It would seem agreeably Aristotelian to hold that the source (qua
Aristotle’s efficient cause) of an episode of jealousy is, for example, the perception of
a teacher attending more carefully to a fellow student than to me: something appears
to me, given who, what, and where I am (cf. Rorty, 1992, p. 89), as a relative disfavour-
ing of me. This perception then causes a krisis, in the sense of an evaluative thought
(Knuuttila, 2004, p. 38) rather than a full-blown judgement (at least on a modern
understanding, which is stronger than that of krisis), about undeserved differential
treatment: a thought that draws the mind to the ‘formal cause’ (via the formal object)
of the emotion of jealousy, and is then accompanied by (3) the final cause of the emotion,
its goal-directed activity (to which I turn later, along with (4) the material cause).
Understanding evaluative thought as the cognitive core of an emotion may seem to
make the motivational link to acting (e.g. in a jealous way) mysterious, but as Aristotle
was, in an important sense (explained more fully in Chapter 2), a ‘Humean’ about
motivation—arguing that ‘thought by itself [. . .] moves nothing’ (1985, p. 150
[1139a36–37]) unless driven by a goal-directed desire—this understanding seems to
be in accord with his general motivational theory.
This reworking of the cognitive component of emotion has four advantages in my

view. First, it makes use of Aristotle’s own model of the four causes; second, it allocates
a role both to perception and evaluative thought in the specification of emotion
and thus offers a conciliatory move with respect to the above-mentioned differing
interpretations of Aristotle; third, it retains the assumption of emotions as possessing
propositional content, which helps distinguish (at least some of) them from animal
feelings; and fourth, it tallies with the insight of some well-known contemporary
cognitive accounts, according to which evaluative thoughts occur between the perceived
stimulus and the response, rather than being treated as part of the stimulus (cf. Lyons,
1980; Greenspan, 1988).
It must be admitted that this reworking of Aristotle’s componential view of emotion,
in line with his theory of the four causes, is slightly rhapsodic with regard to his own
text. As a matter of fact, for most of the purposes of the present book it does not make
much of a difference whether we construe Aristotle’s cognitive theory as a perceptualist
or a judgementalist one, for even if it were categorized as the former, it could accom-
modate the claim that emotions have cognitive bases although those do not comprise
the actual evaluative content of the emotions. Notably, it must be readily admitted that
Aristotle does not avail himself of the concept of the formal object of an emotion as its
general evaluative property; the very term ‘formal object’ is a modern invention, albeit
a helpful one. What Aristotle is interested in, when explaining an emotion, is a more
specific object—what would nowadays be called its ‘intentional object’: the specific
bearer of the property which the given emotion is about. For example, in shame,
whereas ‘the shameful’ is its formal object, what Aristotle focuses on is the (cognized)
disgracefulness of one’s own (re)actions as the bearer of the property of the shameful.
When I explore the six emotions in question in Chapters 3–8, I distinguish, therefore,
between their source, as the perception eliciting them, and their ‘aboutness’ as their
intentional object. I also invoke the notion of their ‘immediate target’, for want of a
better term. ‘Target’ is often used synonymously with ‘intentional object’ in current
emotion theory, but I use it here to designate the broad ontological object at which the
emotion is primarily directed. Is it myself as a person (as in shame), another person (as
in gratitude), or a transpersonal ideal (as in awe)?
When one looks at the emotions that Aristotle actually describes in the Rhetoric
(2007), those fall broadly into three categories with respect to their targets:
• emotions directed at oneself (like pride),
• emotions directed at other people (like compassion), or
• emotions directed at external events (like fear).
Notably missing from this list are emotions directed at transpersonal (non-self-or-
selves-directed) ideals or idealizations, such as beauty, truth, and goodness. There is no
awe—either inspired by a heightened sense of beauty in art/nature, the immensity of
the universe, or the goodness of an ideal of self-sacrifice. Knuuttila makes this point
bluntly when he says that ‘Aristotle was not inclined to seek the meaning and end of life
outside it, as Plato did, and correspondingly he did not think that detachment from
appreciating contingent things and from associated emotions is what philosophy
should teach people’ (2004, p. 25). Obviously the point is not that Aristotle did not
embrace self-transcendence, understood in the simple (‘horizontal’) sense of accom-
modating other people into one’s sphere of emotional and moral considerations.
Given his foregrounding of compassion and friendship, he is the self-transcendent
moralist par excellence. However, Aristotle was a ‘people person’ (as explained well
in Vogler, 2017), and arguably did not accommodate self-transcendence in a more
complex (‘vertical’) sense, as attraction to ‘higher’ transpersonal ideals. I explore some
implications of this lacuna in Chapter 8 and offer correctives. More specifically,
I argue that understanding where and why Aristotle missed the boat on awe and
other transpersonally targeted emotions may help us appreciate what would have
been gained had he not.
While I am not shy in suggesting the above proposal of a fourfold componential
model as a contribution to ‘neo-Aristotelian’ scholarship (although not representing
the view of the historical Aristotle), I cannot help returning once again to the con-
sideration that the whole debate about the nature of the cognitive component is,
for present purposes at least, slightly tangential. Philosophers sometimes live inside
a bubble. As I happen, in my current job, to engage with social scientists and practi-
tioners interested in emotions on a more regular basis than with fellow philosophers,
I know all about the effort it takes to persuade some of them of the insights that
emotions are
• reason-responsive,
• morally evaluable,
• educable and worthy of education in the sense of nurture and development
rather than suppression, and
• potentially constitutive of moral selfhood and identity.
If I succeed in getting those Aristotelian points across, I consider myself victorious;
persuading them further of the exact nature of the cognitive component of emotion
would in most cases be surplus to requirements.
This point was also brought home forcefully to me recently when reading Deborah
Achtenberg’s wonderful book, Cognition and Value in Aristotle’s Ethics (2002). I have
yet to come across a richer and more nuanced account of the role of emotions as
cognitions of value, on an Aristotelian account. Achtenberg argues that, for Aristotle,
emotions are cognitions of value in the sense of constituting rational awareness of
and orientations to the world. More specifically, she explains in detail how emotions
represent the evaluative properties of recurring relationships between particulars
(2002, pp. 2, 9). I found myself agreeing with almost everything Achtenberg says in this
book; yet she understands Aristotelian cognitions as perceptions or appearances of
particulars without any necessary propositional content (2002, p. 28). As indicated
above, I beg to differ on this particular point. I find it more rewarding to think of
an emotion such as jealousy as starting with a direct perception or an imaginative

construction, which is then elaborated upon and interpreted, through an evaluative
thought, in light of a value such as desert. The subject does not directly perceive lack of
desert but rather comes to evaluate the situation propositionally as involving this value
(or lack thereof). It is in order to convey this particular sense of emotions as cognitions
of value that I have aspired to reconstruct Aristotle’s account. Yet I am eager not to
overplay this nuance as somehow essential for making sense of Aristotle’s view of how
emotions grasp ethical salience.
On my reconstructed ‘Aristotelian’ account, then, the cognitive component of emotion
requires more than mere perception or phantasia, although the latter is essentially
involved in the elicitation of emotion. Yet even if we add the evaluative thought, this is
still only half the story, for we have not yet accounted for the ‘and-are-accompanied-
by-pain-and-pleasure’ part of the original characterization of emotion. This part makes
it explicit that Aristotle was not a ‘pure’ cognitive theorist, believing that emotions are
exclusively made up of cognitions (a view later initiated by the Stoics and taken up by
Nussbaum, 2001). Rather, he took it that, in emotion—to put it metaphorically—one
feels one’s thoughts and thinks one’s feelings. While this assumption seems to resonate
with current ideas about emotional ‘valence’, a note of warning should be struck about
any direct comparisons with modern conceptualizations.
It is standard practice in contemporary psychology to refer to emotions simply as
‘positive’ (meaning ‘pleasant’) or ‘negative’ (meaning ‘painful’) with respect to their
phenomenological valence (yet, for misgivings, see Solomon & Stone, 2002). This often
confuses newcomers to the field—for in ordinary language, ‘positive’ emotion seems
closer to the meaning of ‘positively evaluated’ or even ‘morally justifiable’ emotion.
In my experience, it can take months before students get used to referring to, say, the
highly praised emotion of compassion as ‘negative’ and the much-maligned emotion
of Schadenfreude (pleasure at another’s undeserved misfortune) as ‘positive’. To avoid this
clash with linguistic intuitions, I will talk about ‘positively valenced’ and ‘negatively
valenced’ emotions when referring to the pain–pleasure dichotomy in the remainder
of the book.
To be sure, Aristotle was interested in the development of what we could call ‘positive
emotions’, but he understood those as emotions that are morally positive, irrespective
of valence. For instance, the two emotions that he connects most intimately to the
developmental trajectory of the moral learner, shame and emulation, are both negatively
valenced overall—and the emotion that, by modern lights at least, will count as Aristotle’s
paradigmatic moral one, namely compassion (eleos), is of course the negatively felt
emotion par excellence. The foregrounding of positivity, in terms of positive affect, in
modern psychology has come under heavy polemical fire in recent years, both generally
(Ehrenreich, 2009) and with respect to particular theories of psycho-moral cultivation
that incorporate a hedonic view of optimal human functioning (e.g. Kristjánsson, 2007,
chap. 6; Tamir & Gross, 2011; Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 8). Yet its appeal seems to
linger on, aided by some trendy sloganeering about the ‘broadening-and-building’
effects of feel-good emotions (Fredrickson, 2009). What emerges, then, is a striking

disharmony between contemporary accounts of emotional regulation and Aristotle’s
account on how to negotiate negativity. Whereas the former are all about downplaying,
eliding, or bypassing negativity, Aristotle’s account embraces negative emotional
valence head-on.
There is a deeper conceptual difference still between ‘emotional valence’ as commonly
understood in contemporary psychology, on the one hand, and by Aristotle, on the
other. Many psychologists seem to assume that emotions can be divided somewhat
unproblematically into the categories of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ with regard to valence.
This does not mean that psychologists deny the existence of phenomenological
emotional ambivalence, but they typically understand such ambivalence as having
to do with the complex interrelationship between co-existing emotions rather than as
happening internally with regard to the same emotion. In contrast, whereas Aristotle does
characterize each emotion as overall ‘painful’ or ‘pleasant’, he seems to have understood
most, if not all, emotions to be of mixed valence: namely, to incorporate a mixture of
pains/disturbance/frustration and pleasure/restoration/gratification (see Frede, 1996;
cf. Konstan, 2006, pp. 33–4). This feature is conspicuously brought out in a discussion
of two emotions to which Aristotle devotes considerable space in the Rhetoric (2007):
anger and emulation. While both emotions are overall of negative valence, the pain in
anger is partly offset by the pleasant anticipation of possible retaliation; the pain in
emulation, at one’s inferiority vis-à-vis an admired exemplar, is partly offset by one’s
pleasure in cherishing the admired qualities of the exemplar. In following chapters, I will
make use of the Aristotelian mixed-valence assumption to explain, for example, that
while grief is overall painful and awe overall pleasant, both emotions are mixed with
contrary phenomenological elements.
Neo-Darwinians sometimes complain about lack of attention to the phenomenological
aspect of emotions in contemporary cognitive theories, with the ‘feel’ of an emotion
being, at worst, disregarded or, at best, considered something of a fortuitous add-on
to the essential cognitive component. Such complaints do not hit at Aristotle, for it is
pellucid—and here, for once, the different interpreters agree—that he considered the link
between emotion and its accompanying pleasure and pain to be a necessary conceptual
one (Leighton, 1982, pp. 156, 159; Knuuttila, 2004, p. 35). More specifically, emotion is
not contingently connected to pleasure and pain; those sensations are part of emotion.
Some controversy—textual and exegetical—remains, however, with regard to the
question of whether the pleasure in pleasant emotions (and the pain in painful ones)
differs between different emotions. Aristotle is standardly taken to say about virtue
that a pleasure peculiar to each virtuous activity will supervene and complete that
activity once it has been successfully accomplished (see e.g. Roberts, 1989, p. 301). It is
tempting to hypothesize that he held the same view with regard to emotions: namely,
that a sensation peculiar to each emotion accompanies that emotion. Leighton (1982,
pp. 155–7) subscribes to this view, taking his cue from Aristotle’s general remarks
in the Nicomachean Ethics about how different activities require different pleasures
to complete them (1985, pp. 277–8 [1175a22–28]; cf. also Nussbaum, 2001, p. 64).
Fortenbaugh, however, disagrees. He finds no traces of this assumption in the Rhetoric;
for example Aristotle does not try to distinguish between the overall negatively
valenced emotions of fear and anger on grounds of different accompanying feelings
(Fortenbaugh, 1969, pp. 167, 185). In the Rhetoric, pleasure and pain are regarded as
mere sensations, not as intentional states with cognitive content. To be sure, different
pleasant emotions are experienced differently, but that is because of their different
cognitive consorts and goal-directed activities (see below), not because the pleasant
sensations accompanying them vary in kind (Fortenbaugh, 2002, p. 111). The jury is
still out on Aristotle’s considered view on this issue. At all events, from the point
of view of a contemporary updated Aristotelianism, Fortenbaugh’s parsimonious
interpretation not only has Ockham’s razor on its side but also famous psychological
experiments from the 1960s which indicated that the induction of uniform physio-
logical arousal can elicit radically different emotions, depending solely on different
cognitions (Schachter & Singer, 1966).
Although Aristotle’s cognitive component tends to be foregrounded, he was also
deeply interested in the physiological substratum of emotion, which he identifies
as their material cause. It goes without saying that most of Aristotle’s biological explan-
ations for why emotions feel the way they do to us, and how they are physiologically
generated, are outdated (see various examples in Fortenbaugh, 2002, pp. 112–13), to
the point of being most charitably passed over in silence. Yet the invocation of the
necessary ‘material cause’ is worth mentioning here to remind readers again of how
encompassing Aristotle’s componential account of emotion is—how far removed from
a ‘pure’ cognitive account such as Nussbaum’s (2001)—and how, through his multiple-
entry bookkeeping of the components, he was able to see emotion as necessarily
embodied and concretized in the flesh. In a way, then, Aristotelian cognitivism includes
some of the essential elements of a (Darwinian-style) physiological theory about the
nature of emotion, although it does not see emotions as uniquely identifiable through
physiological, facial, or phenomenological markers.
The fourth Aristotelian ‘cause’—the so-called final one—comes to the fore in
Aristotle’s assumption that in addition to the perception, thought, and feeling, emotion
also essentially involves disposition to goal-directed activity (see Fortenbaugh, 1969,
pp. 165–7). Knuuttila describes this component as ‘a behavioural suggestion, a spon-
taneous impulse towards action’ (2004, p. 32). We must make sure, however, to present
the goal-directed component in a way that does not cede too much territory to behav-
iourism. Take compassion: a person who feels compassion towards the undeserved
misfortune of another person will, ipso facto, be drawn towards the goal of doing
something about it—for instance, to offer help. However, sometimes the activity
impulse generated by an emotion is merely internal. For instance, shame of the fact
that I am considering a disgraceful act may motivate me to stop considering it. The
goal-directed activity in that example is simply to silence a consideration, rather than

to motivate ‘behaviour’ in an everyday sense. The explanation in this case may be that
shame is a self-directed (aka ‘self-conscious’) emotion.
However, even in the case of an other-directed emotion, such as compassion, I may
be incapacitated for various reasons from engaging in any goal-directed activity. I may,
for example, be paralysed in a wheelchair and not able to do anything about the plight
of victims of a famine that I see on TV except to feel their pain. Aristotelians might
continue to say that compassion in this case is still goal-orientated; it just so happens
that the goal is beyond my reach (cf. Crisp, 2008, p. 241). Indeed, I take that to be the
coherent Aristotelian view. But then we begin to understand why it is often difficult
to separate Aristotelian emotional dispositions from full-blown virtues, as I discuss
further in Sections 1.3 and 1.4, although Aristotle himself was eager to preserve the
distinction between the two. Virtues are typically considered to comprise a number of
different components, such as perception, understanding, emotion, motivation, and
behaviour. However, emotion on an Aristotelian understanding already seems to include
the other relevant virtue components, even a tendency towards acting in a certain way.
Saying that virtue includes both emotion and behaviour thus smacks of double count-
ing. In any case, the relevant valence and goal-directed activity are discussed for each
particular emotion in Chapters 3–8, in addition to the previously explained components
(summarized in Table 10.1 in Chapter 10). For instance, I argue that the source of grief
is the perceived irrevocable loss of personhood; the intentional object of pity is the
cognized deserved misfortune of another person; the valence of awe (albeit mixed) is
more pleasant than painful; and that the goal-directed activity of gratitude is the
acknowledgement and return of a benefit.
All in all, I consider Aristotle to have offered a nuanced and persuasive answer to
the question of what an emotion ‘is’. Yet he may have committed a number of missteps
along the way; it would be odd if after 2,300 years no missteps would need to be
corrected. I believe that such corrections can be done while remaining faithful to a
general Aristotelian approach: essentially cognitive but also componential.
1.3 Character and Virtue: Where Do Emotions Fit In?

An Aristotelian analysis of emotion would be seriously incomplete if it did not include
moral evaluation: indeed one of the columns in Table 10.1 summarizes the moral value
of the emotions that I will, by then, have scrutinized in Chapters 3–8. The present book
is about virtuous emotions, with a strong accent falling on the word ‘virtuous’. In this
section and the following one, I pave the way for the specific arguments presented in
subsequent chapters by saying something general about character, virtue, and virtuous
emotions, understood along Aristotelian lines.
So much has been written of late about Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics—an ethics
concerned with the nature and cultivation of virtuous character—that one more take
on it here would be superfluous. For the uninitiated reader, a good introductory

text, such as Annas’s Intelligent Virtue (2011), will suffice. ‘Character’ and ‘character
education’ have also become buzzwords in the more practical areas of moral learning
and educational policy. Although quite a lot of that literature understands ‘character’
in an amoral, instrumentalist—and, from an Aristotelian perspective, impoverished—
sense (see e.g. popular books by Tough, 2013, and Duckworth, 2016), there is also a
prominent strand of research and practical work that does apply an Aristotelian lens to
character (e.g. Sanderse, 2012; Kristjánsson, 2015), and where character education is
understood predominantly, in its early stages at least, to involve emotional sensitization.
The nuances of an Aristotelian position on those issues set up traps for the unwary,
however. For present purposes, the briefest of rehearsals of some of the Aristotelian
conceptualizations will have to do.
People have constitutional traits that make up what nowadays is called their personality.
Those traits are only malleable to a limited extent; for example, no amount of education
will turn an introvert into an extravert. Aristotle also seems to have considered some
age-dependent and social-position-related traits to be ill-amenable to, if not alteration
in general, then at least quick fixes: for example, the characteristic impulsiveness of
youth only lets go gradually with age (see Rorty, 1992, pp. 77–80). However, personality
has a subset called character, referring to traits that are educable and morally evaluable
and provide a person with moral worth (or lack thereof). Character education is, as
the name suggests, concerned with the gradual honing of character—a process that is
originally (in early childhood) the responsibility of educators, later a joint responsibility
shared by them and the morally developing person, and finally the person’s own
responsibility (along with that of her closest ‘character friends’) as she develops
phronesis: the intellectual capacity to make reflective choices between alternatives (see
further in Kristjánsson, 2015, chap. 4).
However, the constitution of good character continues to be highly relative with
respect to individual temperament, personal needs, and social position. Thus, two
people with equally good moral characters may possess quite different character traits.
Different people have different needs and tendencies, and hence the proper (medial)
state of character ‘is not the same for everyone’ and ‘in the object’, but rather ‘relative to us’.
For instance, what is moderation in eating for me is not the same for Milo the athlete
(Aristotle, 1985, pp. 42–3 [1106a30–b5]). Hitting the golden mean of Aristotelian
character is all about learning to steer clear of what, in each case, is the more contrary
extreme, by dragging ourselves off in the opposite direction ‘as they do in straightening
bent wood’ (1985, p. 52 [1109b6–7]). For example, in the case of grief, since some people
may have a tendency to grieve too much, and others too little, the ideal learning curve
will be essentially person-relative.
Positive traits of character, which enable people to respond morally well and
successfully to challenges in life by choosing what is valuable, are called virtues; their
opposites, qua excesses or deficiencies, are called vices. More specifically, virtues
and vices are, in Aristotle’s theory, taken to be settled (stable and consistent) states of
character (hexeis in Greek), concerned with morally praiseworthy or blameworthy

responses in significant and distinguishable spheres of human life. Each character
trait of this sort typically comprises a unique set of knowledge, attention, emotion,
desire/motivation, and behaviour, but also a certain comportment or style of expres-
sion, applicable in the relevant sphere. The compassionate and caring person thus
understands the meaning and value of compassion, notices easily and attends to
situations in which the lot of others has been undeservedly compromised, feels for
the needs of those who have suffered this undeserved misfortune, desires that their
misfortune be reversed, acts (if possible) for the relevant (ethical) reasons in ways
conducive to that goal, and exudes an outward aura of empathy and care. So, just
as for emotion, Aristotle has a componential view of virtue (and the above list is
not necessarily exhaustive; see e.g. Curzer, 2016, for a fuller list). Rorty offers this
succinct specification:
Virtue (arete) is that sort of active disposition (hexis) which sets a person to act or react in a
mean, in situations involving choice (prohairesis), following reason (logos) as the person of
practical wisdom (phronimos) does in matters concerning pathe and actions. (1984, p. 535)
Curzer (2012, chap. 15) makes a stab at defining various discrete levels of virtue
development, ranging from that of the many (hoí polloí) and the generous-minded
(eleutherios) to the incontinent, continent, those with natural (habituated but non-
phronesis-infused) virtue, to the properly virtuous and, above them, to those with
superhuman or heroic virtue. Notice that Curzer is not saying that everyone needs to
progress through those levels in the same order, Kohlberg-style, without skipping
any of them, or that most people’s moral functioning can be ‘operationalized’ so as to
fall overall within a given level; nevertheless being aware of those milestones may
help us get a handle on the normal trajectory of moral development. However, in a
more recent work, Curzer (2016) has himself problematized a stage-theory inter-
pretation of Aristotle and now seems to consider his previous descriptions of moral
levels as shorthand idealizations rather than accurate depictions of the statuses of
real people. On this anti-idealization reading, given that virtue comprises various
different components, individuals can be strong on one (say, on proper emotion) but
weaker on another (say, on putting emotion into action). Rarely will all those components
align in perfect harmony in a person; thus the multi-component view seems to cast
doubt on the usefulness of a stage-theory model. Curzer considers emotion to kick in
as a significant component of virtue at the level where mere self-control morphs into
habituated virtue—and it continues to have pride of place in phronetic virtue also. Curzer’s
meticulous analysis of all the possible components of virtue in general, as well as their
sub-components (centi-virtues) and sub-sub-components (deci-virtues), identifies no
less than 6,000 possible failure (or success) modes for virtue.
In Section 1.4, I explore in more detail the different ways in which emotions feature
in virtues. I will end this section, however, with a quick comment on a distinction
made by Fortenbaugh that seems to me to muddy the conceptual waters. Fortenbaugh

(2002, pp. 80–2) distinguishes between Aristotelian emotions that are more ‘practical’
from others that are less so in involving a goal for which to act. He mentions fear and
anger as examples of the former; without the relevant activity we would question the
existence of those emotions. He mentions shame and indignation, however, as emotions
that are compatible with inaction. A person may decide not to do anything about them,
as an addition to experiencing them as cognitions and feelings, without undermining
the intelligibility of claim that she was truly ashamed or indignant.
Now, it may well be true that emotions vary by degrees in their propensity to issue in
direct action, but I do not consider that a good enough ground to make a distinction
between practical and impractical (or less practical) emotions. If the shame and indig-
nation of the ashamed or indignant person do not involve tendencies to goal-directed
activity, it seems to me invalid to say that the persons are really experiencing those
emotions, any more than a person who only sheds the odd tear about another’s
undeserved misfortune, but is not moved to helping action, would be experiencing
genuine compassion (cf. Roberts, 1989, pp. 297–8). To be sure, there are often good
reasons why shame and indignation are best kept to oneself rather than expressed in
action. But there may also be reasons for not acting on one’s fear or anger. Both fear
and anger are, therefore, in Fortenbaugh’s sense but pace Fortenbaugh’s own analysis,
logically compatible with inaction.
‘Olympic prizes are not for the finest and strongest, but for contestants, since it is
only these who win; so also in life [only] the fine and good people who act correctly
win the prize’, Aristotle says (1985, p. 20 [1099a1–7]). The implication of those words
seems to be that full-blown virtue requires explicit changes in conduct. Perhaps
we should, then, understand the difference between the ‘emotional component of
virtue’ and ‘full-blown virtue’ such that whereas the former is, without exception,
‘practical’ by involving (through conceptual necessity) propensities towards goal-
directed activity, those can be overridden by various considerations and incapacities.
In contrast, a full-blown virtue necessarily involves a behavioural element. This move
seems to be misguided, however. There are various cases where virtues conflict, and
a fundamental role of phronesis is to adjudicate and orchestrate those conflicts. So
even if someone decides, in the wake of a phronetic reflection, to divulge a painful
truth to a friend, despite a strong sense of compassion for the shock that it will
cause, this does not mean that the virtue of compassion has not been powerfully
drawn upon. It may be there, in full force, although it happens to be overridden in
this particular case and not lead to compassion-looking behaviour. The relative
roles of reason (logos), emotion, and action in Aristotelian virtue, mentioned in
Rorty’s characterization above, thus continue to defy any simple analysis. We clearly
need to delve deeper into what the notion of a ‘virtuous emotion’ implies. Absent
clarity on that point, talk of the role of emotions in moral character obfuscates rather
than enlightens.
1.4 ‘Virtuous Emotions’: What Does It Mean?

Rather than starting with Aristotle, we may be best served by looking first at the
various ways in which emotions are evaluated in contemporary cognitive theories.
Current theorists use different psychological and normative standards—partly
overlapping and partly hierarchical—to evaluate emotions. Let us review those briefly
in an ascending order of complexity and demandingness.
The first standard is sincerity. An emotion can be either sincere or insincere; it is
sincere if we admit to ourselves that we are, in fact, experiencing it. Trilling (1972)
adds another condition to emotional sincerity: that we also admit to others that we are
experiencing the emotion. I consider that condition too demanding. I may be fully
cognizant of the fact that I am righteously indignant, but have good reason for wanting
to hide it from others. I take it that it is sufficient for me to be cognizant of the emotion
for it to count as sincere. In general, the question of whether an emotion should be
expressed openly or acted upon is extrinsic to the evaluation of the emotion as such.
Suppose my righteous indignation is sincere. It does not mean that it is rational. An
emotion fails to be rational if the reasons for experiencing it involve disregard for facts,
negligent and hasty judgements, or purposeful self-deceptions. Perhaps my colleague
really deserved her promotion, but I purposefully misconstrue the evidence in her
disfavour because I was vying for the same position and lost out. Some theorists may
want to say that an emotion is rational if a person’s reasons for experiencing it are based
on internally consistent reasoning. That would be a purely internalist standard of
rationality, perhaps more felicitously described as reasonableness. My emotion could
be reasonable but still irrational in an externalist sense, however; my colleague received
her promotion, let us assume, for good reasons—for reasons that I would have acknow-
ledged had I been aware of them—but for reasons that were not accessible to me at
the time. An emotion is often not counted as fully rational unless it satisfies both
an internalist and externalist standard of rationality. A less demanding condition
would be that an emotion counts as fully rational if I have done the best I possibly
can to ground it in sound facts and good reason. Another—if related—way in which an
emotion can arguably fail to meet an evaluative standard is if it is ‘representationally
unfitting’ (D’Arms & Jacobson, 2000b), meaning that it does not capture the correct
formal object of the emotion: for example, by shame directed at something that is
not shameful.
Whatever our ultimate criteria for irrationality or unfittingness are, the very idea
that emotions can satisfy standards of rationality signals a break with a long trad-
ition of seeing emotions as extra-rational enchantments—and Aristotle must count
as the historic progenitor of this break (see Fortenbaugh, 2002, p. 18). At the same
time, however, Aristotle reminded us of how tempting it is to evaluate emotions
simply with regard to the pleasure they yield, rather than to how rational they are,
as ‘pleasure grows up with all of us from infancy’ and is ‘dyed into our lives’ (1985,
p. 38 [1105a1–3]).
Moral justifiability is the most demanding evaluative criterion of emotions. An

emotion could be sincere, rationally arrived at and fitting but still fail to pass muster
morally. Conversely, we must avoid the ‘moralistic fallacy’ (D’Arms & Jacobson, 2000b)
of assuming that because an emotion is morally unjustifiable, it must be unfitting.
The fittingness of an emotion is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of its moral
justifiability. Indeed, most current emotion theorists will agree with that assumption,
apart from small pockets of hard rationalists (who equate the rational with the moral)
and hard sentimentalists (who deem emotions incorrigible and self-justifying). The
question remains where exactly to draw the line between fittingness and moral appro-
priateness. On my Aristotelian view, soft sentimentalists such as D’Arms and Jacobson
(2000a) over-determine the fittingness condition, with their demanding concept of
‘representational fittingness’, in order to make their sentimentalism more palatable
for believers in emotion regulation and education. For example, they count cases of
emotional over-reactions or under-reactions as representationally unfitting: cases
that I would generally count as fitting—as hitting the right formal object—but morally
amiss. So, for D’Arms and Jacobson, a person who grieves excessively or deficiently
would be guilty of representational unfittingness. From my Aristotelian perspective,
however, extreme (e.g. too intense) emotional experiences of this kind would be
deemed to be moral errors (namely, faults of character) rather than mistakes of
representational fittingness. The reason why D’Arms and Jacobson over-determine
the fittingness condition, according to my Aristotelian view, may be that, as soft
sentimentalists (see a detailed discussion in Chapter 2), they want both to have
their cake (the assumption that emotions are the sole donors of moral value) and eat
it (explain why many emotional occurrences are nonetheless non-self-justifying
and corrigible).
But when is an emotion, then, morally justifiable in the Aristotelian model? Here
are the basics. Every person’s soul has a rational part (reason) and a non-rational
part. The non-rational part is again divided into two subparts. One is ‘plant-like’ and
‘shared [with other living things]’; it is naturally unresponsive to reason. The other
part, comprising our appetites and goals/desires (and emotions in so far as they
involve goals as well as cognitions), is potentially responsive to reason and can, to
varying degrees, ‘share in reason’ (1985, pp. 30–2 [1102a15–1103a3])—which is dif-
ferent from merely being controlled or policed by reason. Notably, the distinction
between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul does not correspond to a
distinction between cognitions and sensations. If the non-rational part comprised
only sensations, it would not be able to learn to share in reason; moreover, as we have
already seen, Aristotle specifically ascribes cognitions to emotions (which belong to
the non-rational part). The degree to which this non-rational part does or does not
share in reason (which involves reason about ends, including moral ends, not only
means to ends, as explained in Chapter 2), then, determines the extent to which
instantiations of the non-rational part—for instance, emotions—can be counted as
morally justifiable.
‘Sharing in reason’ can, however, assume different forms according to the

evelopmental level of the moral learner (recall Section 1.3). We initially share in reason
d
by obeying the advice of our moral educators and role models. We then progress by
taking joint rational decisions along with them, and finally ‘sharing in reason’ means
sharing in the (partly universalist, partly particularist) reason of our own fully developed
phronesis. These conditions mean that the emotions of animals cannot be judged as
morally justifiable except in a metaphorical sense (Aristotle, 1985, p. 189 [1149b31–32]).
This still leaves the possibility that animals can experience emotions—involving
cognitions that can be deemed rational or irrational although the non-rational part of
their ‘souls’ cannot be perfected in a way that establishes moral justifiability. However,
Aristotle seems to have taken the even stronger view that animals are not capable of
the sort of evaluative thoughts that are needed for emotions, as distinct from mere
feelings, to emerge (Fortenbaugh, 2002, pp. 67–70).
After all this conceptual deck-clearing, we are now in a better position to accommodate
the specific Aristotelian insights about the relationship between emotion and virtue.
A distinctive feature of Aristotle’s virtue theory is the assumption that emotional
reactions constitute essential ingredients in virtues. Emotional dispositions can, no
less than action dispositions, have an ‘intermediate and best condition [. . .] proper to
virtue’—a condition in which the relevant emotions are felt ‘at the right times, about
the right things, towards the right people, for the right end and in the right way’ (1985,
p. 44 [1106b17–35]). If a relevant emotion is ‘too intense or slack’ for its present object,
we are badly off in relation to it, but if it is intermediate, we are ‘well off ’ (1985, p. 41
[1105b26–28]). And persons can be fully virtuous only if they are regularly disposed to
experience emotions in this medial way. This theory ties in with Aristotle’s teleological
assumption of psycho-social homeostasis, according to which the parts of the human
soul are arranged such that it may adjust successfully to the various social situations in
which individuals will find themselves, inter alia by adopting medial emotional states
of character (see further in Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 4). In the case of emotion, the
mediality (in the sense of neither being too intense nor too slack, too wide or too
narrow, etc.) refers to (a) occasions, (b) objects, (c) people, (d) motive (i.e. goal), and
(e) way (i.e. degree). Since one also needs to feel the relevant pain and pleasure correctly,
and for each parameter of mediality one’s reaction can fail by being excessive, very
excessive, deficient, or very deficient, there are at least forty failure modes for each
emotion (Curzer, 2016). Getting an emotion morally right, by experiencing it medially
(i.e. morally optimally), is thus a tall order. Previous considerations about mediality
being relative to individual constitution and developmental level also apply here. There
is a further complication, which I exploit in Chapter 4 when defending pity: that
an emotion may need to be experienced non-optimally (non-medially) from time
to time, for developmental reasons, in order to sustain the capacity to experience it
optimally in the long run.
Now, because Aristotle defines the moral optimality of emotions in terms of mediality,
just as he does with virtues, the question arises once again if optimal emotions are
simply virtues or a certain category of virtues. Aristotle enters an important caveat

here, however. Specific episodic emotions do not constitute virtues any more than
individual actions do. Rather, virtues are settled character states: hexeis. We are praised
or blamed for our virtues and vices, but we ‘do not blame the person who is simply
angry’ (1985, p. 41 [1105b20–1106a7]). The underlying idea is that we cannot control
the experience of occurrent emotions once the relevant emotional disposition to
experience them is in place—with emotional habits becoming cobwebs and then
cables as the years go by. So talk of the moral justifiability of emotion is about emotions
qua emotional traits that we possess, not about the experience of episodic emotions.
Aristotle is making a clear nod to prevailing common-sense views about the passivity
of episodic emotions: those are not within our direct control here and now. The trouble
is that, generally, what is outside our control is also outside the realm of moral respon-
sibility and, hence, of evaluations of moral justifiability. Aristotle famously solves this
problem by explaining how we are originally responsible—jointly with our educators—
for acquiring our traits, and, how we are, therefore, indirectly accountable for individual
acts or emotions stemming from those traits.
Notably, contemporary emotion-regulation theory indicates that the Aristotelian
view on responsibility for emotions as confined to traits is overly simplistic (see e.g.
various chapters in Gross’s edited volume, 2009). Even if A has cultivated, say, a certain
trait of jealousy, or allowed it to take root in her psyche, this does not mean that A is
prey to an ungovernable passion from then on. A can be expected, psychologically and
morally, to control her episodic jealousy in certain contexts. Conversely, even if A has a
weakly developed jealousy trait, this does not mean A may not experience intense
pangs of jealousy in certain extreme circumstances—for even a worm will turn. So
although ascriptions of responsibility and moral justifiability are mainly directed
towards trait-forms of emotions like jealousy, such ascriptions are not necessarily out
of place in the case of episodic experiences.
I shall not pursue those complexities further here as my aim, at the present juncture,
is to make sense of Aristotle’s notion of the potential virtuousness of emotions; and to
do so, we must focus on their dispositional forms. Readers need to bear that focus
in mind when they read through subsequent chapters. Notably, ordinary language
does not help with this endeavour as it evidently provides us with names for the
dispositional forms of just two of the emotions under scrutiny in this book: ‘grateful’
and ‘jealous’ (with the latter being the same adjective as for the episodic form of jealousy).
There are no discrete terms like ‘shameful’, ‘pitiful’, ‘awe-ful’, or ‘grief-ful’ to denote
the trait-forms of the other emotions; for although some of the suggested words do
exist, they have different meanings. It is even moot whether the designations ‘grateful
person’ and ‘jealous person’ typically refer to the trait-forms of the specific emotions
gratitude and jealousy. As we see in the relevant chapters, it is more likely that the
terms, as used in ordinary discourse, designate broader personality profiles which
include other dispositional emotions (such as proneness to general appreciation in the
case of ‘grateful’, or suspiciousness in the case of ‘jealous’) under the same umbrellas.
In some cases it may seem odd to think of emotions, such as awe and grief, as having
dispositional forms at all. Yet, if we think more closely, it is normal to see people as
differing in their proneness to experiences of awe and grief (including in their dis-
positions to having the relevant cognitions), both in terms of frequency and intensity,
and that is the sense in which we need to consider the trait-forms of those emotions in
what follows.
Although Aristotle only rejects explicitly the idea of episodic emotions as virtues,
he offers general considerations that seem to undermine the plausibility of seeing
dispositional emotions as full-blown virtues as well (1985, p. 41 [1105b29–1106a6]). In
the Rhetoric, he consistently refers to morally optimal emotions, such as compassion
and righteous indignation, as traits that are ‘characteristic of good people’ (see e.g.
2007, p. 142 [1386b8–12] on compassion and righteous indignation), rather than as
‘virtues’, and to the inability to experience such emotions as blameworthy deficiencies,
rather than as ‘vices’. Therefore, the view of the historical Aristotle seems to be that
morally optimal emotions qua traits are components of virtues: of complex traits that
have a wider scope than just dispositions to be optimally (medially) affected.
I have at previous junctures in this Introduction offered examples that seem to
blur the emotion–virtue boundary. For instance, as I have indicated, in some cases of
compassion, involving incapacity to act on the emotion, it is difficult to see what else is
needed than the mediality of the emotional experience to turn the relevant trait into a
fully fledged virtue. Moreover, as I am aiming for reconstructed Aristotelianism rather
than Aristotelian exegesis, the option would be open to me to go beyond Aristotle here
and claim that some virtues are nothing but emotions in a mean. However, there is no
reason to scratch where it does not itch. In most, if perhaps not all, cases it is helpful to
follow the historical Aristotle and to understand virtuous emotions as components
of general virtues rather than free-standing virtues themselves. I therefore cautiously
chose the title Virtuous Emotions for this book, although I could perhaps have made a
bigger splash—or emitted a louder rallying cry—by calling it Emotion Virtues: a desig-
nation I have sometimes been tempted to use in the past.
Aristotle often seems to suggest that there is a general emotional trait that corresponds
to each moral virtue, and as Kosman (1980) rightly notes, he rarely mentions virtues in
Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics with respect to actions alone. However, Aristotle
makes an exception in the case of the civic virtues of friendliness, truthfulness, and wit
(1985, pp. 107–14 [1126b11–1128b9]). Best understood collectively as a broad-brush
disposition towards agreeableness (Kristjánsson, 2007, chap. 10) in casual human
encounters—when ‘meeting people, living together and associating in conversations
and actions’ (Aristotle, 1985, p. 107 [1126b11–12])—those virtues do not seem to
possess any unique emotional components, or perhaps no emotional corollaries at all.
The idea seems to be that these virtues have to do with manners rather than morals—
and for the former, there is no special requirement that ‘our heart be in it’, as long as we
behave in an orderly, civil manner. Yet even in the case of these social-glue virtues, it
would be difficult to understand what creates and sustains them without assuming
some more general emotional disposition in favour of smoothly functioning human

associations. Although no such disposition is mentioned by Aristotle in the relevant
passages, it is helpful to bear in mind that the Nicomachean Ethics is written for a
particular readership of people ‘brought up in good habits’ (1985, p. 6 [1095b4–5]), and
those people would presumably be expected to have internalized the relevant general
pro-social emotional disposition at an early age.
Roberts (1989) grapples with the same issue as I have been doing in this Introduction,
of setting out a coherent Aristotelean position on the relationship between emotions
and virtues, or, more precisely, of making sense of when emotional traits can be
considered virtuous. He ends up making a distinction between five kinds of emotion-
relevant virtues, which he admits is not Aristotle’s own, but may still be ‘of some use
in our analysis’ (1989, p. 56). Some virtues are simply emotional traits in a mean, like
compassion; such ‘emotion-virtues’ only require the emotional, perceptual, and conative
elements of virtue without any necessary behaviour or expressive style. Other virtues,
‘virtues of will power’, regulate emotions, such as courage which regulates fear. Yet other
virtues, most notably (poetic) justice, dispose one to a wide range of emotions, having
to do with long-term concerns; Roberts calls those ‘passional virtues’. The fourth group
is ‘virtues of proper affect’, such as good temper which is about feeling anger optimally.
Finally, there are ‘detachment virtues’: dispositions towards a lack of specific emotional
traits; humility, for instance, is a disposition not to feel vanity. I am not sure Roberts’s
taxonomy is going to help the confused Aristotle reader; for instance, there is a pretty
obvious sense in which all Aristotelian virtuous emotions can be considered ‘virtues
of proper affect’. Roberts’s valiant attempt to impose structure on a rather incoherent
edifice is, however, one more reminder of the need to be unhesitant in offering correctives
to Aristotle’s texts, both in cases where a salient issue eludes satisfactory discussion and
where his own discussion is unduly messy.
Let me now pass on to firmer ground. Regardless of the complex nuances of the
relationship between virtues and emotions, it is clear that Aristotle sees emotional
traits as essentially implicated in moral character (recall Section 1.3)—even that deep
core of moral character nowadays referred to as ‘moral selfhood’ (Kristjánsson, 2010).
Furthermore, Aristotle would be baffled by contemporary debates in moral psychology
and moral education about whether ‘moral selfhood’ refers to moral identity (self-concept)
or moral emotions (a dichotomy critiqued in Kristjánsson, 2010, chap. 4). For Aristotle,
there would be no either–or there; emotions—especially the self-conscious ones of
pride and shame—are at once about who we think we are (i.e. part of our ‘identity’) and
an essential part of who we really are deep down, with respect to our moral character, as
emotional beings. In other words, they are both part of our self-mirror (self-concept)
and what it mirrors, in a Janus-faced way.
It is worth noting here, parenthetically, that Aristotle’s discussion of the Janus-faced
nature of moral character nicely anticipates and problematizes the modern distinction
between self-realism (which focuses on who we are ‘deep down’) and anti-self-realism
(which focuses on our beliefs about who we are, qua our moral identity). The paragons
of moral virtue, the megalopsychoi, who not only possess excellence of character but
also an abundance of resources to make good use of it, are thus not only ‘worthy of
great things’, but must also ‘think’ themselves worthy of them (Aristotle, 1985, p. 97
[1123b2–3]). Contemporary lay views seem to coincide with Aristotle’s. Character
is viewed by the general public as fundamental to identity, with loss of moral con-
science seen as greater loss to identity even than loss of autobiographical memory—
but it is still regarded as essentially controllable and changeable. Laypeople also
evaluate moral character in terms of a person’s signature weaknesses rather than,
as in contemporary positive psychology (critiqued in Kristjánsson, 2013), in terms
of her signature strengths (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2015). With the chain of charac-
ter thus considered to be as strong as its weakest—rather than its strongest—link,
this means that a single morally aberrant emotional trait (such as being disposed to
feelings of invidious envy rather than emulation when making upward social compari-
sons) in an otherwise morally decent person, could be seen as fatal to that person’s
character profile.
Because moral character is the core ingredient in the good life of eudaimonia, proper
emotional traits must also be understood as constituents of the good life rather than
just as being instrumentally conducive to it. Aristotle even apparently wants to maintain
that no general emotional trait is expendable from the good life (Kristjánsson, 2007,
chap. 4). What he seems to be saying there is that there are no general emotional traits,
corresponding to morally relevant spheres of human life, that do not admit of a medial
state; yet it remains true that there are specific emotional traits (say, begrudging spite:
epēreasmos) that do not admit of a mean, because they are the excesses or deficiencies
of general traits, and, of course, specific episodic emotions that do not admit of a mean,
because they are not traits (cf. Aristotle, 1985, p. 44 [1107a9–26]).
The above considerations about the role of emotions in eudaimonia are important in
distinguishing Aristotle’s account of virtuous emotions from standard manoeuvres
in contemporary psychology to justify the value of emotions instrumentally. For
Aristotle, an emotion could be instrumentally beneficial, yet non-virtuous. For example,
Schadenfreude could, for all we know, serve some important socio-political purposes;
yet it is not virtuous. Or an emotion could fail to be instrumentally beneficial (at least
in particular circumstances) and yet be virtuous through its intrinsically admirable
qualities befitting a phronimos (a fully virtuous person, guided by phronesis). For
example, the compassion of a phronimos stranded alone on a desert island would not
cease to be virtuous even though it did not benefit anyone. Contemporary moral
instrumentalists typically conceive of morality, in Weberian terms, as a set of social
norms conducive to peaceful co-ordination (‘pro-sociality’) in a world of scarce
resources. These theorists often invoke the term ‘moral emotions’ for emotions
instrumental to producing pro-social ends. However, the term ‘moral emotion’ is a
highly polysemous one, with at least five different understandings (Cova, Deonna, &
Sander, 2015). Moreover, as Aristotelians consider all emotions potentially flourishing-
constitutive, they will tend to see the term ‘moral’ in ‘moral emotion’ as superfluous.
All emotions are, on an Aristotelian understanding, intrinsically relevant to ethics

(cf. de Sousa, 2001, p. 110); all are moral in the sense of entailing value judgements
(be they morally proper or improper) and having to do with people’s flourishing or
floundering in life.
The commonest Aristotelian justification of virtuous emotions relies on how those
actualize the moral value of desert as an intrinsic good, a good cherished by excellent
specimens of the human kind. In his Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle thus claims that
there is a broad emotional inclination, called nemesis or poetic justice, which is
characterized by ‘pain felt at either good or bad fortune if undeserved, or to joy felt at
them if deserved’ (1984, p. 1954 [1233b19–25]). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes
some of the specific emotions that fall under the umbrella of this inclination and
that all ‘come from the same moral character’ (2007, p. 142 [1386b33–35]). Those are
the four fortune-of-others emotions of compassion (pain at another’s undeserved
bad fortune), indignation (pain at another’s undeserved good fortune), satisfied
indignation (pleasure at another’s deserved bad fortune), and gratulation (pleasure at
another’s deserved good fortune), described along with their respective extremes
(see Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 3).
Notably, the terms ‘satisfied indignation’ and ‘gratulation’ are mine. Aristotle says
that those emotions have no names in his language; nor do they in contemporary
English. Schadenfreude or ‘malicious glee’ is sometimes equated with ‘satisfied indig-
nation’ but more helpfully designates its Aristotelian excess, epichairekakia: pleasure at
another’s undeserved bad fortune. Generally speaking, persons of poetic justice desire
that other people get what they deserve, and the fundamental basis of desert is moral
virtue (Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 2). As Curzer correctly notes (2012, p. 245), Aristotle’s
treatment of poetic justice fills the gaps left by his incomplete accounts of so-called
‘general’ and ‘particular’ justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. One of the main aims of
moral education, then, becomes that of setting up moral schemas in the young that
activate this tendency at the right times and in the right proportions. Such schemas
will not only be instrumentally valuable, but intrinsically so. It is part of a person’s
eudaimonia to feel these sorts of feelings.
Not all virtuous emotions can be justified along this route, however. For example,
one can be justifiably angry at another person for her breach of an explicit promise,
irrespective of whether one deserves to be the beneficiary of such a promise in the first
place. The virtuousness of an emotion can thus be grounded in moral values that are
institutional (or ‘artificial’ in a Humean sense) as well as pre-institutional. Most con-
temporary elaborations of Aristotle’s notion of virtuous emotions utilize the examples
of either anger or poetic justice. As explained in Section 1.1, however, I decided to
focus in this book on a different set of emotional traits, both because I have dealt with
poetic justice and anger before (Kristjánsson, 2006, chap. 3; 2007, chap. 5) and because
it is useful to explore whether or not the Aristotelian model bears scrutiny if applied
to new areas. How versatile will it be in allaying worries that may be provoked in
Aristotelian non-comfort zones?
1.5 Emotion Education: The Preliminaries

Famously, Aristotle claimed that the purpose of moral inquiry ‘is not to know what
virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit to us’
(1985, p. 35 [1103b27–29]). In Aristotelianism, virtue education (or ‘character education’,
as it is usually called nowadays) is not an extraneous addition to an understanding of
morality or the study of moral philosophy—it is, rather, what such understanding and
study are all about. So if possessing virtues is what matters most for eudaimonia, then
studying the virtues must be an integral part of any good education. For Aristotle that
clearly means not only studying them dispassionately, but actually studying them in
the sense of acquiring them, just like a budding violinist studies violin playing by training
to play the instrument well.
I have already mentioned that educating the virtues is, in its early stages at least, more
than anything a process of sensitization to proper emotions; Achtenberg even claims
that Aristotle does not distinguish between ‘emotional’ and ‘ethical’ development
(2002, p. 7). For example, the progress to a level of habituated virtue is via learning to
attach emotional value to virtuous actions and loving them for their own sake. Curzer
(2016) explains how this progress is not a unified step from a clearly defined (Kohlberg-
style) stage to another, but rather a process of non-sequential incremental acquisition
of many different virtue components. Ideally, then, from an Aristotelian perspective,
any exploration of the moral justification of an emotional trait should culminate in
educational advice on how it can be cultivated. I take on that task briefly at the end
of each chapter about individual emotions in what follows (Chapters 3–8) by offering
educational observations related to the particular nature of each emotion. Subsequently,
in Chapter 9, I tackle the issue of emotional education in more general terms by
juxtaposing Aristotelianism with some alternative accounts.
It would be impossible for even the most devout Aristotelian to argue that Aristotle
has made the task of extracting a theory of emotion education from his writings easy.
First, regarding the crucial developmental juncture towards habituated virtue, Aristotle
gives little procedural advice apart from general tips about using music to train the
emotions (see e.g. Fortenbaugh, 2002, p. 48). Second, while emotions clearly continue to
occupy a leading role when habituated virtue gradually morphs into phronetic (reflective,
critical, autonomously chosen) virtue in adolescence or early adulthood—because of
their status as essential ingredients in fully developed virtue—we are not given any clues
as to whether emotions play a direct role in that ‘difficult transition’ (Irwin, 1975, p. 576).
Commentators disagree as to whether phronesis itself includes a motivational element,
or whether it feeds on motivations provided by the moral virtues (cf. Zagzebski, 1996,
versus Curzer, 2012). It is at least clear that even if phronesis is upheld by some motivation
of its own in its ‘shaping and developing of emotion’ (Achtenberg, 2002, p. 7)—say, a
desire to be critical and reflective—it does not possess any discrete emotional component
of its own. In other words, there is no unique ‘phronesis-emotion’; after all, phronesis is
an intellectual and not a moral virtue.
To remind readers once again that the focus of the present work is reconstructive
rather than exegetical, it behoves me to move on from ruing the lacunae in Aristotle’s
writing to try to say something constructive about how his general ideas about the
education of emotions can be developed further in light of contemporary findings
(see Chapter 9). There is obviously no dearth of interest in Aristotelian character
education in today’s climate, and most of the writers driving that bandwagon propose
to move beyond Aristotle’s parsimonious remarks about the cultivation of emotion,
as part of character education, to something more subtle and sophisticated (see e.g.
Sherman, 2000; Carr, 2005). It does help with those efforts that Aristotelians are no
longer the lone criers in the desert. Indeed, it has become almost a truism to say
that the tide has turned in education circles in recent years from seeing emotions as
interlopers in the realm of reason, and intruders in classrooms, towards acknowledging
their role in the well-being of students—be that ‘well-being’ understood in psychological
(subjective well-being, psychological health), moral (flourishing, character cultiva-
tion), or purely educational (effective learning, grade attainment) terms (Shuman &
Scherer, 2014).
How quickly this shift has occurred can best be seen from an overview article,
written as late as 1988, in which the author saw no sign of the ‘myth’ of emotions as
educational trespassers letting go, and deemed the emotional aspect of education
‘largely ignored’ (Best, 1988, pp. 239, 245). Rather than conceptualizing this as a single
‘affective shift’, it may be helpful to think of multiple shifts having occurred at about the
same time. For example, in the field of moral education, the almost priestly status of
Kohlberg’s (1981) developmental paradigm—foregrounding emotionally disengaged,
rational capacities—crumbled, as a serious shortfall was found between reasoning
faculties and actual moral behaviour (Blasi, 1980). Instead, emotion came to be seen as
implicated in moral functioning at all levels, even constituting the core of moral char-
acter or selfhood (Kristjánsson, 2010). Similar seismic shifts have taken place in the
psychology of well-being (Fredrickson, 2009) and of learning (Schutz & Pekrun, 2007).
Yet some theorists worry that, through the recent affective turn in moral education, the
pendulum has already swung too far away from reason (Sauer, 2012a; Railton, 2014;
Kristjánsson, 2016b): namely, away from Aristotle’s notion of emotions as ideally
reason-infused. I postpone further discussion of these issues until Chapter 9.
1.6 A Roadmap of Subsequent Chapters

It is common practice to give readers, in an introductory chapter, a roadmap of what is
to follow. Readers who do not care for such a map can simply skip this section and head
straight to Chapter 2.
Chapter 2, entitled ‘Emotions and Moral Value’, picks up the thread from Section 1.4
and runs with it towards some deep questions about the relationship between emotion
and moral value. For an emotion to be virtuous, it must be getting moral value right,
but what exactly does ‘getting moral value right’ mean in that context? Do virtuous
emotions apprehend antecedently existing values, or are values mere projections of
emotions? The debate about the moral epistemology of emotions is waged between
moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Rationalists believe that moral facts exist
independently of our emotions, and that those facts can be tracked by human reason.
Sentimentalists believe either that no moral facts exist at all or, alternatively, that moral
facts are created by our emotions and exist in our minds. It is helpful to distinguish
between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of both moral rationalism and sentimentalism. I argue
in this chapter that Aristotelianism is best understood as a form of ‘soft rationalism’—
and I offer it as an antidote to currently fashionable forms of ‘hard sentimentalism’.
I explain the relevance of this epistemological position for the argument in the following
chapters and to the educational argument in Chapter 9.
Chapter 3 begins the exploration of specific virtues, starting with gratitude. The aim
of this chapter is to offer a reconstruction of gratitude as an Aristotelian virtuous
emotion, along the argumentative lines suggested in this Introduction. I begin with an
overview of recent discourses on gratitude in philosophy and psychology. I then proceed
to spell out a formal characterization of gratitude as an Aristotelian virtuous emotion.
The fourth section pauses to explore how such a characterization can be squared with
Aristotle’s apparently unambiguous remarks about gratitude as a non-component of
the virtuous make-up of the megalopsychoi (the paragons of moral virtue). Finally,
I conclude by demonstrating the virtuousness of gratitude—what makes it intrinsically
valuable as part of eudaimonia—by elucidating its association with the overarching
emotional virtue of nemesis (poetic justice).
In Chapter 4, I turn the attention to pity. The aim of this chapter is to offer a mitigated
moral justification of this much-maligned emotional trait, in the Aristotelian sense
of ‘pain at deserved bad fortune’. I lay out Aristotle’s taxonomic map of pity and its
surrounding conceptual terrain and argue that this map is not anachronistic with
respect to contemporary conceptions. I then offer a revisionary ‘Aristotelian’ moral
justification of pity, not as a full virtue-component intrinsically related to eudaimonia
but as a positive moral quality that has instrumental value in developing and sustaining
a certain intrinsically valuable state of character—namely compassion (eleos). The
justification offered is mitigated in the sense that it does not elevate pity fully to a virtuous
disposition, constitutive of eudaimonia; yet it does offer a crucial counterweight to
Aristotle’s own denunciation of pity.
Chapter 5 addresses the emotion of shame. Rather than focusing exclusively on
Aristotle’s own account and its possible shortcomings, this chapter offers a sustained
philosophical meditation on contrasting interpretations of the emotion of shame
within four academic discourses: social psychology, psychological anthropology,
educational psychology, and Aristotelian scholarship. It turns out that within each
of these discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasizes shame’s
expendability or moral ugliness, but also a heterodox interpretation which seeks to
retrieve and defend shame. As the heterodox interpretation seems to offer a more
realistic picture of shame’s role in moral development, the provenance of the mainstream
interpretation merits scrutiny. I argue that social scientific studies of the concept of
shame, based on its supposed phenomenology, incorporate biases targeting excessive,
rather than medial, forms of the emotion. I suggest ways forward for more balanced
analyses of the nature, moral justification, and educative role of shame, by reconstructing
Aristotle’s own account of shame.
Chapter 6 is about jealousy. The chapter proceeds via a critical review of recent
writings about jealousy in philosophy and psychology. Although Aristotle himself did
not explore this emotion, it is easily amenable to an Aristotle-style analysis. It turns
out, however, that although Aristotelian conceptual and moral arguments about the
necessary conceptual features of jealousy qua specific emotion, and the intrinsic
value or disvalue of a stable trait of jealousy for eudaimonia, do carry philosophical
mileage, they may fail to cut ice with psychologists who tend to focus on jealousy as a
broad dimension of temperament. My review reveals a disconcerting lack of trans-
disciplinary work on jealousy: the sort of work that Aristotle would (arguably) have
favoured. I explain how the best way to ameliorate this lacuna is, precisely, through
an Aristotelian analysis, where jealousy is (perhaps counter-intuitively) accorded a
place as a potentially virtuous emotion.
Chapter 7 tackles grief. The chapter has three interrelated aims. The first is to analyse
the concept of grief; the second is to argue for the putative rationality of grief (in
particular against a well-known contention to the contrary); and the third is to offer a
moral justification of grief along broadly Aristotelian lines as an intrinsically virtuous
trait of character. With regard to this third and ultimate aim, I argue not only that grief
plays an unappreciated positive role in our moral experiences but flesh out a case
for what exactly that positive moral role is. More precisely, I argue that grief is best
justified as an Aristotelian desert-based emotional trait, incorporating two distinct
desert-motivated desires, one specifically directed at the memory of the dead person
as deserving of homage, the other more cosmically focusing on the general undeserv-
ingness of good people passing away. The argument goes against the grain of most
previous instrumental justifications of grief and palpably violates a well-known
contention from the literature that grief involves no reference to desert.
Chapter 8 initiates a much-needed analysis of awe. While interest in the emotion of
awe has surged in psychology, philosophers have remained eerily silent. This chapter
aims to rectify this imbalance and begin to make up for the unwarranted philosophical
neglect. In order to do so, awe is given the standard Aristotelian treatment to uncover
its conceptual contours and moral relevance—although Aristotle did not himself
explicitly identify awe. The chapter critiques and proposes improvements to existing
psychological conceptual analyses of awe; probes the question why Aristotle ignored
it; addresses an often-presumed link between awe and humility, bearing on its moral
status; and finally explores some educational contours of awe.
Chapter 9 rehearses Aristotle’s scattered and somewhat unsystematic remarks about
emotion education. Arguably, the best way to assess the relevance and credibility of
Aristotle’s educational account is to compare and contrast it with other current accounts
of emotion education. This chapter, therefore, subjects to critical scrutiny six different
discourses on emotion education in addition to Aristotle’s: care ethics; social and
emotional learning; positive psychology; emotion-regulation discourse; academic-
emotions discourse; and social intuitionism. Four differential criteria are used to analyse
the content of the discourses: valence of emotions to be educated; value epistemology;
general aims of emotion education; and self-related goals. Possible criticisms of all the
discourses are presented—not excluding Aristotle’s own. Subsequently, seven strategies
of emotion education (behavioural strategies; ethos modification and emotion contagion;
cognitive reframing; service learning/habituation; direct teaching; role modelling; and
the arts) are introduced to explore how the seven discourses avail themselves of each
strategy. It is argued that there is considerably more convergence in the educational
strategies than there is in the theoretical underpinnings and assumptions of the seven
discourses. Profound divergence of opinion is, therefore, bound to remain at the psy-
chological and philosophical levels. However, the Aristotelian account carries unique
benefits of its own, which are highlighted here.
Finally, Chapter 10 draws together the main strands of argument from previous
chapters and offers some concluding remarks and afterthoughts, both substantive
and methodological. It also provides a table (Table 10.1) which summarizes the main
components of each specific virtue, identified in preceding chapters, as seen from an
Aristotelian perspective.
2
Emotions and Moral Value
2.1 Emotions and Value Epistemology

If emotions can be virtuous, it must be because they are able to tap into moral value.
Indeed, for virtue ethicists, such as Aristotle, the relationship between virtues and
values is quite intimate. Virtues do not only promote moral values, as it were, from the
outside; they incarnate them in an intrinsic way. But that way of putting things does
not really answer the epistemological question of how emotions relate to value. Are
they essentially ‘value-recorders’ (helping detect objectively existing values) or ‘value-
donors’ (imparting subjective values to their objects)? Four traditional philosophical
theories on this question are discussed later in this section.
Prior to that, however, it is instructive to mention briefly a number of ways in which
emotions can relate productively to values apart from simply ‘tracking’ them like a
thermometer tracks temperature. First, emotions can ‘broadcast’ values: convey and
express them to others (Sherman, 1997, p. 50) Second, emotions can act as quick-fire
proxies for values that it might take reason a while to recall; they can even promote
self-knowledge by directing us to areas of our psyche that we are not immediately
aware of but where important moral knowledge is stored (Goldie, 2004a; Brady, 2013).
Third, emotions can enliven our values and protect them against ‘axiological entropy’:
the gradual diminution over time of our tacit sense of the importance of the values in
which our character traits are grounded (Starkey, 2015).
I will not be pursuing any of those issues in the remainder of the present chapter,
however, but focusing rather on the deep epistemological question of how emotions
relate to value in the sense of ‘recorders’ or ‘donors’. I use as my point of departure some
common assumptions from the current practical discourse on emotion education, and
I evaluate conflicting epistemological theories initially with respect to the extent to
which they harmonize with those assumptions. Some orthodox philosophers may see
this method as getting hold of the wrong end of the stick: surely, epistemology grounds
and justifies practical assumptions rather than vice versa. I do, however, consider this
method to be reasonably faithful to the naturalism animating Aristotle’s own method
of inquiry, according to which moral theory must be answerable to the best available
empirical evidence—and I take it that moral educators who have engaged with the
practice of emotion education are working with a set of practically grounded assump-
tions of which the relevant epistemologies should ideally make sense.
32 Emotions and Moral Value
I repeatedly alluded in Chapter 1 to the growing interest—psychological, educa-

tional, and philosophical—in the salience of emotions for flourishing lives. This inter-
est is not confined to Aristotelians. Social and emotional learning (SEL), on the one
hand, and positive psychology, on the other, are for instance independent approaches
that share this interest, and although both have been influenced by Aristotelian
thought, they depart substantially from anything that could helpfully be labelled
‘Aristotelianism’ (see further in Chapter 9; cf. Kristjánsson, 2007; 2013).The differ-
ences between these approaches notwithstanding—for instance, concerning the role
of positively valenced emotions in the good life and the instrumental–intrinsic value
dichotomy—they appear to share at least five basic assumptions, although these are
rarely stated systematically and explicitly:
(1) Moral Assumption. Proper emotions form part of the good life and are implicated
in moral selfhood.
(2) Developmental Assumption. The development of emotions is essential to the
development of humans as moral persons. Without emotions, the moral enterprise as
we know it would never have gotten off the ground in the first place, as we would not
have learned how to track the morally relevant features of situations.
(3) Corrigibility Assumption. Emotions are essentially corrigible. They can be
judged morally appropriate or inappropriate, and they are open to correction and
coaching. Emotions are not infallible as a normative guide, therefore. What feels right
here and now cannot simply be assumed to be truly right.
(4) Methodological Assumption. Psychological findings and other social scientific
data provide invaluable evidence for gauging the nature and value of emotions.
Issues of emotional adequacy cannot be settled exclusively from the philosophical
armchair.
(5) Educational Assumption. Emotion education is not only valuable for moral
education but can enhance the necessary affective conditions for successful learning
in general.
Conspicuously absent from the recent emotion-education agenda, within approaches
such as SEL and positive psychology, has been any sustained engagement with
contrasting normative moral theories—with their disparate views on the nature and
salience of emotions—dominating the theoretical landscape: Kantianism, utilitarian-
ism, virtue theory, care ethics, contractualism, liberalism, Marxism, poststructuralism,
and so on. Implicit in most educational writings on the subject seems to be the idea
that those assumptions from educational practice are a reasonable modus operandi
for followers of otherwise contrary normative outlooks. In 2007, Bruce Maxwell
and Roland Reichenbach broke the silence on the normative ‘theoretical affinities’
of approaches to emotion education. Their main conclusion—that the normative
theories explored in their paper provide compatible and complementary, rather than
competing, avenues to cultivate the emotions—seems, if anything, to buttress the
emotions and moral value 33
implicit consensus in the emotion-education literature. Yet they acknowledge the

existence of under-explored complexities that might problematize the matter further,
for instance regarding the meta-ethical commitments of approaches to emotion
education (2007, p. 161). I return to some of those concerns in Chapter 9.
My strategy in the present chapter will be somewhat different from that of Maxwell
and Reichenbach. As already explained, I start by accepting, for the sake of argument,
the validity of the five assumptions, and ask what that tells us about the adequacy of the
epistemological views that I go on to consider. What emerges is nothing like a painless
consensus on the immunity of emotion education from theoretical differences; rather,
a number of standard epistemological views seem to fall short if they are judged solely
from the perspective of the five assumptions. I happen to believe in the validity of the
five assumptions and expect any good theory to be able to accommodate them. Towards
the end of the chapter, however, I probe the alternative strategy of asking whether we
should perhaps revive some ‘fallen’ theory and relinquish instead one or more of the
five assumptions. What would that mean for emotion education as we know it?
My plan is this. I consider, in Section 2.2, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ rationalist, as well as ‘hard’
and ‘soft’ sentimentalist, views on the epistemology of the emotions, and show how
only the two ‘soft’ variants could potentially pass all the five hurdles. In Section 2.3—
after introducing various complexities regarding theories of moral motivation—I
argue that the most fully worked out latter-day version of ‘soft’ sentimentalism in fact
fails to account adequately for the Corrigibility Assumption. ‘Soft rationalism’—which
I argue comes closest to the Aristotelian approach—seems then, tentatively, to be the
only remaining option. In Section 2.4, I explore a recent attempt by Jesse Prinz to
resurrect a form of hard sentimentalism; and in Section 2.5, I demonstrate how
radical (and ultimately unacceptable) the educational implications of accepting his
proposal would be.
2.2 Four Competing Epistemologies

Consider the Euthypro-type question posed by Ronald de Sousa: ‘Do emotions
apprehend antecedently existing facts about value, or are facts about value mere pro-
jections of emotions?’ (2001, p. 116). In other words, are emotions value-recorders or
value-donors? The dichotomy in question may seem, at first sight, to be the familiar
ontological one (among philosophers) between moral realism and moral anti-realism
concerning the existence or non-existence of objective moral facts. But that is a
mistake, for not all those who understand emotions as value-donors will embrace
moral anti-realism. They may, for instance—as we will see later—hold the view that
although emotions do not track externally existing (mind-independent) moral facts,
they reveal moral facts about us. The debate about the moral epistemology of emotions
is waged, rather, between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Rationalists
believe that moral facts exist independently of our emotions, and that those facts can
34 Emotions and Moral Value
be tracked by human reason. Sentimentalists believe either that no moral facts exist at
all—with moral value residing in the non-cognitive, non-truth-evaluable expression of
emotional preferences—or, alternatively, that moral facts are created by our emotions
and exist in our minds. In either case, they believe that moral properties are essentially,
and exclusively, related to emotions in the sense of being created by emotions.
It is helpful to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of both moral rationalism
and sentimentalism. According to hard rationalism, not only do all moral facts—not just
some—exist independently of our emotions, but also, emotions hinder rather than help
reason’s quest for those facts and may even detract from their moral value. This does not
mean that hard rationalists need to reject the Developmental Assumption about the role,
albeit temporary, that emotions serve in the development and acquisition of a moral
sense by the young. They may also envisage some place for emotion e ducation in the
necessary trajectory towards maturity (see the Educational Assumption). Obviously,
hard rationalists will also gladly embrace the Corrigibility Assumption. But for them,
emotions do not form part of the morally good life of a mature person, and reason alone,
when fully honed, is capable of grasping moral value. Hard rationalists are thus bound to
forswear both the Moral and the Methodological Assumptions, which means, simply
put, that if one accepts those assumptions, one cannot be a hard rationalist.
Plato is perhaps the prototypical hard rationalist, with his theory of moral value as
residing in eternal, mind-independent ‘forms’, and his insistence that the content of
those forms is to be approached and ultimately grasped through acts of contemplative
reason. Kant is another hard rationalist who even claimed (notoriously) that the moral
value of a reason-discovered moral imperative is compromised rather than enhanced
by the existence of a co-operating emotional inclination to follow it. Nevertheless,
recent years have seen the proliferation of more inclusive interpretations of Kant’s
moral theory, which make it amenable at least to the Developmental and Educational
Assumptions, in addition to the Corrigibility one (see e.g. Maxwell & Reichenbach’s
take on Kantianism, 2007). Yet I reiterate my earlier observation that one cannot really
believe in all five assumptions and, at the same time, subscribe to the moral epistemol-
ogy underlying Kantianism. Since Kohlberg (1981) was heavily influenced by not only
Platonic, but more especially Kantian ethics, it is easy to understand why emotion
education was not well accommodated in the once-powerful Kohlbergian cognitive-
developmental model.
‘Soft’ rationalists—who could also be called ‘sentimentalist rationalists’—distin-
guish themselves from their ‘hard’ counterparts in believing that not only proper
actions but also proper reactions are conducive to moral functioning. A distinctive
feature of a canonical soft rationalist model is the assumption that emotional reactions
may count as virtuous, an assumption that I explored in some detail in Chapter 1 in the
context of Aristotelian theory. That theory counts, I submit, as soft rationalist precisely
because of its claim that emotions are felt in a virtuous way when they have been
infused with reason, not in the sense of being policed by reason (a characteristic of
people who are merely continent or self-controlled but not virtuous), but in the sense
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The show must
go on
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The show must go on
Author: Henry Slesar
Illustrator: Robert Engle
Release date: September 4, 2023 [eBook #71568]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHOW

MUST GO ON ***
The Show Must Go On
By HENRY SLESAR
Illustrated by ENGLE
Actors wanted: experience unnecessary,

salary excellent, life expectancy brief....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity July 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He awoke in darkness, trembling with the thought of escape.
His hands groped around the floor, trying its solidity. Then he crawled
forward with agonizing slowness until his fingertips found a wall. He
raised himself to his feet, his cheek scraping the cool surface of the
enclosure.
An idea came to him, and he slapped at the pocket of his shirt. His
palm struck the outline of something. Matches!
He lit one, and raised it to the level of his wide, frightened eyes. He
was facing a door, a barricade of steel, without sign of latch or
doorknob. But there was a sign, and he read it in the flicker of the
matchflame. It said:
PUSH
He made a noise in his throat, and shoved against the door. It gave in
to his weight, and he was outside the building, standing in a courtyard
washed softly by moonlight.
He circled where he stood, and knew he was a prisoner still. A wire
fence, four times his height, surrounded him.
He came closer to it, and plunged his fingers through the mesh,
rattling it helplessly in his misery. Then he saw the second sign, and
held his breath. It read:
YOU CAN DO IT
Encouraged, he began his climb. The toes of his rubber-soled shoes
fit neatly into the openings, and he gained the summit of the fence
quickly. He swayed uncertainly at the top, and almost dropped the
twenty-five feet to the other side. But he regained his balance,
clambered down the mesh, and dropped panting to the ground.
A voice boomed at him.
"All right, let's go! We haven't got all night!"
He forced himself to his feet, and looked for the source of the sound
with wild movements of his head. He could see nothing but the
menacing shadows of a crowded forest. With a frightened glance
over his shoulder, he plunged into the thick of it, hoping to find a
pathway to the unknown freedom he sought.
He thrashed through the tangled vines for a small eternity, and then
gave up with a sob. He fell against a tree trunk, dampening the bark
with his tears.
This time, the voice was quieter, but its tone was impatient.
"Keep going, keep going! To the right. The right!"
He clung to the tree as if for protection, and then, with a gasp,
plunged once more into the darkness.
He found the clearing, to the right.
It was like an arena, with spectator trees, and with bright eyes
winking at him through the leaves.
There was a log to the left of the cleared green circle, and a frail
young girl in torn clothing sat on it, huddled with either fear or cold.
She was clutching something like an infant to her chest.
He came closer and saw that it was a broadsword. He paused.
"Who are you?" he said.
She looked up at him, her expression savage.
"You're here!" she said.
He took a step forward, and the voice spoke once more.
"Kill her and you go free."
"No!" he shouted.
"Kill him and go free," said the voice.
The girl put her head in her arms. Her shoulders shook.
He walked towards her and she screamed.
"No, please!" he said painfully. "I won't hurt you. Why should I hurt
you?"
She looked at him narrowly. Her hand tightened around the handle of
the sword. "You know why," she accused.
"You must trust me," he said. He put his hand out gently to her. She
backed away from his touch, and leaped off the log. She moved away
cautiously, gripping the weapon with both hands.
"Use the sword," said the voice. "Strike, and go free."
She trembled, and lifted the sword from the ground. The man whirled,
eyes penetrating the forest for an escape route. He backed up, and
fell over a trailing root.
"Now," said the voice. "Strike!"
The girl moved towards him hypnotically.
"I hate you.... I hate you ..." she moaned. She lifted the blade high,
and the man lashed out with his foot as she towered over him. The
broadsword flew from her grasp.
"Now kill her," said the voice. "And you can go free."
"I WON'T!" he shouted again. He scrambled to his feet and made a
dive for the weapon. He took it in his hand and waved it threateningly
at the surrounding woods.
"Come out! Come out!" he screamed. The eyes of the forest blinked
back at him in silence.
He flung the sword from his hand, as if in loathing. Then he crashed
into the forest once more.
The Producer gurgled through his hookahmatic. Frick, his assistant,

recognized this symptom of official disgust, and jumped to his feet.
"Turn it off!" the Producer said, gesturing towards the fidelivision
screen. Frick turned it off. "No, leave it on," the Producer moaned,
peeping at the white oblong through his chubby fingers. "Let's see
what Manford does in this pickle." Frick turned it on.
"He'll probably drop in the dinosaur film," he said.
"If he does, I get a new Director," the Producer answered in a
rumbling voice. "He's used that spot three times in the past month."
The fidelivision flashed. A screaming red title dripped bloodily across
the screen. "Man Against Dinosaur!" it said. The Producer's angry
cry almost drowned out the horrific roar of the live-prop brontosaurus
that appeared.
"Meeting, meeting!" he cried. "We're going to have a staff meeting—
right after the show!"
"A live meeting?" Frick gasped.
"A live one," the Producer said. "Everybody here—right here—in
person! This is an emergency!"
"Gosh, T.D.—" Frick frowned disapprovingly. "That's kind of rough,
isn't it? I mean, a phonescreen session would be a lot simpler. It'll
take hours for Manford and the rest of 'em to get through the Jam."
"I don't care," the Producer said petulantly. "This kind of bumbling
inefficiency has gone far enough. It'll do 'em good to get crushed in
the Traffic for a change—"
Frick paled, obviously disturbed by the severity of the punishment the
Producer was meting out. Only the lowest ranks of employees, the
non-executives, the factory people, were forced to suffer the
indignities of the Jam.
"I'm sure they'll get that fellow," Frick said. "After all, T.D.—how far
can he get? When he gets out of the forest, he'll reach the Studio
Barrier, and he'll be stopped. Simple as that."
"And what if he finds the exit?"
Frick scoffed, "Well, the odds on that—"
"Odds? Don't talk to me about odds, Frick!" The Producer winced as
man and brontosaurus came together on the screen. There was a
closeup of the man's face, and his expression wasn't pretty when he
saw the imitation beast. But of course, he couldn't know it was
harmless—
"The letters!" the Producer groaned. "The complaints! I can see 'em
now—"
The office door opened. A pretty redhead with vacant eyes and a
frozen smile poked her head inside.
"What is it, Miss Stitch?"
"Will you take a call from Mr. Manford? Phonescreen Seven."
"You bet I will," the Producer said menacingly.
Frick lowered the fidelivision sound and flicked on P.S. 7 with a few
efficient motions. The face of Joe Manford, the Director of the night's
Thrill Show, was haggard, despite the jovial smile.
"Hi, T.D.," he said. "Been watching the show?"
"Yes, Joseph," the Producer said gravely.
"Oh." The smile faded, but only for a moment. "Well, nothing to worry
about. Our boys will have that fellow rounded up in a few minutes.
Can't imagine how that got fouled up. But that's the Thrill Show for
you. Full of surprises."
"Is that a fact?" said the Producer. He picked up the butt of his
hookahmatic and sipped smoke calmly. "I presume this fellow was
fully authorized before you put him on?"
"Oh, yes," Manford said hastily. "He passed the routine FCC physical,
and had the usual adrenalin and hypnomecholyl dose. I mean, you
saw the girl didn't you? She was fine, wasn't she?" He beamed.
"Yes," said the Producer. "She certainly was fine." Frick stirred
uncomfortably behind him.
"Anyway," the Director continued, "we're dropping in the dinosaur film
—that's always good for a few shivers—and we've sent a crew into
the Studio to get that man out of there—"
The Producer nodded his head toward his assistant. "Frick," he said,
eyes on Manford. "You tell him."
Frick stepped into range. He cleared his throat and looked at the
floor. "There'll be a meeting after the show," he mumbled.
"Meeting?" Manford said. "What for?" He blinked, and looked at
Frick's bowed head. Then he looked dazed. "You don't mean a—a
live meeting?"
Frick nodded. The Producer puffed contentedly on his hookahmatic.
He blew a smoke ring, and it puffed itself to pieces against the
phonescreen.
The man raised himself from the ground. His limbs felt weak, and he
had to force the breaths through his lungs.
He got to his feet, feeling somewhat stronger. The forest seemed as
impenetrable as ever, but he faced its challenge now with more
confidence.
That girl! he thought. My God—she was really going to kill him! He
shook his head bewilderedly. Such a young, pretty girl! What had he
done to her? What made her want to do it?
He moved through the forest slowly, ducking branches, trailing the
sources of dim lights in the distance. But as he approached, they
proved to be illusory, odd reflections of moonlight among the trees.
She didn't want to kill him, not really. He could sense that. It was
something more. She was compelled to do it—that was it. Someone
had put her up to it. But who? Who hated him enough?
The speculation made his head ache. He blanked out his thoughts
and decided to concentrate on his predicament. There had to be a
way out. The girl had entered the forest at some point. But where?
He heard the sound of voices, and he stopped breathing.
"Manford means business," one of them said.
"He's plenty worried. T.D. was watching tonight—"
"The sponsors kick T.D., T.D. kicks Manford, and Manford kicks us.
Who do we kick?"
"I don't know about you. I got an old dog home—"
"Okay. Let's separate and find this bird."
"Right. Hey, Lou! Let's have some tracer lights!"
He concealed himself in the brush as a burst of light exploded over
the treetops. He watched the men parade past; ordinary-looking men,
executive types, with white collars and knit ties and flannel suits.
Strangely enough, they seemed quite at home in this wilderness.
He waited until they passed his hiding place. Then he started on a
nimble run in the direction from which they had come.
The producer fitted himself snugly into Executive position: desk,

swivel-chair, and man welded into one solid, efficient unit. He sighed
a comfortable sigh, and glanced up at the wall clock. Ten-thirty. The
Thrill Show would be over in half an hour; the dinosaur film would
wind it up neatly. He'd probably have some explaining to do to the
sponsors tomorrow, but he was all prepared to give the usual
"popular demand" argument.
He regretted the live meeting he had called. It would be two hours at
least before the Staff plowed through the Traffic Jam. That meant he
couldn't leave the office until after one-thirty.
He looked at the hopeless tower of papers on his desk blotter. Most
of them were letters, and his secretary had never quite gotten the
hang of weeding out the chaff. Once he found a letter from an FBC
Vice-President in the Discard File; since then, he ordered all mail to
his desk. He wished he could get a better secretary than Miss Stitch,
but the shortage of A1-rated secretaries (A for "Attractiveness," 1 for
Efficiency) was acute.
He skimmed through the top of the pile quickly.
"Dear Mr. Donnelly.... Certainly enjoyed 'Death in the Ring' ... one of
the best Thrill Shows I've ever seen ... wonder if you would consider a
football thriller I have in mind called 'Murder Kicks Off'...."
"Dear Mr. Donnelly.... Let's have more shows like 'Snake Pit' ... that
Mother and Baby idea was the greatest.... I really thought that woman
would go nuts when she saw her kid with the cobra.... A shocker all
the way...."
"Dear Mr. Donnelly.... If 'Kiss of Death' was your idea of
entertainment, you ought to retire ... sort of sex shmaltz went out with
television ... give us real gutsy stuff and never mind the mush.... I'm
only eleven years old, but I'll bet I could write a better scenario than
that.... I have this idea for a show called...."
"Dear Mr. Donnelly...."
The Producer sighed again. He reached into his pill drawer and took
an ulcer capsule. Then he went back to his correspondence.
When the man entered his office, he didn't even glance up.
"That you, Frick?" he said, eyes on a letter of praise from a Yonkers
housewife.
When the man didn't answer, the Producer looked up.
He gasped. "Hey!" he said.
"Shut up!" the man said harshly. He moved swiftly towards the desk
and lifted a bronze ashtray in a lightning motion. He raised the object
threateningly over the fat man's head.
"Keep quiet!" he said.
"What is this?" The Producer's voice quavered. Then he recognized
the face. "You're the one from the Show—"
The man blinked. His face relaxed, and he lowered the impromptu
weapon. "I—I'm sorry...."
The Producer came around the side of the desk. He took the ashtray
from his hand, and helped him into the interview chair. The man
collapsed limply at his touch.
"How'd you get here?" the Producer said.
"I don't know," the man mumbled. "I found a door ... back there...." He
buried his chin on his chest. His clothes were shredded, and his
hands were trembling.
"Just take it easy," the Producer told him. He stabbed his finger on a
desk button. The signal brought Frick into the office.
"What's up, T.D.?" Then the assistant saw the man in the chair. "My
God," he whispered, swallowing hard. "Gosh, I'm terribly sorry, T.D.
—"
"Never mind being sorry," the Producer said gratingly. "Let's just be
thankful he found his way here instead of into the street. If he'd been
picked up by the Police—"
The assistant mopped his brow. "That would have been terrible.
They'd surely recognize him from the show. If the FCC saw him in this
condition—"
"Yes," the Producer said grimly. "If they saw him in this condition, their
medical office would slap an injunction on us so fast—we'd all be out
in the Jam. Do you realize that?"
Frick blanched. "I'll get Dr. Stark in here right away. We'll get him an
anti-dope shot immediately—"
"That girl ..." the man said.
"It's okay, fella," Frick said. "You're okay now."
"Never mind him," said the Producer. "Get Spier in here. Right away!"
Frick hurried out. The Producer poured a slug of brandy into a cup
and held it to the man's lips. He gulped it gratefully, and then
exploded a rasping cough. When the cough subsided, he buried his
head on his chest again, breathing heavily.
The Producer studied the man's face. It was oddly familiar.
"Say," he said. He put his hand under the chin and lifted the face up.
The eyes opened. "Aren't you Jerry Spizer?"
The man stared blankly. The Producer grunted. "Huh. Guess you
don't know who you are right now, fella. But you're Jerry Spizer, all
right. Imagine that!" T.D. shook his head. "The great Spizer. In a Thrill
Show!" He chuckled dryly.
The doctor bustled into the office, a small cyclone, trailing the
nervous assistant behind him like a flurrying dust cloud.
"Roll up his sleeve," he told the Producer commandingly. He removed
the hypodermic spray-gun from his bag and carefully filled it with a
dozen cc's of the anti-dope. He dabbed the man's arm with a shred of
cotton, and pressed the spray against his flesh. "Good thing I hung
around tonight," the doctor grumbled. "If this man ever got away in
this condition—"
"We know, we know," the Producer said testily. "Fix him up and cut
the chatter—"
"I saw that show," the doctor said. "Somebody sure fouled up.
Probably gave him an overdose."
"We'll get to that later," the Producer promised. "Just do your job,
Doc."
"I'm through," Stark said crisply. "Put him on that couch over there
and raise his legs. He'll come to his senses in about ten minutes—I
hope."
Frick and the Producer helped the man to the sofa. He sprawled on it
full-length, fingers trailing on the carpet.
"Do you know who he is?" T.D. said. "He's Jerry Spizer."
"Who?"
"Spizer. The big TV star. You remember."
The doctor halted in the process of clasping his bag, and came over
to the sofa. He looked at the man's relaxed face. "By God," he said.
"You're right. Now what the hell is Spizer doing on a Thrill Show?"
The Producer shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't heard anything about
him for the past eight or ten years."
"He must have had it tough," Frick said musingly. "I mean, a big star
like that on a program like this—"
"What do you mean, 'a program like this'?" The Producer looked
displeased. "If the Staff had a nickel's worth of imagination, they
would have played this up big—"
"Gosh," said Frick. "That's true. We could have used a credit card—"
"I'll bet he wouldn't have permitted it," the doctor said. "You know
what Spizer thought of the Thrill Show."
"Yeah?" The Producer's face reddened. "Well, we proved how wrong
he was, didn't we? The public was just sick and tired of that namby-
pamby stuff. There had to be a Thrill Show!"
"Sponsors demanded it," Frick said loyally.
"And besides," T.D. added, "if he doesn't like us, what the hell did he
sign up for?"
The doctor pursed his lips. "Maybe he was hungry."
Frick said: "He's still not coming around, Doc."
"He'd better," Stark said warningly. "If the anti-dope doesn't work, it
could mean a lot of trouble for the Thrill Show, Mr. Donnelly—"
The Producer looked frightened. "That's ridiculous. It's got to work.
It's always worked—"
"You better call your Staff," the doctor said. "Find out what dosage
they gave this man. Check his FCC medical authorization. And do it
fast, Mr. Donnelly. This is just the kind of thing the FCC can hang you
on."
"Thank God I called that meeting!" the Producer said.
"Here's the straight poop."

Manford, the Thrill Show director, looked briskly around the room.
They had gathered around the table in the conference room, the Staff
members still hollow-cheeked and shaken by their experience in the
Jam.
"This fellow came into the office last week and signed up for a spot in
the Thrill Show. We needed somebody for the 'Battle of the Sexes'
show, and he was a pretty nice-looking guy. A little seedy, maybe. But
all right. He gave his right name—here's his record—but nobody on
the interviewing staff recognized him. Guess they're all a little too
young to remember Jerry Spizer very well—"
"All right," the Producer prodded. "So what happened?"
"Well, just the routine things. The FCC medical officer gave him the
standard physical. His psych check wasn't the best we've ever had,
but that's always a debatable business. When he showed up for work
yesterday, we gave him the regular dose of ten cc's of adrenalin and
four cc's of hypnomecholyl. That's s.o.p. for an Anger-Emotion Show,
of course."
The Producer looked at Stark. "Did you give him the shot?"
"No." The doctor shuffled the papers in his hands. "That new fellow,
Grayson. Do you want to see him?"
"He's gone home," Manford said. "It'll take an hour to get him here.
Why not phonescreen him?"
They took the Director's suggestion. In a few minutes, the image of
Dr. Phil Grayson appeared on Phonescreen Four. He was a young
man, with a high, balding forehead and a rabbity mustache. He
looked worried when his home screen brought him the picture of the
intense group around the conference table.
"What is it?" he said.
"Just checking back on some records, Doctor," T.D. said smoothly.
"Remember the man you injected today? This fellow Spizer, for the
'Battle of the Sexes' Show?"
The doctor nodded. "Of course."
"Was there anything unusual about the dosage?"
Grayson looked puzzled. "Naturally not. I gave him the prescribed
dosage, just like Dr. Stark told me. Ten cc's of nor-adrenalin, forty-four
cc's of that—what d'you call it—hypnomecholyl. Why?"
Dr. Stark paled. "I told you that?" he said. The color rushed back into
his cheeks a bright crimson. "I told you adrenalin, you fool. Not nor-
adrenalin! And four cc's of hypnomecholyl." He looked wildly at the
men around the table. "I swear I told him!" he said.
"You didn't!" the young doctor gasped. "You told me forty-four—"
Stark jumped to his feet, his face livid. He started towards the
phonescreen as if to throttle the two-dimensional image on the glass.
"You're a liar!" he cried. "You knew it was an Anger-Emotion Show!
You knew what was required—"
"I didn't know," Grayson answered, his mustache twitching. "You
didn't tell me that. I just assumed—"
"You assumed!" The Producer stood up, looking thunderclouds at Dr.
Stark. "You knew what kind of show it was, Stark. Why didn't you tell
him? We needed an Anger reaction—not Fear! That's what loused up
the whole show!"
Manford groaned. "What does that matter now? Forty-four cc's of
hypnomecholyl! What kind of a doctor are you, Grayson? Don't you
know you could kill a man that way?"
"I—I didn't know. I never worked with these mecholyl drugs. I studied
antibiotics—"
"Better if it had killed him," the Producer said darkly. "We might have
covered that up. But we can never get him past the FCC examining
officer now—"
"I swear he told me forty-four! I swear it!"
Dr. Stark made a rush at the phonescreen. Grayson backed away in
terror, despite the many miles that were between him and Stark's
intended violence. With a snarl, the older doctor reached up and
turned off the instrument.
"Now we're in for it," he told the others.
"Maybe he'll be all right," Manford said. "Maybe he'll snap out of it. A
little more anti-dope—"
"Nonsense," Stark snapped. "If it hasn't worked by now, it'll never
work. The overdose has permanently affected his nervous system.
He's an amnesiac for good—an amnesiac with a permanent case of
the jitters—"
Frick shivered. "God! What a fate!"
The Producer looked wise. "Yes," he said solemnly. "He'd be better
off dead, wouldn't he?"
The Staff stared at him.
"You know what I'm talking about," T.D. said. "He'd be better off dead.
Better for him, for the Thrill Show, for us."
"Well," Manford said feebly.
"Well, nothing!" The Producer's voice was harsh. "Do you get the
significance of all this? Do you know what happens when the FCC
medical officer wants to re-check Spizer? An injunction! A court
battle! Then Spizer goes on the stand as Exhibit A, and we lose. No
more Thrill Show." He looked at their faces individually. "No more
jobs. Bankruptcy. Poverty. The Jam."
This time, the shiver was collective.
"We can't let that happen!" Manford licked his lips. "What about the
sponsors? They got pull, don't they? They need us, don't they? I
mean, nothing else will give 'em the kind of ratings they get from the
Thrill Show—"
"Their hands will be tied," T.D. said. "One slip is all the Federal boys
have been waiting for. And with all that foreign criticism our State
Department's been getting—"
"They still buy our films abroad," another Staff man said glumly.
"That won't matter." The Producer sat down heavily, and put the cold
end of his hookahmatic in his mouth. "The Thrill Show is doomed.
Let's face it."
The group dropped their eyes to the table.
"Of course," the Producer said quietly. "There's one way out."
They looked up at him hopefully.
"Remember Juan Esprenzo?" he said.
They stared at him.
"That was a troublesome situation, too. But we came out of that one,
didn't we?"
They gaped, silently.
"Juan Esprenzo was killed on the 'Angry City' Thrill Show of
November 19th, 1985. It was purely an accident, of course. He
wandered out of the guidepaths in the studio and was struck by a
falling prop. Nobody could have foreseen it, and nobody could have
prevented it. His family received $50,000 in insurance. The FCC
investigation described the incident as unfortunate, and there was a
special Juan Esprenzo Memorial Show held on January 3rd. But
these things happen—just as they once did in boxing, football, racing.
Nothing unusual. Nothing to ban a program about."
They turned their eyes to the outer room, where Jerry Spizer lay in a
coma on the studio sofa.
"Do you get what I mean?" the Producer said. "Don't you think we
could pass another investigation a la Esprenzo—better than we could
pass the one we're facing right now?"
They looked hopeful and frightened in turn.
"You mean—deliberately kill him, T.D.?"
"Cause an accident?"
"Kill him right on the program?"
"Exactly," the Producer said, with a satisfied smile. "Put him on again
tomorrow night. Make it a set-up. Have something go wrong. Then
keep the cameras trained on him while we rush out of the Studio
Control Room to find out if he's all right. The whole country will see it
was an accident—only an accident."
He turned to Wilson, the head script-writer.
"Wilson," he said. "You've got an assignment."
He awoke in darkness, trembling with the thought of escape.

His hands groped around the floor, trying its solidity. When his
fingertips found a wall, he raised himself with agonizing slowness, his
nails scraping along the ridges in the damp stone.
He pressed his hot cheek against the cool surface, and sobbed
pitifully.
When his eyes adjusted to the feeble light, he measured the strength
of his prison, and felt the added terror of hopelessness. He turned his
eyes to the pool of darkness in the center of the dungeon, and
ventured forth a cautious foot.
He had taken only three steps before he heard the voice.
"Look out!" it said.
Then he saw the Pit.
He looked with horror at the writhing beasts inside.
He sank to his knees, and stared in terrible fascination at their
swaying bodies. Then he buried his face in his hands.
He looked up when he heard the swish! above him.
Gleaming, swinging, evoking a memory in an impossibly distant past
—it was a pendulum, of razor-sharp steel.
And it was descending.
He screamed, and lifted his arms above his head. The pendulum
ground to a halt, the mechanism groaning and screeching in protest.
There was a second of silence, and then the blade fell to earth with
the suddenness of an avenging sword. This time, the scream was cut
off in his throat, and the giant weapon flattened him sickeningly
against the edge of the precipice.
Vaguely, as in a dream, he heard the sound of speech, and running
footsteps.
"My God! It broke! The pendulum broke!"
"Somebody get the doctor!"
"Look out for that Pit! It's a forty-foot drop!"
"Come on!"
A hand touched his shoulder, and a ring of anxious faces floated like
pink balloons over his head.
"I think he's still alive!"
"What?"
"He can't be! That thing weighs a ton!"
"Well, he looks pretty bad, but I can see his eyes moving and he
seems to be—"
"Get that blade off him!"
He knew that the great weight had been removed from his body, but
he could feel no difference. He was looking with almost objective
interest into the face of a fat man, a familiar face with wide eyes and
an open, bow-lipped mouth. The face was covered with a film of
nervous perspiration, and there was a strange sort of anxiety in the
man's movements.
"He's got to be! He's got to be!" The fat man was whispering intently.
"But T.D.—"
"Shut up! When you lift him up, I want you to—"
He heard nothing more, but his eyes remained open, fixing the face
of the fat man. Then he felt arms around his shoulders once more,
and he felt himself slipping, slipping back towards the edge.
With a spurt of strength, with a flash of sudden intelligence, he raised
his left arm, and the fingers caught the collar surrounding the fat
man's neck in loose folds. He held on grimly, until the fat man
screamed with satisfying terror.
"Look out, T.D.!" somebody shrieked.
"He's dragging me with him!" The fat man flailed out helplessly. "He's
pulling me over the edge!"
Somebody else leaped to his aid, but the dying man's grip was
tenacious, his purpose certain.
"We're going over!"
They did: the fat man and his victim, and Cameras Three, Four, and
Five caught the action beautifully.
Miss Stitch slipped her compact back into her purse, and straightened
the corners of the stack of mail on her desk blotter. She looked
towards the empty office of the Producer, and smiled with secretive
pleasure. Then she slit open the envelopes in front of her, and
leisurely read the morning mail.
"Dear Mr. Donnelly.... Boy, oh boy! What a thriller you gave us the
other night! I thought 'Pit and the Pendulum' was one of the best Thrill
Shows yet.... I sure was disappointed when I saw the title card and
thought you were going to re-hash that old Poe bit, but that new
ending of yours really knocked me cold.... I sure got a kick out of
seeing that fat old guy going over the edge of the Pit. What a terrific
wind-up!... I wonder if you would be interested in a really great story
idea?... You see, there's this crazy old guy who has a secret
laboratory on a mountain-top.... Well, one night it's raining and
lightning like mad.... And this beautiful blonde comes along in a
classy convertible...."
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHOW
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Virtuous Emotions Kristjan Kristjansson All Chapter

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Virtuous Emotions Kristján

To Nora and Hlér, for being there

1. Introduction: Developing an Aristotelian Account

1.1 Why Aristotle?

2 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 3

4 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

1.2 What an Emotion Is: A Componential View

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 5

6 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

I explore those issues—which continue to pose threats to those beholden to an

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 7

8 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 9

This reworking of the cognitive component of emotion has four advantages in my

10 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 11

an emotion such as jealousy as starting with a direct perception or an imaginative

12 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

effects of feel-good emotions (Fredrickson, 2009). What emerges, then, is a striking

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 13

14 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

goal-directed activity in that example is simply to silence a consideration, rather than

1.3 Character and Virtue: Where Do Emotions Fit In?

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 15

on it here would be superfluous. For the uninitiated reader, a good introductory

16 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

character (hexeis in Greek), concerned with morally praiseworthy or blameworthy

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 17

made by Fortenbaugh that seems to me to muddy the conceptual waters. Fortenbaugh

18 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

1.4 ‘Virtuous Emotions’: What Does It Mean?

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 19

Moral justifiability is the most demanding evaluative criterion of emotions. An

20 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

‘Sharing in reason’ can, however, assume different forms according to the

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 21

simply virtues or a certain category of virtues. Aristotle enters an important caveat

22 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 23

some more general emotional disposition in favour of smoothly functioning human

24 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 25

All emotions are, on an Aristotelian understanding, intrinsically relevant to ethics

26 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

1.5 Emotion Education: The Preliminaries

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 27

1.6 A Roadmap of Subsequent Chapters

28 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 29

30 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

2.1 Emotions and Value Epistemology

32 Emotions and Moral Value

I repeatedly alluded in Chapter 1 to the growing interest—psychological, educa-

emotions and moral value 33

implicit consensus in the emotion-education literature. Yet they acknowledge the

2.2 Four Competing Epistemologies

34 Emotions and Moral Value

Title: The show must go on