place to be.
Furthermore, when there is great injustice, we should not use that
fact as an excuse for childish and undisciplined behavior. Injustice
should be greeted with protest and careful, courageous strategic
action. But the end goal must remain always in view: as King said so
simply: “A world where men and women can live together.” Building
such a world takes intelligence, control, and a spirit of generosity. That
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spirit has many names: Greek philophrosunē, Roman humanitas, biblical agapē, African ubuntu 6— a patient and forbearing disposition to see and seek the good rather than to harp obsessively on the bad.
I hesitate to end with a slogan that surely betrays my age: but, after
so many centuries of folly orchestrated by the retributive spirit, it finally does seem time to “give peace a chance.”
Appendix A: Emotions and Upheavals
of Thought
The analysis of anger and forgiveness in the present book can be fully
grasped without studying the emotion theory I developed in Upheavals of
Thought. Nonetheless, for a deeper understanding of the theoretical background, some readers may be interested in a brief summary of its main
contentions.
In the earlier chapters of Upheavals, I defend a conception of emotions according to which they all involve intentional thought or perception
directed at an object (as perceived or imagined by the person who has the
emotion) and some type of evaluative appraisal of that object made from
the agent’s own personal viewpoint. This appraisal ascribes importance
to the object in terms of the agent’s scheme of goals and ends. Thus, we
do not grieve for every death in the world, but only for deaths of people
who appear to us to be important in our lives; we fear not all possible bad
events, but only those that seem to pose some serious threat to our proj-
ects; and so on. These appraisals need not involve full- fledged beliefs,
although they often do; indeed, they need not involve language or even
complexity. Most animals make at least some appraisals of objects, from
the point of view of their sense of their well- being, and have emotions in
consequence. All that is required is that they see the object (a bit of food, say) as good from the point of view of the creature’s own pursuits and
goals. Similarly, very young human infants, not yet capable of language,
are still capable of many emotions, because they have an inchoate sense
251
252 Appendix A
of their own good and ill, and of the way in which objects and events
contribute to that good or ill.
Some emotions are “situational,” fixed on a particular set of cir-
cumstances; others are “background,” meaning that they are ongoing
in the fabric of life (for example a fear of death that most people carry
around with them), but can also become more concrete focused on a par-
ticular event (a particular threat to the person’s life). Background emo-
tions are sometimes consciously experienced, but not always. The fear
of death often motivates behavior without being an object of conscious
awareness.
In the balance of the book’s first chapter, I then investigate the role
of non- cognitive elements (feelings, bodily states) in emotions. I argue
that, although some such elements are present in most of our emotional
experience, and although, indeed, all human and animal emotions are
embodied in some way, these non- cognitive elements do not have the
constancy and regular association with the emotion type in question that
would be required if we were to include them in the definition of an
emotion of a particular type. Even with an emotion as simple as fear,
which is indeed frequently associated with something like shivering or
trembling, there are numerous counterexamples— including the fear of
death. Most of us have that fear most of the time, in a way that has psy-
chological reality and motivational power, but (usually) we are not con-
sciously aware of shivering or shaking. In this case, then, there is not only no single feeling, but, sometimes, no conscious feeling at all. With other
more complex emotions—for example, grief and compassion—there are
usually feelings of some sort involved (again, not always), but it is not
easy even to begin to identify, in a general way, the bodily feelings that
would belong to those emotions. And often, even when we think we
have identified such elements (grief feels like a pain in the stomach, say),
we find, on closer inspection, that one may continue to have grief over
time while these bodily manifestations change, often greatly. (A griev-
ing person may sometimes feel achy, sometimes exhausted, sometimes
endowed with extra energy— and yet it would be wrong to say that she
is not still grieving.) Compassion does not have any close association
with a particular feel. Love is accompanied by bewilderingly many dif-
ferent feelings— but also, at times, no marked feeling at all. (A parent’s
love for her child may persist without being linked to any particular
feeling.)
We can still insist that emotions often feel visceral and profoundly
agitating (not the non- conscious ones, however). What we should not
do is to associate a given emotion type with any one particular sort of
feeling state. Furthermore, we should understand correctly what the agi-
tation is. What feels wrenching and visceral about emotions is often not
Emotions AND upheavals of thought
253
independent of their cognitive dimension. The death of a loved individ-
ual is unlike a stomach virus because it violently tears the fabric of attachment, hope, and expectation that we have built up around that person.
What is true of feelings appears to be true, as well, of physical states.
Although we are learning more about the brain and its role in emotions of
many kinds, and although we should certainly learn as much as we can,
we do not yet have an account of any particular emotion, not even the rel-
atively simple emotion of fear, that identifies it with changes of a particu-
lar sort in a particular area of the brain. Studying the work of Joseph Le
Doux, I conclude (agreeing with him) that we have reason to think that
fear has precursors or common concomitants in a particular area of the
brain, but that this does not entail that, once fear is learned, there could
be no case of the emotion that was not accompanied by changes in that
part of the brain. Once again, the case of the fear of death is instructive.
I do not rely on this relatively controversial aspect of my theory any-
where in the present book, although it still seems to me to be correct
and important. I do not think that it is even that controversial if all my
qualifications are taken duly into account.
Next, investigating the emotions of nonhuman animals in chapter 2,
I argue that we should not understand the cognitive content of emotions
to involve, in every case, anything like the acceptance of a linguistically
formulable proposition. Many emotions, both nonhuman and human,
involve only an evaluatively laden sort of seeing- as, where a creature
such simpler emotions are particularly common in prelinguistic infants,
but they can persist in adulthood as well, as many infantile emotions do.
Moreover, even with complex emotions that have something like a prop-
ositional structure, it would be wrong to think that this structure always
takes a linguistic form or could be formulated in language without awk-
ward translation. Thinking about emotion in music (which I study in
chapter 5) informs us that language is not the only symbolic structure
capable of rich emotional expressiveness, and there is no reason to think
that the linguistic formulation of an emotion is always primary.
Chapter 3 then turns to the role of society and social norms in con-
structing an emotional repertory. The cognitive content of emotions is
shaped in many ways by specific social norms and specific societal cir-
cumstances. These give instructions for the manifestation of an emotion,
but they also more deeply shape the appraisals that make up an emotion,
and may create specific types of emotion that are unique to a given soci-
ety. General shared features of human life also exert a major influence,
but even those shared circumstances (mortality, bodily illness) are dif-
ferently shaped in different societies. Sometimes divergent social norms
shape only people’s views about the proper objects of a given emotion
254 Appendix A
(what it is appropriate to fear, or grieve for). But sometimes, in addition,
they shape the emotional taxonomy itself, producing subtly different
forms of anger, grief, and fear. Thus, applying that account to the present
case, anger is in a way a cultural universal, since in all societies people
react to wrongful damages and wish for payback; but specific forms of
anger are strongly shaped by social norms regarding what an insult is,
what honor is, what manliness is, and so forth.
I then study (in chapter 4) the developmental character of human
emotions. Our earliest emotional experiences precede the acquisition of
language and even the secure individuation of objects. Moreover, causal
thinking of the type involved in anger, though earlier than many have
thought, still takes time to develop. Such facts color not only the emo-
tional life of infancy but also a person’s later history. Archaic patterns
often persist into adult life, underneath the often sophisticated structure
of adult love and grief. (This part of Upheavals parallels the account of human development in chapter 7 of my Political Emotions, which, however, goes beyond it in many respects, discussing the role of love in over-
coming infantile anxiety and guilt.)
An issue of particular delicacy is the difficulty of distinguishing
between “background emotions” that persist through situations of many
types, and moods. Moods (as I understand them) are objectless states,
lacking the intentionality of full- fledged emotions. An objectless sad-
ness, a global fearfulness, a chronic irritability, an endogenous state of
depression, all are moods. However, given the imperfection of our self-
knowledge, it is very difficult to distinguish these from emotions whose
object is either highly general or unknown to the person. Take depres-
sion. Some depressions may have purely chemical causes, and no object.
But sometimes people are depressed about their lives and prospects in a
very general way. Their depression has an object, albeit a highly general
one. Or they may be depressed about some crisis or loss in early life and
are not fully aware of this. In such cases therapeutic work is frequently
needed to uncover the roots of the depression, determining whether it
has an object, and, if so, what. The same thing is true with fear.
What about anger? People who are chronically irritable often are
really angry at something or someone, but just can’t uncover the roots
of their emotional state. Or their anger may have a highly general
object: a universe that they perceive as unfair to them, or just a set of
life- prospects in which they are never treated with the respect that is
their due. As we’ve had reason to see, such irritability may be con-
nected to a sense of helplessness: people can feel extremely vulner-
able and in consequence feel that the “slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune” are wrongly directed at them. Is there any irritability that is
purely endogenous and lacking intentionality? Certain physical states
Emotions AND upheavals of thought
255
(for example, premenstrual tension, in at least some women’s experi-
ence) often do appear to predispose a person to annoyance or anger;
but perhaps they do so through creating a feeling of powerlessness or
weakness or unattractiveness that then predisposes the person to think
the world, or the people in her life, are against her in some way, rather
than through direct endogenous causation. The entire question is dif-
ficult, and badly understood.
The existence of such difficult borderline cases, however, does not
call an intentionalist account of emotions into question. Any category-
demarcation is likely to yield unclear cases, since the world is not preor-
dered for the convenience of philosophers.
Appendix B: Anger and Blame
If anger has been too little analyzed in the recent philosophical literature, this may be in part because the focus of discussion has been elsewhere.
The analysis of “blame” has moved to center stage, inspiring work of
high quality and diverse viewpoints. Even though, as the editors of a fine
recent anthology on the topic hold, “work on blame is still in its infancy,”1
there is enough philosophically valuable work that any project like mine
needs to pause and situate itself in relation to this burgeoning literature.
The form of this literature is a familiar one in philosophical anal-
ysis. Candidate definitions are proposed and debated, against an
implicit background assumption that a unitary account is the right goal.
Although some participants in the debate emphasize the flexibility of
their accounts, and the way in which they can allegedly accommodate
different types of blame, there is little or no skepticism about unity, at
least at a general level.
Some concepts, perhaps most concepts, are well illuminated in this
way, provided that the unitary account is flexible enough to cover dispa-
rate instances of the phenomenon in question. There are, however, other
concepts that are so deeply ambiguous at their core that the single term
conceals more than it reveals. In an influential essay on the idea of pri-
vacy, Judith Jarvis Thomson made a very strong case against the search
for a unitary account of that term.2 The values of informational secrecy,
personal autonomy, seclusion, and perhaps yet others that are standardly
picked out under that rubric are so heterogeneous in nature and func-
tion that it is more misleading than useful to treat privacy as a single
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Anger and Blame
257
notion for which we need simply to search for the best single
account. I
have followed Thomson, arguing that the public/ private antithesis is so
profoundly multiple that using these terms without immediate disam-
biguation misleads political and legal analysis.3 Some so- called “privacy
interests” are interests in shielding personal information from prying
eyes. Others involve a desire for seclusion or solitude. But still others have nothing to do with either secrecy or solitude, and have to do, instead,
with personal control or autonomy. Contraception, for example, is mis-
leadingly protected under “privacy” rights, because what is really at
stake is the decisional autonomy to use contraception— whether it is used
in seclusion or publicly (Bill Baird, plaintiff in one important case,4 gave
contraceptives to young women at a public event), and whether or not its
use is a secret. The use of the word “privacy” misleads judges, at times,
into thinking that the acts that are protected are only those in a privileged and secluded place (e.g., the marital home), or acts that are characterized by intimate association. Thus there is a tendency to think that sexual
autonomy gets special protection when it comes into play in a place of
privileged seclusion, though why this should be so is never argued: the
unitary term substitutes for argument. Things would have been much
clearer had different words been used— “rights of informational secrecy,”
“decisional autonomy- rights,” “rights of seclusion”— which would of
course not prevent people from asking what relationships might obtain
among the phenomena those different words introduce.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Thomson and I are cor-
rect: the term “privacy” is not useful, since it conceals differences that are at least as significant as any common ground among the different notions
that it standardly introduces. Now the question is, is “blame” more like
“privacy,” or more like the many other notions that do seem to be illumi-
nated, up to a certain point anyway, by a unitary analysis?5 The former,
I believe; but argument is needed, given that many excellent people hold
the latter as a working assumption.
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