Evaluating Emotions

How are emotions related to values? This book shows that the answer to this question, and to questions about the nature of emotions and values, can be found in an understanding of what it means to care about something. It is argued that caring consists in having a particular class of desires and that negative emotions, such as fear and anger, can then be understood as desires that are instrumental to pursuing the end of caring desires, whilst positive emotions are felt satisfactions of caring desires. The advantages of this care-based theory of emotions include the following: it can account for the fact that some emotions motivate whilst others don't, it can account for standards of appropriateness of emotions, and it works with a simple ontology. The first four chapters of this book demonstrate that arguments supporting a rival theory, the perceptual theory of emotions, which sees emotions as perception-like states that help us gain evaluative knowledge, are problematic.

Eva-Maria Duringer is Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Tubingen, Germany.