In the modern day, the phenomenon of victim blaming—in part due to the rise of feminism in popular social consciousness—has taken center stage in discourse concerning rape culture, sexual assault, and the more general objectification and subjugation of women in patriarchal culture. However, this phenomenon is wide-ranging, both in the past and present; we have seen people blame victims for poverty, for school shootings, for domestic violence, and even for the Holocaust. This paper is an inquiry into the moral psychology of victim blaming. When we use the phrase “victim blaming”, we typically take a critical stance towards the person doing the blaming. The victim blamer is inappropriately blaming the victim for their own victimhood, which is a problem because it diverts responsibility for a wrong doing from the perpetrator to the victim. So, one important set of questions about this phenomenon concerns delineating which sorts of cases constitute an inappropriate blaming of the victim and why. A second set of questions concerns why human beings have a propensity to blame the victim. That is, why is victim blaming a recurring phenomenon in the reactions of people to the suffering of their fellow human beings?
My aim in this paper is to sketch out a broadly Aristotelian account of victim-blaming. So, I will answer the two questions above together, and argue that cases of genuine victim-blaming are – on an Aristotelian view – a result of a lack of the virtue of courage on the part of the victim-blamer. Specifically, I will argue that victim-blaming involves reacting to a particular kind of fear having to do with the suffering of others – eleos (sympathy or pity) – which Aristotle discusses in his account of the emotions in Rhetoric II. On his view, pity is a kind of imaginative fear one feels for another person who is perceived in some sense as a victim.
To that end, I will first explain Aristotle’s account of pity from Rhetoric II, and then flesh it out beyond that text by considering the causal role it plays in Aristotle’s philosophy of action. This is crucial because I must explain how an emotion like pity can affect a resulting action (such as victim-blaming). Here, I argue that for Aristotle all emotions – including pity – are desires, which means they can trigger action by way of the faculty of imagination.
In the second part of the paper, I will turn to Aristotle’s account of courage and explain how it links up to the account of pity I have outlined. I will then apply this philosophy of action in an analysis of victim blaming, and argue that victim blaming is a result of lack of courage – the virtue concerning fear – on the part of the blamer. On Aristotle’s account, courage is the mean between two extremes: rashness (lack of fear of things one ought to fear) and cowardice (being ruled by one’s fear, even in cases where fear is an appropriate reaction). Following this structure, I argue here that there are two kinds of bad cases with victim blaming, one from cowardice and one from rashness.
It’s often taken as a commonplace – both in philosophy and in everyday discourse – that good friends are loyal friends. But what is it to be loyal, and what role does loyalty play in good friendship? In the paper, I seek to answer this question. In surveying the role of loyalty in good friendship, the paper also helps to elucidate the nature of practical reasoning in good friendship by focusing on the characteristic way in which good friends act on reasons of friendship.
First, I adopt the view that friendship generates reasons to act in ways that respect our friends as agents. A good friend does not paternalistically foist goods or ends upon you; nor does she require sacrifices of you which you haven’t agreed to accept. Instead, good friends share ends and deliberate together about what to do. Consider: if A wants to travel with B, A does not unilaterally decide on where to go and what to do, even if she foots the bill. She consults with B, and they judge together where they want to go and what they want to do. Ideally, their plans reflect the good judgment of both, especially with respect to their major, life-organizing ends. However, friendship can also involve a duty to defer in special circumstances, which may give A reason to do or believe something not because she judges it to be good, but because B does.
Next, I adopt the account of loyalty which holds that loyalty is manifested through action, and that loyal action is defined by a particular motive in part characterized by an emotional pull directed at the object of loyalty. The conative aspect of the loyal motive is important: I argue it requires that the loyal x (friend, employee, or citizen) have an independently sufficient motive to do what at least apparently furthers the interests of the object of loyalty independently of x’s judgment about whether it would be (all-things-considered) good to do so. In the paper, I call this the judgment insensitivity condition on loyal action.
Consider: the employee who stays only when she judges that her employer offers a cushier benefits package isn’t loyal; the employee who stays whether or not the employer’s offer is better is. I argue that the combination of these independently plausible accounts leads to the counterintuitive result that good friends don’t characteristically act loyally. Good friends characteristically act on shared reasons that reflect their shared judgment – especially in important cases and concerning major ends --which conflicts with the judgment insensitivity of loyal acts. In such cases, acting loyally would either fail to respect one’s own agency (by alienating oneself from one’s reasons) or the other’s agency (by treating his major end as either contrary to good reason or not worth investigating). I argue that this is true even
if there is a duty to defer in friendship. In important cases – like moving a body, say – A’s deference to B is either predicated on A’s judgment that B’s judgment is generally reliable or is a placeholder for A’s sharing in B’s judgment upon investigation. I argue that neither option is compatible with judgment insensitivity, given counterfactual conditions on when endorsement of the act would be withdrawn. I end by suggesting what space remains for loyal action in good friendship: it is found primarily in sharing in your friend’s minor interests just for your friend’s sake, which attitude is compatible with respecting your friend’s agency (and he yours). Thus, loyalty in good friendship amounts to small-scale acts of being there for your friend when little is on the line.
In recent years, there has been a good deal of philosophical work on the norms governing our affective lives. Like actions, our emotions and emotional attitudes seem to be subject to various normative standards. We often praise, criticize, and perhaps even blame people for their emotional reactions, and philosophers have made progress distinguishing and defending different ways of assessing emotions. However, much of this work has focused on the fittingness/unfittingness, prudence/imprudence, or moral aptness/inaptness of specific emotions understood in isolation from one another. Relatively little attention has been given to the relation of emotions to one another across time and how these relations might affect the normative standards we use to assess emotions.
Emotions are related to one another in a wide variety of ways, from loose association to conceptual connection (Pugmire, 2007). I am interested in the systematic ordering of emotions that fall closer to conceptual connection side of the range. As others have argued, this systematic order between emotions across time is important in understanding the activity of valuing. (Scheffler, 2010). This background order and connection between emotions can also become disordered. In this paper, I consider one way this systematic affective ordering can become disordered by exploring the phenomenon of what I will call “being all over the place.” This is a vernacular American expression which refers to an experience of rapidly vacillating emotional responses. The more formal term for this experience in the psychological literature is “emotional lability.”
While there has been a fair amount of attention paid to the related notion of mixed emotions or emotional ambivalence, much of the discussion there has been focused on the narrow question of whether, a rational person can experience two or more conflicting emotions simultaneously. (Kristjansson, 2010) Truly ambivalent emotions are supposed to present a deep challenge to dominant accounts of the nature of emotion. This is not my question. Rather than focus on synchronic consistency, I’m focused on diachronic orderings. Specifically, I’m focused on vacillating emotions, and I’m interested in how periods of vacillation can both support and undermine the kind of moral and epistemic work emotions, especially so-called “negative emotions” can perform.
I will begin by saying a bit about the central features of being all over the place. I will distinguish it from other experiences of systematic emotional disorder. I will then go on to consider what being all over the place does to the subject and how it shapes the emotions that are part of this process. Ultimately, I hope to show that for emotions to do the kind of moral work some have claimed for them, it is important for persons to sometimes be all over the place, but it is also important to escape this disorder after a period of time.
References
Kristjan Kristjansson (2010) “The Trouble with Ambivalent Emotions” Philosophy 85 (334):485-510
David Pugmire (2007) Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions Oxford: Oxford University Press
Samuel Scheffler (2010) Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory New
York: Oxford University Press
Aristotle holds that virtuous people take pleasure in virtuous acts while acknowledging that not all virtuous acts are pleasant in themselves. Courageous acts in battle are often unpleasant, he says, so, “It is not the case, then, with all the virtues that the exercise of them is pleasant, except in so far as it reaches its end” (NE III.9 1117b15–16). Virtuous people would evidently take some kind of pleasure in virtuous acts that reach their end, even if those acts are unpleasant, but it is unclear what he means by “reaches its end.” One might think that courage in battle would attain its end by contributing to a desired consequence, such as keeping one’s city safe, but Aristotle holds that virtuous acts are engaged in for the sake of the kalon or what is appropriate. So, he may be saying that virtuous people find pleasure in doing what is appropriate as such, even if the acts involved are not pleasant in themselves and do not produce the desired consequences.
Moral psychologists who have brought contemporary psychology to bear on Aristotle’s thesis that virtuous people take pleasure in virtuous acts have disagreed about whether this thesis can be empirically vindicated, and his position on the unpleasantness of some kinds of virtuous acts makes this thesis all the more puzzling. The aim of this paper is to show that it can be vindicated.
Building on Susan Sauve Meyer’s interpretive work on Aristotle’s conception of virtuous motivation, we argue that genuinely virtuous states of mind are both autonomous and directed toward a good end, while simultaneously attuned to aspects of contexts that matter to the appropriateness of the action. We then
examine Julia Annas’s hypothesis that the psychological state of the virtuous agent can be understood as an experience of flow associated with intrinsically motivated activity, as this is understood in positive psychology (Annas, 2008), and Lorraine Besser-Jones’s (2012, 2014) critique of Annas. The upshot of this inquiry is that the pleasure associated with intrinsic motivation does not fit Aristotle’s concept of genuine virtue and the pleasure associated with it. We argue that integrated motivation and basic psychological need satisfaction as these are defined in Self-Determination Theory (SDT) offer a more promising approach (Arvanitis, 2017; Curren & Ryan, 2020).
From the standpoint of research in SDT, ethical pleasure – the pleasure that virtuous people are said to take in virtuous acts – may consist largely of satisfaction of basic psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy, and to some extent the psychic rewards of engaging in benevolent acts (Martela & Ryan, 2016). This would constitute substantive ethical pleasure, as we understand it. Yet, Aristotle’s remarks about the pleasure that accompanies virtue suggest the existence of a form of ethical pleasure associated with acting for what is kalon or appropriate to the circumstances. We call this volitional ethical pleasure and explain how it arises from the formation and preservation of a coherent self through the motivational, emotional, and cognitive integration characteristic of virtue. In doing this, we offer an alternative to Julia Annas’s flow-based conception of the psychological state of the virtuous agent, agreeing with Lorraine Besser-Jones that the psychological profile of virtuous motivation is not intrinsic motivation, as Annas assumes, but rather integrated motivation. We offer an alternative to Besser-Jones’s pessimistic conclusion about Aristotle’s thesis by exploring in more depth the significance of psychological integration for personal well-being, and psychic costs of failing to act in conformity with an integrated state of psychological functioning corresponding to virtue.