Justifying the Emotions

It is perhaps no more than a commonplace that moral education is in part at least an education of the emotions. Yet moral philosophers have often taken this to mean merely that we must learn to control them, for if we fail to do so we are at the mercy of what is fickle and irrational, and so are unable to exercise any control over our lives. It is a corollary of such a view that the emotions as such do not contribute to the moral worth of a person, and in consequence the role they play in our moral outlook and assessment has largely escaped philosophical scrutiny.' One reason for this frequent neglect is a lack of appreciation of the complex features involved in individual emotions; a lack due perhaps to the spell cast by the traditional distinction between Reason on the one hand and Feeling on the other, with its consequent tendency to simplify. The thesis I want to defend is that an investigation of such features will bring to light a close connection between the emotions and our evaluation of human beings. I am not here interested in excessive emotional reaction which ought to be controlled. My claim is rather that once we have identified what is conceptually involved in individual emotions it can be shown that a deficiency of this or that,emotional reaction, either in general or on some specific occasion, may be traced to some moral failing or human short-coming. This will give us a sense in which it will sometimes be appropriate to say not just that it is natural for a man in such-and-such a situation to feel a certain emotion, but even that in this sort of situation he ought to have felt it. To illustrate this thesis in an exemplary way I shall concentrate on the case of anger.