PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Virtue Ethics, Stoicism
16 May 2018
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PHILOS 2YY3 – Mar 20 2018
Virtue and Emotion
Moral Significance of Emotion
• What is the moral significance of emotions?
o From a virtue ethics standpoint, virtues are dispositions to act and react in
relation to how we feel, but also dispositions about how to feel in relation to
how we act and react (viz. in the right way, at the right time, for the right
reasons, etc.)
• Emotions have intrinsic moral value → they are not instrumental or superfluous
• With virtuous actions, the right emotional response is coincident with having the right
rational judgment
o E.g. feeling indignation over witnessing injustice, sorrow over suffering, shame
over intemperance, etc.
Ir/rational Emotions
• For Kant, emotions belong to inclination, are completely irrational and are only morally
relevant insofar as reason must subdue their desires according to its law
• For the Stoics, emotions are part and parcel with rational nature insofar as they are
involved in evaluative judgments
o Avoid these two extremes: emotions are neither fully rational nor fully irrational
• Emotions are Janus-faced: some rational, some irrational, some beyond the influence of
reaso, soe that a e transformed by reason 35 -> e.g. transforming self-
preseratio to preseratio of hat is est
Emotions, Good & Evil
• Our desigatio of good ad eil are never without an emotional idea, image or urge
to pursue ad aoid hat is good ad eil respetiely
o Hursthouse: most emotions are in part constituted by, or at least generate, a
desire to do something, construing these desires as themselves involving ideas or
thoughts, of good and evil (pleasure and pain).
• Although judgments about good and evil are never reducible to emotional states,
eotios theseles involve evaluative judgments aout hat e take to
be generically good and evil
Emotional Education
• The intimate connection between moral and emotional judgments is illustrated by
identifying how we were taught to use judgment statements in concert with self-
conduct
o Hursthouse focuses on racism as a paradigm case of bad training to illustrate
the immense complexity of the ways in which the emotions are trained, and
values thereby inculcated 35
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