Freddy Purcell details Paddy McQueen’s recent talk on the fittingness of emotions, including some heated discussions.
This week, we welcomed Paddy McQueen from Swansea university for one of the most entertaining talks of the year so far. Paddy works on a broad range of topics in ethics, political philosophy, and social theory, but it was his 2024 book on regret that drew him into the philosophy of emotion. In this book, Paddy makes use of the ideas of emotions as “fitting”, where we can make normative judgements on someone’s emotional response to decide whether it is appropriate. For example, if someone did commit a moral harm, it would be fitting for them to feel regret as their action is regret worthy. However, with his book now published, Paddy has started to look more critically at this idea in study he hopes will inform an article.
One prominent view of fittingness in emotions comes from Christine Tappolet, who takes an objective and value realist approach to the evaluative properties that cause emotion. This means she argues that a large dog possesses the (evaluative) property of being fearsome in the same way that a table has properties of size or weight. Unless we make a mistake, when we have an emotional response, we perceive an evaluative property like fearsomeness, subsequently feeling the fitting emotion of fear. Tappolet argues that sometimes this process misfires when we are subject to “defeaters”. These defeaters are distortions to our perception, like looking at an object refracted underwater, that cause us to have an unfitting emotional response. Emotional defeaters may include taking drugs or being jokingly insulted. Accepting this argument for the moment, the next question is, how do we know when we’ve had a fitting emotional response? Tappolet argues that generally our emotions are correct, so we know that something is fearsome if we feel fear towards it. In more difficult cases, she argues that we ought to examine whether there are any defeaters, perhaps by talking to others, or we may appeal to emotional experts who tend to feel emotions more accurately. Paddy struggled to contain his scepticism about the fittingness view throughout this description, but ploughed onto the second prominent view nonetheless.
This view belongs to D’Arms and Jacobson. The pair generally want to avoid Tappolet’s strong realism, so are more popular, but insist that some things really do have evaluative properties like fearsomeness. With the existence of such evaluative properties, D’Arms and Jacobson therefore argue that a relationship of fit does exist, where an emotion is fitting if the object of emotion somehow merits that feeling. They ground this account in anthropology, arguing that there is a basic set of human emotions that normally fit with certain objects. Under their account, we can therefore see what emotional responses are fitting by seeing how people “normally” respond to certain objects. D’Arms and Jacobson therefore follow a similar line of reasoning to Tappolet, arguing that we generally know the evaluative properties of an object through our emotional responses to them.
After outlining these views, Paddy could finally fully unleash his scepticism about the idea of fittingness. He framed his response by examining how the proponents of fittingness justify how we know whether we have had a fitting response.
- Because I have the correct emotion: It seems quite obviously uninformatively circular to judge whether an object merits an emotional response based on whether you have the correct emotion. If asked how you know whether you had the correct emotion, the only answer you could give to this follow up question is that the object merited it.
- Because there was a relevant evaluative property: Runs into exactly the same sort of issues of circularity. It also isn’t obvious that we should accept that objects have independently existing properties like fearsomeness.
- Because there are relevant base properties: Instead of arguing that objects have one property like admirability, you might argue that they have a set of properties that merit an emotional response. For example, we might admire someone because of their charitable spirit, kind-heartedness, and strength in the face of adversity. This idea sounds better to me, but of course you run into the issue of how to decide what a relevant base property is, as almost anything could be admirable, in a way that seems deeply context dependent. Paddy also pointed you that there doesn’t appear to be a clear way to judge what a correct weighting of such properties would be.
- Because I am an emotional expert: Again, how would we identify such a person?
- Because this is how typical humans normally respond: Paddy argued that it is very difficult and likely problematic to decide what normal emotional capacities are. Human beings respond in vastly different ways to the same thing, and it may not be clear whether there is an incorrect response amongst this variety. Would I be wrong or misguided if didn’t laugh at a joke that my friend found hilarious? Or would my friend by wrong in finding it funny? It doesn’t feel like the fittingness account could ever answer this issue.
As well as these issues, Paddy also argued that fittingness theorists give no account for how an object may have multiple evaluative properties. For example, if a situation was both funny and tragic, what would be the appropriate emotional response? Furthermore, how would you judge what degree of emotional response is appropriate, particularly if you had to sort between multiple properties? Even on accepting value realism, Paddy therefore gave a compelling argument against these formulations of fittingness.
With this argument articulated, Paddy moved to what positions this leaves us in. One solution would of course be to abandon fittingness as an idea, something I think Paddy and the rest of the audience were sympathetic to. However, if judging whether someone has a correct emotional response is important socially, Paddy tentatively suggested a different way to formulate the idea of fittingness through the idea of internal coherence. Under this account, an emotion is fitting if it coheres with a person’s endorsed preferences and values. For example, it would be fitting for me to feel regret after stepping on a snail if I value the lives of snails and think that wanton snail related destruction ought to be avoided.
A benefit of this view that Paddy described is that it appears to elegantly solve the issue of feeling emotions over time. Under a traditional fittingness view, evaluative properties are like facts, so don’t change over time. This means that if you do something regrettable, it is always appropriate to regret it. However, under Paddy’s view, a response of regret is only fitting while a particular evaluative outlook lasts. So, my values might change, leading me to have different fitting responses to the same thing over time. This would explain how a person may move from regretting something, to accepting it with time.
From the outset, I think the room was on board with Paddy’s dismantling of the fittingness view as meaningful glances and laughs were exchanged throughout its explanation. However, during question time, Paddy received a barrage of criticism for his internal coherence view of fittingness. It was highly entertaining to watch philosophers intellectually joust across a seminar room, but I did feel Paddy received a lot of stick for a view he didn’t seem too committed to. Part of this criticism was that Paddy’s view seemed to suggest quite an internalist view of values, when our value systems appear to be deeply impacted by social and cultural factors. Paddy also didn’t seem to give an account of how to navigate emotional responses where feelings appear to conflict with each other or be related to unknown values. He conceded, that people could likely only deal with what they understand to the best of their ability, a response I felt was appropriate but undermining to the meaningfulness of the fittingness view.
In pub discussion with Paddy, I asked him how his view might account for experiences where an emotional response appears to change our evaluative outlook. I gave an example, inspired by Aldo Leopold, of a person committed to hunting who shoots a wolf and upon seeing it die, feels a deep sense of regret that then turns them against hunting as a practice. Paddy accepted that his view doesn’t currently handle this sort of case, where it seems like there is a more dynamic relationship between internal framework and emotions. How might we judge whether a change in our internal framework from an emotional response was correct?
With all of that said, Paddy gave a highly entertaining, well-delivered, and insightful talk that I greatly enjoyed (something I think is reflected in the length of this summary…). I always appreciate topics that relate to how we navigate the world, and I think that meant that everyone got invested in discussions. I would therefore like to thank Paddy for this colloquium; it was very cool! If you have any reflections on this summary, be sure to leave them in the comments below.