Question Is a person responsible for their emotions, for the way they feel? Can they ever be held accountable for feeling a certain way?

Accepted:
October 21, 2010

Comments

This is a deep and important question, that goes to the heart of both our understanding of emotions and of responsibility.

There seem to be conflicting intuitions about this question. On the one hand, it seems natural to think that an agent is only responsible for what she does, or for what is under her control, yet emotions--often also known as passions--seem to be events that happen to us, and therefore are not under our control, and so it would seem that we are not responsible for our emotions. On the other hand, we often do hold ourselves and other responsible for their emotions: one might worry about the fact that one is happy about a friend's failure, or that one laughs at a sexist joke, and we often expect others to feel certain ways.

In this respect, emotions are very different from sensations, such as pain or hunger. Although one can cause oneself to feel pain--say, by deliberately striking one's hand with a hammer--normally, pain is a natural response to damage to one's body. Hunger, too, is arguably a sensation that represents the fact that the body needs food. And while one can hold someone responsible for being hungry, such as when one is hungry on a hike because one neglected to eat before starting out, or to bring food along, in such cases, as in the case of being responsible for the pain that one feels when one strikes one's hand with a hammer, one's responsibility for the sensation is, as it were, indirect: one is responsible for bringing it about that one feels the sensation. Responsibility for emotions, is, by contrast, more direct: one doesn't hold someone responsible for being the kind of person who laughs at a sexist joke, one holds him responsible for laughing; and when one is disappointed that a friend doesn't sympathize with one's failure on an exam, one is disappointed at the fact that the friend isn't feeling the appropriate emotion, not that the friend has failed to cultivate the appropriate dispositions that would lead her to sympathize with one. All this suggests that perhaps the intuition that agents are only responsible for what they control is too coarse-grained to account for responsibility for emotions; perhaps the intuition derives from thinking of certain paradigms of responsibility, such as intentional action, which are of course quite different from emotions (and other passive mental states for which agents are responsible, such as judgments that an action is wrong or cruel, which do not seem to be states that are under the direct control of an agent any more than emotions are).

So perhaps what accounts for the tension between our pretheoretical intuitions about responsibility and emotions is a slide from the phenomenal passivity of emotions--the fact that emotions, like sensations, seem to happen to agents--to the fact that therefore they are not the proper candidate for responsibility. One way to reconcile these conflicting intuitions would be to jettison the notion of control altogether, and to deny that responsibility requires control. Yet this intuition is so firmly embedded in our thinking about responsibility, and it seems so nicely to capture, for example, the difference between responsibility for voluntary and involuntary actions, that this seems like a bad idea. Similarly, while one might be inclined to reject the idea that emotions are passive states and instead to construe them as active states--the ancient Stoics and more recent philosophers, such as the late Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum, following the Stoics, take emotions to be judgments, and hence active, not passive states--this solution, too, seems unsatisfying. Not only does it do violence to the concept of an emotion, it's not even clear that most judgments are indeed active states that are up to us or under our control. (To be sure, certain judgments, such as the conclusions of practical reasoning, or intentions, might seem to be the result of deliberate intentional activity, but even they, arguably, are not directly up to us in the way that it is up to an agent to move her hand.)

One way to reconcile these apparently conflicting intuitions, and to preserve both the idea that responsibility is connected to control and that emotions are passive states, would be to rethink the notion of control necessary for responsibility. Rather than construing control along the lines of the control that one exercises over one's bodily movements, one might instead, following T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe To Each Other, take the control necessary for responsibility to consist in rational control: in other words, and very roughly, on such an account, an agent is responsible for some state (whether it be an action or a mental state), just in case that state bears rational relations to one's judgments about reasons. So one is responsible for some state, or event, just in case it reflects an agent's (conscious or unconscious) rational judgments. Hence, one is responsible for moving one's leg to kick the cat, but is not responsible for the movement of one's leg when it is struck by a doctor's hammer, because only in the former case can the action be traced back to some intention. Similarly, one is responsible for one's judgment that kicking the cat is cruel, or for one's pleasure in a friend's failure (_Schadenfreude_), because such mental states, although passive and not subject to direct intentional control, do reflect attitudes and judgments that one has, whereas, by contrast, sensations, although also not subject to direct intentional control, do not bear such rational relations--unlike emotions or intentions, they aren't reason-sensitive states. (In "Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life," Ethics 115 [2005]: 236-271, Angela Smith develops just this sort of approach, drawing on Scanlon, although without--if I remember correctly--engaging directly with emotions.)

While I find this approach to responsibility for emotions congenial, it nevertheless leaves open questions. Perhaps it works for certain higher-order, or thought-laden emotions, but what about emotions like the startle response, or more 'primitive' emotions, of the sort shared by human beings and animals? One possible response is that 'primitive emotions' are merely homologous in human beings and animals, and that actually they are quite different. But this doesn't seem right. The 'primitive' emotions don't seem to be sensitive to reasons in a way that higher-order emotions are. That is to say, whereas one's anger at having one's foot stepped on will dissipate when one learns that the person who stepped on one's foot was pushed, it's not clear that such rational considerations can affect the startle response or the feeling of disgust. Even if one knows that the dog's bark is worse than his bite, and that, in fact, it's just a little yapper without much of a bite at all, one may nevertheless feel fear and be on edge when one hears the yapping as one walks by the dog's yard. So perhaps some emotions are more like sensations after all, and not only not under our direct control, like all emotions, but aren't reason-sensitive states either. Perhaps one can't, after all, simply say that agents are responsible for their emotions; perhaps one should, instead, say that agents are responsible for certain kinds of emotions. But then one wonders what accounts for this difference. And given that human beings are continuous with other animals, and, consequently, that there isn't a sharp distinction between those emotions that we share with other animals and those that are the province of rational animals alone, then, one might wonder, what relation, if any, is there between 'primitive' and more refined emotions?

All this is to say that the question of responsibility for emotions goes very deep indeed, and opens up both new aspects of responsibility, as well as new questions about emotions themselves.

Question Is a person responsible for their emotions, for the way they feel? Can they ever be held accountable for feeling a certain way? Accepted:October 21, 2010

Question Is a person responsible for their emotions, for the way they feel? Can they ever be held accountable for feeling a certain way?

Accepted:
October 21, 2010