Chapter 1 - Emotions and Judgements of Value

Summary

Introduction

Martha Nussbaum argues that emotions should be seen as a constituent part of the system of reasoning. Emotions are not simply ‘the fuel that powers the psychological mechanisms of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself. Emotions are discriminating responses to perceptions of value and are permeated with intelligence. Once we acknowledge that emotions entail true or false judgements and appraisals that serve as guides to ethical choice, we cannot ignore them in accounts of ethical judgement. The development of an adequate theory of the emotions should take their cultural origins, childhood past and operations in daily human life into consideration.

In the first part of her book Nussbaum develops a theory of the emotions using Marcel Proust's description (1982) in his Remembrance of Things Past, namely, that emotions are ‘geological upheavals of thought’. The varied experiences of our emotional life are well explained by a view that has its genesis in the ideas of the ancient Greek Stoics. They held that emotions are forms of evaluative judgement. We share the world with other external objects (things and persons) and we judge these objects according to their importance for our own flourishing. However, since these objects are external and since we cannot control all external objects, the judgement will also include an acknowledgement of one’s own vulnerability to an object in particular and to the outer world in general.

Need and recognition

A meticulous analysis of the variety of her emotional reactions to her mother's unexpected death made Nussbaum realise that the Stoics’ account of cognition should be expanded. She thus proposes an explanatory theory of the emotions in which she argues that an emotion always includes an appraisal or a judgement. In the case of emotions, the thought of an object is always in combination with a thought of the object's importance to one’s own wellbeing. Emotions should thus be regarded as cognitive-evaluative.

The term ‘cognitive’ simply refers to ‘processing and receiving information’. The appraisal of the object is a spontaneous, immediate cognitive reaction or thought, which may include a correct or incorrect judgement. She distinguishes between emotions and bodily appetites, such as hunger and thirst, and objectless moods such as irritability and endogenous depression. This broad distinction seems to be accepted not only in everyday life, but also in Western and non-Western philosophies.