Chapter 6 - Affects and passions

Summary

By providing a psychological account of affects and passions in terms of feeling and inclination, this chapter makes sense of Immanuel Kant's moral assessment of each. It offers some general overview of Kant's empirical psychology, and explains the psychology of affects and passions. Two key claims about affects and passions are present in Kant's earliest lectures on anthropology. Like affects, passions are illnesses of mind that shut out the sovereignty of reason, and just as affects prevent the comparison of one feeling with others, a passion is an inclination that prevents reason from comparing it with the sum of all inclinations in respect to a certain choice. With respect to Kant's seeming affirmation that one can be, to some degree, morally responsible for affects, one needs to distinguish between moral responsibility for actions motivated by affects, and responsibility for the affects themselves.