ABSTRACT
As we advanced through the dialectical thickets of desire-based accounts in the last chapter, we presented and assessed an account of emotions that conceives of them as representations of the satisfaction or frustration of our desires. In discussing the reasons for being dissatisfied with this account, our attention was once again drawn to the intimate links between emotions and values. These links have as a matter of fact been stressed since antiquity, and almost all of the theories we shall examine in the remainder of this book conceive of the emotions as being or involving types of evaluations. In the present chapter, our aim is to motivate and clarify this fundamental idea. We shall first explain some of the substantial roles values may play in connection with the emotions and, second, examine whether the nature of values allows them to play these roles.
That there are intimate links between emotions and values seems to be obvious. Ordinary language corroborates the existence of such links insofar as to each emotion type there corresponds an evaluative predicate, one often derived from the name of the emotion in question, as when we say of something that it is ‘shameful’, ‘disgusting’, ‘annoying’, ‘contemptible’, ‘admirable’, ‘amusing’, or the like. According to the idea that emotions are types of evaluation, having an emotion amounts to apprehending the object of the emotion in evaluative terms. Feeling shame or amusement consists in apprehending a given object as, respectively, shameful and amusing. We shall see and assess in the chapters to come the more specific analyses of emotions as types of evaluations that have been put forward. For present purposes, bear in mind that what philosophers mean by ‘values’ or
‘evaluative properties’ differs to some extent from the way ‘value’ is commonly used. First, philosophers speak of positive and negative values. Thus this term does not only denote things like beauty, courage, and solidarity, but also ugliness, cowardice, and selfishness. Second, values are not only conceived of as abstract political or personal ideals one is committed to upholding – liberty, fraternity, equality, loyalty, etc. – but as properties exemplified by concrete objects, situations, or events, and we shall shortly turn our attention to what this ultimately amounts to.
