Desert-Based Emotions

As a complex virtue, justice seems to encompass, among other things, certain desert-based emotions that are at least developmentally – and arguably also, morally – important for an understanding of justice. It would be premature to assume at this point that these emotions can be morally justified and that the virtue of justice necessarily requires them. The purpose of this chapter is a more preliminary one: to explore the philosophical reasons for the rising interest in desert-based emotions and to offer a conceptual overview of some prototypical emotions of this sort. More specifically, in the present section, I examine the writings of three philosophers, Robert Solomon, Samuel Scheffler and Peter Strawson, that, from different perspectives, shed light – directly or indirectly – on the nature and moral/political salience of desertbased emotions. This section thus explains the considerations which have, in fact, motivated the recently growing interest in desert-based emotions as germane to justice; one might, of course be independently interested in such emotions without recourse to the role that they play (or do not play) in justice. Subsequently, in Sections 3.2 and 3.3, which form the more substantial part of this chapter, I identify and analyse two important classes of desert-based emotions having to do with the deserved and undeserved fortunes of others and of oneself, respectively. The reader will not reap from my exploration a definitive answer to the question whether those emotions are, generally speaking, virtuous – that awaits Section 4.3 – but should, I hope, at the end of this chapter have an enriched understanding of what kind of virtues they would have to represent, in order to really be virtuous. Why are emotions relevant for justice? Robert C. Solomon, in one book

and a couple of articles (1994; 1995; 2001), presents us with various answers to that question. While the reasons given in those answers are all interrelated and mutually supportive, I will divide them up loosely into conceptual, psychological and moral reasons. The conceptual reasons must be understood against the backdrop of

Solomon’s general stance on morality and the emotions, a stance that he has defended in various earlier works. Solomon is, after all, one of the earliest and most outspoken frontrunners of the cognitive theory of emotions, according to which beliefs or judgements – which are, in principle, amenable to reason, cultivation and regulation – form an essential part of emotions, or are even (as Solomon used to emphasize at the beginning of his crusade) the emotions

themselves (see my earlier discussion in Section 1.3). Theorists have through the ages (pro Plato but contra Aristotle) misdescribed the emotions as gatecrashers in the realm of reason, and emotionally inspired beliefs as disruptions of rational thought, but in doing so they wrongly tore the subject matter of morality in two. We must now revise this all-too-common conceptual account and return to a moral-sentiment theory of morality which considers the basis of morality to be found in our natural dispositions to have certain emotions. In the field of justice, for example, we need to acknowledge that this virtue does not have its origins in lofty Socratic insights but arises rather from the ‘promptings of some basic emotions’: some sympathetic, such as compassion, others antipathetic, such as envy; emotions which make justice ‘both necessary and possible’ (Solomon, 1995, pp. 31, 200). These conceptual and general insights pave the way for Solomon’s

psychological reasons which have to do with both the origin and the nature of justice concerns in human beings. It is, in his view, simply a matter of developmental fact that the idea of justice consists originally of a constellation of feelings, which alone provide the psychological ground in which grand philosophical theories of justice can take root (ibid., p. 30). Any sound psychological account of the emergence of justice concerns in children will thus show us that the first appearance of a sense of justice is expressed in terms of a small class of emotional responses to the perception of certain resource-distribution situations and that, rather than disappearing or decreasing in importance, this earliest nucleus of feelings sustains justice concerns into adulthood, remaining essentially the same as when it first appeared in early infancy (for a concise overview of the relevant psychological literature, see, for example, Charlesworth, 1992). To think of pure rationality, divested of any emotional input, as a requirement for a correct understanding of justice, one must have become disengaged from those very facts about human existence which distinguish us, for instance, from the goddess of justice who is not only permanently blindfolded but, more importantly, above nature. Solomon’s radical naturalistic view of justice leaves various questions

unanswered about the genealogy of justice qua psychological disposition(s). The standard options which come to mind when exploring his view would be: (a) an economic rational-choice model of justice internalization – mirroring social-contract theory in political philosophy – according to which children learn to believe in justice in order to attain some other goals which are both prior and external to justice, (b) a more Freudian-inspired emergent-motive theory of justice as a primordial drive or (c) an evolutionary account of justice as an adaptive mechanism, which might be suggested in conjunction with (a) or even (b) but could also be held separately from those. Solomon’s psychological reasons for emotionalizing justice seem to be more or less neutral with regard to these options – into which I will delve more thoroughly in Section 4.1 – or at least not to exclude any of them.