ABSTRACT
The rational sentimentalist will hold that the concept of "dangerous" is the concept of "meriting or warranting fear"; by the same token, they will hold that for something to be shameful is for it to justify or make rational the feeling of shame. The common-sense intuition that emotional suffering can be reasonable or unreasonable is best supported by looking more closely at a platitude about the nature of emotion. This chapter argues that there are good reasons to think that emotional suffering is reason-responsive, because emotional suffering is an essentially evaluative phenomenon. It shows that none of these are reasons to think that physical suffering is an essentially evaluative phenomenon, and that there will be, as a result, no good reason to think that it is reason-responsive. The chapter also shows how this puts pressure on a new and upcoming theory in the philosophy of pain, namely evaluativism.
