ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an account of unfairness that can be applied to emotions. It presents three important features of unfairness: (1) that an unfair emotion is morally objectionable in some way; (2) that the unfairness is conditional on the specific circumstances, and not, for example, about all instances of a certain type of emotion; and (3) that unfairness is inherently interpersonally directed at another person. Finally, the chapter discusses how unfair emotions can constitute a directed wrong. As a first approach, it discusses commonly held accounts of directed wrongs as violations of duties that correlate with someone’s moral rights or claims but dismisses this approach by arguing that we cannot have duties to have or not have a certain emotion. The alternative approach proposed at the end of the chapter is to conceive of directed wrongs as something for which the person committing the wrong has to account for to the person against whom the wrong is directed. It is the topic of the subsequent chapters to show that this type of accountability can apply to unfair emotions.
