Morality and emotions
(Martha C. Nussbaum)

 

Emotions such as anger, fear, grief, envy, compassion, love and jealousy have a close connection to morality. Philosophers have generally agreed that they can pose problems for morality in a variety of ways: by impeding judgment, by making attention uneven and partial, by making the person unstable and excessively needy, by suggesting immoral projects and goals. The place of emotions in moral theories depends on whether they are conceived of merely as impulses without thought or intentional content, or as having some sort of cognitive content. Plato argued that emotions form a part of the soul separate from thought and evaluation, and moved, in the course of his writings, from a sceptical view of their contribution to morality to a more positive appraisal. Aristotle connected emotions closely with judgment and belief, and held that they can be cultivated through moral education to be important components of a virtuous character. The Stoics identified emotions with judgments ascribing a very high value to uncontrolled external things and persons, arguing that all such judgments are false and should be removed. Their cognitive analysis of emotion stands independent of this radical normative thesis, and has been adopted by many philosophers who do not accept it.
  Modern theories of emotion can be seen as a series of responses and counter-responses to the Stoic challenge. Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche all accepted many of the Stoics’ normative arguments in favour of diminishing the role played by emotions in morality; they differed, however, in the accounts of emotion they proposed. Focusing on compassion or sympathy, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Schopenhauer all defended the role of some emotions in morality, returning to a normative position closer to Aristotle’s (though not always with a similarly cognitive analysis).
  Contemporary views of emotion have been preoccupied with the criticism of reductive accounts that derive from behaviourist psychology. By now, it is once again generally acknowledged that emotions are intelligent parts of the personality that can inform and illuminate as well as motivate. Philosophers’ views have been enriched by advances in cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology. Feminist accounts of emotion differ sharply, some insisting that we should validate emotions as important parts of moral character, others that emotions shaped by unjust conditions are unreliable guides.

 

1 Morality and conceptions of emotion

 

Emotions are usually considered to be distinct both from bodily appetites, such as hunger and thirst, and from objectless moods, such as irritation and endogenous depression (see Emotions, nature of). Major members of the class have traditionally been love, anger, grief, fear, envy, jealousy, guilt and pity (compassion) (see Love; Moral sentiments; Rectification and remainders). Some philosophers have adopted an account of these experiences that makes them rather close to appetites after all: emotions are surges of affect or energy in the personality, unreasoning movements that push people into acting without being very much connected to their thoughts about the world. This view is frequently connected to the idea that emotions derive from an animal part of our nature, often by thinkers who do not have a high regard for animal intelligence.
  Seen this way, emotions figure in morality only as forces that either advance or impede the purposes of moral judgment or will. They can be trained and to some extent conditioned, but in a relatively mechanical manner. Thus they will never be what makes a virtuous character virtuous, though a virtuous person can take pride in having exercised an appropriate degree of discipline over them (see Self-control; Virtues and vices §3).
   Other philosophical theories about emotions hold that they involve interpretation and belief. An emotion such as grief is not simply a mindless surge of painful affect: it involves a way of seeing an object, an appraisal of that object as important, and the belief that the object is lost. Fear involves the belief that bad events are impending, and that one is not fully in control of warding them off. Such theories hold that changes in the relevant beliefs entail changes in emotion: one who learns that danger is not really at hand will cease to fear. When we scrutinize the beliefs involved in the emotions, it emerges that they are of two sorts: beliefs about what is happening in the world (Is the person really dead? Is the enemy really at hand?) and evaluative beliefs (Is the person really worth getting upset about? Is the danger serious?). Many of the evaluative beliefs derive from social teaching, some of it moral in nature. We learn what insults are worth getting upset about, what losses are serious, what damages are to be avoided.
  Seen this way, emotions become intelligent parts of the moral personality, which can be cultivated through a process of moral education (see Moral education §3). Such a process will aim at producing adults who not only control their anger and fear, but experience anger and fear appropriately, towards the appropriate objects at the appropriate time in the appropriate degree. Merely self-controlled persons look to these theorists like those whose moral development is incomplete or imperfect. If we find them hating foreigners, but controlling their behaviour towards them, we will judge that there is some further moral work they should be doing before they can claim to be fully virtuous. 

2 Emotions and character-based theories

  All moral theories have some occasion to talk about emotions, but some focus on their cultivation more than others. Theories that focus on the calculation of utility will see emotions as forces that either promote or eclipse such calculations and the appropriate acts (see Utilitarianism). Theories that focus on duty can have a substantial place for an account of emotion, since emotions will be seen as motives that either promote or impede action in accordance with duty (see Deontological ethics; Duty). But if the account of duty is not supplemented with an account of virtue, it will not be clear how these motives should be integrated into the personality. Kant’s theory of virtue (1797) shows us that a duty-based view need not neglect emotions as elements in virtue (see Kant, I. §10; Emotions, philosophy of §3). Since this theory has a noncognitive conception of emotion, and also a rather negative view of the contributions made by emotion, it gives emotions a rather restricted role; but there is nothing to prevent a virtue-theory such as Kant’s from giving more positive attention to the cultivation of emotion.
  Theories of character based on Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, however, have been Western philosophy’s most substantial sources for thought about the proper cultivation of emotion within morality (see Emotions, philosophy of §2). Aristotle’s norm of a reasonable person is one whose character is infused completely by the correct reasons for action, which have shaped all their motives and attitudes. Because he aims to describe the cultivation of a whole person and way of life, rather than simply to prescribe a list of duties, he has ample scope for discussing emotional self-shaping.

3 Ancient Graeco-Roman theories of emotion: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics

  Plato argues in the Republic that the soul contains three distinct parts: the calculative part, the appetitive part, and the ‘spirited’ part (see Plato §14). This last part seems to be where Plato locates emotions such as anger, grief and fear. Although his account is cryptic, he suggests that the emotions differ from appetites in their responsiveness to changes in belief, and also in the fact that they are less brutish and more discriminating. But he refuses to construe them as belonging to the ‘part’ that performs evaluative reasoning. In normative terms, the Republic argues that all pity, fear and grief should be prevented from developing by a process of moral education that teaches young people that there is nothing for a good person to fear or grieve over; anger is apparently allowed to remain, but is channelled for military purposes. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s account of the emotional ‘part’ seems more positive: focusing on emotions of reverence and awe, he shows how this element in the personality makes a crucial contribution to virtue and understanding.
  For Aristotle, emotions are combinations of a feeling of pleasure or pain with a belief (or perhaps a more rudimentary cognitive attitude, a seeing x as y). Fear, for example, combines painful feeling with the thought that there are bad events impending. The combination is not casual: the pain is pain at the thought of that impending danger. Therefore, changes in belief will change emotions. (Aristotle makes these arguments in Rhetoric, showing how an orator can manipulate the passions of the audience.) In normative terms, Aristotle argues that the virtuous person is one who has attained balance and appropriateness in emotion as well as action. A person who completely lacked anger at an insult to loved ones, for example, would be culpably deficient; but excessive anger is strongly criticized, and the condition to aim for is ‘mildness of temper’ (see Aristotle §§22-4).
  Epicurus and his school (including the Roman poet Lucretius) presented impressive accounts of several emotions, in particular the fear of death (see Epicureanism §13). They argued that this fear poisons individuals’ lives and causes social distress. Since they agreed with Aristotle about its cognitive basis, they argued that it could be completely removed by teaching people that death is not a bad thing for the person who has died.
  The Greek and Roman Stoics were the great passion theorists of antiquity. They produced impressive analyses and taxonomies of the passions, arguing powerfully in favour of the view that they are essentially evaluative judgments that ascribe to things or persons outside our control great importance for our flourishing (see Stoicism §19). This analysis is continuous with Aristotle’s, but it goes a step further, denying that there is any bodily feeling over and above the cognition that is essential to the identity of a particular emotion. This apparently counter-intuitive view is rendered plausible by extensive consideration of the power of thought to transform the personality.
  One might accept this analysis of emotion and still hold, with Aristotle, that many of the judgments involved in emotions are true and appropriate: when one’s child dies, for example, it is right to think that something of enormous importance has been lost. The Stoics, however, held that all the judgments involved in all the passions are false, because all ascribe too much importance to external things and persons, making people dependent on the world for their happiness. To this argument they added several others: emotions weaken the personality, robbing it of force and integrity; they make one prone to excessive and violent acts; and, finally, they are not necessary to motivate good acts, which can be chosen out of duty alone.
  Their conclusion is thus that the emotions should be extirpated from human life. Moved especially by the damage done by anger in social life, and convinced that there is no getting rid of anger without getting rid of the attachments to externals that are also involved in love and grief and fear, they came to the radical conclusion that we can stop cruelty and violence only by cultivating utter detachment from everything that used to matter to us. They then strove valiantly to show that we can motivate an active concern for humanity without relying on emotion. Removing emotions is not expected to be like removing false beliefs about more trivial matters: because the evaluations involved are transmitted early through social and parental teaching, they have become deeply habitual, and can be changed, if at all, only through a lifetime of patient effort. Their hope was that as this effort is exercised with greater success, the personality as a whole would become enlightened.
  Because their analyses are so compelling and humanly rich, and because they focus with convincing examples on the depredations of emotion in politics, writers such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius continue to make this radical thesis compelling. 

4 Modern supporters of the Stoic normative thesis

  The Stoics set the agenda for early modern moral theories of emotion. Most thinkers, though not all, accept some version of the cognitive Stoic analysis of passion; they then differ sharply over the normative thesis. Descartes (1649) modified the Stoic analysis to fit into his divided account of mind and body, but his definitions of the passions are related closely to those of the Stoics; his normative judgments, while not quite as severe, are similar (see Descartes, R. §10).
  Spinoza accepted the Stoic analysis and the radical normative thesis, holding, with Seneca, that philosophical therapy can free us from bondage to our emotions (see Spinoza, B. de §9). He gave the normative programme new urgency by insisting that all strong attachments are essentially ambivalent: we love an external person or thing because we find that it assists our efforts to flourish. But anything that can assist us, so long as it is separate from us, can also frustrate us; so all love is mixed with hate. Like the Stoics, Spinoza held that there is a type of joy that is not an emotion in the sense that it is not based on a overvaluation of the significance of externals; it is the contemplative joy with which one regards the deterministic system of the universe as a whole. Like the Stoics, Spinoza identified that order with god; thus the good state is designated the ‘intellectual love of god’.
  Kant did not accept the Stoic analysis of the passions. Oddly enough, he presented no arguments against it, and no substantial analysis of his own; but he plainly conceived of passions as pre-rational, impulsive and undiscriminating. Thus, the only role he saw passions playing in virtue was a rather mechanical one, as forces that either aid or impede duty. In general, he thought they impede it, and he therefore conceived of virtue as a kind of strength of will, in which the will maintains its control over the potentially disrupting passions.
  Kant was well aware of the Stoic normative view. To a great extent he shared it, praising the Stoics for cultivating detachment from passion, and for promoting active beneficence rather than relying on compassionate emotion. But he showed considerable ambivalence, and was unwilling to dismiss compassionate emotion utterly. He understood that it may be difficult to motivate beneficence without this emotion, that motives of duty by themselves may not suffice. He therefore urged people to seek out experiences in which they will naturally be moved to compassion, so that their beneficence will have the strength of passion behind it.
  A surprising ally of the Kantian position was Nietzsche (1881), who objected to pity as an emotion that insults the dignity of the suffering person by implying that this is a person who really needs the things of this world. Equipped with a rather romantic picture of strength and self-sufficiency, Nietzsche believed that the truly strong can rise above life’s ills through will, and therefore do not need compassion, grief or fear. Citing the Stoics, Spinoza and Kant as his predecessors, Nietzsche denounced the Christian/democratic tradition of praising compassion as a basic social motive. 

5 Modern anti-Stoics: the defence of sympathy

  Opposition to the Stoic normative thesis began in the ancient world, with Augustine, who insisted that the goal of self-sufficiency was an inappropriate one for a Christian to pursue. Characterizing the ideal Stoic wise man as obtuse in his detachment from longing and pain, he concluded: ‘The fact that something is tough does not make it right; and the fact that something is inert does not make it healthy.’ Subsequent Christian views have agreed in characterizing moral error as due to wrongly placed love, and in making love itself an essential ingredient of the cure. Dante’s Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1313-21) famously ends with the visionary experience of a harmony of emotion and will. Because emotional error is understood (in an anti-Stoic fashion) to be rooted in the body itself and its sexuality, it is expected that this perfected state will arrive only in paradise, after the purifications of purgatory. Most important Christian thinkers make pity or compassion central parts of Christian life, arguing that these emotions are appropriate expressions of and responses to our vulnerable and imperfect earthly condition.
  The eighteenth century saw the flowering of a number of distinct approaches to the sympathetic emotions. Although Christian views did not cease to exert an influence, the notion of original evil was contested increasingly in favour of a view of natural goodness in which basic emotional equipment played a salient role. Hutcheson and Hume made the capacity for sympathy a basic part of human nature (see Hutcheson, F. §2; Hume, D. §3). Hume (1739/40) made many valuable observations about the role of sympathy in motivating moral conduct (see Moral motivation §6). But his conviction that desires and passions are basically noncognitive, and that reasoning is capable only of devising means to ends set by desire, led him to short-change many aspects of the passions that even his own concrete analyses at times acknowledge. Although he connected passions with a characteristic object, he seems not to have treated the connection as essential to the identity of the passion: a passion is simply a particular type of impression caused by the object. Hume’s enormous influence has led to the sharp split between passion and cognition that characterizes much modern Anglo-American thought (see Emotions, philosophy of §§3-4).
  Rousseau gave the emotion of pitié, compassion, a central role in social morality (see Rousseau, J.-J. §4). Describing the education of young Émile (1762), he shows that the experience of being astonished and pained at the pain of another is an essential foundation for all society. Compassion leads us to recognize the vulnerability that all humans share, and to appreciate the pain that disasters of various types cause others. Thus, the emotion leads us to be sceptical of distinctions that situate some people as high above others, their fortunes as vastly more secure.  Rousseau evidently thought that emotions, involving complex imagining and thought, convey moral information that it would be difficult to obtain in any other way. Accepting a version of the Stoic idea of original human innocence, he seems to have held that excesses in self-love derive from experience of unequal social conditions.
  Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provides one of the modern tradition’s most detailed analyses of the moral contributions of emotion. Heavily indebted to the Stoics, Smith develops a richly detailed account of the cognitive content of passions such as anger and sympathy. He differs with the Stoics on the normative question, taking up a more Aristotelian view about attachments to family and loved ones. His device of the ‘judicious spectator’, modelled on Stoic conceptions of self-scrutiny and conscience, gives the moral agent a way of estimating the point of propriety in passion: we are to ask what a concerned spectator, not personally involved, would feel at the events, and this will help us identify bias and irrationality deriving from our own personal immersion. Despite his positive view of sympathy and other emotions, Smith thought them inconstant and unreliable as guides to social choice, since he observed that we are most easily moved by events closest to ourselves: an earthquake in China means less to a person than an injury to his own finger (see Smith, A. §§2-3).
  Another philosopher who defended the fundamental role of compassion in morality was Schopenhauer (1840). Criticizing Kant, he argued that all genuinely moral action must be grounded in other-directed emotion (see Schopenhauer, A. §6). Imagining compassion as involving a mysterious union of the self with the other, he leaves the reader unclear as to precisely why it is not, therefore, a form of self-concern. Schopenhauer’s account had, nevertheless, tremendous influence in a culture dissatisfied with duty-based views. 

6 Contemporary views: influences from psychology and anthropology

  The middle of the twentieth century saw the rise of noncognitive views of emotion in both behaviourist psychology and in Freudian psychoanalysis (see Behaviourism, methodological and scientific; Freud, S.; Psychoanalysis, post-Freudian). Philosophers such as Anthony Kenny, Robert Solomon, Robert Gordon, William Lyons, Ronald de Sousa and Michael Stocker have by now demonstrated the poverty of such accounts and our need for some type of cognitive view (see Emotions,nature of §2). (Kenny also in the process offered cogent criticisms of Hume’s elusive and influential account.)
  During this period, cognitive psychology was itself evolving. By now, psychologists no longer expect to be able to give purely behavioural accounts of emotion in terms of stimulus and response, and most of the dominant accounts hold that emotions are a form of intelligent interpretation in which an animal takes in news of how things are in the world with respect to its most important goals and projects. Richard Lazarus (1991) has argued that emotion’s evolutionary contribution is best explained this way: emotions give animals information that is essential to survival. Psychologists generally agree that we have reason to credit many animals at least with the capacity for complex appraisals suited to this account of emotion. Their work has enriched the philosophical debate.
  At the same time, anthropologists have produced fascinating accounts of the role played by social norms in shaping the emotion-categories of different societies. These accounts raise questions about the extent to which an emotional repertoire is malleable; at least with respect to specific sub-types and internal demarcations within categories, there appears to be considerable cross-cultural variation in emotion-types, and also, presumably, at least some variation in emotional experience (see Moral sentiments §3; Morality and ethics §4).
  This returns us to the moral problem with which the Stoics grapple: for if we see that emotions are learned with the learning of social norms, and we are convinced that our society is not perfect, then it might be unwise to trust the emotions too much as guides to conduct. One society described by anthropologist Jean Briggs (1971), the Utku Eskimos, actually embodies a relatively successful Stoic programme for the elimination of anger, thus prompting us to ask how we should think about our own goals and moral projects. 

7 Feminist accounts of morality and emotion

  Women have frequently been devalued on the grounds of being emotional and making decisions by consulting emotion. This has led many feminist thinkers to defend the contribution that emotions might play in moral reasoning, arguing that it is the (male) denigration of emotion that is mistaken. Philosophers such as Annette Baier, Lawrence Blum, Sara Ruddick, Virginia Held and Nel Noddings have defended a normative ethical view in which care for others plays a central role, and have seen this as a way of promoting feminist goals (see Feminist ethics).
  On the other hand, feminists who consider the social origins of the appraisals involved in emotion have reasons for doubt. If women have a great propensity to care for others, is this always a good thing? Is it not the case that men have standardly urged women to see themselves as care-givers, rather than as sources of worth and agency in their own right? J.S. Mill (1869) argued that even women’s desire to please men has a social origin and is a legacy of women’s subordination. This line of argument has been continued recently in the work of Catharine MacKinnon (1989), who argues that women’s emotions and desires are in significant ways created by inequality and injustice, and that we should therefore be highly sceptical of the claim that women’s instincts of care are always trustworthy and morally valuable.
  It is not necessary to choose between these extremes. We can hold that many emotions are valuable parts of the moral life without giving implicit trust to any that have been shaped in imperfect and unjust social conditions - judging, with Aristotle and Adam Smith, that emotions can be good guides as elements in a life organized and examined by critical reflection. 

See also: Emotivism; Family, ethics and the

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM 

References and further reading

  Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) Nicomachean Ethics, trans. with notes by T. Irwin, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985, books II-IV.(On the role of passions in virtue.)

Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) Rhetoric, trans. G. Kennedy, Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, New York: Oxford University Press.(Illustrates Aristotle’s view that, since emotions are combinations of a feeling of pleasure or pain with a belief, changes in belief will change emotions.)

Baier, A.C. (1994) Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Discusses the role of care in moral theory.)

Blum, L. (1980) Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, London: Routledge.(Defends the role of compassion in moral judgment.)

Briggs, J. (1971) Never in Anger, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Anthropological study of a society that removes anger.)

Dante (1313-21) Divina Commedia, trans. J. Ciardi, The Divine Comedy, New York: E.P. Dutton, 3 vols, 1989. (Highly influential medieval Christian account of love, which ends with the visionary experience of a harmony of emotion and will.)

Descartes, R. (1649) Les passions de l’âme, trans. The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 1, 1984.(Analysis of passions in accordance with mind-body dualism.)

De Sousa, R. (1987) The Rationality of Emotion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.(Excellent account of the cognitive content of emotions and its evolutionary role.)

Gordon, R. (1987) The Structure of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Valuable philosophical analysis of emotion/cognition relationship.)

Held, V. (1993) Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.(Care ethics and social justice.)

Held, V. (ed.) (1995) Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

(Collection of different feminist viewpoints on care ethics.)

Hume, D. (1739/40) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1978.(Influential account of the relationship between emotion and action.)

Kant, I. (1797) Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, trans. J.W. Ellington, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1964; repr. in Immanuel Kant: Ethical Philosophy, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983.(Discussion of role of emotions in virtue; critique of pity as moral emotion.)

Kenny, A. (1963) Action, Emotion and Will, London: Routledge.(Influential and devastating critique of behaviourist and Humean conceptions of desire.)

Klein, M. (1921-45) Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-45, London: Tavistock, 1985.(Central psychoanalytic account of emotion and morality.)

Lazarus, R. (1991) Emotion and Adaptation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(Critique of behaviourism and account of the field’s return to cognitive conceptions of emotion by leading cognitive psychologist.)

Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols.(Basic sources for Hellenistic views of morality and emotion, with fine commentaries.)

Lutz, C. (1988) Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.(Valuable anthropological study of role of social norms in emotion.)

Lyons, W. (1980) Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Well-argued defence of a cognitive-Aristotelian account.)

MacKinnon, C. (1989) Feminism Unmodified, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Argues that women’s subordination to men has shaped their emotions and desires.)

Mill, J.S. (1869) The Subjection of Women, in J. Gray (ed.) On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.(Argues that women’s emotions are shaped by unjust social conditions.)

Nietzsche, F. (1881) Morgenröte, trans. R. Hollingdale as Daybreak, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.(The central locus for Nietzsche’s attacks on pity.)

Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.(Argues that women’s experience of maternal care should be the basis for ethics; opposes abstract principles.)

Nussbaum, M. (1994) The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.(Discussion of ancient Graeco-Roman views of passion and morality.)

Oatley, K. (1992) Best-Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Valuable account by a cognitive psychologist.)

Plato (c.386-380 BC) Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989.(Describes the ascent of love to contemplation of the immortal form of beauty.)

Plato (c.380-367 BC) Republic, trans. G.M. Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992, book IV. (Account of the structure of the soul and the role of the passions in virtue.)

Plato (c.366-360 BC) Phaedrus, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995.(Illustrates how emotions play a positive role in connecting the person to beauty and truth.)

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) Émile: ou, de l’éducation, trans. A. Bloom, Emile: or, On Education, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, book IV.(Contains a fundamental account of compassion’s role in social morality.)

Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.(Balanced account of the moral importance of maternal care.)

Schopenhauer, A. (1840) Über die Grundlage der Moral, trans. E.F.J. Payne, On the Basis of Morality, Providence, RI and Oxford: Berhahn Books, 1995.(Argues that all proper moral action must be grounded in other-directed emotion.)

Seneca, L.A. (before AD52) On Anger, in J.M. Cooper and J. Procopé (eds) Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.(Influential account of the removal of anger as social goal.)

Sherman, N. (1989) The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(Excellent account of role of emotion in virtue.)

Smith, A. (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. (Rich account of balance in passion, and of role of sympathy in morality.)

Solomon, R. (1976) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company; repr. 1993.(Influential philosophical account of emotion.)

Spinoza, B. (1677) Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner), trans. E.

Curley, Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.(Analyses our ‘bondage’ to passions as cause of strife, urges a therapeutic programme to remove passions.)

Stocker, M. (1996) Valuing Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Valuable analysis of evaluative dimensions of emotion.)