Virtue and Emotion

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Emotions are ubiquitous. Everyone has them. Everyone wants more of some kinds and less of others. Sometimes they help us act in line with our plans and intentions. Sometimes they interfere. Every day we make decisions (sometimes split second and unconscious ones) about whether to trust our feelings or to doubt and plow past them. Is this ever done in a principled way? We make decisions and judgments all the time about our emotions but how often are we able to articulate explicitly why we might trust our emotions in one situation but not another? Different virtue traditions offer conflicting perspectives on how we ought to govern our emotions such as cultivating emotions to be in harmony with one’s practical judgment as Aristotle thought or repressed because they tend to interfere with reasoning as the Stoics thought. These longstanding debates touch every aspect of daily life, yet there is still a surprising amount of disagreement over what emotions tell us and how we should manage them. This course serves as an introduction to virtue ethics with a special focus on various emotions and their role in evaluative reasoning and well-being. Core questions guiding our inquiry will be: * What are emotions? * How do they affect our attention and judgment? * How ought the virtuous person rely on their emotions? * What value do different emotions have?