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i
From Psychology to Morality

ii
iii
John Deigh

Essays in Ethical Naturalism
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–087859–7
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
In loving memory of Sarah Lynn Hill

1948–2014
vi
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Sources xi
Introduction: Naturalism in Ethics 1

one Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 13
two William James and the Rise of the Scientific Study
of Emotion 38
three Freud 59
four Psychopathic Resentment 83
five Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision 101
six Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments? 129
seven Williams on Practical Reason 150
eight Sidgwick’s Conception of Ethics 179
vi
viii Contents
nine Moral Ideals 195

ten The Emotional Significance of Punishment 219
eleven Punishment and Proportionality: Part 1 231
twelve Punishment and Proportionality: Part 2 249
Index 271
ix
Acknowledgments
I tried out most of the essays in this volume before various audiences at con-
ferences, meetings of professional organizations, departmental colloquia, and
research institute workshops. I am grateful for the interest that was shown and
for the many helpful comments I received at these events. I have benefited
too from the input of friends, colleagues, and students who read one or more
of these essays in draft. I wish, particularly, to thank Daniel Brudney, Brad
Cokelet, David Dolinko, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Kane, Herbert Morris,
Martha Nussbaum, Larry Sager, Michael Stocker, and Paul Woodruff. My
discussions with them over the years about my ideas have been immensely
valuable. Similarly, years of discussions with Jonathan Adler and Robert
Solomon, and a memorable seminar on emotions that Solomon and I jointly
taught, were enormously helpful to me. Unfortunately, their untimely deaths
prevent me from also thanking them on this occasion.
The three essays on punishment with which the collection concludes
came about from my participation in a working group on the problems of rein-
tegration into society that confront felons who have served significant time in
prison. The group was sponsored by the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics
at John Jay College, and I am grateful to Jonathan Jacobs, Director of the
ix
x
x Acknowledgments
Institute, and the other members of the group for the rich and illuminating
discussions we had about these problems.
I wish to thank Peter Ohlin, my editor at Oxford University Press, for his
interest and support as well as his help in putting this collection together.
Abigail Johnson and Isla Ng also helped with the Press’s editing and pro-
duction of the collection, and I thank them too for their assistance. Sarah
Shamburg assisted me in preparing the manuscript for production and
securing the needed permissions for reprinting the previously published
essays. I am very grateful to her for her help. I am grateful too for the institu-
tional support in the form of research leaves, funds, and assistance that I re-
ceived from the University of Texas at Austin.
I had the good fortune early in my career to study with Herbert Morris,
who supervised my Ph.D. dissertation. Many of the seminal ideas in my work
came from our conversations and his guidance during the years I worked
on the dissertation. Since then he has continued to be a friend and mentor
whose encouragement and support, comments and criticism, I treasure. Not
long ago he introduced me to the depth of thought in Poussin’s paintings.
My choice of Spring as cover art for this collection was made in tribute to a
wonderful friendship of more than forty years.
xi
Sources
1. “Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology” was first

published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Peter Goldie, ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). I presented a version of it at the Fifth
Annual Royal Conference on Ethics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008.
2. “William James and the Rise of the Scientific Study of Emotion” is a contri-
bution to a special section on William James’s theory of emotions in Emotion
Review 8 (2016): 56–61. It is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.
3. “Freud” is a considerably revised and expanded version of the article with

the same title in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Simon Critchley and
William Schroeder, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). Parts are reprinted
by permission of Wiley-Blackwell.
4. “Psychopathic Resentment” first appeared in Self-Evaluation: Affective and

Social Grounds of Intentionality, Anita Konzelman Ziv, Keith Leher, and Hans
Bernhard Schmid, eds. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011) and was based on my contri-
bution to a conference on self-evaluation at the University of Basel in 2009. It is
reprinted with permission of Springer.
xi
xi
xii Sources
5. “Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision” is a revised version of my

contribution to Morality and the Emotions, Carla Bagnoli, ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011). It originated as a paper I gave at the “Emotions in
Context” conference at the University of Chicago Law School in 2008.
6. “Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?” appeared in Forms of

Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency, Neil Roughley
and Thomas Schramme, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). It
was my contribution to a conference on fellow feeling at the University of Essen
in 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
7. “Williams on Practical Reason” has not been previously published. An earlier

version was my contribution to a memorial conference for Bernard Williams at
the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for Ethics at Georgia State University in 2006.
8. “Sidgwick’s Conception of Ethics” was first published in Utilitas 16

(2004): 168–183. It originated as my contribution to an American Philosophical
Association symposium honoring the work of Jerome Schneewind, which took
place at the Pacific Division Meeting in 2003. It is reprinted by permission of
Cambridge University Press.
9. “Moral Ideals” appeared in Rationality, Rules, and Ideals: Critical Essays on

Bernard Gert’s Moral Theory, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Audi, eds.
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). I presented part 1 of this essay at
a conference on Bernard Gert’s Moral Theory at Dartmouth College in 1999 and
later at an author-meets-critics session at a meeting of the American Society for
Value Inquiry in 2001. It is reprinted by permission of Rowman and Littlefield.
10. “The Emotional Significance of Punishment” was published in Emotion

Review 8 (2016): 56–61. It is my contribution to a special issue on law and
emotions edited by Susan Bandes and Terry Maroney. It is reprinted by permis-
sion of Sage Publications Ltd.
11. “Punishment and Proportionality: Part 1” was published in Criminal Justice

Ethics 33 (2014): 185–199. It is a product of my participation in the working
group on prison practices and conditions in liberal democracies organized by the
Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at John Jay College, CUNY. It is reprinted
by permission of Cambridge University Press.
12. “Punishment and Proportionality: Part 2” appeared in Criminal Justice Ethics

35 (2016): 20–36. Like essay 11, it is a product of my participation in the working
group on prison practices and conditions in liberal democracies organized by
xi
Sources xiii
the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at John Jay College, CUNY. The last
part is taken from my contribution to the Fred Berger Prize symposium on Kit
Wellman’s article “The Rights Forfeiture Theory of Punishment” at the American
Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meeting in 2015. It is reprinted by
permission of Cambridge University Press.
xvi
xv

xvi
1
Introduction: Naturalism
in Ethics
Naturalism has a long tradition in ethics. Arguably, it goes back to the

beginnings of moral philosophy when Protagoras held forth at Callias’s
salon on the origins of justice and conscience in human beings. The speech
he delivered, notwithstanding its fabular character, was a piece of natural
history about the emergence in human life of cities and the practices that
kept them from breaking up and returning their citizens to an existence of
scattered and vulnerable families.1 Its pivotal thesis was that all citizens of a
city were equipped with justice and conscience just as other animals were
equipped with great strength or great mobility. These traits were therefore
unlike the skills of craftsmen, each of which only a small number of specially
trained citizens possessed. Indeed, that they were possessed by all or nearly
all citizens was crucial to the city’s stability and cohesion. Socrates, in asking
Protagoras to back up his promise to young men who would put themselves
under his tutelage that he would teach them how to excel at being citizens,
had expressed skepticism about the possibility of teaching such virtue. He
was certain that no one had expertise in looking after a city comparable to
the expertise of skilled craftsmen, and he was equally certain that only those
1. Plato, Protagoras 320c10–328d3.
1
2
2 Introduction
with such expertise could teach a craft. His mistake, according to Protagoras,
was due to his looking in the wrong place for teachers of virtue. Because all
or nearly all citizens were equipped with justice and conscience and all or
nearly all exhibited these traits in their daily lives, any citizen, with the ex-
ception of the few who had turned against the city, were suitable teachers. In
fact, Protagoras maintained, one often found ordinary as well as distinguished
citizens in their engagement with the young teaching them virtue as natu-
rally as they taught them Greek.
Naturalism reached its zenith in ancient philosophy with Aristotle’s eth-
ical writings. Aristotle’s program in ethics was to answer through the study
of human psychology the questions that Socrates had asked about how one
should live and about the nature of virtue. A deep understanding of the parts
and workings of the human soul, Aristotle believed, would show what a good
life consisted in and how through the development and exercise of the in-
tellectual and moral virtues it could be achieved. To be sure, Plato too un-
dertook to answer the same Socratic questions through a study of human
psychology. He too thought that our coming to understand the parts and
workings of the human soul would show us which life was the best for human
beings and how one could acquire the virtues necessary to live it. And Plato,
needless to say, was no naturalist. The difference between the two, however,
is that Plato, unlike Aristotle, attributed to the rational part of the soul powers
that gave it access to an intelligible world whose constituents were immu-
table and eternal and that made the soul itself immortal. Aristotle opposed
Plato on these points. While he held that the rational part of the soul distin-
guished human beings from other animals, he understood the human soul
to function entirely within the natural world. Its rational part belonged to the
natural world no less than the parts that he identified as common to all ani-
mals. His answers to Socrates’s questions thus came entirely from a study of
natural phenomena.
The naturalist tradition in ethics went into hibernation during the
Middle Ages. Its dormancy was due to the dominance of Christian thought
throughout the period. Christian thought had merged with Neoplatonism in
the last century of the Roman Empire, and this merger, abetted by Augustine’s
making the doctrine of free will one of its fixtures, effectively excluded nat-
uralism from moral philosophy for the millennium that followed. Indeed,
the doctrine of free will, which Augustine had advanced to absolve God
of any responsibility for human sin, was the most important contributor to
the silencing of naturalism during the medieval period. The rediscovery of
Aristotle’s ethical treatises in the thirteenth century initiated some movement
towards a change in this situation. The great influence of these treatises on
3
Introduction 3
Aquinas led to his promoting natural reason as a source of knowledge in-

dependent of revelation, and his doing so in turn prepared the way for the
tradition’s revival. But it took more than three centuries of philosophical
study after Aquinas’s death and the rise of modern science to bring it about.
The most important early modern contributors to the tradition’s re-
vival were Hobbes and Spinoza. Neither man was a friend of Platonic forms
or their progeny, and both opposed the doctrine of free will that had long
since become Christian dogma. Hobbes thought the very notion of a free
will was incoherent. Spinoza thought free will was an illusion. Both pursued
ethics—the science of virtue and vice, as Hobbes called it—on the basis of
the naturalist-cum-egoist theories of human psychology that they expounded.
As a consequence of their radical views, both were targets of vigorous attacks
by the defenders of religious orthodoxy, Judaic as well as Christian in
Spinoza’s case.
Philosophical resistance to Hobbes’s thought was also fierce. Spinoza, by
contrast, spent years in the philosophical wilderness until late in the eight-
eenth century, when several prominent German thinkers began to take him
seriously. In Britain, the impact of Hobbes’s philosophy was immediate. The
debates over egoism that his ethics ignited produced two generations of ra-
tionalist, particularly Platonist, responses. In time, though, it also produced a
new set of defenders of naturalism in ethics. The greatest of these was Hume,
whose Treatise of Human Nature surpassed in the depth and subtlety of its
theory of human psychology all previous works in British moral philosophy.
Hume, like Hobbes, rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of freedom
of the will. At the same time, he went beyond Hobbes in explaining how
human actions could be effects of antecedent causes compatibly with their
being freely chosen. He then turned to expounding a theory of ethics based
on his naturalist psychology. This exposition too went beyond Hobbes, not
only in its rejection of egoism, but also in its account of justice as a virtue
whose origins lay in the natural history of human beings. Hobbes had built
his account of justice on the idea of the natural condition of humankind,
but he did not understand this idea historically. The natural condition of
humankind, in Hobbes theory, was the condition human beings would be
in if they lived without benefit of a government, and such a condition could
be the result of a civil war, as Hobbes feared, as well as the original condition
of savages. Human behavior, in his view, would be the same in either case.
Hume’s use of natural history to explain the origins of justice cancelled
the advantage rationalist opponents of naturalism had seemingly held given
the difficulty of reducing justice to either self- interest or benevolence.
Nonetheless, naturalists were not alone in using natural history to support
4
4 Introduction
their theories. It did not belong exclusively to their toolkit. The outstanding
example of its use outside of naturalism is Rousseau’s account in his Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality of the birth and growth of human injustice and
cruelty.
Rousseau agreed with Hume in taking justice to have originated in
the conventions of property. Unlike Hume, however, who explained these
conventions as the consequence of cooperative schemes that human beings
invented for their mutual advantage, Rousseau explained them as the conse-
quence of consent to the appropriation of land by those who worked it. This
difference between the two views is crucial. For Rousseau, in making con-
sent to being excluded from the use of land by another’s declaring it his own
the origin of justice, implied that justice and consequently injustice derived
from the operations of the human will. Of course, if Rousseau had thought
that a man’s will was itself determined by natural forces, his view would not
have been crucially different from Hume’s. But Rousseau held exactly the
opposite view:
I see nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine . . . I perceive exactly the
same things in the human machine, with this difference, that in the operations
of the brute, nature is the sole agent, whereas man has some share of his own op-
eration, in his character as a free agent. The one chooses and refuses by instinct,
the other from an act of free will.2
Rousseau’s project was to explain the wretchedness of the human condition

as entirely the work of men. He reiterated his theme in the opening sentence
of Emile, “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things;
everything degenerates in the hands of man.”3 It is hard to think of a better
coda for Augustine’s doctrine.
The brilliance of Rousseau’s natural history lay in its developmental story
of how humans began their sojourn on earth as innocent, solitary beings with
simple desires for the necessities of self-preservation and then, as the result
of their entering into stable and complex social relations of increasing extent
and complexity, acquired new desires that eventually made them capable of
both moral virtue and moral vice, with a decided tendency towards the latter.
What is striking about this history is its implication that human beings create
the social structures that make it possible for them to achieve moral virtue
or sink into moral depravity. Morality, in other words, on this history, is an
artifact of human culture, and therefore human beings, rather than possess a
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and
Discourses, G. D. H. Cole, trans. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1959), p. 207.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 37.
5
Introduction 5
conscience and moral sensibilities innately, acquire them through accultura-

tion. While this view may have had earlier exponents, no one had expounded
it more forcefully or imaginatively than Rousseau.
Of course, the view itself poses no threat to naturalism in ethics. After all,
it is open to defenders of such naturalism simply to disagree with Rousseau
about the origins of morality. They could, as against Rousseau, explain con-
science and moral sensibilities as being among our inherited powers and
dispositions. No doubt, many followers of Darwin would explain them in this
way. Nonetheless, a growing disenchantment with teleological explanations
of human nature, accelerated by the appearance and acceptance of Darwin’s
theory, increased the attractiveness of Rousseau’s thesis that morality is
wholly an artifact of human culture as an alternative to the supposition that
conscience and moral sensibilities are part of man’s natural endowment. It
remained then for thinkers in the naturalist tradition to construct theories
of the development of conscience and moral sensibilities that substantiated
Rousseau’s thesis.
The two most influential theories of this sort were Nietzsche’s and
Freud’s. Both men expounded thoroughly naturalist accounts of the workings
of the human mind. Their understanding of these workings, however, was
decidedly different from that of the associationist psychology that Hume
had expounded and bequeathed to nineteenth-century British empiricism.
Nietzsche and Freud based their accounts of the mind’s workings, not on
principles of association, but rather on the dynamics of unconscious conflict
among instinctual forces, and they used these dynamics to explain the for-
mation in human beings of a conscience and moral sensibilities. Nietzsche
weaved his explanations into the natural histories he offered in On the
Genealogy of Morals. Freud made his explanations central to the individual
psychology he developed and then fit them to a historical account of the
emergence of conscience in human beings. Both took up Rousseau’s theme
of representing the emergence of conscience as involving a transformation
of human nature. Of the two theories, Freud’s had the farthest reach in its
influence on subsequent thought. And to the extent that the view of morality
as an artifact of human culture was widely accepted, his theory did more to
advance naturalism in ethics than any other theory in psychology or social
science put forward in the last century.
The essays collected in this volume belong to the naturalist tradition
whose course I have just sketched. The first ones are studies in psychology
that bear on questions of ethics. Before one can take up the central question
of ethics concerning how to live, one must come to some understanding
of the place of desires and emotions in our lives and how reason works to
6
6 Introduction
direct their promptings. On a naturalist understanding of human nature,

desires and emotions are the ultimate springs of our action, while reason
provides us the intelligence we need to act well. The first essay is a critical
survey of the major concepts of emotion in modern philosophy and psy-
chology from the older, empiricist concepts of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries to the present. The discussion highlights the importance
of the theories of William James and Sigmund Freud first in overthrowing
these older concepts and then in shaping later conceptualizations of the
phenomena. The next two essays focus on James’s and Freud’s theories re-
spectively. The essay on James explains how his concept of emotion derived
from Hume’s distinction in the Treatise between calm and violent passions
and then argues for the unsuitability of James’s concept for ethics and, in-
deed, for any field in which emotions are conceived of as motives. I con-
clude that recent attempts in neuroscience and philosophy to resurrect
James’s theory are dead-ends. The essay on Freud has two movements. In
the first I trace the development of his thought from his original theoretical
work on the neuroses exhibited in hysteria and obsessive behavior to his
construction of a general theory of human personality and its disorders. In
the second, I explain the philosophical import of his theory as a contribu-
tion to the naturalist tradition in Western thought and how it made signifi-
cant advances over its predecessors.
The two essays that follow deal obliquely with the doctrine of free will.
Their aim is to vindicate the strategy for dealing with the doctrine that P. F.
Strawson pursued in “Freedom and Resentment,” his landmark address to
the British Academy. Strawson’s strategy was to give a naturalist account of
our practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions. Such an
account, if successful, would negate the proposition that a person is morally
responsible for an action only if the action resulted from his or her exercising
a free will, and Strawson used a study of certain emotions that he called “reac-
tive attitudes” to show how one could give such an account. He thus supplied
naturalism with a powerful argument against one of the main bulwarks of the
doctrine. His address has had enormous impact on subsequent philosophical
treatments of the question of free will. Many philosophers, writing under the
influence of his argument, have drawn their accounts of moral responsibility
from considerations of the reactive attitudes. Yet despite this impact, his argu-
ment has won few converts to naturalism. The reason is that it has been poorly
understood. The misunderstanding is twofold. First, philosophers who have
taken themselves to be following Strawson commonly mischaracterize the
way he understood resentment. Second, the same philosophers have failed to
grasp the crucial role of naturalism in his argument, and, consequently, their
7
Introduction 7
accounts of moral responsibility do not threaten views on which moral respon-

sibility implies an exercise of free will or at least do not threaten such views
in the way Strawson saw his argument as doing. “Psychopathic Resentment”
corrects the first misunderstanding. “Reactive Attitudes Revisited” corrects
the second.
The sixth and seventh essays in the collection shift the focus to nat-
uralist accounts of moral judgment and practical reason. The sixth
essay examines the place of our capacity for empathy in making moral
judgments. Hume’s ethics is commonly interpreted as taking empathy—
what Hume called “sympathy”—to be a necessary factor in our making
moral judgments, and its role in his theory supports his thesis that moral
judgments are inherently motivational. Against Hume, I argue for a more
capacious understanding of moral judgment. This more capacious under-
standing fits Piaget’s account of how moral judgment develops in children,
and Piaget’s account, I further argue, offers a better framework than Hume’s
for investigating the motivational character of moral judgments. The sev-
enth essay is a partial defense of Bernard Williams’s view that the source of
an agent’s reasons for action is, in every case, some element in the agent’s
set of desires, emotions, evaluative dispositions, inclinations, and the like.
Williams’s view is defensible when one takes reasons for action as facts an
agent considers when deliberating about what to do, given an Aristotelian
notion of deliberation. It is indefensible when one takes reasons for action
to be facts an agent considers when determining whether doing the action
would be or was justified. Much of the controversy that Williams’s view
stirred, including some of the most virulent objections to it, is due to con-
fusion of these two different ways of understanding reasons for action.
After explaining the confusion, tracing its origins to the beginnings of the
philosophical literature on reasons for action in Anglo-American philos-
ophy, and dispensing with the objections that were based on it, I defend
Williams’s view against objections, Christine Korsgaard’s, in particular,
that were not based on it.
The eighth essay also focuses on practical reason. Sidgwick’s conception
of ethics is its specific topic. Sidgwick, in his masterwork The Methods of
Ethics, proposed to treat each of the main theories of ethics as being rooted
in a rational procedure for determining what one ought to do. In short, he
conceived of ethics as the study of practical reason. He took egoism, utilitar-
ianism, and dogmatic intuitionism as the main theories to be examined with
the aim of showing that they could be unified. Such unification requires
that the theories agree on the sense in which ‘ought’ is to be understood
in moral imperatives of the form A ought to φ, where A is the name of an
8
8 Introduction
individual and φ is a verb of action. When egoism is formulated as a naturalist

theory, however, the sense ‘ought’ has in these moral imperatives is different
from the sense it has in the moral imperatives of dogmatic intuitionism.
The reason is that on such a formulation, on Hobbes’s formulation, for in-
stance, the starting assumption is that a brute desire for one’s own’s happiness
predominates among the moving forces in one’s life. Consequently, on this
formulation, moral imperatives of the form A ought to φ are hypothetical in
Kant’s sense. By contrast, on dogmatic intuitionism, the sense ‘ought’ has
in moral imperatives of this form is categorical in that, unlike hypothetical
imperatives, the conditions of their validity do not include A’s having a desire
that A would satisfy by φing. To be sure, a naturalist formulation of egoism
was not Sidgwick’s preferred formulation. He preferred a rationalist formula-
tion. Its starting assumption was that reason prescribed one’s own happiness
as the ultimate end of action. But he allowed the possibility of a naturalist for-
mulation. The upshot of his doing so, as I argue, is that his project of unifying
the three theories was foredoomed.
The ninth essay is a contribution to a volume of critical essays on Bernard
Gert’s moral theory. It is chiefly a critical discussion of Gert’s treatment of
moral duties and moral ideals. The central aim of Gert’s theory is to represent
morality as a set of precepts that all rational and impartial persons would favor
everyone’s following. Construction of such theories was common in ethics
in the latter half of the twentieth century, and Gert’s construction is an espe-
cially clear and uncomplicated example of this type of theory. Gert divided
the set of moral precepts into rules and ideals, though in truth he could have
called them all rules and divided them into those that were meant to con-
strain action and be enforceable by punishment and those that were meant to
promote action without the threat of punishment. He thus conceived of mo-
rality as a set of rules regulating behavior. This conception too was common
to the type of theory his exemplified.
The thrust of my criticism is that Gert’s is an impoverished conception
of morality. Morality is as much concerned with our inner life as it is with
regulating behavior. It contains, for instance, a duty of benevolence as well
as duties not to kill and to keep one’s promises. Gert thinks the very notion
of a duty of benevolence is problematic. Moral duties, he declares, corre-
spond to rules that either forbid or require that certain actions be done, and
requiring general benevolence would mean, he then argues, that a person
would have to act benevolently all of the time towards everyone, which is
impossible. If, however, one takes morality to guide the will or prescribe
dispositions and not merely to regulate behavior, the problem Gert alleges
does not arise. On this conception of morality, the duty of benevolence is the
9
Introduction 9
duty to maintain a good will or a benevolent disposition towards all, which

means that what is required to fulfill it is a commitment of the will and not
an action. Such a commitment, I argue, is certainly possible. I conclude by
sketching an account of moral ideals on which they are understood as models
or exemplars and not rules.
The collection closes with three papers on punishment. The standard
treatment of the topic in philosophy has for decades taken legal punish-
ment as the paradigm case. Accordingly, philosophers writing on punish-
ment have commonly understood its infliction as an institutional response
to a breach of an institution’s rules. My treatment of the topic in these three
papers rests, instead, on a broader understanding of punishment. On this
understanding, punishment is as much at home in a natural context as
an institutional one. The broader context is that of a stable social group.
Outside of an institutional context, punishment is pain or loss inflicted by a
member of the group on another member who is equally or less powerful in
retaliation for the latter’s having displeased or angered the former. Within
an institutional context, it is pain or loss inflicted by an agency formally
empowered to enforce the rules of the institution in retaliation for their
having been violated. In either case, it works to preserve the group’s social
order, which is either natural or civil according as the relations of power
among the members are unmediated or mediated by rules. This under-
standing covers not only legal punishment but also punishment that one
country inflicts on another in retaliation for the latter’s having attacked its
citizens or property, punishment that mob bosses inflict on underlings in
retaliation for the latter’s having betrayed them to another mob or to some
government authority, and punishment that husbands or wives inflict on
their spouses and parents inflict on their children in retaliation for being
angered by their spouses or children. All three papers take as their point of
departure this broader understanding of punishment.
The first of the three, “The Emotional Significance of Punishment,”
explains how punishment works to preserve a group’s social order. I identify
three functions that it has in this respect. It deters those inclined to act in
ways that disrupt the order from doing so; it strengthens the disposition to
maintain the order of those who are not so inclined by assuring them that dis-
ruptive acts are not tolerated; and it provides a means by which its recipients
can repair the social relations they had ruptured. The explanation of the last
function, punishment’s reparative function, proceeds from an account of
the dynamics of these social relations that reprises the discussion of reac-
tive attitudes in the collection’s earlier essays. Punishment has these three
functions, not by design, but by virtue of how retaliatory behavior within a
01
10 Introduction
social group between members of equal power or by more powerful members

towards less powerful ones works to maintain the group’s stability.
The final two essays deal with questions of justice with regard to making
the severity of punishment in the penal law match the gravity of the offense
for which it is inflicted. The requirement of justice that the severity of pun-
ishment match the gravity of the offense is a requirement of proportionality.
The first of the two essays examines whether a legislator’s or a legislative
assembly’s determining the severity of punishment for an offense with the
aim of optimally fulfilling the deterrent function of punishment would meet
this requirement. This way of determining the severity of a punishment for
a given offense, I argue, yields harsher punishment than that of aiming at
preserving the social order, and for this reason it tends to yield punishments
that are disproportionately severe. The second of the final two essays takes up
the strict retributivist’s way of determining the severity of a punishment for a
given offense. This way of determining such severity, I argue, is morally prob-
lematic. It represents the view that justice requires retaliation for its own sake,
and such a view contravenes principles of humanity basic to Western ethics,
specifically, our general duty of benevolence towards human beings. At the
same time, punishment is not similarly problematic when it is inflicted for a
larger social end than mere retaliation, when it is inflicted, for instance, to
promote public safety or preserve social order.
Oxford University Press solicited two scholars to review this collection.
Both made several good suggestions for improving its presentation. One of
them, noticing the affinity of some of my views to Hume’s, suggested that
I identify the kind of naturalism the collection’s essays represent as a version
of sentimentalism. This suggestion, however, overstates the affinity of my
views to Hume’s. Hume’s naturalism combines sentimentalism with an op-
position to rationalism on the question of reason’s power to motivate action.
I share Hume’s opposition to rationalism. The seventh essay, the essay on
Williams’s account of practical reason, makes clear my acceptance of his
view that reason lacks the power to motivate action on its own. I do not,
however, share his subscription to sentimentalism. Yet given the tendency
of scholars in a field to place a set of ideas in a familiar niche so as to better
understand their complexity, it may be helpful to explain the separability of
these two aspects of Hume’s naturalism.
Sentimentalism is a thesis about how human beings tell the difference
between virtue and vice. Specifically, it is the thesis that our affective
responses to people’s behavior rather than our cognitions of its character are
what ultimately determine whether we find it virtuous or vicious. “Morality,”
Hume said in summarizing his sentimentalism, “is more properly felt than
11
Introduction 11
judg’d of.”4 Hume rested this thesis on his account of what he called indirect
passions, the sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, in particular.
These passions are built into the human frame, which means that as soon
as a child’s affective capacities have developed enough to experience them,
the child is conscious of virtue and vice. They are, in this respect, like visual
impressions of color. That is, a child becomes conscious of different colors as
soon as its visual powers are sufficiently developed to be capable of discrimi-
nating among them. Hume, indeed, affirmed the analogy between colors and
virtues, colors and vices.5 One can reject this analogy, though, and therefore
sentimentalism while at the same time opposing, as Hume did, rationalism
on the question of reason’s power to motivate action. Thus the two aspects of
his naturalism come apart.
In fact, I do not accept the analogy. I do not believe it can be sustained.
My discussion in the first essay of problems with the perceptual model of
emotions explains why.6 The gist of the discussion is that one cannot tell
the difference between virtue and vice unless one understands what would
make a feature of a person’s character a virtue and what would make it a vice.
It is not sufficient, contrary to Hume, that the motives one discerns behind
people’s actions please or displease one when one views them disinterestedly.
One must also have the concepts of benefit and harm so as to understand
how actions that spring from such motives tend to benefit or harm the agent
or others. By contrast, one does not need to understand anything about colors
to see them. The failure of the analogy is evident in the difference between
how one teaches a child the words for different colors and how one teaches
it the words for different values. On the account of the latter teaching that
I favor, it serves to retarget the child’s desires and emotions away from some
of the objects they have as inherited dispositions and towards others that did
not previously arouse them. Such teaching corresponds to the training of
desires Aristotle takes to be necessary to one’s acquiring the moral virtues.
The account, then, fits a naturalist theory of ethics on which our telling the
difference between virtue and vice is a matter of cognition and not feeling
compatibly with reason’s lacking the power to initiate action.
4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. with rev. by P.
H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 470.
5. See David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning Principles
of Morals, 3rd ed., L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. with rev. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), p. 294.
6. I give a more extended critique of Hume’s analogy in an earlier essay “Emotions and
Values,” which appears in my collection Emotions, Values, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
21
12 Introduction
At the same time, the account yields an explanation of Hume’s thesis

that morality is essentially practical. This result may strike some as untenable
for any naturalist theory on which our telling the difference between virtue
and vice is a matter of cognition. One cannot, so it is commonly thought,
side with Hume in opposing rationalism on the question of reason’s power to
initiate action without having either to reject Hume’s thesis or to deny, as he
did, that we know the difference between virtue and vice through cognition.
Yet the choice between these two options is a false dilemma. One can de-
fend a naturalist account of ethical evaluation without being forced to decide
between them.
Words for values enter our vocabulary when we are young through
teaching intended to reinforce or adjust the targets of the desires and emotions
the liability to which we inherit from our simian ancestors. The aim of the
teaching is the same as that of teaching us to live well as civilized human
beings and members of the human society into which we are born. Our grasp
and use of these words continue to guide us long after childhood when they
have ceased to refer only to things that spark desire and arouse emotion either
innately or through teaching. Though we learned the difference between
danger and safety in learning what to fear and what inspires confidence,
our ability to recognize things and situations as dangerous or safe outstrips
our disposition to feel fear or confidence—to be afraid or confident—in the
presence of those things once we have mastered the words and learned how
to navigate our lives. We know that a gun if loaded or a car if speeding at high
velocity is dangerous, and we thus take care in how we handle the gun or drive
the car. We do this without having to be afraid of the former’s discharging or
the latter’s crashing. Nor do we think, when we recognize the danger, that
it would be rational or fitting to feel fear or that we have reason to feel it or
ought to feel it. The thought guides our action, though the danger is not an
object of fear. Philosophers who require a definition of the word ‘danger’, a
verbal account of its meaning, that explains why applying the word to things
and objects guides action are destined to be forever trapped in Wittgenstein’s
fly bottle. I believe the account of ethical evaluation I give shows the way out.
13
Concepts of Emotions
in Modern Philosophy
and Psychology
Two major themes characterize the study of emotions in modern philosophy

and psychology. One is the identification of emotions with feelings. The
other is the treatment of emotions as intentional states of mind, that is, states
of mind that are directed at or towards some object. Each theme corresponds
to a different concept of emotions. Accordingly, the study has divided, for
the most part, into two main lines of investigation. On one, emotions are
conceived of as principally affective states. The concept on which this line
proceeds is feeling-centered. On the other, emotions are conceived of as prin-
cipally cognitive states. The concept on which this line proceeds is thought-
centered. Both concepts reflect revolutionary changes in the theoretical study
of emotions that began to take place at the end of the nineteenth century and
continued for several decades into the twentieth. The two main lines of in-
vestigation come out of objections to the concept of emotion that dominated
philosophy and psychology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
revolution in our thinking about emotions begins with the abandonment of
this older concept.
13
41
14 From Psychology to Morality
I
The older concept is a fixture of empiricist psychology in the modern tradi-
tion. Empiricists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the mind as a
single field of thought and feeling, fully conscious and transparent to itself. Its
chief inhabitants are distinct ideas and impressions. The latter include visual,
auditory, and tactile impressions as well as other sensations of external things.
The former are products of these impressions. They are either simple or com-
plex, and if complex, then one can always understand them as combinations of
simples. In Hume’s wonderful simile, impressions and ideas are “like players
in a theater who successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away,
and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (1978, p. 253).
The class of impressions includes more, though, than sensations of external
things. It also includes both localized and unlocalized feelings of pleasure
and pain. The latter are the emotions. They are in Locke’s words “internal
sensations” (1975, pp. 229–230) and in Hume’s “secondary” or “reflective”
impressions (1978, p. 275). The basic ones are simple impressions of pleasure
or pain whose connection to ideas, physiological activity, and conduct is ei-
ther that of cause to effect or conversely. Specifically, on Locke’s view, these
internal sensations result from ideas of good and evil; on Hume’s their im-
mediate causes are impressions of pleasure and pain along with, in some
cases, ideas of external things. At the same time, on the empiricist’s view, we
can conceive of these basic emotions in abstraction from their typical causes
and effects, just as we can conceive of simple sensations of color or sound.
Abstracted from their causes and effects, according to classical empiricism,
emotions are discrete, episodic, and purely affective states of consciousness.
The traditional empiricist concept of emotions came under a withering
attack by William James. The attack was part of James’s broadside, in the
famous ninth chapter of The Principles of Psychology, against traditional
empiricism’s general understanding of mental states as either wholly simple
states or complex states composed of these simples. Hume’s simile nicely
presents James’s target. The empiricist understanding of mental states, James
observed, presupposed that “sensations came to us pure and single” (1950,
vol. 1, p. 233), that they recurred at different times in our experiences of the
world, and that the great mass and constantly changing flow of thought in
our minds was due entirely to the combination and recombination of these
simple sensations and their corresponding simple ideas. None of these three
suppositions, James argued, can be sustained. Sensory experience is no more
made up of individual units of sensation than rivers are made up of indi-
vidual drops of water. Our thought, James argued, naturally appears to us as
15
Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 15
“sensibly continuous,” like a stream (1950, vol. 1, p. 237). It can no more be

broken down into mental atoms whirling in a void than its correlative brain
activity can be broken down into discrete, concatenated events. Secondly, this
stream of thought is Heraclitan. One never, James insisted, had the same sen-
sation twice. Indeed, sensations, according to James, are unrepeatable items
of experience. Because each sensation corresponds to some modification of
the brain, there could be no recurrence of the exact same sensation. For that
to happen, the second occurrence would have to occur “in an unmodified
brain,” which is “a physiological impossibility” (1950, vol. 1, pp. 232–233).
Thirdly, if, contrary to Locke’s supposition, there are no simple, recurrent
sensations, then there are no corresponding simple, recurrent ideas either.
Consequently, human thought does not break down into elementary units of
feeling and thought. The continuous change in what we feel and think does
not consist in the combining and recombining of the same set of simple, im-
mutable sensations and ideas.
We are led to think otherwise, James observed, by our habit of identifying
sensations of sight, sound, taste, and so forth by their objects. We speak of the
same sounds when we hear the same thing on different occasions, a musical
note, say, or a bird’s chirp. Inattentive to variations in our sensory experience,
we say that the sensations are the same when, in fact, there is no individual
sensation on any of these occasions and therefore no relation of identity
holding between sensations on different occasions. What is the same is the
object of sensation. When we listen to the performance of a sonata, for ex-
ample, we hear the same notes repeated at different intervals and in different
arrangements, yet it would be wrong to think that each time we heard some
note during the performance, we had a distinct auditory sensation that was
separate from and a successor of an equally distinct auditory sensation we had
in hearing the previous note and that was identical to an auditory sensation
we had when we last heard this note. The experience of hearing the sonata
does not consist of separate, individual sensations of sound experienced se-
quentially and repeated at different intervals. It is only the tendency to con-
fuse these sensations with their objects that leads us carelessly to think of the
experience in this way and to speak of having the same sensation when we
hear the same note.
We are not, of course, liable to confuse emotions with their objects, for
we do not identify them with their objects. Fear, after all, is fear whether
it is fear of spiders or fear of earthquakes. Nonetheless, emotions too are
misconceived on the traditional empiricist understanding of them as either
simple, recurrent states of mind or compounds of such states. “Pride and
humility,” Hume tells us, at the very beginning of his discussion of these
61
passions, are “simple and uniform impressions” (1978, p. 277). So too, he says,
are the other passions (though later, in book II of the Treatise, he identifies
several passions, respect, contempt, and amorous love, as mixtures of two
other passions (1978, pp. 389–396)). The traditional empiricists’ misconcep-
tion, in this case, is due, not to their mistaking emotions for their objects,
but rather to their modeling emotions on external sensations. Thus, Locke,
having begun his study with simple, external sensations, then introduces
pleasures, pains, and passions, which arise with external sensations, either
through impact on the body of some external object or with our thoughts of
good and bad. The latter are emotions, and we experience them, Locke says,
as internal sensations. Similarly, though more elegantly, Hume identifies ex-
ternal sensations as primary impressions, the simple ones being the starting
points of his investigations, and then, when he takes up emotions, identifies
them as secondary impressions. The understanding of emotions, in either
case, therefore inherits the mistakes James criticized in the traditional empir-
icist treatment of external sensations. And James then went on in c hapter 25
of The Principles to level the same criticisms of the traditional empiricists’ un-
derstanding of emotions. “The trouble with the emotions in psychology,” he
wrote, “is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. So
long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like
the old immutable species in natural history, so long all that can be done with
them is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points, and effects”
(1950, vol. 2, p. 449).
James’s objection to the traditional empiricist concept of emotions was
thus continuous with his objection to the traditional empiricist understanding
of mental states generally. To identify each type of emotion as a distinctive,
recurrent inner sensation or feeling, James argued, is to misunderstand the
nature of emotional states of mind. At the same time, James accepted the tra-
ditional empiricist characterization of emotions as feelings. The feelings that
he identified with emotions, however, were feelings produced by changes
in the body. Emotions, according to James, were those feelings that arose
as the result of the physiological and neurological changes that typically
occurred as the result of the perception of some exciting fact. As James put
it, “My theory . . . is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of
the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the
emotion” (1950, vol. 2, p. 449). By so identifying the emotion with these
feelings, James reversed the commonsense order of events in an episode of
emotion. For common sense has it that what excites the emotion is the per-
ception of a fact, and the emotion then causes the bodily changes that ex-
press it. According to common sense, a person perceives a charging bear,
17
for example, feels fear, blanches, and runs, whereas on James’s account, the
perception of the charging bear causes the person to blanch and run, and
the feeling of these bodily movements is the fear. In effect, then, on James’s
account, the emotion does not cause the behavior that expresses it or the
behavior it is commonly said to motivate. Rather such behavior is the direct
effect of the perception of some fact, and feeling the bodily changes the be-
havior consists in is the emotion. Emotions, on James’s account, are therefore
epiphenomenal. They are the products of bodily changes, but they do not
themselves cause any action.1
II
James’s identification of emotions with bodily feelings is one of two major
innovations behind the abandonment of the traditional empiricist con-
cept of emotion. The other emerged in treatments of emotion that oppose
the epiphenomenalism in James’s account. James, to be sure, regarded his
reversing the commonsense account of the relation of emotions to their be-
havioral expressions as an advance in the study of emotions. But not every
contributor to the study did. Some stuck with common sense. On the
commonsense account, emotions are springs of action. They have motiva-
tional force. In reversing common sense, James implicitly denied that they
had such force, and this consequence of his program is the rub. For it is not
easy to give up citing emotions to explain actions.2
The traditional empiricist concept of emotions supported such
explanations. On traditional empiricism, emotions are motives of actions.
Specifically, they arise from thoughts or perceptions and immediately move
their subjects to action. A good example is Hume’s account of the emotions
1. In taking James’s rejection of the commonsense order of events in an episode of emotion

as affirmation of the view of emotions as epiphenomenal, I do not mean to suggest that James
held that all mental states were epiphenomenal. In The Principles of Psychology, chapter 5,
James appears to reject the latter view on grounds of common sense. Hence, his express
challenge to common sense in his theory of emotions implies that he is making an exception
in this case to the rule of common sense that he invokes in rejecting epiphenomenalism as a
general theory of the mind. See James, 1950, vol. 1, pp. 128–144, esp. p. 144.
2. Indeed, while James’s considered view was to deny that emotions had motivational force
(lest they precede rather than succeed the bodily movements that express them), he too some-
times fell back to the commonsense understanding of emotions as springs of action. Thus, in
the chapter on instincts, c hapter 24, he wrote, “Sympathy is an emotion . . . [s]‌ome of [whose]
forms, that of mother with child, for example, are surely primitive, and not intelligent forecasts
of board and lodging and other support to be reaped in old age. Danger to the child blindly and
instantaneously stimulates the mother to actions of alarm and defense” (1950, vol. 2, p. 410).
81
he called “the direct passions.” The direct passions, on Hume’s account, in-
clude desire and aversion, joy and grief, hope and fear, anger and benevo-
lence, among others. Like all secondary impressions in Hume’s psychology,
they are inner feelings, each being qualitatively distinct from the others. At
the same time, instances of each vary according as the feeling they consist
in is more or less turbulent and as it is more or less forceful. Hume, that
is, distinguished between the phenomenal character of an emotion and its
motivational strength. Emotions are either violent or calm depending on
how much agitation in the mind they entail. They are either strong or weak
depending on the amount of force with which they motivate action. In other
words, on Hume’s account, the degree to which an emotion is calm or vio-
lent is independent of the degree to which it is weak or strong (1978, p. 419).
Consequently, a passion may be calm; it may produce little agitation in the
mind; yet it may be stronger than some violent, co-occurring passion and so
move its subject to actions that are contrary to the actions the more violent
passion is prompting. As Hume put it, “’Tis evident passions influence not
the will in proportion to their violence, or the disorder they occasion in the
temper; but on the contrary, that when a passion has once become a settled
principle of action, and is the predominant inclination of the soul, it com-
monly produces no longer any sensible agitation” (1978, pp. 418–419).
Indeed, any passion, Hume observed, “may decay into so soft an emo-
tion, as to become, in a manner, imperceptible” (1978, p. 276). Certain calm
ones, in particular, “are more known by their effects than by the immediate
feeling or sensation” (1978, p. 417). What I shall call “Hume’s doctrine of
the calm passions” implies both that we can know of an emotion independ-
ently of its phenomenal character and that we can conceive of it as present
and operative even though it lacks a phenomenal presence. The doctrine,
consequently, suggests a different concept of emotion from that employed
in traditional empiricism. It suggests a concept focused on the motivational
rather than the affective character of emotions. Hume of course did not make
this concept explicit. He could hardly have done so and kept quiet, as he did,
about the seeming incoherence he introduced into his system in referring to
an imperceptible impression. An unfelt feeling, after all, is a contradiction
in terms. Hume, in other words, could not have maintained the doctrine
of the calm passions unqualified without having to abandon his notion of
an emotion as a secondary impression. More generally, he could not have
maintained the doctrine without abandoning the framework of traditional
empiricist psychology within which he worked. On that framework the mind
is a field of consciousness, and its states, therefore, are essentially conscious.
The doctrine of the calm passions, to the contrary, implies the possibility of
91
some emotions, though states of mind, occurring outside of this field. Some
emotions may be, in a word, unconscious.
The idea that emotions need not always be conscious states is the second
major innovation behind the abandonment of the traditional empiricist un-
derstanding of emotion. While Hume’s doctrine of the calm passions suggests
this innovation, it was not until Sigmund Freud developed his theory of the
unconscious, 150 years later, that it was fully realized. Freud was not the
first thinker to propose that there were unconscious mental states. He readily
acknowledged predecessors. But those precedent proposals did not present
much of a challenge to the traditional empiricist framework. Typically, what
was proposed was that some thoughts and ideas existed just beyond the pe-
riphery of the mind, in a subconscious part, and if not easily retrievable,
could become conscious nonetheless without effort. Examples were ideas
corresponding to words that are “just on the tip of our tongues,” as we say, that
we struggle to recall only to have them suddenly appear clearly in conscious-
ness, and ideas that must occur to us during sleep since it is not uncommon
for one, upon waking up in the morning, to see immediately the solution to
a problem that had vexed one the night before. Freud, by contrast, held that
some ideas and thoughts were deeply buried in an unconscious part of the
mind and were blocked from being retrieved by repression. One’s mind, as it
were, generated force to keep them from becoming conscious. Such repres-
sion was necessary because the repressed thoughts and ideas were themselves
charged and energetic and would immediately rise to consciousness if there
were no counterforce to keep them in check. Examples of such repressed
ideas and thoughts were beliefs about being personally responsible for some
traumatic event that occurred when one was very young. Such beliefs, while
they may never become conscious, reveal themselves in dreams, self-defeating
behavior, even illness. That they manifest themselves in this way is Freud’s
reason for understanding them as charged. Unconscious thoughts and ideas
could not have the influence on people Freud saw in their dreams, irrational
behavior, and illnesses that lack organic causes unless they were forceful in
their own right. Freud called the tension between their force and that of re-
pression “the dynamic unconscious.” The great originality of his theory of
mind was due to this way of conceiving of unconscious thoughts and ideas.
Freud took emotions too as capable of being repressed (Freud, 1915,
1923, 1924). They too could be unconscious. Consequently, he could not
conceive of emotions as feelings. Nonetheless, he is commonly interpreted
as having so conceived of them, notwithstanding the evident incoherence
his taking emotions as feelings would, as in Hume’s case, introduce into his
theory. (See, e.g., Lear, 1990, pp. 88–90.) The passages that are commonly
02
cited to support this interpretation are not decisive, however, and, I would
argue, are better read as supporting an interpretation on which Freud gives
meaning to the term ‘unconscious emotion’ while acknowledging that the
term ‘unconscious feeling’ is self-contradictory (Freud, 1915; Deigh, 2001).
Emotions may be unconscious, but feelings are necessarily conscious.
Hence, Freud did not identify emotions with feelings. He identified them
instead with states whose expression included feelings or that had the poten-
tial for such expression, a potential that was blocked from being realized by
repression. Be this as it may, ideas of unconscious love, fear, hate, anger, and
the unconscious sense of guilt are fixed points in Freud’s theory, and because
of the theory’s great influence on twentieth-century thinking about human
psychology and culture, reference to them has become commonplace in our
everyday thought and talk about the human mind. Freud’s theory, therefore,
whatever Freud’s express opinion of the possibility of unconscious emotions
was, offers a concept of them, a concept that is a major alternative to James’s.
It remains then to define this concept.
To begin with, Freud took emotions to be states of mind we are con-
scious of through the feelings that manifest them. As such, they are distinct
from those feelings, and they may exist and operate in us even when we are
unconscious of them. In addition, Freud sought, in the operations of uncon-
scious emotions, explanations of a great range of phenomena of human life
including odd behavior like parapraxes, unconventional sexual conduct such
as fetishism and bestiality, inappropriate feeling or lack thereof, excessive
fear, for example, or flat affect, and somatic illnesses that had no obvious or-
ganic cause. Such explanations were among the most distinctive explanations
of psychoanalytic theory. They required, not only identification of an emo-
tion that was either not manifest in what, if anything, the subject was feeling
or, though manifest in the subject’s feeling, concerned with something
other than the ostensible object of those feelings, but also identification of
the person, thing, event, or state of affairs towards which the emotion was
actually directed. The latter requirement indicates Freud’s special concern
with the true objects of people’s emotions. While these were often people,
things, events, etc. that produced the emotion, they were sometimes merely
the products of the subject’s fantasies. As Freud put it, when he came to ex-
plain certain hysterical symptoms in his patients as the products of repressed
pseudo-memories of sexual trauma in early childhood, whether incidents of
sexual abuse really occurred or were fantasized made no difference from the
patient’s viewpoint. Because the fantasized events seemed to the patient as
real as if they had actually occurred, the repressed pseudo-memories and the
terror they instilled in the latter case had the same effect on him as genuine
21
memories of real abuse. In effect, then, Freud, in giving these explanations,

fixed on emotions as intentional states of mind. He saw, with each, how it was
related to its object so as to give meaning or import to the feelings, behavior,
and conditions that manifested it. For Freud, such intentionality was the core
element of the concept of emotions he invented in introducing unconscious
emotions into the theory of the mind.
At the same time, Freud did not expressly consider what an emotion’s inten-
tionality consisted in or what constituted its distinctive relation to its object. To
introduce a concept of emotion that was a genuine alternative to the one James
defined, it was sufficient for Freud to have made the intentionality of emotions
and the import it gave to them the focus of his conception. Accordingly, on
the concept he introduced, emotions are not, as distinct from the one James
defined, epiphenomena. Rather they can be causes, and what they cause are
actions. Secondly, being sometimes unconscious states, emotions are not, con-
trary to James, identical with feelings. Rather they are expressed by feelings.
Thirdly, the feelings that express emotions are meaningful phenomena,
whereas for James they are merely indices of bodily processes. Feelings of grief,
shame, fear, or the like, on Freud’s view, have the same meaning or import
as the emotions they express, and indeed that import is transmitted from the
emotion to them. Grief, for example, has the import of loss, and in feeling grief
one feels the loss over which one is grieving. Shame has the import of one’s
appearing unworthy before others whose esteem one values, and in feeling
shame one feels unworthy of them. On the concept James defined, by contrast,
the feelings an emotion consists in, being nothing over and above the feelings
of bodily changes, are not meaningful in this way. Their being feelings of grief,
say, or shame is, rather, mere happenstance, a consequence of the concept that
ultimately yielded telling empirical criticism.3
III
The concept of emotion that Freud introduced thus stood in need of an account
of the meaning that he located in an emotion’s intentionality. In the last third
of the twentieth century, many philosophers and psychologists, often without
recognizing their debt to Freud, converged on such an account.4 While the
theories of emotion they advanced differed from each other in specifics, they
3. Experimental work by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962) is generally thought
to have established that the bodily processes a person who is feeling some emotion undergoes
are not by themselves sufficient to determine the type of emotion the person is feeling.
4. Some, however, clearly recognized this debt. See Solomon 1976, pp. 180–182.
2
agreed in taking some form of evaluative judgment as an essential element of

an emotion and in citing the thought content of such a judgment to explain the
intentionality of emotions. On these theories, for instance, judgments about
good fortune are essential to joy, and judgments about undeserved misfortune
are essential to pity. Accordingly, the import of the feelings expressing joy or
pity derives from these judgments. Feelings of joy, therefore, concern some-
thing good that has happened to one, and feelings of pity concern undeserved
misfortune that has befallen someone. The feelings that express emotions are,
therefore, importantly different from feelings and sensations that merely reg-
ister some physiological disturbance. The latter, being symptoms of bodily
changes, do not concern anything. They have no import. When after sudden
exertion, say, one is short of breath and feels weak or wobbly, the feeling is
symptomatic of respiratory difficulty and nothing more. If, by contrast, upon
a sudden attack of panic one is short of breath and feeling wobbly, the feeling
is not just a symptom of respiratory difficulty. It concerns, rather, something of
which one is intensely afraid and what determines the object of one’s fear is
the judgment that one is in danger. The object of one’s fear, in other words, is
what one thinks is endangering one. And the same pattern of analysis, so these
theories hold, applies to emotions generally. Every emotion, that is, is neces-
sarily about something, however vague or indeterminate, and what it is about
is determined by the evaluative judgment it contains. Consequently, such a
judgment is an essential element of the emotion.
To take such a judgment as an essential element of an emotion, and not
merely a common concomitant, is therefore to understand an emotion as
essentially a cognitive state. This understanding, which now prevails among
philosophers and psychologists who study emotions, represents a recovery
of ideas about emotions that were prominent in the thought of the ancients.
Indeed, Aristotle is often cited in the expositions of contemporary cognitivist
theories of emotion as a source of their central thesis. And the boldest of
them go so far as to endorse the ancient Stoic theory on which emotions are
taken to be identical to evaluative judgments of a certain kind (Solomon,
1976; Nussbaum, 2001; see also Nussbaum, 1994, chs. 9–13). Most of these
theories, however, are less bold and give accounts of emotions that include,
as essential elements, other things besides evaluative thought and articulate
some complex relation among these elements. Agitation of the mind, auto-
nomic behavior, and impulses to action are the usual additions. But even in
these theories evaluative judgment is the primary element in the mix, for it
is the element by which each emotion is principally identified. It is the ele-
ment the theories principally use to define different types of emotion (Deigh,
1994, pp. 835–842).
23
A theme that is common to these theories is that emotions, like other cog-
nitive states, belong to intelligent thought and action. They are in this respect
on a par with beliefs and other judgments, decisions, and resolutions. They
are, that is, states that one can regard as having propositional content, which
their subjects accept or affirm. Accordingly, one can treat them as warranted
or unwarranted, justified or unjustified, by the circumstances in which they
occur or the beliefs on which they are based. Thus fear would be warranted if
its object evidently posed some threat to one and unwarranted if it evidently
posed no threat. Likewise, anger would be justified if it were a response to a
genuinely demeaning insult and unjustified if based on one’s mistaking an
innocent remark for such an insult. In either case, the emotion is warranted
or unwarranted, justified or unjustified, because the evaluative judgment in
which the emotion consists, either in whole or in part, is warranted or unwar-
ranted, justified or unjustified. In general, then, on these theories, an evalu-
ative judgment is an essential component of an emotion. It is, moreover, the
component by which one type of emotion differs from another. If you want to
understand the difference between contempt and anger, say, then according
to these theories the difference lies in the type of evaluative judgment that is
essential to each emotion. When you have contempt for someone because
he has behaved badly, you judge the person to be low or unworthy of your
esteem in view of that behavior. When you are angry at someone because
he has behaved badly, you judge that the person has injured or insulted you
or someone close to you by so behaving. I will call this model of cognitivist
theory “the standard model.”
The standard model is subject to two powerful and related objections.
First, sometimes one can experience an emotion towards something that one
knows lacks the properties it must have for the emotion to be warranted.
Consider, for example, the fear people typically experience when looking
down from a precipice. They may know that they are perfectly safe and in no
danger of falling, yet fear falling nevertheless. Similarly, common phobias
such as snake and spider phobias supply examples of fear of an object the
subject knows is harmless. Again, people sometimes feel disgust at foods they
know are nutritious, benign, and perhaps even tasty.5 Defenders of cognitivist
theories that fit the standard model must, to account for these examples, de-
scribe the subjects of these emotions as making contradictory judgments or
holding contradictory beliefs. Yet familiarity with such experiences tells us
that when, for example, one feels fear on looking down from a precipice,
knowing that one is perfectly safe, one doesn’t judge or believe that one is in
5. See Rozin and Fallon 1987.

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“Ah! I see through the whole game! You’re flirting with the woman
and want me for a blind in case Maybelle finds you out.”
“Clever! The boy’s clever! But—listen—I never try to put anything
over on Maybelle. A grand jury hasn’t an all-seeinger eye than Mrs.
Bud Henderson. Let’s beat it!”
On the drive uptown Henderson devoted himself with his usual
thoroughness to a recital of the history of Mrs. Torrence. The lady’s
social status lay somewhere between the old and the new element,
Bud explained. The president of the trust company that administered
her affairs belonged to the old crowd—the paralytic or angina
pectoris group, as Bud described it, and his wife and daughters just
had to be nice to Torrence’s wife or run a chance of offending her
and losing control of the estate. On the other hand her natural gaiety
threw her toward the camps of the newer element who were too
busy having a good time to indulge in ancestor worship.
Henderson concluded his illuminative exposition of Mrs. Torrence’s
life history as they reached the house. They were admitted by a
colored butler who took their coats and flung open a door that
revealed a spacious living-room.
“Helen!” exclaimed Henderson dramatically.
It was possible that Mrs. Torrence had prepared for their entrance by
posing in the middle of the room with a view to a first effect, an effect
to which her quick little step as she came forward to meet them
contributed. Her blue tea gown, parted a little above the ankles,
invited inspection of her remarkably small feet adorned with brilliant
buckles. She was short with a figure rounded to plumpness and with
fluffy brown hair, caught up high as though to create an illusion as to
her stature. Her complexion was a clear brilliant pink; her alert small
eyes were a greenish blue. Her odd little staccato walk was in
keeping with her general air of vivacity. She was all alive, amusingly
abrupt, spontaneous, decisive.
“Hello! Bud, the old reliable! Mr. Storrs! Yes; I had been hoping for
this!”
She gave a hand to each and looked up at Bruce, who towered
above her, and nodded as though approving of him.
“This is delightful! A new man! Marvelous!”
As she explained that she had been away since June and was only
just home, Bruce became aware that Henderson had passed on and
was standing by a tea table indulging in his usual style of raillery with
a young woman whose voice even before he looked at her identified
her as Constance Mills.
“You know Mrs. Mills? Of course! If you’d only arrived this morning
you’d know Connie. Not to know Connie is indeed to be unknown.”
Constance extended her hand from the divan on which she was
seated behind the tea table—thrust it out lazily with a minimum of
effort.
“Oh—the difficult Mr. Storrs! I’m terribly mortified to be meeting you
in a friend’s house and not in my own!”
“To meet you anywhere——” began Bruce, but she interrupted him,
holding him with her eyes.
“——would be a pleasure! Of course! I know the formula, but I’m not
a debutante. You didn’t like me that night we met at Dale Freeman’s,
and I was foolish enough to think I’d made an impression!”
“Let’s tell him the truth,” said Henderson, helping himself to a slice of
cinnamon toast. “Bruce, I bet a hundred cigarettes with Connie I
could deliver you here and I win!”
“Not a word of truth in that!” declared Constance. “Bud’s such a liar!”
Mrs. Torrence said they must have tea, and Henderson protested
that tea was not to be thought of. Tea, he declared, was extremely
distasteful to him; and Bruce always became ill at the sight of it.
“But when I told Connie you were bringing Mr. Storrs she said he
was terribly proper and for me not to dare mention cocktails.”
“Now, Helen, I didn’t say just that! What I meant, of course, was that
I hoped that Mr. Storrs wasn’t too proper,” said Constance.
“Proper!” Bruce caught her up. “This is an enemy’s work. Bud, I
suspect you of this dastardly assault on my character!”
“Not guilty!” Bud retorted. “The main thing right now is that we’re all
peevish and need martinis. What’s the Volstead signal, Helen?”
“Three rings, Bud, with a pause between the first and second.”
The tea tray was removed and reappeared adorned with all the
essentials for the concoction of cocktails. When the glasses were
filled and all had expressed their satisfaction at the result,
Henderson detained the negro butler for a conference on dice
throwing. He seated himself on the floor the better to receive the
man’s instructions. The others taunted him for his inaptitude. The
butler retired finally with five dollars of Bud’s money, a result attained
only after the spectators were limp with laughter.
“You’re a scream, Bud! A perfect scream!” and Mrs. Torrence refilled
the glasses.
She took Bud to the dining-room to exhibit a rare Japanese screen
acquired in her travels, and Bruce found himself alone with
Constance. She pointed to her glass, still brimming, and remarked:
“Please admire my abstemiousness! One is my limit.”
“Let me see; did I really have three?” asked Bruce as he sat down
beside her.
“I want to forget everything this afternoon,” she began. “I feel that I’d
like to climb the hills of the unattainable, be someone else for a
while.”
“Oh, we all have those spells,” he replied. “That’s why Prohibition’s a
failure.”
“But life is a bore at times,” she insisted. “Maybe you’re one of the
lucky ones who never go clear down. A man has his work—there’s
always that——”
“Hasn’t woman got herself everything—politics, business,
philanthropy? You don’t mean to tell me the new woman is already
pining for her old slavery! I supposed you led a complete and
satisfactory existence!”
“A pretty delusion! I just pretend, that’s all. There are days when
nothing seems of the slightest use. I thought there might be
something in politics, but after I’d gone to a few meetings and served
on a committee or two it didn’t amuse me any more. I played at
being a radical for a while, but after you’ve scared all your friends a
few times with your violence it ceases to be funny. The only real joy I
got out of flirting with socialism was in annoying my father-in-law.
And I had to give that up for fear he’d think I was infecting Shep with
my ideas.”
II
A tinge of malice was perceptible in her last words, but she smiled
instantly to relieve the embarrassment she detected in his face. He
was not sure just how she wanted him to take her. The unhappiness
she had spoken of he assumed to be only a pose with her—
something to experiment with upon men she met on gray afternoons
in comfortable houses over tea and cocktails. Mrs. Shepherd Mills
might be amusing, or she might easily become a bore. The night he
met her at the Freemans’ he had thought her probably guileless
under her mask of sophistication. She was proving more interesting
than he had imagined, less obvious; perhaps with an element of
daring in her blood that might one day get the better of her. She was
quite as handsome as he remembered her from the meeting at the
Freemans’ and she indubitably had mastered the art of dressing
herself becomingly.
He was watching the play of the shadow of her picture hat on her
face, seeking clues to her mood, vexed that he had permitted himself
to be brought into her company, when she said:
“I’m not amusing you! Please forgive me. I can’t help it if I’m a little
triste. Some little devilish imp is dancing through my silly head. If I
took a second glass——”
Bruce answered her look of inquiry with a shake of the head.
“Are you asking my advice? I positively refuse to give it; but if you
command me, of course——”
He rose, took the glass, and held it high for her inspection.
“The man tempts me——” she said pensively.
“The man doesn’t tempt you. We’ll say it’s the little imp. Mrs. Mills, do
you want this cocktail or do you not?”
“It might cheer me up a little. I don’t want you to think me stupid; I
know I’m terribly dull!”
She drank half the cocktail and bade him finish it.
“Oh, certainly!” he replied and drained the glass. “Now, under the
additional stimulus, we can proceed with the discussion. What were
we talking about, anyhow?”
“It doesn’t matter. Life offers plenty of problems. How many people
do you really think are happy—really happy? Now Bud’s always
cheerful; he and Maybelle are happy—remarkably so, I think. Helen
Torrence—well, I hesitate to say whether she’s really happy or not;
she always appears gay, just as you see her today; and it’s
something to be able to give the impression, whether it’s false or
not.”
“Yes; it’s well to make a front,” Bruce replied, determined to keep a
frivolous tone with her. “The Freemans enjoy themselves; they’re
quite ideally mated, I’d say.”
“Yes, they’re making a success of their lives. Dale and Bill are
always cheerful. Now there’s dear old Shep——”
“Well, of course he’s happy. How could he be otherwise?”
“You’re not taking me seriously at all! I’m disappointed. I was terribly
blue today; that’s why I plotted with Bud to get you here—I
shamelessly confess that I want to know you better.”
“Come now! You’re just kidding!”
“You’re incorrigible. I’m that rarest of beings—a frank woman. You
refuse to come to my house, presumably because you don’t like me,
so I have to trap you here.”
“How you misjudge me! I haven’t been around because I’ve been
busy; I belong to the toiling masses!”
“You have time for Miss Harden; you two seemed ever so chummy
on the golf course. Of course, I can’t compete with Millie—she’s so
beautiful and so artistic—so many accomplishments. But you ought
to be considerate of a poor thing like me. I’m only sorry I have so
little to offer. I really thought you would be a nice playmate; but——”
“A playmate? Aren’t we playing now?—at least you are playing with
me!”
“Am I?” she asked.
She bent toward him with a slight, an almost imperceptible
movement of her shoulders, and her lips parted tremulously in a
wistful smile of many connotations. She was not without her charms;
she was a very pretty woman; and there was nothing vulgar in her
manner of exercising her charms. Bruce touched her hand, gently
clasped it—a slender, cool hand. She made no attempt to release it;
and it lay lingering and acquiescent in his clasp. He raised it and
kissed the finger tips.
“You really understand me; I knew you would,” she murmured. “It’s
terrible to be lonely. And you are so big and strong; you can help me
if you will——”
“I have no right to help you,” he said. “It’s part of the game in this
funny world that we’ve got to help ourselves.”
“But if you knew I needed you——”
“Ah, but you don’t!” he replied.
Bud tiptoed in with a tray containing highball materials and placed it
on the tea table. He urged them in eloquent pantomime to drink
themselves to death and tiptoed out again. Bruce, wondering if he
dared leave, hoped the interruption would serve to change the
current of his talk with Constance, when she said:
“Shep speaks of you often; he likes you and really Shep’s ever so
interesting.”
“Yes,” Bruce answered, “he has ideas and ideals—really thinks about
things in a fine way.”
He did not care to discuss Shepherd Mills with Shepherd’s wife,
even when, presumably, she was merely making talk to create an
atmosphere of intimacy.
“Shep isn’t a cut-up,” she went on, “and he doesn’t know how to be a
good fellow with men of his own age. And he’s so shy he’s afraid of
the older men. And his father—you’ve met Mr. Mills? Well, Shep
doesn’t seem able to get close to his father.”
“That happens, of course, between fathers and sons,” Bruce replied.
“Mr. Mills——”
He paused, took a cigarette from his case and put it back. He was by
turns perplexed, annoyed, angry and afraid—afraid that he might in
some way betray himself.
“Mr. Mills is a curious person,” Constance went on. “He seems to me
like a man who lives alone in a formal garden with high walls on four
sides and has learned to ignore the roar of the world outside—a
prisoner who carries the key of his prison-house but can’t find the
lock!”
Bruce bent his head toward her, intent upon her words. He hadn’t
thought her capable of anything so imaginative. Some reply was
necessary; he would make another effort to get rid of a subject that
both repelled and fascinated him.
“I suppose we’re all born free; if we find ourselves shut in it’s
because we’ve built the walls ourselves.”
“How about my prison-house?” she asked. “Do you suppose I can
ever escape?”
“Why should you? Don’t you like your garden?”
“Not always; no! It’s a little stifling sometimes!”
“Then push the walls back a little! It’s a good sign, isn’t it, when we
begin to feel cramped?”
“You’re doing a lot better! I begin to feel more hopeful about you. You
really could be a great consolation to me if—if you weren’t so busy!”
“I really did appreciate your invitation. I’ll be around very soon.”
After all, he decided, she was only flirting with him; her confidences
were only a means of awakening his interest, stirring his sympathy.
She had probably never loved Shepherd, but she respected his high-
mindedness and really wanted to help him. The depression to which
she confessed was only the common ennui of her class and type;
she needed occupation, doubtless children would solve her problem
to some extent. Her life ran too smooth a course, and life was not
meant to be like that....
He was impatient to leave, but Mrs. Torrence and Henderson had
started a phonograph and were dancing in the hall. Constance
seemed unmindful of the noise they were making.
“Shall we join in that romp?” asked Bruce.
“Thanks, no—if you don’t mind! I suppose it’s really time to run
along. May I fix a drink for you? It’s too bad to go away and leave all
that whisky!”
The music stopped in the midst of a jazzy saxophone wail and Mrs.
Torrence and Henderson were heard noisily greeting several
persons who had just come in.
“It’s Leila,” said Constance, rising and glancing at the clock. “She
has no business being here at this time of day.”
“Hello, Connie! Got a beau?”
Leila peered into the room, struck her hands together and called
over her shoulder:
“Come in, lads! See what’s here! Red liquor as I live and breathe!
Oh, Mr. What’s-your-name——”
“Mr. Storrs,” Constance supplied.
“Oh, of course! Mr. Storrs—Mr. Thomas and Mr. Whitford!”
Bruce had heard much of Whitford at the University Club, where he
was one of the most popular members. He had won fame as an
athlete in college and was a polo player of repute. A cosmopolitan by
nature, he had traveled extensively and in the Great War had won
honorable distinction. Having inherited money he was able to follow
his own bent. It was whispered that he entertained literary ambitions.
He was one of the chief luminaries of the Dramatic Club, coached
the players and had produced several one-act plays of his own that
had the flavor of reality. He was of medium height and looked the
soldier and athlete. Women had done much to spoil him, but in spite
of his preoccupation with society, men continued to like George, who
was a thoroughly good fellow and a clean sportsman.
Whitford entered at once into a colloquy with Constance. Thomas,
having expressed his pleasure at meeting Bruce, was explaining to
Mrs. Torrence how he and Whitford had met Leila downtown.
“Liar!” exclaimed Leila, who was pouring herself a drink. “You did
nothing of the kind. We met at the Burtons’ and Nellie gave us a little
drink—just a tweeney, stingy little drink.”
The drink she held up for purposes of illustration was not
infinitesimal. Mrs. Torrence said that everyone must have a highball
and proceeded to prepare a drink for Thomas and Whitford.
“You and Connie are certainly the solemn owls,” she remarked to
Bruce. “Anyone would have thought you were holding a funeral in
here. Say when, Fred. This is real Bourbon that Jim had for years.
You’ll never see anything like it.”
“Bruce,” cried Henderson, “has Connie filled you with gloom? She
gets that way sometimes, but it doesn’t mean anything. A little of this
stuff will set you up. This bird, Storrs, always did have glass legs,” he
explained to Thomas; “he can drink gallons and be ready to
converse with bishops. Never saw such a capacity! If I get a few
more Maybelle will certainly hand it to me when I get home.”
Constance walked round the table to Leila, who had drunk a glass of
the Bourbon to sample it and, satisfied of its quality, was now
preparing a highball.
“No more, Leila!” said Constance, in a low tone. The girl drew back
defiantly.
“Go away, Connie! I need just one more.”
“You had more than you needed at the Burtons’. Please, Leila, be
sensible. Helen, send the tray away.”
“Leila’s all right!” said Thomas, but at a sign from Mrs. Torrence he
picked up the tray and carried it out.
“I don’t think it pretty to treat me as though I were shot when I’m not,”
said Leila petulantly. She walked to the end of the room and sat
down with the injured air of a rebellious child.
“Leila, do you know what time it is?” demanded Constance. “Your
father’s having a dinner and you’ve got to be there.”
“I’m going to be there! There’s loads of time. Everybody sit down and
be comfortable!” Leila composedly sipped her glass as though to set
an example to the others. Thomas had come back and Constance
said a few words to him in a low tone.
“Oh, shucks! I know what you’re saying. Connie’s telling you to take
me home,” said Leila. She turned her wrist to look at her watch—
frowned in the effort of focusing upon it and added with a shrug:
“There’s all the time in the world. If you people think you can scare
me you’ve got another guess coming. It’s just ten minutes of six;
dinner’s at seven-thirty! I’ve got to rest a little. You all look so
ridiculous standing there glaring at me. I’m no white mouse with pink
eyes!”
“Really, dear,” said Mrs. Torrence coaxingly, walking toward Leila
with her hands outstretched much as though she were trying to
make friends with a reluctant puppy. “Do run along home like a good
girl!”
Leila apparently had no intention of running along home like a good
little girl. She dropped her glass—empty—and without warning
caught the astounded lady tightly about the neck.
“Step-mother! Dear, nice step-mamma!” she cried. “Nice, dear,
sweet, kind step-mamma! Helen’s going to be awful good to poor
little Leila. Helen not be bad step-mamma like story books; Helen be
sweet, kind step-mamma and put nice, beautiful gin cocktails in
baby’s bottle!”
As she continued in cooing tones Leila stroked her captive’s cheek
and kissed her with a mockery of tenderness. Henderson and
Thomas were shouting with laughter; Constance viewed the scene
with lofty disdain; Whitford was mildly amused; Bruce, wishing
himself somewhere else, withdrew toward the door, prepared to
leave at the earliest possible moment. When at last Mrs. Torrence
freed herself she sank into a chair and her laughter attained a new
pitch of shrillness.
“Leila, you’ll be the death of me!” she gasped when her mirth had
spent itself.
“Leila will be the death of all of us,” announced Constance solemnly.
“Oh, I don’t know!” said Leila, straightening her hat composedly at
the mantel mirror.
“Too bad Leila’s ‘step-mama’ couldn’t have heard that!” sighed
Henderson.
“Now, Leila,” said Constance severely, “do run along home. Please
let me take you in my car; you oughtn’t to drive in the condition
you’re in.”
The remark was not fortunate. Leila had discovered a box of
bonbons and was amusing herself by tossing them into the air and
trying to catch them in her mouth. She scored one success in three
attempts and curtsied to an imaginary audience.
“My condition!” she said, with fine scorn. “I wish you wouldn’t speak
as though I were a common drunk!”
“Anyone can see that you’re not fit to go home. Your father will be
furious.”
“Not if I tell him I’ve been with you!” Leila flung back.
“Say, Leila!” began Henderson, ingratiatingly. “We’re old pals, you
and I—let’s shake this bunch. I’ll do something nice for you
sometime.”
“What will you do?” Leila demanded with provoking deliberation.
“Oh, something mighty nice! Maybelle and I will give you a party and
you can name the guests.”
“Stupid!” she yawned. “Your hair’s mussed, Helen. You and Bud
have been naughty.”
“Your behavior isn’t ladylike,” said Thomas. “The party’s getting
rough! Come on, let’s go.”
“Oh, I’m misbehaving, am I? Well, I guess my conduct’s as good as
yours! Where do you get this stuff that I’m a lost lamb? Even an
expert like you, Freddy, wouldn’t call me soused. I’m just little bit
tipsy—that’s all! If I had a couple more highballs——”
III
By a signal passed from one to the other they began feigning to
ignore her. Constance said she was going; Bud, Whitford and
Thomas joined Bruce at the door where he was saying good-night to
Mrs. Torrence. Leila was not so tipsy but that she understood what
they were doing.
“Think you can freeze me out, do you? Well, I’m not so easily friz!
Mr. What’s-your-name——” She fixed her eyes upon Bruce
detainingly.
“Storrs,” Bruce supplied good-naturedly.
“You’re the only lady or gentleman in this room. I’m going to ask you
to take me home!”
“Certainly, Miss Mills!”
With a queenly air she took his arm. Henderson ran forward and
opened the door, the others hanging back, silent, afraid to risk a
word that might reopen the discussion and delay her departure.
“Shall I drive?” Bruce asked when they reached the curb.
“Yes, thanks; if you don’t mind.”
“Home?” he inquired as he got her car under way.
“I was just doing a little thinking,” she said deliberatingly. “It will take
only five minutes to run over to that little cafeteria on Fortieth Street.
Some coffee wouldn’t be a bad thing; and would you mind turning
the windshield—I’d like the air.”
“A good idea,” said Bruce, and stepped on the gas. The car had
been built for Leila’s special use and he had with difficulty squeezed
himself into the driver’s seat; but he quickly caught the hang of it. He
stopped a little beyond the cafeteria to avoid the lights of the busy
corner and brought out a container of hot coffee and paper cups.
“Like a picnic, isn’t it?” she said. “You won’t join me?”
She sipped the coffee slowly while he stood in the street beside her.
“There!” she said. “Thank you, ever so much. Quarter of seven?
Forty-five minutes to dress! Just shoot right along home now. Would
you mind driving over to the boulevard and going in that way? The
air certainly feels good.”
“Nothing would please me more,” he said, giving her a quick
inspection as they passed under the lights at a cross-street. She was
staring straight ahead, looking singularly young as she lay back with
her hands clasped in her lap.
“Constance was furious!” she said suddenly. “Well, I suppose she
had a right to be. I had no business getting lit.”
“Well, strictly speaking, you shouldn’t do it,” he said. It was not the
time nor place and he was not the proper person to lecture her upon
her delinquencies. But he had not been displeased that she chose
him to take her home, even though the choice was only a whim.
“You must think me horrid! This is the second time you’ve seen me
teed up too high.”
“I’ve seen a lot of other people teed up much higher! You’re perfectly
all right now?”
“Absolutely! That coffee fixed me; I’m beginning to feel quite bully. I
can go home now and jump into my joy rags and nobody will ever be
the wiser. This is an old folks’ party, but Dada always wants to exhibit
me when he feeds the nobility—can you see me?”
Her low laugh was entirely reassuring as to her sobriety, and he was
satisfied that she would be able to give a good account of herself at
her father’s table.
“Just leave the car on the drive,” she said as they reached the
house. “Maybe I can crawl up to my room without Dada knowing I’m
late. I’m a selfish little brute—to be leaving you here stranded! Well,
thanks awfully!”
He walked with her to the entrance and she was taking out her key
when Mills, in his evening clothes, opened the door.
“Leila! You’re late!” he exclaimed sharply. “Where on earth have you
been?”
“Just gadding about, as usual! But I’m in plenty of time, Dada.
Please thank Mr. Storrs for coming home with me. Good-night and
thank you some more!”
She darted into the house, leaving Bruce confronting her father.
“Oh, Mr. Storrs!” The emphasis on the name was eloquent of Mills’s
surprise that Bruce was on his threshold. Bruce had decided that any
explanations required were better left to Leila, who was probably an
adept in explanations. He was about to turn away when Mills
stepped outside.
“We’re entertaining tonight,” he said pleasantly. “I was a little afraid
something had happened to my daughter.”
A certain dignity of utterance marked his last words—my daughter.
He threw into the phrase every possible suggestion of paternal pride.
Bruce, halfway down the steps, paused until Mills had concluded his
remark. Then lifting his hat with a murmured good-night, he hurried
toward the gate. An irresistible impulse caused him to look back.
Mills remained just inside the entry, his figure clearly defined by the
overhead lights, staring toward the street. Seeing Bruce look back,
he went quickly into the house and the heavy door boomed upon
him.
Bruce walked to the nearest street car line and rode downtown for
dinner. The fact that Mills was waiting at the door for his daughter
was not without its significance, hinting at a constant uneasiness for
her safety beyond ordinary parental solicitude. What Constance had
said that afternoon about Mills came back to him. He was oppressed
by a sense of something tragic in Mills’s life—the tragedy of a failure
that wore outwardly the guise of success.
In spite of a strong effort of will to obliterate these thoughts he found
his memory dragging into his consciousness odd little pictures of
Mills—fragmentary snapshots, more vivid and haunting than
complete portraits: the look Mills gave him the first time they met at
the Country Club; Mills’s shoulders and the white line of his collar
above his dinner coat as he left the Hardens’; and now the quick
change from irritation to relief and amiable courtesy when he
admitted Leila.
Henderson and Millicent and now today Constance had given him
hints of Mills’s character, and Bruce found himself trying to reconcile
and unify their comments and fit them into his own inferences and
conclusions. The man was not without his fascinations as a subject
for analysis. Behind that gracious exterior there must be another
identity either less noble or finer than the man the world knew....
Before he slept, Bruce found it necessary to combat an
apprehension that, if he continued to hear Mills dissected and
analyzed, he might learn to pity the man.
IV
That evening when Shepherd Mills went home he found Constance
seated at her dressing table, her heavy golden-brown hair piled
loosely upon her head, while her maid rubbed cold cream into her
throat and face. She espied him in the mirror and greeted him with a
careless, “Hello, Shep. How did the day go with you?”—the question
employed by countless American wives in saluting their husbands at
the end of a toilsome day.
“Oh, pretty good!” he replied. No husband ever admits that a day has
been wholly easy and prosperous.
She put out her hand for him to kiss and bade him sit down beside
her. He was always diffident before the mysteries of his wife’s toilet.
He glanced at the gown laid across a chair and surveyed the crystal
and silver on the dressing table with a confused air as though he had
never seen them before.
The room denoted Constance Mills’s love of luxury, and incidentally
her self-love. The walls on two sides were set in mirrors that reached
from ceiling to floor. The furniture, the rugs, the few pictures, the
window draperies had been chosen with an exquisite care and
combined in an evocation of the spirit of indolence. There was a
much be-pillowed divan across one corner, so placed that when she
enjoyed a siesta Constance could contemplate herself in the mirrors
opposite. Scents—a mingling of faint exotic odors—hung upon the
air.
She was quick to note that something was on Shepherd’s mind and
half from curiosity, half in a spirit of kindness, dismissed the maid as
quickly as possible.
“You can hook me up, Shep. I’ll do my hair myself. I won’t need you
any more, Marie. Yes—my blue cloak. Now, little boy, go ahead and
tell me what’s bothering you.”
Shepherd frowned and twisted his mustache as he sat huddled on
the divan.
“It’s about father; nothing new, just our old failure to understand each
other. It’s getting worse. I never know where I stand with him.”
“Well, does anyone?” Constance asked serenely. “You really mustn’t
let him get on your nerves. There are things you’ve got to take
because we all do; but by studying him a little and practicing a little
patience you’ll escape a lot of worry.”
“Yes,” he assented eagerly. “You know he just pretends that I’m the
head of the plant; Fields is the real authority there. It’s not the
president but the vice-president who has the say about things.
Father consults Fields constantly. He doesn’t trust me—I’m just a
figurehead.”
“Fields is such an ass,” remarked Constance with a shrug of her
shapely shoulders. “An utterly impossible person. Why not just let
him do all the explaining to your father? If any mistakes are made at
the plant, then it’s on him.”
“But that’s not the way of it,” Shepherd protested plaintively. “He gets
the praise; I get the blame.”
“Oh, well, you can’t make your father over. You ought to be glad
you’re not of his hard-boiled variety. You’re human, Sheppy, and
that’s better than being a magnificent iceberg.”
“Father doesn’t see things; he doesn’t realize that the world’s
changing,” Shepherd went on stubbornly. “He doesn’t see that the
old attitude toward labor won’t do any more.”
“He’ll never see it,” said Constance. “Things like that don’t hit him at
all. He’s like those silly people who didn’t know there was anything
wrong in France till their necks were in the guillotine.”
“I told you about that clubhouse I wanted to build for our people on
the Milton farm? I hate to give that up. It would mean so much to
those people. And he was all wrong in thinking it would injure the
property. I think it’s only decent to do something for them.”
“Well, how can you do it without your father?” she asked, shifting
herself for a better scrutiny of her head in the mirror.
“You know that little tract of land—about twenty acres, back of the
plant? I could buy that and put the clubhouse there. I have some
stock in the Rogers Trust Company I can sell—about two hundred
shares. It came to me through mother’s estate. Father has nothing to
do with it. The last quotation on it is two hundred. What do you think
of that?”
“Well, I think pretty well of it,” said Constance. “Your father ought to
let you build the clubhouse, but he has a positive passion for making
people uncomfortable.”
“I suppose,” continued Shepherd dubiously, “if I go ahead and build
the thing—even with my own money—he would be angry. Of course
there may be something in his idea that if we do a thing of this kind it
would make the workmen at other plants restless——”
“Piffle!” exclaimed Constance. “That’s the regular old stock whimper
of the back-number. You might just as well say that it would be a
forward step other employers ought to follow!”
“Yes, there’s that!” he agreed, his eyes brightening at the suggestion.
“If you built the house on your own land the storage battery company
wouldn’t be responsible for it in any way.”
“Certainly not!” Shepherd was increasingly pleased that she saw it all
so clearly.
She had slipped on her gown and was instructing him as to the
position of the hooks.
“No; the other side, Shep. That’s right. There’s another bunch on the
left shoulder. Now you’ve got it! Thanks ever so much.”
He watched her admiringly as she paraded before the mirrors to
make sure that the skirt hung properly.
“If there’s to be a row——” he began as she opened a drawer and
selected a handkerchief.
“Let there be a row! My dear Shep, you’re always too afraid of
asserting yourself. What could he do? He might get you up to his
office and give you a bad quarter of an hour; but he’d respect you
more afterwards if you stood to your guns. His vanity and family
pride protect you. Catch him doing anything that might get him into
the newspapers—not Franklin Mills!”
Relieved and encouraged by her understanding and sympathy, he
explained more particularly the location of the property he proposed
buying. It was quite as convenient to the industrial colony that had
grown up about the storage battery plant as the Milton land his father
had declined to let him use. The land was bound to appreciate in
value, he said.
“What if it doesn’t!” exclaimed Constance with mild scorn. “You’ll
have been doing good with your money, anyhow.”
“You think, then, you’d go ahead—sell the stock and buy the land?
It’s so late now, maybe I’d better wait till spring?”
“That might be better, Shep, but use your own judgment. You asked
your father to help and he turned you down. Your going ahead will
have a good effect on him. He needs a jar. Now run along and dress.
You’re going to be late for dinner.”
“Yes, I know,” he said, rising and looking down at her as she sat
turning over the leaves of a book. “Connie——”
“Yes, Shep,” she murmured absently; and then, “Oh, by the way,
Shep, I was at Helen’s this afternoon.”
“Helen Torrence’s? What was it—a tea?”
“In a manner of speaking—tea! Dramatic Club business. George
Whitford was there—he’s concentrating on theatricals. George is
such a dear!”
“One of the best fellows in the world!” said Shep.
“He certainly is!” Constance affirmed.
“Connie——” he stammered and took her hand. “Connie—you’re
awfully good to me. You know I love you——”
“Why, of course, you dear baby!” She lifted her head with a quick,
reassuring smile. “But for goodness’ sake run along and change your
clothes!”
V
When his guests had gone, Mills, as was his habit, smoked a cigar
and discussed the dinner with Leila. He was aware that in asking her
to join him on such occasions of state he was subjecting her to a
trying ordeal, and tonight he was particularly well pleased with her.
“They all enjoyed themselves, Dada; you needn’t worry about that
party!” Leila remarked, smoking the cigarette she had denied herself
while the guests remained.
“I think they did; thank you very much for helping me.”
Leila had charm; he was always proud of an opportunity to display
her to her mother’s old friends, whose names, like his own, carried
weight in local history. His son was a Shepherd; Leila, he persuaded
himself, was, with all her waywardness and little follies, more like
himself. Leila looked well at his table, and her dramatic sense made
it possible for her to act the rôle of the daughter of the house with the
formality that was dear to him. Whenever he entertained he and
Leila received the guests together, standing in front of Mrs. Mills’s
portrait. People who dared had laughed about this, speculating as to
the probable fate of the portrait in case Mills married again.
“I’d got nervous about you when you were so late coming,” Mills was
saying. “That’s how I came to be at the door. I’d just called Millicent
to see if you were over there.”
“Foolish Dada! Don’t I always turn up?” she asked, kicking off her
slippers. “I’d been fooling around all afternoon, and I hate getting
dressed and waiting for a party to begin.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Mills replied dryly. “Just what did you do all day?
Your doings are always a mystery to me.”
“Well—let me see—I went downtown with Millie this morning, and
home with her for lunch, and we talked a while and I ran out to the
Burtons’ and there were some people there and we gassed; and
then I remembered I hadn’t seen Mrs. Torrence since she got home,
so I took a dash up there. And Connie was there, and Bud
Henderson came up with Mr. Storrs and we had tea and Mr. Storrs
was coming this way so I let him drive me home.”
This, uttered with smooth volubility, was hardly half the truth. She
lighted a fresh cigarette and blew a series of rings while waiting to
see whether he would crossexamine her, as he sometimes did.

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From Psychology to Morality: Essays

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From Psychology to Morality

From Psychology to Morality

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2018

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CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

In loving memory of Sarah Lynn Hill

Introduction: Naturalism in Ethics 1

nine Moral Ideals 195

1. “Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology” was first

3. “Freud” is a considerably revised and expanded version of the article with

4. “Psychopathic Resentment” first appeared in Self-​Evaluation: Affective and

5. “Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision” is a revised version of my

6. “Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?” appeared in Forms of

7. “Williams on Practical Reason” has not been previously published. An earlier

8. “Sidgwick’s Conception of Ethics” was first published in Utilitas 16

9. “Moral Ideals” appeared in Rationality, Rules, and Ideals: Critical Essays on

10. “The Emotional Significance of Punishment” was published in Emotion

11. “Punishment and Proportionality: Part 1” was published in Criminal Justice

12. “Punishment and Proportionality: Part 2” appeared in Criminal Justice Ethics

From Psychology to Morality

Naturalism has a long tradition in ethics. Arguably, it goes back to the

1. Plato, Protagoras 320c10–​328d3.

Aquinas led to his promoting natural reason as a source of knowledge in-

Rousseau’s project was to explain the wretchedness of the human condition

conscience and moral sensibilities innately, acquire them through accultura-

direct their promptings. On a naturalist understanding of human nature,

accounts of moral responsibility do not threaten views on which moral respon-

individual and φ is a verb of action. When egoism is formulated as a naturalist

duty to maintain a good will or a benevolent disposition towards all, which

social group between members of equal power or by more powerful members

At the same time, the account yields an explanation of Hume’s thesis

Two major themes characterize the study of emotions in modern philosophy

14 From Psychology to Morality

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 15

“sensibly continuous,” like a stream (1950, vol. 1, p. 237). It can no more be

16 From Psychology to Morality

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 17

1. In taking James’s rejection of the commonsense order of events in an episode of emotion

18 From Psychology to Morality

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 19

20 From Psychology to Morality

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 21

memories of real abuse. In effect, then, Freud, in giving these explanations,

22 From Psychology to Morality

agreed in taking some form of evaluative judgment as an essential element of

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 23

4. “Psychopathic Resentment” first appeared in Self-Evaluation: Affective and

1. Plato, Protagoras 320c10–328d3.