Fittingness, Practice, and Emotion

Fitting attitude analyses of value aim to analyse various kinds of value in terms of fitting attitudes. Thus, for example, something is disgusting if and only if disgust is a fitting response towards it. One question for this approach is to explain what it means for some property to make some other response fitting. Some theorists have attempted to analyse the notion of fit in terms of reasons while others have instead claimed that the notion of fittingness should be primitive. In this paper, I want to claim that we can get a grip on this notion by considering these attitudes as constituted by a practice. Drawing on a distinction that Rawls makes, this allows us to see that there are really two distinct questions we can ask when we want to explain the fittingness of an attitude: (a) how we determine the shape of the practice and its standards of fit as a whole and (b) how we determine the fittingness of a specific response within the context of the practice. Focusing on the fittingness of emotional attitudes, I will then put this analysis to work by showing how it allows us to provide a framework to explain and criticise our current standards of fittingness by examining the kinds of goods that our practice of emotion aims at.

Date & time

Tue 16 Feb 2021, 3:30pm

Location

RSSS Building, Level 6,Room 6.71

Event series

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Updated:  16 February 2021/Responsible Officer:  Head of School/Page Contact:  CASS Marketing & Communications