On most accounts present in the literature, the complex experience of shame has the injury to self-esteem as its main component. A rival view, originally propounded by St Augustine, relates shame to the structure of human agency, and more specifically, to the conflict between will and desire. A recent version of this view developed by David Velleman relates shame to the capacity of self-presentation and the need for privacy. I examine two different interpretations of Velleman's theory and argue that neither suggests a credible alternative to the received view. Hobbesian theories of shameAssume that a person has a certain idea of his own self. He has formed certain beliefs about his physical capacities, his intellectual capacities, his standing in the society, his achievements, his relationships with his friends and family members. Then we say that he is in possession of a self-assessment theory providing him with a scale for grading his various qualities, relations, and activities. Each of these grades is accompanied by value ascriptions: the person should have formed beliefs about how much value each of the properties he attributes to himself is supposed to carry. There would be occasions when at least one of these values decreases. On such occasions the person would become aware that his capacities or achievements are not as significant as he thought they were. Given that those capacities and achievements carry at least some value in the agent's eyes, his overall self-esteem would decrease. The emotional reaction to this decrease in value is shame. The decrease itself can come from a number of sources. It can be a result of the agent's own action, of an action directed at him, or even of someone else's action directed at some third party.Shame is a result of a procedure of self-evaluation in which the agent is engaged in appraising his own worth. Where, as a result of that appraisal, the agent's opinion of his worth -what we call his
Abstract. For a predicate expression F contained in a sentence S ('x is F ') to count as an insult, it should be used in a situation having a number of contextual elements. There should be an audience to whom the utterance of S is addressed. There should be a target of the insult, an individual who the speaker wishes to be shunned, excluded from certain, more or less salient, forms of social cooperation. The purpose of the utterance of S is to persuade the audience, by appeal to their emotions, to shun the target. Slurs have the canonical occasions of use structurally identical to the occasions of insults.
Gratitude is usually conceived as a uniquely appropriate response to goodwill. A grateful person is bound to reward an act of goodwill in some appropriately proportionate way. I argue that goodwill, when interpreted as love, should require no reward. Consequently, the idea of gratitude as a proportionate response to love is not intelligible. However, goodwill can also be understood merely as a disinterested concern. Such forms of goodwill are involved in reciprocal relationships. But gratitude has no place in these relationships either. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
I explore Mandeville's account of moral judgement and its implications for the understanding of hypocrisy. According to Mandeville, we have a psychological need to like ourselves sufficiently, so as to carry on with our lives. Because our self-liking necessarily depends on the opinions others form of us, we are extraordinarily sensitive to praise and condemnation. The practice of moral judgement exploits this sensitivity. Hypocrisy is an intrinsic element of this practice.
I start by reconsidering two familiar arguments against modal realism. The argument from epistemology relates to the issue whether we can infer the existence of concrete objects by a priori means. The argument from pragmatics purports to refute the analogy between the indispensability of possible worlds and the indispensability of unobserved entities in physical science and of numbers in mathematics. Then I present two novel objections. One focusses on the obscurity of the notion of isolation required by modal realism. The other stresses the arbitrary nature of the rules governing the behaviour of Lewisean universes. All four objections attack the reductive analysis of modality that is supposed to be the chief merit of modal realism.
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