The Value of Reactive Attitudes: Critical Response to Christine Tappolet's Emotions, Values and Agency

Abstract

In her recent book, Emotions, Values and Agency (2016), Christine Tappolet develops and defends an account of human agency in which emotions play an indispensable role in enabling us to think and act as self-governing, reason-responsive, and therefore responsible individuals. The two central pillars to her account are: first, a perceptual theory of the emotions, according to which our emotional experiences tune us into a range of normatively significant features in our environment (chapter 1) and motivate us to act in relevant ways (chapter 2); and, secondly, a neo-sentimentalist account of evaluative properties (or values), according to which such properties are perfectly objective features of the world, though they are only made salient to us, in fact individuated, by way of ‘fitting’ emotional responses (chapter 3). In this short commentary I do not engage directly with these central pillars. Instead, I focus on the question Tappolet raises in chapter 4 of how her own view of emotions and values relates to the topic of moral responsibility, specifically as approached from a ‘Strawsonian’ perspective. Does it help illuminate or support Strawson’s substantive account of responsibility and/or his methodological claim that philosophers will get a better grip on this phenomenon, not by way of some abstract metaphysical inquiry into the causal origins of behaviour, but rather by way of focussing on our everyday, emotionally-infused ‘attitudes and practices’ of holding responsible (Strawson 1962)?1