Emotions, Values, and the Law

Emotions, Values, and the Law brings together ten of John Deigh's essays written over the past fifteen years. In the first five essays, Deigh ask questions about the nature of emotions and the relation of evaluative judgment to the intentionality of emotions, and critically examines thecognitivist theories of emotion that have dominated philosophy and psychology over the past thirty years. A central criticism of these theories is that they do not satisfactorily account for the emotions of babies or animals other than human beings. Drawing on this criticism, Deigh develops analternative theory of the intentionality of emotions on which the education of emotions explains how human emotions, which innately contain no evaluative thought, come to have evaluative judgments as their principal cognitive component. The second group of five essays challenge the idea of the voluntary as essential to understanding moral responsibility, moral commitment, political obligation, and other moral and political phenomena that have traditionally been thought to depend on people's will. Each of these studies focuses on adifferent aspect of our common moral and political life and shows, contrary to conventional opinion, that it does not depend on voluntary action or the exercise of a will constituted solely by rational thought. Together, the essays in this collection represent an effort to shift our understanding ofthe phenomena traditionally studied in moral and political philosophy--from that of their being products of reason and will, operating independently of feeling and sentiment--to that of their being manifestations of the work of emotion.

John Deigh is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illionis at Chicago. He is the author of The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory. He is the editor of Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy.