©Ronald de Sousa
University of Toronto
DRAFT of a paper to be presented to the 1999 Religion, Society and
Values
MARTHA NUSSBAUM NAMED SEMINAR, Australian National University June
1999
ABSTRACT:
click for FULL
TEXT
Learning, whether of skills or of knowledge, typically extends the
range of our pleasures. This can be plausibly regarded as a biological
adaptation. Emotions are essential to learning intellectual and bodily
skills: some, like curiosity, motivate inquiry, others, like pride, reward
its outcome. Thus emotions seem capable of stimulating growth and change.
But the way that emotions function in intellectual or skill learning is
doubtless different from the way they function in moral growth or progress.
Moral education also involves our emotions, but the range of relevant emotions
is broader -- including, perhaps, intrinsically moral emotions such as
compassion, indignation, empathy, as well as others, such as jealousy,
spite, that we are inclined to classify as intrinsically nasty. Here the
role of emotions is more complex: they do not function merely as desires,
prompting calculation of means to their satisfaction; their biological
basis is highly controverted, and insofar as most emotions are learned
in early formative stages of moral development their effect is probably
inherently conservative. My argument begins with a minimalist, "black-and-white"
view of emotions as motivating, and then builds on some suggestive ideas
in Nussbaum’s work about the contribution of emotions to moral knowledge
and emotional and moral growth.