Love, Hate, and Reactive Attitudes

One day conference on love, hate, and reactive attitudes, with a focus on thinkers from the 18th/19th century. 

https://www.paulkatsafanas.com/love-hate-reactive-attitudes.html

Funded by the Boston Area Consortium for Kant and Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy (https://bostonareaconsortium.org/).    

Held at Boston University and open to the public. 

PLEASE REGISTER HERE: https://forms.gle/C8oaDHALAutmKT2w7

(The event is open to the public, but registration is required.)

Location: 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 325

Talks:

Stephen Darwall (Yale)

Title: Entitled to Respect and Worthy of Love: Two Different Kinds of Intrinsic Human Value

Abstract: I argue in The Second-Person Standpoint that deontic morality is grounded in a fundamental second-personal authority or dignity that is had by any moral agent.  We recognize this authority by a second-personal form of recognition respect, which I argue is a Strawsonian reactive attitude.  Dignity is one kind of intrinsic human value.  More recently, I have argued that there is a different kind of intrinsic human value that we recognize through second-personal attitudes of the heart that are forms of love.  This form of love is also a Strawsonian reactive attitude, one through which we recognize being worthy of love.  These different kinds of value define two different kinds of ethical community: what Kant called “the realm of ends” and what Martin Luther King, Jr., called the “beloved community.”

Patrick Hassan (Cardiff)

Title: Schopenhauer on Malice as the Externalisation of Suffering

  Abstract: In one of the few sustained accounts of malice in the history of Western ethics, Schopenhauer argues that the desire for the suffering of another for its own sake is best explained as the causal product of the agent's own inner-suffering. Via his metaphysics of the Will, Schopenhauer thus presents us with an idiosyncratic take on the ancient idea that vice and unhappiness are intimately connected. Yet Schopenhauer's elaboration of the causal claim which conceives of malice as a form of self-soothing does not obviously sit well with his repeated insistence that malice is a sui generis motive, distinct from egoism. This talk aims to elucidate this puzzle and offer a solution that avoids the exegetical costs of competing accounts. I close by suggesting that this conception of malice is not only of historical interest, but may also prove useful for understanding the contemporary phenomenon of incel misogyny.    

Amy Levine (Harvard)

Title: Finitude as Interpretive Dependence in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety

Abstract: In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard offers a reading of the biblical story of the Fall which is aimed at explaining the possibility of original sin without presupposing “knowledge of good and evil.” I suggest Kierkegaard takes up this theological problem to address another: on a Kantian picture of agency, how can an agent determine herself to act under a principle for the first time? His solution identifies an overlooked dimension of our finitude: our dependence on language and shared cultural practice for the intelligibility of anything we might do. Anxiety is the self-awareness of this dependence. It has an affective dimension because it also involves dependence on other people. In childhood, while we do not know the meaning of what we might do, adults do; in adulthood, the significance of our actions remains vulnerable to others’ interpretation. This reading of anxiety as self-awareness of interpretative dependence illuminates the connection between anxiety and authenticity for Kierkegaard and later for Heidegger. 

Krista K. Thomason (Swarthmore College)

Title: Kant on Vices of Hatred

Abstract: Kant identifies the vices of hatred for human beings as envy, ingratitude, and malice. The vices manifest themselves in positive attitudes toward the misfortune of others. Kant calls these vices both “loathsome” (6:458) and “devilish” (27:439). Despite Kant’s disparaging remarks, he then claims that the source of all three vices is “a property of human nature native to man, which not only makes us intrinsically guiltless, but also determines us to an admirable purpose” (27:692). This purpose is “the inclination to work against the perfections of others, or to surpass them by ever-increasingly promoting our own cultivation, in agreement with the laws of morality” (27:692). These remarks are puzzling. The vices of hatred are somehow both loathsome and also aids to our moral self-cultivation. My aim in this paper is two-fold. First, I reconstruct Kant’s arguments to show how he can hold both claims at once. Second, I examine whether Kant’s arguments about the vices of hatred can shed light on contemporary views about negative emotions like envy, ingratitude, and malice.

Bas Tönissen (Princeton) 

Title: Kant's concept of the heart: a developmental account

Abstract: This paper investigates the development of Kant’s concept of ‘heart’ (Herz) and its role in his moral thought. I argue that, though it has been largely overlooked, ‘heart’ is not a mere metaphor but an important technical term for Kant. He initially develops it in his Anthropology lectures to refer to a person’s characteristic Sinnesart, (‘way of sensing’) and translating their feelings into desires and actions. However, in Religion, it returns to play a more nuanced and important role: that of connecting this Sinnesart to our intelligible Denkungsart (‘way of thinking.’) By freely choosing the latter, we control whether our heart is good or evil. Moreover, because the heart connects that free choice to our individual sensibility, Kant can say what his mature theory of freedom requires: that we are responsible, at least indirectly, for our own motivations.

Schedule:
9:30-10:45 Bas Tönissen

11:00-12:15 Stephen Darwall

12:15-1:45 lunch break

1:45-3:00 Krista K. Thomason

3:15-4:30 Patrick Hassan 

4:45-6:00 Amy Levine