Triston Hanna
Arizona State University
Emotions are integral to our interpersonal relationships and are governed by norms concerning their experience and expression. They are also evaluated based on the epistemic and moral character of their subjects. Just as emotions serve disparate roles in our lives, they are evaluated against similarly disparate criteria. Emotions are evaluated along at least four axes: alethic, moral, well-being, and biographical. Distinguishing these axes clarifies the social practice of emotion evaluation and is a step toward resolving disagreements in the fittingness literature, often stemming from conflating these distinct notions.
Philosophical literature on emotion has considered alethic fittingness (the fit that emotions have when they are or imply accurate representations) and the role of emotions in evaluations of moral character. However, some philosophers seem to implicitly assume that the normativity of emotions collapses into, or is merely, alethic fittingness. Rejecting this view, I will argue that there are instances where morally appropriate emotions diverge from accurate representation.
In clinical psychology, emotions are evaluated based on their influence on well-being. A common criterion for affective disorders is that the emotional experiences decrease function to a “clinically significant degree.” Well-being considerations of this kind are utilized outside of clinical psychology as well. Emotional evaluations are often determined or significantly affected by well-being considerations.
Finally, sometimes we consider people’s emotional tendencies, previous experiences, beliefs, and other personal factors when evaluating their emotions. These biographical considerations help explain why similar emotions can be evaluated differently depending on the individual.
This plurality problematizes the common methodology of theorizing these distinct notions of emotional fit or warrant to satisfy intuitions about “good” or “understandable” emotional experiences. Our intuitions track these different evaluative axes. Due to this multiplicity, without careful consideration our intuitions tell us, at most, that the emotion is appropriate on at least one axis, but not on any particular one.
The practice of emotional evaluation is messy and pluralistic. It attends to the ways that emotions can be valuable, matter to us, and the factors that determine how and when we experience them. To argue for a primacy of any of these criteria—or to reduce them into each other—is to oversimplify both social practice and the value of emotions.
Chair: Dominik Boll
Time: September 13th, 14:40-15:10
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 