This volume is the first to bring together original work by leading philosophers and psychologists in an examination of the moral psychology of contempt.

By bringing the work of philosophers and psychologists together this volume is an interdisciplinary, though predominantly philosophical, exploration of an often discussed but rarely researched emotion; admiration. By exploring the moral psychology of admiration the volume examines the nature of this emotion, how it relates to other emotions such as wonder, envy and pride and what role admiration plays in our moral lives. As to the latter, a strong focus is on the potential link between admiration, emulation and the improvement of our characters, as well as of society as a whole.

This volume provides readers with the state-of-the-art in research on gratitude. It does so in the form of sixteen never-before published articles on the emotion by leading voices in philosophy and the sciences of the mind.

Examines Nietzsche's thinking on the virtues using a combination of close reading and digital analysis.

Under what circumstances can love generate moral reasons for action? Are there morally appropriate ways to love? Can an occurrence of love or a failure to love constitute a moral failure? Is it better to love morally good people? This volume explores the moral dimensions of love through the lenses of political philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It attempts to discern how various social norms affect our experience and understanding of love, how love, relates to other affective states such as emotions and desires, and how love influences and is influenced by reason. What love is affects what love ought to be. Conversely, our ideas of what love ought to be partly determined by our conception of what love is.

The feeling that one can’t get over a moral wrong is challenging even in the best of circumstances. This volume considers challenges to forgiveness in the most difficult circumstances. It explores forgiveness in criminal justice contexts, under oppression, after genocide, when the victim is dead or when bystanders disagree, when many different negative reactions abound, and when anger and resentment seem preferable and important. The book gathers together a diverse assembly of authors with publication and expertise in forgiveness, while centering the work of new voices in the field and pursuing new lines of inquiry grounded in empirical literature. Some scholars consider how forgiveness influences and is influenced by our other mental states and emotions, while other authors explore the moral value of the emotions attendant upon forgiveness in particularly challenging contexts. Some authors critically assess and advance applications of the standard view of forgiveness predominant in Anglophone philosophy of forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment, while others offer rejections of basic aspects of the standard view, such as what sorts of feelings are compatible with forgiving. The book offers new directions for inquiry into forgiveness, and shows that the moral psychology of forgiveness continues to enjoy challenges to its theoretical structure and its practical possibilities.

At a time when respect is widely touted as an attitude of central moral importance, contempt is often derided as a thoroughly nasty emotion inimical to the respect we owe all persons. But while contempt is regularly dismissed as completely disvaluable, ethicists have had very little to say about what contempt is or whether it deserves its ugly reputation. Macalester Bell argues that we must reconsider contempt's role in our moral lives. While contempt can be experienced in inapt and disvaluable ways, it may also be a perfectly appropriate response that provides the best way of answering a range of neglected faults. Using a wide variety of examples, Bell provides an account of the nature of contempt and its virtues and vices. While some insist that contempt is always unfitting because of its globalism, Bell argues that this objection mischaracterizes the person assessments at the heart of contempt. Contempt is, in some cases, the best way of responding to arrogance, hypocrisy, and other vices of superiority. Contempt does have a dark side, and inapt forms of contempt structure a host of social ills. Racism is best characterized as an especially pernicious form of inapt contempt, and Bell's account of contempt helps us better understand the moral badness of racism. It is argued that the best way of responding to race-based contempt is to mobilize a robust counter-contempt for racists. The book concludes with a discussion of overcoming contempt through forgiveness. This account of forgiveness sheds light upon the broader issue of social reconciliation and what role reparations and memorials may play in giving persons reasons to overcome their contempt for institutions.

These ten original essays examine the moral and philosophical implications of developments in the science of ethics, the growing movement that seeks to use recent empirical findings to answer long-standing ethical questions. Efforts to make moral psychology a thoroughly empirical discipline have divided philosophers along methodological fault lines, isolating discussions that will profit more from intellectual exchange. This volume takes an even-handed approach, including essays from advocates of empirical ethics as well as those who are sceptical of some of its central claims. Some of these essays make novel use of empirical findings to develop philosophical research programs regarding such crucial moral phenomena as desire, emotion, and memory. Others bring new critical scrutiny to bear on some of the most influential proposals of the empirical ethics movement, including the claim that evolution undermines moral realism, the effort to recruit a dual-process model of the mind to support consequentialism against other moral theories, and the claim that ordinary evaluative judgments are seldom if ever sensitive to reasons, because moral reasoning is merely the post hoc rationalization of unthinking emotional response.

What makes a word bad? Bad Words is a philosophical examination of slurs and other derogatory and problematic language, by some of the leading contributors to the field. Slurs are an interesting case for the philosophy of language. On the one hand, they seem to be meaningful in something like the way many other expressions are meaningful - different slurs might seem in some way to refer to different groups, for example. But on the other hand, it's clear that slurs also have distinctive practical effects and roles: they can seem to be just an arbitrary tool for insulting or enabling harm. How are those aspects related? Just how the use of words is related to their significance is of course one of the deepest issues in philosophy of language: slurs not only refine that issue, by presenting a kind of use that presents novel challenges, but also give the issue a compelling practical relevance. The Engaging Philosophy series is a new forum for collective philosophical engagement with controversial issues in contemporary society.

Negative emotions are familiar enough, but they have rarely been a topic of study in their own right. This volume brings together fourteen chapters on negative emotions, written in a highly accessible style for non-specialists and specialists alike. It starts with chapters on general issues raised by negative emotions, such as the nature of valence, the theoretical implications of nasty emotions, the role of negative emotions in fiction, as well as the puzzles raised by ambivalent and mixed emotions. The second part of the volume consists of studies of specific emotional phenomena, ranging from the emotion of being moved and the sense of uncanniness to jealousy, hatred, shame, contempt, anxiety, and grief.