Emotion is a moral issue.

Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about Mind and Artificial Intelligenceby Craig DeLancey, Oxford University Press 2002. £37.50/$49.95 (xvi + 254 pages) ISBN 0 19 514271 3Interest in the scientific study of emotions has been increasing for the past two decades across the whole spectrum of sciences of the mind. Philosophers of psychology, however, have concentrated on the nature of mental representation, the nature of conscious experience and the prospects for artificial intelligence. Very few scientifically oriented philosophers have shown an interest in the emotions. But that is not to say that there has been no philosophical discussion of the subject. There are pressing questions in ethics and aesthetics that require an account of human emotion. Folk psychology, whatever its shortcomings as a proto-science of the mind, offers such an account and moral philosophers and aestheticians have worked with the tools at hand. Many of these philosophers, however, would justify their practice in another way, arguing that a purely scientific – or ‘naturalistic’ – account of the mind will be too impoverished and reductionistic to account for human emotional experience at the level of detail they require. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Craig DeLancey will have none of this, and sets out in this book to defend naturalism about the emotions by exemplifying its rich explanatory potential in a survey of central issues in the philosophy of emotion. He aims to address each issue in a way that is consistent with what is known about the ‘basic emotions’ – those clearly defined, short-term emotional responses found in all human cultures and concerning which there is a substantial scientific consensus. There is some controversy about the definitive list of basic emotions, so DeLancey concentrates on the two most widely accepted ones: anger and fear. In practice, then, his strategy is to constrain philosophical reasoning about the emotions by demanding consistency with empirical findings about short-term, behaviorally manifest instances of anger and fear. This minimal empirical constraint turns out to have considerable bite.Perhaps the most important philosophical issue concerning the emotions is whether they are ‘intentional’ – that is, whether they essentially involve a representation of the world. Earlier philosophers have argued that it is simply incoherent to claim that a person can be frightened without believing that they are in danger. This ‘strong cognitivism’ is indefensible in the light of a large body of varied experimental evidence on the basic emotions. The anecdotal evidence and thought experiments that have been used to support strong cognitivism can be fully accounted for by what DeLancey terms ‘weak cognitivism’, the view that ‘emotions are for humans often, but not necessarily, highly integrated with cognitive states’ (p. 44). DeLancey further argues that many emotional responses are intentionally directed, not at a fact about the world, but merely at an object. A person can be frightened of a leaping tiger without being frightened that the tiger is dangerous or that it will harm them.Another central philosophical issue is whether emotions can be judged to be rational or irrational. Traditionally, these judgments have been thought to rest on the fact that an emotion represents a state in the world. Irrational emotions therefore involve false representations. By contrast, DeLancey understands the rationality of emotions in terms of the many ways in which emotions contribute to the human capacity for rational action. Emotions can be functional or dysfunctional in each of these many ways. This leads him into a discussion of ‘moral internalism’ – the controversial philosophical claim that moral beliefs can cause people to act without the backing of a desire to be moral, or any other affective or motivational state. Moral ‘externalists’ insist that beliefs can only produce action in conjunction with desires. The belief that charity is a moral imperative will not lead to action unless it engages the emotions. Once again, DeLancey argues that simple forms of internalism can be refuted empirically. The leading neuroscientists of emotion, Edmund Rolls and Antonio Damasio, describe patients who have high IQ and perform normally on the usual battery of cognitive tests, but whose practical reasoning ability is severely impaired because of deficits in their ability to experience emotion. DeLancey argues that these results can be extrapolated to suggest a central role for the emotions in practical reasoning in specifically moral contexts. He himself embraces what he describes as a modified form of internalism, arguing that if basic emotions are ‘weakly cognitive’ then those intrinsically motivational states will be intricately bound up with moral reasoning. This, he argues, can explain the apparently direct role of moral reasoning in motivating action suggested by the anecdotes and thought experiments currently used to support internalism. In fact, in some cases a basic emotion is the empirical core of the mental episode that folk psychology would describe as a moral judgment.Whatever the merits of his specific arguments, DeLancey is to be commended for bringing these two disparate literatures into contact. A further excellent feature of this book is a website at which readers are invited to discuss issues arising from the book with the author (http://www.passionateengines.org).