On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour

33:40021–8308

© The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKJTSBJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour0021-8308© The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 200320033341000Original ArticleOn the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”Kristján Kristjánsson

On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”

KRISTJÁN KRISTJÁNSSON

Kristján Kristjánsson,

On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”, pp. 000–000

As attention has shifted towards the emotions in general, the notion of so-called negative emotions has come in for renewed interest. The author explores this notion and argues that its invocation cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscures all sorts of relevant complexities. There are thus no emotions around to which we can helpfully refercollectively as “negative,” although there are of course painful emotions, emotions that negatively evaluate states of affairs, emotions that are negatively morally evaluated, and so forth. Furthermore, while attempts are under way to reappraise various (commonly) negatively evaluated emotions, those attempts involve different kinds of argument which cannot and should notbe collected together as “defenses of negative emotions.”

I. INTRODUCTION

If Ronald de Sousa is right in saying that “most of what is morally interestingabout human life is played out in the domain of the emotions” (1987: 17), thephoenixian rise of the emotions as a topic of interest among philosophers andpsychologists during the last twenty-five years or so must have been long overdue.For once, also, an issue of academic interest has percolated through to the public:The fundamental message of the prevailing cognitive theories of late, that emo-tions are in principle educable and regulatable, has struck such a chord with theordinary person that academic buzzwords such as “emotional intelligence” havesuddenly become topics of enthusiastic everyday conversation in the workplaceand at the dinner table.

As both scholarly and public attention has shifted towards the emotions ingeneral, the so-called

negative emotions

have come in for renewed interest. Just asevery family has its skeleton in the cupboard, every academic subject has its ownpathology; in this case it is the despised emotions typically referred to as “negat-ive.” But what, precisely, does “negative emotion” denote? Is there such a thingas a negative emotion? Does the term “negative emotion”—as opposed to “pos-itive emotion”—serve a useful theoretical purpose, or should we perhaps considerit an unwelcome visitor in the field of emotion research?

1

These are the kinds ofquestions that I propose to take on in the present paper, and I will be aiming atbrief, but definitive, answers to at least some of them.

A

Google

-search in May 2003 revealed 13,700 Web entries for the search term“negative emotion.” A quick glance at the first 100 Web sites (in the searchengine’s order of relevance) did not produce a single specification of the term inquestion. Those 100 Web sites could be divided roughly into three categories.The first comprised pages espousing various kinds of Eastern philosophies andideologies (broadly conceived), in particular Buddhist ones. The emphasis therewas on the eradication of those “unwholesome and destructive” negative emotions

352

Kristján Kristjánsson

© The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

“on which Western society runs.” Nowhere were those emotions identified orlisted. We must bear in mind, however, that in traditional Buddhism, one of thefundamental goals is to empty the mind of the clatter of agitations, and althoughthere is a distinction there between those emotions which are counted as agita-tions and those which are not, the remaining ones have, more or less, lost theconative and affective components that characterize the corresponding emotionsin the Western philosophical sense: having rather become manifestations ofuniversal reason or cosmic benevolence. The absence of any clear distinctionbetween negative and positive emotions in those popular Buddhist Web sites can,thus, be partly condoned by the fact that their most salient point of emphasis wasthe general negativity of emotions in the Western sense. (For a popular but some-what more rigorous account of the Buddhist position than found on the Web, seeRevel and Ricard’s, 1998 bestseller.) In any case, I shall leave Eastern accounts of“negative emotions” out of consideration in the following.

The second category of Web sites concerning the negative emotions turned outto be one which many academic philosophers and psychologists would, I pre-sume, refer to dismissively as “psychobabble.” A couple of citations will give thereader a fair glimpse of the standard of discussion: “As long as you hold a negativeemotion about someone, you are emotionally tied to that person. When you lovesomeone, you are tied to them. When you are angry at someone or afraid ofthem, you are also tied to them. Being tied to them keeps you from growing andmoving on emotionally.” (Fortunately, this Web site offered a cassette tape withcomplete visualization exercises to help us release our negative emotions and “feelgood again.”) A second Web site provided the insight that negative emotions“express an attempt or intention to Exclude” while positive emotions “express anattempt or intention to Include,” adding a list of typical positive emotions thatboasted, among other things, laughter, boredom, interest, and action! There was,obviously, not much philosophical illumination to be gained there.

Within the third category was of a number of academic or semi-academic(popularized) explorations of negative emotions, often compiled by psychotherap-ists of various stripes. The most promising of those sites set out with the unchar-acteristically salient question “What is a negative emotion?”, but unfortunatelythis turned out to be a mere rhetorical question, never to be answered, perhapsin order to avoid disturbing the flow of revolutionary advice about how to “bettermanage” all those enervating “uncomfortable experiences.”

This quick look at 100 “relevant” Web sites might give one the impression thatscant consideration had generally been given to the core notion at stake, namelywhat a “negative emotion” really is. But, as someone could plausibly observe, isthis not simply typical of the Web, with all of its slipshod banalities: much adoabout nothing? Surely, as soon as one delves into the scholarly literature, one willbecome more enlightened. To test that hypothesis, I conducted a search of recentarticles listed in the data base

PsycINFO

where the search term “negative emo-tion” appeared in the relevant abstracts. When browsing through a dozen or so


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of those, chosen at random from the years 2000–2002—most of which had beenpublished in respected social-science periodicals—I was dismayed to learn thatnot only was there scarcely more attention paid there to underlying conceptualissues concerning emotional “negativity” and “positivity” than in the Web-basedmaterial, but the use of the very term “emotion” also seemed to depart radicallyfrom what I had taken to be a relatively stable consensus in recent emotion research.

To take a couple of examples, one essay aims to give an overview of variousresearch findings relating negative emotions to a range of immune-system diseases(Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2002). The notion of negative emotion is given short shriftin the Introduction; the authors simply report their intention of highlighting themedical consequences of “depression, anxiety, and hostility” (2002: 84). No con-sideration is given to the question of whether those are emotions in the first place,let alone negative emotions. In default of such considerations, the authors seemto be rather premature, after producing their findings, in drawing the conclusionthat

negative emotions

can intensify a variety of health threats—unless they, counter-intuitively, consider it some sort of a logical truth that any psychological conditionwhich leads to illness is to be called a “negative emotion.”

2

Otherwise, what theycould, at most, have reasonably concluded is that

depression, anxiety, and hostility

seem to have such an effect. Another paper examines “the structure of negativeemotions in a sample of nonclinical adolescents.” After a large sample of adoles-cents has completed certain standard self-report questionnaires measuring symp-toms of “fear, anxiety, and depression” and those have been factor analyzed, weare told that the results support the idea that “fear, anxiety, and depression arereasonably distinct but correlated components of negative emotions” (Muris et al.,2001). At what point in the research design or the interpretation of the given datathe notion of negative emotion entered in is, however, left unexplained.

Notice that in both these papers,

depression

and

anxiety

are, evidently, taken asprototypical examples of negative emotion. The problem there is that dominantcognitive-theory accounts of emotion, old and new, would not consider those as

emotions

at all but rather as

moods

. First, emotions have intentional objects ( I amsad at some particular loss; about some misfortune); moods, such as depression,do not. The latter are, so to speak, directed at everything and anything, which iswhy Solomon refers to them as “metaphysical generalizations” of emotions (1983:133). Second, emotions are propositional (structured by and articulable in declar-ative sentences), but moods are not differentiated by any propositional content.Third, emotions have reasons; moods have causes—and so on (see e.g. Solomon,1983: 132–133; de Sousa, 1987: 7; Roberts, 2003: 112–115). This is not to say thatthere is no connection between emotions and moods—moods predispose to certainemotions and emotions beget moods, which is quite another, if no less interesting,story—nor is it to say that emotion theorists share a common view of the indi-viduation of emotions; quite the contrary, there is embarrassingly little consensusin that area (see Kristjánsson, 2002: 17–22). Conceding all that, it neverthelessremains odd that so many academics describe as emotions—and even take as

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representative of the subset of negative emotions—precisely those psychologicalstates which the emotion literature tends to classify as examples of non-emotions.

II. KINDS OF “NEGATIVITY”

Philosophers often accuse social scientists of conceptual sloppiness. Are the papersI have mentioned not simply cases in point? That may well be, but for the presentline of inquiry we should be aware of the danger of the pot calling the kettle black.For despite what Solomon correctly calls “increasingly sophisticated debates”(1992b: 115) about emotions in the philosophical literature, precise characteriza-tions of the elusive term “negative emotion” (no less frequently invoked here thanin psychological circles) are rare. The closest we come to a systematic, carefullycrafted account is in Ben-Ze’ev’s (2000) extensive interdisciplinary study of theemotions. Yet, even in his account something is, I submit, amiss.

Ben-Ze’ev claims that the divisions of emotions into positive and negative is a“basic” one, expressing the centrality of the evaluative component in emotions.He also notes, as other have done before him, that there are more emotion wordsavailable to describe negative than positive emotions and that the former seem tobe more subtly differentiated (2000: 99). “Essentially,” Ben-Ze’ev remarks, “posit-ive emotions incorporate a positive evaluation, pleasant feelings, and the desireto maintain the situation; negative emotions incorporate a negative evaluation,unpleasant feelings and the desire to change the situation” (2000: 68). (In whatfollows, let me, for brevity’s sake, refer to emotions that incorporate a negativeevaluation of a state of affairs as “negatively evaluating” emotions and emotionsthat incorporate a positive evaluation of a state of affairs as “positively evaluating”emotions.) Ben-Ze’ev’s characterizations are consistently followed in his analyses ofdifferent emotions and seem theoretically useful, at least for his own line of inquiry.

There are some apparent snags, however, the first one being that these charac-terizations have arguably little to do with the way in which the terms “negativeemotion” and “positive emotion” are used in everyday language. For instance, inBen-Ze’ev’s analysis, compassion and sympathy (traditionally praised as positiveand virtuous) become negative emotions, while

Schadenfreude

and pride (the former,understood in the traditional way as pain at another’s undeserved misfortune,being universally condemned, and the latter commonly viewed askance) become“positive.” Now, there may be good reasons to depart from ordinary language:Sometimes distinctions deeply embedded in ordinary language turn out to beuseless; alternatively, there may be good arguments for invoking new distinctionswhich cut across ordinary usage. I shall not wade further into the tangled thicketof conceptual methodology except to remark that while any satisfactory inquiriesinto the nature of open-textured concepts (such as emotion concepts) will becritical and revisionary, involving the trimming of the “ragged edges” of ordinarylanguage—or for that matter even of people’s considered intuitions—when


355


necessary, such trimming must be done

respectfully

, by providing good argumentsfor their necessity (see Kristjánsson, 2002: 22–24). However, Ben-Ze’ev does notprovide any such arguments except by simply stating the obvious, namely thatapart from the psychological criterion (chosen by him) for distinguishing betweennegative and positive emotions, there also exists a moral criterion, according towhich a negative emotion would, for instance, count as one negatively evaluated inlight of moral values; criteria which may easily conflict (2000: 103). But why choosethe psychological one if the other seems closer to everyday usage (at least, as I havepointed out, for emotions such as compassion and

Schadenfreude

)—unless, that is,one is in the grip of a flawed and outdated fact-value distinction about evaluationnecessarily supervening on value-free description (see Kristjánsson, 2002: 26–28).

Ben-Ze’ev is not the only one to seem undermotivated in dealing with thesetwo potentially conflicting criteria; the plethora of words used as substitutesfor “negative” emotion in the emotion literature, such as “malign,” “antisocial,”“hostile,” “antipathetic,” and even “nasty” may betray an inadequate grasp of theunderlying conceptual conflict, if not a covert or overt attempt at evading it. Theofficial newsletter of the International Society for Research on Emotions recentlydevoted a whole issue to the topic of “nasty emotions.” The editors somehowmanage to blow hot and cold by saying that the emotions in question got to beconsidered nasty “at least partly” through their close association with moralityand moral condemnation (Cornelius and Fischer, 2002: 2). The Society’s Pres-ident is a little less ambiguous in his opening column by characterizing nastyemotions as “for the most part a subset of the negative affects” (Solomon, 2002a:3).

3

“For the most part” must be considered an important caveat here, for anemotion such as, say, Aristotle’s morally maligned “pleasure at someone else’sundeserved fortune” is—at least in Aristotle’s schema of fortunes-of-others emo-tions—a particularly nasty one, although it does not involve any negative affects;quite the opposite obviously (for further analysis, see Kristjánsson, 2003). Incident-ally, it is altogether unclear that the remaining authors in this issue of the news-letter share their President’s conception of what constitutes a nasty emotion; noneof them engages directly with the specification of the term.

Blissfully unaware of those conceptual difficulties—or so it seems—writers con-tinue to speak of “negative and unpleasant emotions” (La Caze, 2002: 155) as ifthose fall unproblematically into line. If we understand “negative” in this particu-lar citation to mean “psychologically negative” in Ben-Ze’ev’s above sense, and“unpleasant” to mean “painful for the experiencing subject,” we realize, however,that even within the psychological criterion of negativity, there may lurk sub-criteria which are at odds with one another. Here we come to the second snag inBen-Ze’ev’s position, the position according to which—as we recall—negativeemotions essentially incorporate a negative evaluation

and

unpleasant feelings.The snag is this: Anger, which incorporates a negative evaluation, can be pleasantfor the subject; love or gratitude, which incorporate positive evaluations, are oftenpainful, and so forth. Ben-Ze’ev’s response to this observation is that love is,

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nevertheless, “basically a positive emotion,” meaning that “the positive evaluationand its associated positive motivational component and pleasant feelings are moreessential in love than are the negative elements.” So even for emotions as complexor ambivalent as the above-mentioned trio of anger, love and gratitude, “we cannevertheless characterize their typical cases as either positive or negative” (2000:72). Let is suffice to say here that this response seems to offer a somewhat

ad hoc

,if not a Procrustean, solution to the problem at hand.

4

It may well be thatunpleasant feelings are more essential (at least in the sense of being more com-mon) in anger than pleasant ones, but this does not change the simple fact thatthere is no necessary connection between an emotion’s evaluative pattern and itsaffective component.

We have already seen how the term “negative emotion” has, in the emotionliterature, become a grab-bag of ill-assorted, and often internally conflicting, ele-ments. Which precise senses could reasonably underlie uses of this term in differ-ent contexts, and why is it perhaps not so helpful to saddle those senses with thelabel “negative emotion”? Let me distinguish between six senses, most of whichare commonly encountered, the first three broadly

moral

and the last threebroadly

psychological

:

(

a

)

Morally unjustifiable emotion

. Most philosophers who have written about theemotions during the recent renascence of emotion research have beenchiefly interested in their applicability to ethics; a fact correctly noted inRoberts’ recent book (2003: 36). Picking up a thread from Aristotle, thosetheorists have ruminated over the moral evaluation of emotional episodesin specific contexts; whether these are, first,

rational

and, second,

morallyfitting

within the given circumstances: experienced at the right time, in theright proportion, towards the right person, etc. (see further in section 3).From a moral point of view, this is a perfectly valid enterprise, but equat-ing it with the search for “negative” as opposed to “positive” emotionsobscures rather than illuminates, for the terms “negative” and “positive”are surely more at home when engaging with emotions in a dispositional,rather than an episodic, sense.

(

b

)

Morally unjustifiable emotional disposition

. Moral philosophers have long beeninterested in delineating vicious traits of character, traits that dispose theagent to immoral deeds or emotions; witness the compilation and sub-sequent vilification of the “seven deadly sins.” Referring to morally unjus-tifiable emotional dispositions as “negative emotions,” however, invites botha moral and a practical problem. The moral one is that, owing to thecontext-dependence of moral appraisals, most emotions would,

qua

disposi

-

tions, be difficult to categorize as exclusively unjustifiable, or exclusivelyjustifiable, from a moral perspective.

5

Even the most “positive” emotion,according to common opinion, such as compassion, would count as morallyunjustified in cases where it is felt out of proportion by, say, a health


357


professional. Few emotions would remain unambiguously within the presentcategory except perhaps invidious envy and motiveless malice, making theterm “negative emotion” as a label rather unproductive. Furthermore, prac-tically speaking, the blatant value-ladenness of this category would makeit ill-amenable to psychological research into people’s “negative emotions.”

(

c

)

Emotion which is generally evaluated negatively

. Judging from my—admittedlyunscientific—investigations of what the general public means by “negativeemotion,” this category probably comes closest to it. When references tocompassion as a “positive emotion,” or

Schadenfreude

as a “negative emotion,”crop up in everyday conversation, this is, I presume, typically what peoplemean, namely emotions that are generally evaluated positively or negatively.Psychologists might be interested in “negative emotions” in this sense, inthe context of recording people’s prevailing opinions, but philosopherswould probably soon lose interest, since for them what matters in the endis not what

happens

to be generally evaluated morally this way or another,but rather what

should

be so evaluated (namely here senses (

a

)

and (

b

) ).(

d

)

Painful emotion

. This is evidently also a sense in which an emotion is labeledas negative, but it takes us back to a problem noted earlier concerningBen-Ze’ev’s conception: A painful emotion need not be negatively evalu-ating, which Ben-Ze’ev thinks of as the central aspect of a negative emo-tion. Nor of course need it be negatively evaluated.

6

(

e

)

Negatively evaluating emotion

. That is an emotion evaluating the object or theobject’s situation as negative. This forms the core of Ben-Ze’ev’s charac-terization of “negative emotion,” and is no doubt useful for various theor-etical purposes in psychology. But as already pointed out, it bears scantresemblance to the ordinary-language understanding of “negative emo-tion,” since it includes, for instance, compassion under its rubric.

7

(

f

)

Emotion which negatively evaluates a state of affairs which is positive for the object, orpositively evaluates a state of affairs which is negative for the object

. I suggest this asa serviceable operational definition for possible use in some psychologicalexperiments. It goes some distance in capturing the moral dimension ofsenses (

b

) and (

c

)

8

—and hence is more in line with ordinary intuitions thanthe conceptions (

d

) and (

e

) which seem to be opted for by most psycholo-gists when examining what they call “negative emotions”—yet, this de-finition is non-normative. The defects of this suggestion, however, are thatit invokes a sense which no researcher has, to my knowledge, previouslythought of in relation to so-called negative emotions, and it would onlybe applicable in the case of other-regarding emotions, that is emotionswhere the subject and the object of the emotion are not the same person.

Let us notice two things about these six possible senses of “negative emotion.”The first is that all except (

f

) have been utilized, at one time or another, fortheoretical or practical purposes: Much of the current emotion literature, in so far

358



at it is morally inspired, deals with sense (

a

). Some of the infamous “deadly sins”are negative emotions in sense (

b

), and when Calhoun and Solomon discuss thepossible meanings of the labels “positive” and “negative” in their often-citedIntroduction to

What Is an Emotion?

, their first suggestion seems to be that anegative emotion is one which is “hostile” in a moral sense (1984: 33). Thepublic’s choice for the meaning of “negative emotion” would probably be (

c

), andthat conception has also usefully entered into some of the psychology literature(see e.g. Karasawa, 1995). Michael Stocker (1996) has, for one, made some intrigu-ing observations about painful emotions (

d

) as non-negative (see further in sectionIII). Finally, (

e

) seems to be the alternative preferred by many philosophers (e.g.Ben-Ze’ev, even if somewhat strangely mixed with (

d

) ), and most psychologists(e.g. Stein and Jewett, 1986).

The second thing to note is that (

a

)–(

f

) all delineate important categories ofemotion. None of these categories is arbitrary or trivial. Almost all have beenreferred to productively in philosophical explorations and/or psychological experi-ments. But why not simply call them by their respective names rather than forcingthem into the Procrustean bed of “negative emotion”?

In a recent penetrating study, in the present journal, of the notion of “basicemotions,” Solomon has shown how the search for such emotions has historicallydistorted rather than furthered our understanding of emotions (2002b).

9

At theend of the present section, I want to claim something similar about the pursuit of“negative emotions”: We can say everything that we need to say about

negativelyevaluated

emotions,

negatively evaluating

emotions,

painful

emotions, etc. without mak-ing any recourse to the fuzzy notion of “negative emotion.” Moreover, invokingthat notion cannot be done without cost to our understanding since it obscuresall sorts of relevant complexities. “Negative emotion” is not even applicable as ageneral umbrella term to cover all the phenomena described by (

a

)–(

f

),

for whilean emotion may belong under the umbrella according to the criteria for inclusionin one category (for instance “compassion” in (

e

) ), it may be forced out fromunder the umbrella according to the criteria for inclusion in another category (forinstance, compassion as not belonging to (

c) ).The term “negative emotion” thus stands revealed as a red herring in emotion

research: one which should be discarded as soon as possible or, perhaps betterstill, sent down to Doctor Leon’s useful Web Glossary of useless psychobabble(http://www.drleons.com/babble.htm). Incidentally, I think that much the sameapplies, mutatis mutandis, to the term “positive emotion,” although an explorationof that issue will, for reasons of space, be left for another day.10

III. KINDS OF “REAPPRAISALS”

It is a commonplace in recent emotion literature that, as Ben-Ze’ev puts it, “cer-tain emotions that have traditionally been considered as negative” are now being

http://www.drleons.com/babble.htm

On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions” 359


defended or even elevated to the status of the morally commendable (2002: 148).Given the conclusion of the previous section, that there is, as a matter of fact, nocategory of emotions which can helpfully be referred to as “negative,” we need totake this commonplace with a grain of salt. What should be observed first is that“negative” must here be used in a moral sense; it is plainly not the case, forinstance, that emotions which have hitherto been considered to incorporate anegative evaluation of a certain state of affairs (see category (e) above whichformed the core of Ben-Ze’ev’s [2000] sense of “negative emotion”) have nowbeen miraculously discovered to be positively evaluating. The claim must ratherbe understood such that certain emotions which have traditionally been negat-ively evaluated from a moral perspective are now being given a more sympath-etic hearing. In my view, however, even this formulation of the above-mentionedcommonplace invites confusion by obscuring salient differences between theserecent “reappraisals.” Different strands of argument are described as if theybelong to a uniform fabric, when it is clearly in the service of conceptual clarityto keep them separated. In order to do justice to those recent efforts to reevaluatecertain emotions, let me try to separate and clarify various distinct argumentsabroad in the literature, listed here in ascending order of radicality, starting withthe more modest ones:

(i ) Instrumental-value argument. A number of recent studies argue that particu-lar stigmatized emotions, such as envy and jealousy, have some redeemingfeatures: that they are not as black as they have been painted, do notdeserve their “unqualified opprobrium,” etc. (e.g. Farrell, 1989: 262, onjealousy). The idea here is that while we would generally be better offwithout those emotions, there are some factual or conceptual considera-tions which force us to accept them, however cautiously and conditionally,because of their instrumental value. One of two approaches is thenusually taken. One is to argue that the emotions in question can bringabout positive moral consequences in particular (marginal, inessential)cases (e.g. Ben-Ze’ev, 2000: 262). The other is to emphasize the contrastvalue of those emotions: They offer a kind of testimonial or guarantee ofauthenticity to the moral emotions by making the latter stand out in sharprelief to the former (e.g. de Sousa, 1987: 321; citing a view expressed byLaurence Thomas).

(ii ) Value-of-the-painful argument. A less guarded defense is suggested, forinstance, by Michael Stocker’s justification of the “painful emotions,”such as regret and grief. Those are not only instrumental means for theongoing good moral life. The painful emotions are said to be intrinsicallyvaluable because they are necessary ways of experiencing, dealing with,and resolving the conflicts and ambivalences of daily life as we know it,and that “not to have these problems is not to be a person like us.” Theideal of wholly pleasant emotions is, by contrast, a “fantasy-ideal.” A life

360 Kristján Kristjánsson


where we could only experience those “might well not be a life at all” and“most certainly [ . . . ] not [ . . . ] anything even approaching a good life”(1996: 235–237). This argument constitutes a variation on an old theme,expressed in such proverbial sayings as “He is a fool that is not melan-choly once a day.” Given the state of the world as it is, reactions ofcheerlessness, if not downright agony, are often natural moral reactions.

(iii ) One-term-many-emotions argument. The rub here is that certain emotionterms, such as “envy” and “pride,” wrongly give the impression that onlya single emotion is at issue—and a morally flawed one at that. However,once we disentangle various uses of a given term in various locutions,we realize that it refers to a number of distinguishable emotions—casuallyleft undistinguished in everyday speech—where some are, admittedly,morally reproachable and avoidable, but others are morally defendableand even morally required in certain contexts (e.g. La Caze, 2001, onkinds of envy; Kristjánsson, 2002, on kinds of pride).

(iv) Proper-focus argument. The argument goes something like this: With variousemotions, such as jealousy, contempt, or vengeance, we have been system-atically misled by philosophers and moralists to concentrate on theirextreme forms (typically: the defects of excess) as their only possiblemanifestations, which may then be correctly written off as morally flawedbeyond redemption. The truth is, however, that there are properly-focused intermediate forms of these emotions where the emotion is bothrational (appropriate to its target) and morally fitting in the given circum-stances. This argument usually draws heavily on Aristotle’s notion of amorally justifiable emotion as one experienced at the right time, withreference to the right object, with the right motive, and in the right way,as well as his architectonic of the golden mean, in particular his defenseof proper anger as a mean between the extremes of deficiency (inirascibil-ity) and excess (irascibility). In other words, many (if plainly not all) com-monly negatively evaluated emotions can, in their proper dosage, be seenas virtues or as ingredients in virtues: as parts of a good human life. Thatthese can also be improperly (excessively or deficiently) experienced doesnot, as such, tell against the plausibility of their moral justification, for, asthe Latin has it: abusus non tollit usum: Abuse is no argument against properuse (see e.g. Mason, 2003, on the propriety of properly-focused contempt;Kristjánsson, 2002, on jealousy; Solomon, 1994, on vengeance). Thisargument is sometimes used in conjunction with (iii ); for instance,Kristjánsson (2002: ch. 5) uses it to defend jealousy after characterizingjealousy as a specific form of envy. Moreover, it can sometimes be difficultto distinguish between (iii) and (iv) in particular writings, as there isadmittedly a thin line between claiming, on the one hand, that the term“x” refers to distinct emotions and, on the other, that emotion x canassume distinct forms with respect to its focus and fittingness. Nevertheless,



this distinction is not a negligible one since it indicates a significantlydifferent conceptual and moral approach.

(v) Misdescription argument. This is, in a sense, the most radical argument:Emotion term “x,” which people have generally considered to refer to aparticular combination of emotion-forming ingredients (cognition, desire,affect, etc.), and a nasty one at that, can actually be shown by good argu-ments ( linguistic, psychological, conceptual, or moral) to refer to anotherand more acceptable combination. For example, John Portmann argues,in a book which caught the attention of the public media in the wakeof the dot-com crash, that Schadenfreude should not be understood aspleasure at another’s undeserved misfortune, but rather as pleasure atanother’s deserved misfortune, with the former emotion being better cap-tured by the term “malicious glee” (Portmann, 2000; for an analysis andcritique, see Kristjánsson, 2003).

What these different arguments have in common is the assumption that we havebeen too hard on emotions which we have not properly understood, and thatthese are not really (for various reasons) retrograde or eliminable from moral life.To refer collectively to those arguments as “recent defenses of negative emotions”is, however, misleading because of the fuzziness of the term “negative emotion,”and also involves an avoidable oversimplification because those arguments differessentially in radicality, employ different tactics, and draw on different philosoph-ical persuasions. To be sure, there may be something to Mason’s claim that inorder to see anything like “properly-focused contempt”—or other emotions ofthat ilk—required for the moral life, one must have become dissatisfied with theidea that “an enlightened morality must be a gentle morality” (2003: 236); dis-satisfied with the indiscriminate rejection of various emotional responses to theexperience of which human beings seem to have a natural faculty but an acquireddifficulty. Most of the writers mentioned in this section share broadly Aristoteliannaturalist sympathies and are not antagonistic to the view that people can be ofunequal moral worth as persons, depending on their demonstrated level of moralattainment (see e.g. Kristjánsson, 2002: 130–135). Most seem to favor a moralsociety where proper pride is considered a more wholesome character trait thansheepish humility. But these are little more than the most general of similarities.The view that morality can properly countenance some commonly stigmatizedemotions does not require an Aristotelian grounding in the strict sense; it can bedefended along Humean or Millian lines, or even along the lines of contemporaryvirtue ethics. Moreover, as already noted, the scope and force of the argumentsthemselves is diverse enough to defy any generalization, with each one of thosehaving to be analyzed and judged on its own merit.

I said at the beginning of this paper that I would be aiming at definitiveanswers to at least some of the questions posed in section I. Enough has, I hope,been said to fulfill that promise. To recapitulate, there are no emotions around



to which we can helpfully refer collectively as “negative,” although there are ofcourse painful emotions, emotions that incorporate negative evaluations of statesof affairs, emotions that are negatively morally evaluated, and so forth. To put itbluntly, there is no such thing as a negative emotion. Furthermore, while genuineattempts are under way to reappraise various (commonly) negatively evaluatedemotions, those attempts involve different kinds of strategies which cannot andshould not—either logically and morally—be collected together under one singlelabel.

Kristján Kristjánsson Department of Education University of Akureyri P.O. Box 224 IS-602 Akureyri ICELAND [email protected]

Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Aaron Ben-Ze’ev and Mikael M. Karlsson fortheir detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to Robert C.Solomon for his helpful suggestions.

NOTES

1 For an enlightening historical overview of the notions of “positive” and “negative”emotion, see Solomon and Stone (2002).

2 This may have been the view of some medieval physiologists. Since one, however,hardly comes across this view in the current literature—as opposed to the common viewthat negative emotions can in fact lead to illness—I leave it out of my list of the many sensesof “negative emotion” in the following section.

3 For a more nuanced exposition of Solomon’s view, see Solomon and Stone (2002).4 Ben-Ze’ev would, of course, not agree. He provides, for example, a lengthy and

somewhat complex explanation of the centrality of the evaluative element in emotion inhis book (2000: 67–73). Given that evaluation is here more central than feeling, we mayask, however, why Ben-Ze’ev does not simply drop the reference to feelings in hiscategorization of “negative emotion.”

5 Needless to say, what matters here is also what kind of moral theory one endorses: adeontological, consequentialist, or a teleological one.

6 Not to mention the more subtle problem that the seemingly straightforward criterionof pain may be shot through with ambiguities—witness the good old Millian insights aboutthe complexity, multi-dimensionality, and contextuality of pain and pleasure (see e.g.Solomon and Stone, 2002: 423–425).

7 Moreover, a similar problem of ambiguity might crop here as mentioned in note 6regarding the criterion of pain: An evaluation of “the object or the object’s situation” neednot constitute a simple or single evaluation.



8 An emotion such as righteous indignation (pain at someone else’s undeserved fortune)would constitute an obvious exception in this respect, however, since the object wouldpresumably in most cases evaluative his fortune positively. Yet indignation is not, from themoral point of view of senses (b) and (c), a negative emotion.

9 In a more recent article (Solomon and Stone, 2002), which appeared as I was aboutto put the finishing touches to the present piece, it is also argued, in a similar vein, thatfacile uses of “positive” and “negative” characterizations of emotions are simple-mindedand detrimental to serious emotion research. While I agree with many of the substantialpoints made by the authors, I do not fully share their “deconstructionist” suspicionstowards polarities and “oppositional thinking” (432–433). I do believe that important andinteresting contrasts can be drawn between painful versus pleasant emotions, negativelyevaluating versus positively evaluating emotions, morally justifiable versus morallyunjustifiable emotions, etc. My criticisms of the term “negative emotion” are, as can beseen from the above argumentation, more internal to that notion (concerning how it is usedin a lot of different senses which do not align), rather than having to do with ways in which“negative emotion” is falsely contrasted with “positive emotion” through an “insistence onoppositional thinking” (Solomon and Stone, 2002: 432).

10 I would, for instance, fully concur with Solomon’s point that it adds, as such, nothingto an analysis of pride to say that it is “positive” (Solomon, 2003: 10). For a number ofreasons “positive emotions” have not formed as lively a topic of debate as “negativeemotions”: Fewer “positive” emotions have been differentiated and named, they rarely giverise to health problems, and they do not as typically produce specific urges to action (seeSolomon and Stone, 2002: 421, citing research by Barbara Fredrickson). Still, interest in“positive” emotions might be rising; just a few days before writing this final note, a newissue of the Emotion Researcher (vol. 18, no. 2, 2003), devoted to the “nice” emotions,appeared in my mailbox.

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On the Very Idea of “Negative Emotions”