Response from Sean Greenberg on November 3, 2005

This question points to a tension in our pre-theoretical views about emotions. On the one hand, they seem to be mental states with respect to which we are passive, and over which we have no control. This reflects the phenomenology of emotional experience. On the other hand, we sometimes expect people to have certain emotions, and criticize people for having certain emotions.

If, as many philosophers believe, responsibility presupposes control, given that emotions seem to be states over which we have no control, it would seem, then, that we cannot be responsible for our emotions. So, on the one hand, it would seem that we ought not to be responsible for our emotions, while on the other hand, we do hold people responsible for their emotions. Is there any way to resolve this tension?

I think that this tension may be resolved by reconceiving the notion of control at issue here. Rather than locating the control necessary for responsibility in decision, it could be relocated in rationality. So instead of requiring that our emotions be subject to our choice or decision if we are to be responsible for them, we might want to say that we are responsible for emotions insofar as they are reason-sensitive states.

The virtue of such an account is that it can acknowledge the passivity of our experience of emotions, without taking that phenomenological passivity as a normative disqualification. Moreover, it provides a principled way to distinguish emotions from other passive states for which we are not responsible.

For example, pains, like emotions, are states with respect to which we are passive. However, we do not normally hold people responsible for being in pain. If we take reason-sensitivity to be a condition of responsibility, then this would explain why we don't hold people responsible for pains, because they do not reflect reasons, while we do hold people responsible for emotions.

One might well wonder whether the idea that responsibility can be grounded in reason-sensitivity is generalizable, whether it can provide the basis for a general account of moral responsibility. Following T.M. Scanlon, I think it can; for more details, see T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other, Chapter 6, "Responsibility."