Emotional Regulation and Responsibility.
Tom Roberts
Forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
Abstract
I argue that one's responsibility for one's emotions has a twofold structure: one bears
direct responsibility for emotions insofar as they are the upshot of first-order evaluative
judgements concerning reasons of fit; and one bears derivative responsibility for them
insofar as they are consequences of activities of emotional self-regulation, which can
reflect one's take on second-order reasons concerning the strategic, prudential, or moral
desirability of undergoing a particular emotion in a particular context.
1. Introduction
Self-disclosure accounts of moral responsibility hold that an agent is responsible for a
certain outcome insofar as it expresses or reveals some aspect of who she is, and to what
she is evaluatively committed. In contrast to volitionist alternatives, which treat choice or
decision-making as a precondition of responsibility, self-disclosure views aim to establish
that agents can be appropriately praised and blamed even for states and behaviours that
are not under her voluntary control, such as beliefs and other mental states, omissions,
noticings, forgettings, and so forth.1 According to Angela Smith's recent exposition of
this approach, the rational relations view, a subject is responsible for outcomes of these
kinds when they are appropriately grounded in, or issue from, her underlying evaluative
judgements (Smith, 2005, 2008, 2012). For instance, someone is a reasonable target of
For discussion of this distinction, see Watson (2004), Levy (2005). Defences of the self-disclosure
approach can be found in Scanlon (1998), Smith (2005, 2008, 2012), Talbert (2008), Adams (1985).
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blame when her failure to remember a friend's birthday reflects an underlying lack of
concern for that person2 (rather than being, say, the result of being drugged or
brainwashed), and someone is worthy of praise when her reaction of disgust at a piece of
racist propaganda issues from an underlying commitment to racial equality.
In this paper, my concern is with a subject's responsibility for her emotional states, and I
shall argue that the rational relations view, as it stands, neglects the ways in which mature
subjects can exercise a degree of voluntary control over states of this sort through their
powers of emotion regulation. Emotional self-regulation, although it is a core concern of
the affective sciences, has not been properly acknowledged in the literature on emotional
responsibility, which has tended to treat the emotions as spontaneous reactions to
evaluatively significant encounters with the world. Attending to these powers, however,
reveals that a self-regulating agent can exercise a form of managerial oversight over her
emotional responses, and in doing so can recognise a range of reasons - prudential,
practical, moral - for and against undergoing a certain emotion at a time.
My argument offers an amendment to Smith's overall position,3 and I suggest that the
rational relations view's account of the ways in which a person's emotions reflect her
underlying evaluative commitments is overly passive: emotional episodes can be selfregulated (suppressed, diverted, modulated, and expressed) for a variety of strategic
reasons, and their conditions of appropriateness are commensurately diverse. Our
emotional states are determined not solely by our evaluative take on the world as we
confront it, but also by our assessment of the wisdom of undergoing a particular
emotion at a time, including its prudential, instrumental, or moral propriety. We can thus
See Smith (2005) for discussion.
I focus on Smith's exposition of this approach due to its sustained focus on responsibility for mental
states, but similar considerations apply to related non-volitionist accounts that emphasise an agent's
responsiveness to reasons (e.g. Fischer & Ravizza (1998), Hieronymi (2005), McHugh (2013)).
2
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2
think of emotional responsibility as having a twofold character. An agent has direct
responsibility for her emotions insofar as they are upshots of first-order evaluative
judgements; and has derivative responsibility for them as consequences of our activities
of self-regulation, which can reflect second-order evaluative judgements. Emotions thus
differ in an important respect from other - more clearly passive - mental states that have
been the primary focus of the self-disclosure approach, and have complex conditions of
elicitation and endurance that have been overlooked by proponents of that view.
In the following section, I draw out the core features of the rational relations approach
to emotional responsibility; in section 3, I examine a common, Aristotelian objection to
the view, which holds that a full account of responsibility must accommodate the history
of a person's attitudes, and the ways in which she has cultivated them over time; in
section 4 I raise a new set of considerations by appeal to a range of forms of emotional
self-regulation; and in section 5 indicate that these contribute to an individual's
responsibility in this domain.
2. Emotions and reasons
On the self-disclosure picture, a person is responsible for those things that reflect her
identity as a rational agent in possession of an evaluative take on the world: her
underlying judgements and commitments concerning who and what is important; what is
worthy of consideration and respect; which projects matter and ought to be pursued;
what is just and unjust, beautiful and ugly and so forth. An agent who has such an
evaluative perspective is apt to reveal her commitments in the pattern of things she
notices and remembers, in the inferences she makes, and in the ways she responds
emotionally to unfolding events, even when these outcomes are not performed
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deliberately or reflectively. On Smith's account, the relation between a person's
underlying evaluative commitments and outcomes of these kinds is a rational one:
someone who sincerely values some end can be expected, in her capacity as a rational
agent, to exhibit an appropriate pattern of actions and responses. She is responsible for
these products when this rational connection is exhibited, and when the underlying
attitudes that are reflected are commitments for which she is answerable - that is,
judgements that she can be asked and expected to defend, to justify by appeal to reasons
of a certain kind, and to abandon and revise (and perhaps to apologise for) if she finds
herself unable to do so (e.g. Smith, 2005: 252-254).
An individual's actions may stem from intentions that reflect her take on moral reasons,
for instance, while her mental states may express evaluations that are sensitive to reasons
of a different, and distinctive, kind. For example, an agent can be understood to be
responsible for her beliefs just when they reflect her take on reasons of an epistemic
nature; when, that is, they are grounded in an appraisal of how the world is, to which she
can appeal in defending her doxastic position. A subject who finds herself unable to
bring her beliefs into line with the evidential reasons that she recognises – as with certain
compulsive beliefs, for instance – does not, plausibly, bear full responsibility for these
mental states.
The evaluative assessments that are at the heart of emotional responsibility are those that
are sensitive to reasons of appropriateness or fittingness.4 We can view reasons of this sort
as playing an equivalent role to those of an evidential nature in the doxastic domain,
Although Smith says comparatively little about these reasons and their distinctive features, her examples
of the reasons associated with emotion-relevant evaluations are those of fittingness. In addition, this
account presupposes that emotions are grounded in cognitive-evaluative states, and that they have a
representational component. This is a popular, but not mandatory, conception of the essential nature of
emotions (see, e.g., Solomon (1976), de Sousa (1987), Greenspan (1988)). For discussion of emotional
reasons, see D'Arms & Jacobson (2000).
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albeit with some qualifications. Some emotions, such as fear and grief, have quite clear
conditions of appropriateness -- fear is fitting when the world presents a threat to one's
interests and wellbeing; grief is fitting when one has lost something or someone one
cherishes.5
Emotional evaluations have a relational element: the state of the world impinges on
different persons' concerns in different ways, and so need not be a reason for the same
emotional response for everyone. Circumstances that make your anger or envy
appropriate may warrant other emotions, such as satisfaction or pity, in me. Emotional
responding, then, is not a simple, value-neutral matter of tracking the way things are, but
an involved and personal recognition of, and reaction to, the ways in which one's
interests are affected by the events that transpire around one. A second consideration is
that reasons of emotional fit warrant not just a type but a certain degree of emotional
response. Minor dangers warrant mild fears; significant injustices merit substantial anger;
the small career successes of a rival justify envy of a low degree. In extreme cases at least,
an inability to keep one's emotional responses to a level that is proportionate to the
extent to which the world has impinged upon one's concerns amounts to a lack of
responsibility even if the emotion is broadly of the correct type.6 An agent who
recognises that a minor social transgression has been performed, who sees herself as
having reason for mild, disapproving irritation, but who is nonetheless overwhelmed by
apoplectic fury may be considered to lack responsibility for this emotional state, and
likewise for an agent who has no rational grip at all on what counts as a proportionate
In other cases, such as embarrassment, anxiety, or annoyance, it is less easy to specify precisely the
relevant reasons of fit, and hence to analyse exactly how responsibility for these attitudes is to be
understood. Nonetheless, we have a reasonable intuitive grip on what counts as an appropriate emotional
response in a given circumstance, even if we do not always have the vocabulary to express it.
6 This is not to say, however, that an inability to proportion one’s emotions appropriately always entails a
lack of responsibility for these states. When a (disproportionate) emotion aligns with, and so expresses, the
agent’s evaluative judgements it can be an outcome for which she is responsible, on the self-disclosure
picture. Thanks to an anonymous referee for alerting me to this possibility.
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response to the transgression in question. Thirdly, one's underlying evaluative
commitments tend to be expressed in, and to warrant, a pattern of intelligible emotional
responses over time. Someone who places a high value on gaining an academic
qualification, for instance, will be rationally apt to exhibit nervous anticipation in the
weeks before her exams; sadness and upset when she receives poor marks; regret when
she looks back upon her performance, and so forth.7 Such patterns indicate the relatively
stable character of a rational subject's evaluative perspective.
The rational relations approach thus understands the emotional responsibility of an agent
in terms of the ways in which her emotional episodes issue from an underlying evaluative
perspective on the world and its actual and potential affects on her wellbeing (broadly
construed), where she can - in principle - be asked to justify and defend this web of
assessments. For example, one is said to be responsible for one's fear of flying when this
emotion is grounded in one's assessment of the threat that it poses, and one can be
reasonably asked to articulate one's justification for this evaluation.8 In contrast, imagine
a subject whose fear of flying resists any rational revision. Despite acknowledging the
negligible risk associated with this form of travel, and recognising the pilot's
qualifications, the aircraft's impeccable safety record and so on, this individual is
incapable of shaking her emotional state. It is natural to hold that this subject, whose
emotion does not disclose her evaluative perspective, lacks responsibility for her fear; the
psychological capacities from which her fear issues don't reflect her take on relevant
kinds of reason - namely, dangers. Or consider someone whose distressed state is a sideeffect of a course of medication, and whose upset condition is not improved even in the
face of a recognised increase in good fortune or a positive change of circumstances.
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8
See, e.g. Helm (1994) for discussion.
See Smith (2005) for similar cases.
6
Again, the subject's emotion fails to fall into line with the reasons of fit that she
acknowledges; it is not the rational product of an underlying evaluative commitment.
The self-disclosure approach aims to explain the conditions under which it is appropriate
to react to an agent with a full range of critical attitudes, including those of a moral
nature.9 A subject is a reasonable target for criticism, firstly, when the connection
between her underlying judgements and their outcomes is at fault in some way.
Sometimes, a subject's failing is rational or cognitive in character, as when she neglects to
bring her beliefs into line with the best available evidence, or she holds two mental states
whose contents are in conflict. The person whose fear of spiders occurs in the face of a
recognition of their innocuous, non-threatening nature, for example, can be criticised on
rational grounds. In the emotional domain, if we treat reasons of fittingness as equivalent
to those of an evidential character, the responsibility borne by a subject is akin to
epistemic responsibility: it is a matter of being open to certain forms of criticism based
upon how well one recognises reasons of a certain kind. Here, though, our vocabulary of
emotion-relevant praise and criticism is rather richer than in the doxastic case: a failure to
respond appropriately to reasons for and against being fearful by systematically
misjudging the nature of the threat one faces, for example, may mark one as cowardly; a
failure to be properly sensitive to reasons for and against anger makes one a target for
attributions of short-temperedness; a failure to acknowledge reasons for being happy
indicates gloominess or pessimism. Appropriate emotional reasons-responsiveness,
meanwhile, warrants attributions of level-headedness, coolness of temper, self-assurance,
and so forth.
Thus Smith (2008, 2012) states that the rational relations view is not simply an account of "aretaic"
responsibility, warranting attributions of goodness and badness, but of moral responsibility proper,
licensing attributions of praise or blame. Against this, see, e.g. Levy (2005), Shoemaker (2011).
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The rational connection between an agent's outcomes and her evaluative judgements
makes further forms of praise, blame, and censure appropriate, too, because the
underlying judgements themselves can be "(substantively) mistaken, inappropriate, or
otherwise objectionable" (Smith, 2005, p254). A racist's amusement can be the target of
moral disapprobation in virtue of its rational connection to her underlying, and morally
suspect, racist judgements (for instance, that members of certain ethnic groups do not
deserve equal treatment), while a political activist's anger can be morally praiseworthy in
virtue of its rational connection to her admirable assessment of what counts as injustice
or unfair treatment.
It is the evaluative character of the subject's judgements that makes distinctively moral
assessment appropriate, for it is judgements of this sort that contribute to the individual's
identity as a moral agent, with a perspective upon things of value and concern.10 Many
mental states (and noticings, forgettings, omissions, and so forth) will not be subject to
moral appraisal, on the grounds that they reflect more neutral assessments of the world.
It is not clear, for example, what it would be for beliefs about simple factual matters,
such as those of mathematics or geology, to express morally objectionable underlying
attitudes, and the same is true for many emotional episodes. Joy at simple daily pleasures,
or disappointment with poor weather, for example, don’t reflect a moral take on one’s
situation. Insofar as emotions are capable of reflecting a subject's perspective qua moral
agent, though, and insofar as she is a reasonable target for calls to justify her evaluative
judgements, a person's emotional states are open to moral, as well as rational, criticism.
3. A historical objection
We can tell a similar story for certain forms of aesthetic criticism, too. For instance, we might treat a
subject's enjoyment of a sentimental artwork as aesthetically problematic in virtue of its being grounded in
poor aesthetic judgement.
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The rational relations view presents an ahistorical analysis of responsibility: provided that
the outcome (action, belief, attitude) stems from an evaluative appraisal for which the
person is answerable, further facts about the provenance of either the evaluation or the
outcome do not matter. Likewise, responsibility does not reside in an agent's future
ability to alter her evaluative commitments:
"When we praise or criticize someone for an attitude it seems we
are responding to something about the content of that attitude
and not to facts about its origin in a person's prior voluntary
choices, or to facts about its susceptibility to influence through a
person's future voluntary choices." (Smith, 2005: 251).
In the following sections, I will raise what can be thought of as short-term historical
considerations that challenge Smith's analysis of emotional responsibility, by emphasising
self-regulating agents' abilities to voluntarily alter their emotions both prior to their onset,
and during their occurrence. Before considering these issues, however, it will be
instructive to examine a common objection11 to the rational relations approach,
grounded in an appeal to longer term historical features, in order to set the short-term
historical considerations in context.
The rational relations view does not concern itself with the ways in which a person's
upbringing, societal position, education, and past actions have affected her current
evaluative perspective. In holding that what matters for responsibility is answerability -
See, e.g., Levy (2005), Shoemaker (2011). For accounts of emotional responsibility that emphasise
historical features, see, e.g., Sherman (1999), Sankowski (1977), Sabini & Silver (1987).
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being a reasonable target for certain justificatory demands - the approach sets aside the
effects of historical influences on an agent's moral character, which may be thought to be
exculpatory or condemnatory. The long-term historical objection suggests, in Aristotelian
spirit, that an assessment of an agent's responsibility for her evaluative commitments,
and their rational products, must take into account their provenance: the factors that
have, in the course of an individual's life, causally contributed to her perspective as a
moral agent. It appears, that is, that there are cases in which two individuals have
attitudes that are equally rationally reflective of their evaluative judgements, but where
they are nonetheless not identically responsible for these states. Consider, for example,12
someone who was brought up within a profoundly racist community, whose prejudices
she acquires and conforms to without submitting them to reflective scrutiny, and in
which such critical appraisal is discouraged. Provided that the pernicious influence of her
family and peers is sufficiently pervasive, it appears plausible that societal effects are
capable of undermining this subject's responsibility for her racist beliefs and emotions.13
We are intuitively inclined to treat this individual as less responsible than someone whose
entrenched racism is the result of knowingly consuming xenophobic propaganda, for
example, even where the two persons' sensitivity to reasons is the same. We can
construct similar examples that indicate the relevance of historical properties to
responsibility without difficulty - for instance, an agent whose propensity towards anger
or sadness has its roots in brain injury, or, conversely, someone whose traits are the
result of dedicated, long term self-improvement. Such examples, the argument goes,
provide fodder for the volitionist, control-oriented alternative to the self-disclosure
approach: what matters in each case is that the subject has deliberately acted, or has been
prevented from deliberately acting, to alter her own evaluative states over time, not
See Smith (2005: 267) for discussion of this case.
For example, her amusement at racist jokes; her lack of sympathy for the suffering of minority groups;
her satisfaction at their mistreatment, and so on.
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simply that she can be called upon to justify them. In the emotional domain, the only
attitudes for which a subject is truly responsible, on the volitionist view, are those which
have been deliberately cultivated over time.
Smith's response (2005: 268-70)14 is to argue that treating historical factors such as
upbringing as exculpatory involves adopting an unacceptable, patronising and alienating
attitude towards the agent under consideration. It is to treat her as excluded from full
membership of the community of moral agents; as incapable of truly grasping the
reasons that she takes to justify a particular attitude. Although some histories are relevant
insofar as they render an agent systematically insensitive to reasons (e.g. those that
involve brainwashing, injury, or other direct manipulation), and so contribute to her lack
of responsibility for her mental states, any subject who can reasonably be requested to
offer a rational justification for her attitudes is an appropriate candidate for praise and
blame on this basis.
I will not defend Smith's response to the Aristotelian objection here. Instead, the rest of
the paper will consider the short-term historical considerations raised by attending to
adult emoters' powers of self-regulation: their abilities to shape, construct, and suppress
emotional responses in the moments before and after the onset of an affective episode. I
will argue that self-disclosure theories such as the rational-relations view have failed to
appreciate this distinctive feature of our emotional psychology, and that even if we
accept Smith's general view that responsibility is grounded in the rational relatedness of
emotions to underlying evaluative commitments, cases of emotional self-regulation resist
the straightforward analysis to which Smith's approach lends itself. There is more to
emotional responsibility than a simple and direct rational connection between emotions
14
See also Scanlon (1998).
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and an agent's evaluative take on considerations of fittingness. On the account to be
offered, a subject bears direct responsibility for her emotions insofar as they rationally
reflect her first-order evaluation (that is, her assessment of how the world impinges upon
her interests; which things are threats and opportunities; gains and losses), and she bears
derivative responsibility for her emotions insofar as these states are products of selfregulatory activities that are sensitive to her second-order evaluation (that is, her take on
the strategic, instrumental, or moral appropriateness of an emotion at a time). Moreover,
the latter powers of emotional self-regulation make her an appropriate target for
distinctive forms of praise and blame, to which an agent whose emotions were connected
only to her first-order evaluative judgements would not be susceptible.
4. Emotional self-regulation
Before considering the psychological capacities that contribute to our emotional selfregulation, it is worth emphasising that the conditions under which emotions are elicited
in ordinary circumstances are themselves diverse. The philosophical literature on
emotions has tended to focus on cases in which an affective state is generated through an
agent's perceptual encounter with the world - the sight of a bear, the hearing of a joke, a
conversation with an adversary, and so forth. The rational relations view construes these
cases as follows: something evaluatively significant is confronted, and this triggers a
response that reflects relevant underlying commitments (concerning danger, or
funniness, or offensiveness, say). Conceiving of emotions in this way, although it
captures a central class of familiar affective responses, runs the risk of obscuring the
complexity of many emotionally significant states of affairs, and the ways in which the
same event can have contrasting effects upon a single person's interests. A subject's
emotional response to such a situation (for example, to a bereavement that results in a
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large inheritance, or to a job offer that requires relocation to a distant city) depends
upon, inter alia, which aspect of the situation she attends to, her considered evaluation of
its relative significance, and its overall salience among a web of competing concerns.
Secondly, many of our most resonant emotional episodes are directed towards objects
that are not concurrently present, and therefore not able to be perceived, during the
period over which the emotion is experienced. Emotions may be endogenously elicited
when a subject thinks about, remembers, imagines, or anticipates something. Regret, for
instance, is typically past-directed, while states such as nervousness, fear, or excitement
often feature future events among their objects. Although these responses involve what
we might think of as an indirect route between the emotion and its object, due to the
latter's distance in time or space, there is little reason to construe the perceptuallymediated cases as conceptually primary, or of greater import when it comes to questions
of responsibility. Emotions that are endogenously generated can have commensurately
vivid phenomenological character, and can be equally strongly motivating, as those which
are perceptually elicited. Endogenously caused emotions bear suitable rational relations
to underlying evaluative judgements, too, in standard cases. The anxiety that results from
my reflecting upon my future health or career success, for example, is rationally tied to and reflects - my self-interested concern. The rational relations view thus has a story to
tell about an agent's responsibility for emotions that are elicited 'from the inside'. As
before, a systematic departure of emotions of this sort from the subject's evaluative
commitments - or a systematic insensitivity of these commitments to reasons of an
appropriate kind - would correspond to a lack of responsibility.
13
As a general category, emotion regulation - whose significance as a topic in the
psychological study of emotion15 has not been matched by equivalent philosophical
attention - comes in a variety of stripes, some of which can affect perceptually-elicited
emotions and others those generated endogenously. Regulatory strategies can be
conscious, as when a subject deliberately modifies her surroundings to calm or amuse
herself; or unconscious, as when changes in her physiology contribute to a heightened
state of fear or panic. They can be exercised prior to the onset of an emotional episode,
as when a nervous flyer takes a pill to settle her anxiety; or during the episode, as when
she mentally rehearses flight-safety statistics to quell her rising apprehension. They can
involve manipulation of physical objects, as when a subject switches off the television to
avoid a horror film; a subject's own body, as when she covers her ears from the annoying
intrusion from next door; or inner states of attention and imagination. They can be
solitary, as when a subject soothes her anger by enjoying time alone; or interpersonal, as
when she engages in dialogue with a therapist.
For present purposes, my interest is in four broad psychological categories of voluntary
emotion regulation, selected in virtue of their implications for questions of emotional
responsibility, praise, and blame. These are cognitive change, including imaginative
reappraisal; attention direction; situation-selection and modification; and expression
modification. Each of these can be performed reflectively and deliberately by a mature
adult subject, and offers her a degree of voluntary control over the emotional episodes
she undergoes at a time. The point to be defended is that, when successful, selfregulatory abilities can result in an agent's having an emotion that does not simply
express her initial, sincere evaluation of reasons of fittingness (her take, for example, on
what is dangerous, or funny, or sad). In spite of a breakdown of these ordinary rational
15
E.g. Gross (1998; 2002), Gross & Thompson (2007).
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relations, however, an agent in this position need not be guilty of irrationality, and her
emotion may instead reflect her take on the strategic wisdom of undergoing that state at
a time, in light of its effects upon her and those around her.
4.1 Cognitive change
Both perceptually-elicited and endogenous emotions can be voluntarily affected by an
agent's powers of cognitive change, which can permit her to undergo emotional episodes
that do not reflect her initial, sincere take on reasons of emotional fittingness. In some
cases, cognitive change takes the form of a re-appraisal of the eliciting situation; a
transformation of the web of assessments from which emotions rationally ensue.
Although these powers are far from unrestricted, it is often possible to bring oneself to
see a situation in a new light, through reflection and consideration. If one is at a solemn
event such as a funeral, and one finds oneself becoming amused by some incongruity,
then one might suppress this emotion by reflecting upon the nature of the occasion,
coming to view it in a more serious frame of mind. Here, we can stipulate both that the
incongruity is something by which one is genuinely amused, that one's amusement is the
upshot of one's evaluative take on the situation,16 and so that one's unamused emotional
reaction does not reflect one's assessment of first-order reasons of fittingness. Instead,
cognitive changes have been brought about for reasons other than those of fit: in this
case, social or prudential reasons. Cognitive re-appraisal is a familiar emotional coping
strategy: bad news may be re-evaluated with a positive spin; setbacks can be reconceived
as challenges or learning experiences; gallows humour can allow one to see the funny
side of a grim situation, and so forth.
16
Ruling out, that is, that the amusement is simply a reflexive response to a tense situation, for instance.
15
Cognitive change can result from the agent's imaginative powers, too. In some cases, a
subject imaginatively reconfigures the way the real world is, while in others she conceives
of a fictional landscape in a new way. In both scenarios, her imaginative modifications
have an effect upon her emotional state. A subject who encounters a horrifying crime
scene, for instance, may reconceive it as an artifice or stage set, in order to suppress her
fear or panic, or to investigate it with a detached eye. A cinema-goer, meanwhile, may
suspend her disbelief at a film's clichéd or improbable contents, the better to immerse
herself in the experience. Again, the emotions undergone by such subjects do not
rationally reflect their take on relevant reasons of fit. The crime scene witness has good
reason to be horrified, and her evaluation of the situation as horrifying is sensitive to
these reasons, but her imaginative reconception allows her, at least temporarily, to enjoy
a less intense and disruptive emotional episode. The cinema-goer's sincere evaluation of
the film as shallow and unoriginal, meanwhile, is not rationally reflected in her enjoyable
emotional response.
4.2 Attention direction
Emotion regulation can result from the deliberate re-direction of an agent's attention,
towards or away from a salient aspect of what may be an evaluatively complex eliciting
situation. If one is nervous or excitable about an impending event, for instance, then one
can focus on another, less agitating feature of one's present or future situation in order to
soothe or improve one's emotional attitude. An anxiously-waiting interview candidate,
for example, may direct her attention to her newspaper, to prevent herself from dwelling
upon what worries her. Or consider the pilot of a stricken plane, whose evaluative take
on her situation treats it, rightly, as highly perilous. In order to land safely, however, the
pilot may exercise a strategy of attention direction that delivers an emotional state that is
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less apt to interfere with her command of the aircraft's controls by, for instance, forcing
her focus onto the procedural details she must go through for a safe landing.17
Attention direction has an endogenous correlate, too. Here, the subject modulates her
train of thought in order to bring forth emotions of a certain kind and quality, by
selectively attending to, remembering, or suppressing her thoughts about individual
objects, times, places, and so on. The apprehensive interviewee, for instance, may cope
with his nerves by directing his thoughts towards more relaxing considerations; while a
widower may manage his grief by focusing on uplifting or comforting memories of his
spouse. Conversely, carefully attending to something in thought or perception can
prompt an emotional experience that one has been withholding or suppressing - the
widower may focus on memories that permit him to embrace his grief, as part of a
process of healing, for example. Again, powers of attention direction are far from
unlimited - salient environmental features such as threats to one's wellbeing tend to
capture and hold one's attention, after all - but they offer a degree of voluntary control
over the emotional responses one experiences at a time (often in respect of degree, rather
than kind). In contrast to the reappraisal processes associated with cognitive change, the
subject need not alter her evaluative assessments, even temporarily; instead, she directs
her attention towards one, rather than another, of the objects of those assessments.
4.3 Situation selection and modification
This variety of emotion regulation involves the subject manipulating the environment in
which she finds herself, in order that it has a particular effect upon her emotional state.
Perhaps in conjunction with the exercise of cognitive change: she may construe the emergency in a
positive light, as an opportunity for heroism and acclaim; she may imaginatively frame the situation as
being part of a simulation or training exercise, etc.
17
17
This can be performed by way of ensuring that a certain emotion-eliciting situation is
encountered (selection), or by altering the details of an encounter to make probable a
certain emotional response (modification).18 The former category includes everyday
choices such as who to spend time with, which activities to partake in, where to travel
and so on; decisions we may make in order to be cheered up or calmed down, thrilled or
moved, or to avoid disagreeable emotional reactions found in other circumstances.
Situation modification occurs when, for example, we change the television channel or the
kind of music we're listening to, choose to engage with one person rather than another in
a social setting, or reorganise our living or working space. These common strategies give
the agent a degree of indirect control over the emotions she undergoes over time. By
predicting her likely affective response to a situation, and selecting or modifying the
situation accordingly, she is able to regulate the emotions she experiences. As with
attention direction, this form of regulation does not require that the subject alter her
evaluative commitments, nor the rational relations holding between these and her
emotions; the control she exerts is over features of the eliciting situations she encounters
- the world is manipulated on the basis of the effects it will have upon her.
4.4. Expression modification
Finally, the tight connection between an emotion and its bodily expression makes it
possible for an agent to emotionally self-regulate by taking charge of what her body is
doing. We need not take a particular stand on the nature of the relationship - causal or
constitutive - that holds between an emotional state and the somatic changes, gestures,
and behaviours that issue from it: it is uncontroversial that there is (at least) reciprocal
There is no clear boundary between these two subcategories, such that there is always an answer to when
a modification gives rise to a new situation, but no special difficulties arise from this.
18
18
influence between the two phenomena. Emotions give rise to physiological and
behavioural output, and are in turn affected by patterns of somatosensory feedback.
Simple cases of this form of self-regulation include modulating one's breathing to cool
one's frustration; suppressing one's nervous tics; holding back tears; and performing or
withholding speech that has an emotionally laden character. Often, expression
modification affects the degree, rather than the kind, of emotional response undergone
by the regulator; it is not easy, by behavioural means alone, to switch between emotion
types, but there are common strategies to suppress or encourage the particular state that
one is in, or that one is about to enter.
The effect of expression modification on the subject's cognitive states is indirect. It is not
obviously the case, for example, that my calming respiration has the function of altering
my evaluative assessment of an aggravating situation, or that my efforts to stop myself
from crying change how I think about the loss I am grieving. Insofar as emotions have
an intentional content, moreover, this content is not directly determined by changes in
my bodily expression. However, expression modification plausibly alters the
phenomenology of an emotional episode,19 and serves to provide an opportunity for selfgoverned cognitive reappraisal, for attention direction, for situation modification, or for
the eliciting situation to evolve under its own steam. When I relax by body to let my
anger subside, I have the time to re-think my attitude, to focus my attention elsewhere,
and for the infuriating moment to pass or be resolved. Thus we can treat this variety of
emotional control primarily as contributing to the conditions under which other forms of
regulation can be exercised.
Competing theories of the essential nature of emotions will thus come down differently on whether
behavioural expression alters the emotion itself directly (a feeling theory will hold that phenomenological
effects are constitutive of emotional effects, for instance). For present purposes, it suffices to examine the
intentional contents of the emotion, for these are the locus of emotional responsibility on the view under
consideration.
19
19
5. Regulation and responsibility
These powers of self-regulation indicate that emotional episodes may have diverse shortterm histories. Emotions are not always simply affective responses to eliciting conditions,
rationally determined by one's underlying appraisal of reasons of fittingness: one can
assess that a situation is dangerous and regulate away one's fear; evaluate a scene as
horrifying yet respond to it in a neutral way; consider something a terrible loss but
manage one's grief, and so on. Even where an emotion is a rational reflection of one's
evaluation of a situation, this need not be the whole story if and when the subject has
manipulated that situation, or selectively attended to some salient aspect of it. An
occurrent emotional episode, then, can be either a direct and spontaneous consequence
of an encounter with something evaluatively significant, in thought or perception, or the
product of a self-governed strategy of emotional regulation of the kinds considered
above. For instance, my calm emotional take on a forthcoming public speaking
engagement may be the rational product of an assessment that treats the event as nothing
to worry about, or it may be the result of a careful programme of self-regulation that
belies (or alters) my underlying evaluation of the event's significance.
The separation of a subject's emotional state from her underlying take on reasons of
fittingness found in some cases of self-regulation need not be a target of rational
criticism. Emotion regulation can be performed for any reason recognised by the subject
- prudential, social, instrumental20 - and can thus reflect not simply her appraisal of the
evaluative import of a particular situation, but also of the strategic significance of having
In the terminology of the literature on doxastic responsibility, these are "state-directed" reasons (see, e.g
Hieronymi (2005), Parfit (2011)).
20
20
an emotion of a certain sort at a given time. A skilful self-regulator has a meta-cognitive
perspective on her own emotional life, and can predict the ebb and flow of her affective
responses in advance, before exercising her regulatory powers. Sometimes, regulation is
performed in order to avoid the unpleasant - perhaps unbearable - qualitative character
of negative emotions such as anxiety, annoyance, or grief; or to achieve and enjoy a state
with a positive phenomenology such as satisfaction or amusement. Other strategies focus
on the effects that emotional episodes have upon their subjects, and on other members
of a social group. The physiological and psychological consequences of powerful
emotions, for instance, can have a debilitating effect on fine-grained motor behaviours
and clarity of thought, while states such as anger can have beneficial consequences in a
competitive or sporting context. Emotions can influence our motivational state,
positively or negatively, as when we get carried away in anxiety or excitement, or bogged
down in misery. Due to the communicative role played by emotional expressions within
a peer group,21 it can often be incumbent upon an agent to suppress or encourage an
emotion so as to advertise - sincerely or otherwise - her inner state for the benefit of
others, or for social gain. Agents can recognise moral reasons in their regulatory
activities, in circumstances where, for example, she predicts that her emotion, or its
expression, will have harmful effects.22
In assessing the full nature of a subject's responsibility for her emotions, it follows that
we ought to take into account the ways in which they reflect both her take on reasons of
fittingness, and her recognition of the further considerations she has acknowledged in
her capacity as a self-regulator. An agent's emotional life reflects both kinds of
evaluation: her assessment of the ways in which things in the world impinge upon her
21
22
See, e.g., Griffiths & Scarantino (2009).
For instance, setting a bad example to our children, or interfering with our care for them.
21
interests (a first-order assessment), and her appraisal of the relative desirability of coming
to be in a particular psychological state, with the effects that predictably ensue (a secondorder assessment).
Agents who are capable of emotional self-regulation are, therefore, open to distinctive
forms of praise and criticism, depending on the extent to which they exercise powers of
this sort, and the quality of their motives in doing so. In some instances, the agent is
worthy of acclaim for taking regulatory control of her emotional state, such as when the
pilot steadies her nerves to make a safe landing, or a father cools his anger to present a
positive example for his children. In contrast, a failure to self-regulate in conditions such
as these leaves one open to criticism, even where one's emotion does rationally reflect
one's first-order evaluative assessment (of danger, or of injustice, in these cases). The
pilot who gives in to her debilitating fear is a suitable target for professional criticism, at
least, while the father who is unable to contain his fury can be accused of poor parenting.
Conversely, there are scenarios in which the admirable course of action is to give free
rein to one's emotions in order, for instance, to exploit their positive effects (the focus
given by anger; the catharsis offered by remorse), or where encouraging a particular
emotional response through regulation is, for example, the selfish or anti-social course of
action (sustaining a state of heated annoyance in the company of other people; wallowing
in self-pity). In such cases, it is exercising one's self-regulatory capacities that makes one a
target of negative critical appraisal, rather than a failure to do so. An agent who is more
generally disposed either to continually regulate her emotions, or to systematically fail to
do so, may be an appropriate target of praise or blame on this basis, too. A tendency to
keep one's emotions in check may contribute to an admirably even temper, for instance,
while over-regulation can signal that one takes oneself too seriously, or lacks warmth in
interpersonal relations. A refusal to take steps to self-regulate emotional responses,
22
meanwhile, can be a sign of problematic self-indulgence or emotional immaturity,23 or in
some contexts a creditable feature of emotional honesty or psychological good health.
The distinction between a suitable and an unsuitable degree of emotional self-regulation
may not be clearly delineated: the difference between a cool temper and a cold or
unfeeling one is not marked by a sharp boundary. Similarly, the case in which a pattern
of emotional responses is the result of self-regulation may not be clearly distinguishable
from that in which it is the outcome of a stable, unregulated web of underlying evaluative
judgements. For example, someone may fail to undergo a positive emotional reaction
towards the events she encounters either because she doesn't care about them, or
because she is exercising her self-regulatory capacities (by directing her attention
elsewhere; imaginatively reconceiving the events, and so forth), and there may be little
third-personal evidence to differentiate the two. Thus it may be challenging in practical
terms to determine which agents merit praise and criticism on the basis of their selfregulatory achievements.
6. Conclusions
The rational relations view holds that a subject is responsible for her emotions insofar as
they are rationally related to, and so reflect or express, her underlying evaluative
judgements. This position is ahistorical, in that it does not regard the provenance of a
subject's evaluative commitments as of special significance: emotional responsibility does
not reside in the choices one has exercised in the course of cultivating one's character,
but in the rational connections holding between one's evaluative perspective and one's
emotional responses. The subject is responsible for her emotions just insofar as they
23
Children, after all, plausibly lack sophisticated powers of emotional self-regulation.
23
reflect her identity as a moral agent, by rationally expressing her assessment of the ways
in which things impinge upon her interests - which things are dangerous, which things
count as losses and advantages, which people she is concerned about, and so forth.
I have suggested that a full picture of emotional responsibility must attend to the ways in
which subjects can exercise a degree of voluntary control over their emotions via their
powers of self-regulation, and that it is a mistake to assimilate these affective states too
closely to other, more passive psychological phenomena such as beliefs when developing
an account of responsibility. Familiar capacities such as cognitive change, attention
direction, situation selection, and expression modification can be deployed strategically,
for prudential, instrumental, social, or moral reasons. Thus, a person's emotional states
do not always simply reflect her assessment of reasons of fittingness. We can think of
this as an amendment, or a minor objection, to the rational relations approach: selfregulated emotions are capable of reflecting their subject's take on a range of
considerations for and against the having of a certain emotional state at a time, including
the effects that the episode will have upon her and those around her. They reflect
reasons in addition to those of emotional fittingness when the subject, in virtue of her
meta-cognitive grip on her own emotional attitudes and their likely conditions of
elicitation, voluntarily exercises her powers of self-regulation. Emotional responsibility is
twofold - there can be direct responsibility for an emotional state when it rationally issues
from the subject's assessment of first-order reasons of fittingness; and there can be
derivative responsibility for an emotional state when it is the product of self-regulatory
capacities exercised for second-order reasons concerning the desirability or otherwise of
having that emotion in a particular context.
24
This does not entail that a self-regulating subject can undergo emotions "at will", nor that
emotional responsibility is evinced only where regulation is actively and voluntarily
performed. Although self-regulation occupies a prominent place in our emotional lives,
its strategies are often not deployed, and it faces restrictions that are grounded in our
circumstances, our wider psychological capacities, and our prior evaluative commitments.
Often, we find ourselves in situations that cannot be readily modified, for example, and
which we did not choose to encounter. In such cases, we, as responsible subjects, will
undergo the emotional responses that are rationally mandated by our first-order
assessment of the scene. Our powers of imagination, re-appraisal, and attentiondirection, similarly, are far from limitless: we frequently cannot escape the evaluative
significance of a particularly salient feature, no matter how hard we might attempt to do
so. The threat posed by a charging bear cannot typically be mentally set aside or
reconceived. The direct emotional responsibility depicted by the rational relations
approach suffices in cases such as these, and in those in which we choose not to engage
in self-regulation, where our emotions disclose underlying evaluative judgements for
which we are answerable. Elsewhere, this direct responsibility is supplemented by the
responsibility that derives from voluntary emotional self-regulation. Self-regulation, we
have seen, tends to alter the subject's emotional state by bringing eliciting conditions of a
certain kind to the forefront of her attention, in thought or perception. Considerations
that have been suppressed or neglected can be brought to mind, and the environment
can be manipulated for its emotional effects. Once this has been achieved, the
responsible subject's emotion is rationally determined by her underlying evaluation of
those conditions. Both of these stages of the state's short-term history can be pertinent
to the question of whether the subject is responsible for the emotion, for her assessment
of first- and second-order reasons - each one a take on considerations of value - is
disclosed over this time.
25
The exceptions to this formulation - genuine cognitive changes resulting from either reappraisal or imagination - also pose no threat to the defining principles of the rational
relations approach, even though they involve more than a redirection of a subject's
attention towards considerations about which she has an existing evaluative
commitment. Re-appraisal - the evaluation of bad news in a positive light, for example occurs, in a responsible subject, only when she recognises that there is sufficient reason
for a change of mind; when, for instance, she reflectively weighs-up a complex situation
before altering her overall evaluative assessment of it. An agent whose ability to reappraise the world was not systematically restricted by her take on her reasons for doing
so would not, plausibly, be responsible for those evaluations or their emotional products.
The cognitive change that comes with an imaginative reconstruction of a situation,
moreover, is capable of being rationally reflected in a subject's consequent emotional
state; the central difference between such cases and canonical examples of spontaneous
emotional responding being that the underlying imaginative evaluation is a short-lived
and insincere commitment of the agent.
Both regulated and unregulated emotions, then, are rationally connected to underlying
evaluative judgements, and so can consistently be accommodated within the selfdisclosure approach to emotional responsibility. Nonetheless, it pays to attend more
closely than this approach has hitherto appreciated to the short-term history of selfregulated states, both in uncovering the complexity of our affective psychology, and in
revealing the strategic considerations that contribute to our emotional experiences.
26
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