Vida Yao: "The Good Fit”

Vida Yao, Rice University: "The Good Fit”

Abstract
It is now common for moral philosophers to be wary of conflating two distinct forms of emotional assessment: the “fittingness” of an emotion, with any form of moral assessment of that emotion. The authors who warned against this conflation, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, also warned philosophers not to infer from claims that an emotion is morally inappropriate to feel, to claims it is inaccurate, or “unfitting”. Such an inference, they argue, is an instance of what they label “the moralistic fallacy”: a mistake they believe to be widespread throughout the work of both contemporary and historical philosophers. In response, I consider and defend the Aristotelian view that to assess an emotion as “fitting” is to assess it as accurate and to assess it as what a virtuous person would feel. On this view, it is perfectly legitimate to infer, from a claim that an emotion is the virtuous way to feel to the claim it is “getting it right” – that is, that it is accurate. It is also perfectly legitimate to infer, from a claim that an emotion is the “wrong” (or vicious) way to feel to the claim that it is inaccurate. I will argue that D’Arms and Jacobson’s skepticism of this conception of fit is grounded in a critical misunderstanding of the conceptual relationships between virtue, vice, and emotional accuracy. Moreover, once we are clear on exactly what it is, the moralistic fallacy is not as widespread as they claim it is, and we should refrain from interpreting philosophers from varying philosophical traditions as committing it when there are alternative, more charitable and more philosophically productive interpretations of their views available. Reading such views as committing the moralistic fallacy involves a number of distortions, themselves encouraged by insistence, now widely accepted by contemporary philosophers, that emotional fittingness is not itself a form of moral assessment: a claim that we should reject, given the viability of the Aristotelian conception of emotional fit I defend.