Carter J. Adam - The Moral Psychology of Pride

Series editor:

Mark Alfano, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology

How do our emotions influence our other mental states (perceptions, beliefs, motivations, intentions) and our behaviour? How are they influenced by our other mental states, our environments and our cultures? What is the moral value of a particular emotion in a particular context? This series explores the causes, consequences and value of the emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Emotions are diverse, with components at various levels (biological, neural, psychological, social), so each book in this series is devoted to a distinct emotion. This focus allows the author and reader to delve into a specific mental state, rather than trying to sum up emotions en masse. Authors approach a particular emotion from their own disciplinary angle (e.g., conceptual analysis, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, phenomenology, social psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience) while connecting with other fields. In so doing, they build a mosaic for each emotion, evaluating both its nature and its moral properties.

The Moral Psychology of Sadness edited by Anna Gotlib

The Moral Psychology of Disgust edited by Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar

The Moral Psychology of Contempt edited by Michelle Mason

The Moral Psychology of Anger edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan

The Moral Psychology of Regret edited by Anna Gotlib

The Moral Psychology of Pride edited by J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon

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Selection and editorial matter 2017 J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon

Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN:HB 978-1-7834-8908-4

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ISBN:978-1-78348-908-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN:978-1-78348-910-7 (electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

J. Adam Carter and Emma C.Gordon

Pride is among other things a central aspect of the human condition. As social history has overwhelmingly indicated, pride has been and continues to be an important explanation for morally as well as intellectually significant human behaviour, from subaltern movements such as black pride and gay pride to the rally-round-the-flag nationalism now on the march throughout Europe and other parts of the world.

Even so, there is little consensus on some of the most basic issues concerning the nature of pride: for example, what sort of thing is pride, and why do we care about it? Does being prideful lead us to act in particular ways, and if so, which ways? How do people become proud? Can one be proud only of ones own achievements and characteristics, or is it at least conceptually possible to be proud of the achievements and characteristics of others, such as those with whom one identifies? Generally speaking, is pride a good thing or a bad thing? Why?

That there have thus far been few agreed answers to such questions is, we suspect, at least partly due to the compartmentalised means by which questions about the nature, value and psychology of pride have traditionally been investigated. On the bright side, we think that this problem has the potential to be overcome by investigating pride from the interdisciplinary methodology of moral psychology viz, in particular, by bringing together the conceptual resources that have been refined within professional philosophy with the empirical scrutiny that is distinctive of the human sciences, and the chapters in this book reflect this overarching goal. The present volume will accordingly explore some of the most important issues connected to the topic of pride in a way that utilises the theoretical resources of philosophy, psychology, sociology, religious studies and anthropology.

Discussions of the nature and value of pride (including moral, conative, intellectual and social dimensions) feature many distinctions drawn between different kinds of pride, as well as between different aspects of pride. It would be convenient if any one such distinction were clearly more fundamental than any of the others. However, different distinctions to do with pride tend to cluster around different kinds of research questions, and some of these research questions overlap (sometimes considerably) with others.

In what follows, we offer a brief survey of some of the key research themes that have guided some of the key contemporary discussions of pride. Each chapter in this volume addresses either directly or indirectly at least one of these themes. We note explicitly that in many cases, the kind of philosophical stance one takes on one of these themes can (but will not always) determine the kind of stance one is in a position to take on one or more of the others.

Pride is often discussed as an emotion but perhaps equally often as a kind of character trait or agential disposition. Emotions are, in the most general sense, reactions to matters of apparent importance or significance. A theory of the nature of the emotion of pride will thus be a theory of what such characteristic reactions include and why we should think pride includes these kinds of reactions rather than others. Furthermore, to the extent that the emotion of pride involves certain kinds of appraisals (and not just feelings), we may ask what is, to use Richard Lazaruss (1991) term, prides core relational theme. This point can be perhaps made best by analogy: envys core relational theme is wanting what someone else has. The core relational theme of guilt is having transgressed a moral imperative. A theory of the emotion of pride will have something to say about prides core relational theme. Finally, emotions themselves can be appraised as more or less appropriate in light of the circumstances under which they are manifested: what circumstances are befitting a response of pride? Is pride ever morally (or intellectually) forbidden? A satisfying account of the emotion of pride will likely tell us something about the appropriateness of pride as an emotional response and how this appropriateness can be accounted for with reference to specific features of the emotion of pride (e.g., its distinctive feelings, appraisals, core relational theme).