“Philosophers don’t often write about the heart,” Stephen Darwall begins in The Heart & Its Attitudes, “At least, analytical philosophers don’t” (1). In taking up “matters of the heart,” Darwall means to consider our mutual emotional vulnerabilities and the attitudes that mediate our personal and social relationships. His journey leads the reader through ten chapters: an introductory first chapter followed by nine chapters that might also stand as independent essays. The latter cover the significance of appeals to love (versus respect) in Frederick Douglass’s and James Baldwin’s discussions of race relations (Chapter 2); the commonalities and distinctions between “attitudes of the will” and “attitudes of the heart” as two species of reactive attitudes (Chapter 3); the differences between guilt vs. remorse and moral indignation vs. personal anger (Chapter 4); the distinct ways in which love may mediate the relationship between lovers (Chapter 5); an account of trust and hope (Chapter 6); the place of trust and love in works by philosophers Knud Ejler LØgstrup, Iris Murdoch, and SØren Kierkegaard (Chapter 7); the different kinds of empathy and their role in “being with” another in heartfelt connection (Chapter 8); gratitude as an essentially reciprocating attitude (Chapter 9); and calls for love versus respect in healing the wounds of Black Americans in the wake of American chattel slavery (Chapter 10). It is a deeply personal book, at once “heartfelt” and characteristically erudite. No matter how often contemporary philosophers write about “the heart,” they rarely write about our emotional lives with the range and depth of insight that Darwall displays here. In doing so, Darwall excels in heeding the counsel that P.F. Strawson offers in a work to which Darwall’s book is clearly indebted, “Freedom and Resentment,” namely, “to try to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, especially in our cool, contemporary style, viz. what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual” (2003, 77).
Heeding that counsel in the service of a book that advances our understanding of the sentimental while avoiding the pitfalls of both cool-headed detachment and the saccharine is no small accomplishment. The Strawsonian framing of the book, however, suggests an additional aim, namely that of providing a unified account of the range of sentiments Strawson included among the reactive attitudes, one that includes both what Darwall now calls “attitudes of the will” (e.g., resentment, guilt, and indignation) as well as Darwall’s “attitudes of the heart” (e.g. hurt feelings, remorse, forgiveness, hope, trust, gratitude, and, most prominently, love).[1] Darwall embraces this latter aim when he writes, for example, “One aim I have for this book is to arrive at a general account of what makes something a reactive attitude in Strawson’s sense” (4).[2]
This aim has eluded philosophers since the publication of Strawson’s essay (e.g., see Jonathan Bennett, 1980). Particularly puzzling is how to elaborate Strawson’s schematic account of the reactive attitudes as moral responsibility constituting, the role to which he assigns them in resolving the free will debate. For Strawson, to be morally responsible just is to be a fitting target of the reactive attitudes. Previous responses to the puzzle (prominent among them those found in Darwall’s earlier work, The Second-Person Standpoint) adopt a culling strategy.[3] They retain, as Darwall would now put it, the attitudes of the will at the expense of the attitudes of the heart. Early Darwall construes liability to the reactive attitudes as constituting mutual accountability relations between persons: resentment, guilt, and indignation are fitting responses to qualities of will manifest specifically in the flouting of moral obligations, compliance with which each person has standing to demand of each other—and, so, to address to each other—as a matter of moral claim rights. To stand in such a mutual accountability relation, susceptible to these reactive attitudes upon flouting of one’s deontic burdens, is to occupy early Darwall’s “second-person standpoint.”
At its core, The Heart & Its Attitudes offers a corrective to the view that understanding deontic, quasi-legal mutual accountability (the domain of attitudes of the will)—while neglecting our mutual emotional vulnerability (and, so, the attitudes of the heart)—is sufficient for appreciating the normative contours of our personal and social relationships. But it also promises, in the quest for a unified account of Strawson’s reactive attitudes, to offer a sustained attempt to provide an account of a nondeontic species of reactive attitude.
Having abandoned the culling strategy, however, The Heart & Its Attitudes invites the question of whether holding one another accountable for comportment around our moral obligations (via resentment, guilt, and indignation) is sufficiently analogous to the kind of holding Darwall takes to be at issue with Strawson’s remaining candidate reactive attitudes to warrant viewing the two classes of attitude as two species of the same genus and, if so, why. Darwall characterizes the latter stance, in the case of reactive love, as “hold[ing] (and be[ing] held by), behold[ing] (and be[ing] held by), and uphold[ing] (and be[ing] upheld by) one another in distinctive ways” (65; Chapter 5 passim.). One natural route for arguing that the attitudes of the heart are sufficiently analogous to the attitudes of the will, and the one I prefer, would take Strawson at his word and attempt to understand both the nondeontic and deontic classes as, if not accountability constituting, responsibility constituting.[4] Darwall rejects this route, maintaining that “Strawson’s own nondeontic examples, such as gratitude and love, have no essential connection to responsibility” (6, note 10). Instead, on Darwall’s view, such attitudes of the heart mediate, via their second-personal, reciprocating character, what he calls mutual responsiveness among beings with hearts (ibid.). It is this second-personal, reciprocating structure that now unifies the genus of reactive attitudes for Darwall (see. e.g., 39).
“Reciprocating” marks the fact that the reactive attitudes have, in the manner of a vocative, a call-reply structure. Arguably, however, there are any number of affective attitudes Darwall does not include among the reactive attitudes that nonetheless appear to be essentially reciprocating. I would argue reactive forms of contempt and shame, for example, are so structured. More optimistically, we might plausibly take mutual responsiveness to be mediated by any of what psychologists regard as the prosocial emotions, since their function is to inhibit our tendencies toward selfishness (closed heartedness?), opening our hearts in an invitation to mutually beneficial relationship with others.
What of Darwall’s suggestion that the reactive attitudes are second personal? Removed from its role, in The Second-Person Standpoint, in an account of the authority to address deontic demands and the competence to comply with them simply on the grounds that they are authoritative, it remains unclear to me whether calling an affective attitude “second-personal” adds anything to calling it reciprocating. Indeed, Darwall at times now appears to equate an attitude’s being second-personal with it having a reciprocating structure. He writes, for example:
As I shall use it, “heart” refers to a cluster of emotional susceptibilities that have, I shall argue, an essentially reciprocating (or second-personal) structure. Here and throughout, what I mean by calling an attitude second personal is that it is naturally expressed with the second-personal pronoun (as “thank you” might express gratitude) (1).
True, gratitude is naturally expressed with the second-personal pronoun. So, too, it seems to me, might reactive contempt be naturally expressed in “You are shameful” and call for reciprocation by another’s shame. Again, more optimistically, perhaps any prosocial emotion finds natural linguistic expression in “I invite you”—as in “I invite you to join me in. . .”—and, thus, calls for reply.
If I am correct, Darwall’s account of the genus reactive attitude renders the class coextensive with the essentially reciprocating emotions one feels toward people with whom one has interpersonal relationships, with the deontic species (attitudes of the will) furthermore mediating mutual accountability relations. I have suggested that it thus admits as reactive attitudes candidates that Darwall presumably would exclude.
For my part, I am inclined to agree with R. Jay Wallace, when he writes:
The reactive attitudes are not co-extensive with the emotions one feels toward people with whom one has interpersonal relationships, rather they constitute a particular category of emotion specially distinguished by its constitutive connection with [normative] expectations. (1996, 31)
This view leads Wallace, however, to his own version of the culling strategy, retaining as reactive attitudes resentment, guilt, and indignation at the expense of gratitude, forgiveness, love, hurt feelings, and shame. It does so because Wallace, like Darwall, associates normative expectations with (perhaps implicit) demands.[5]
Not all normative expectations are deontic in modality or felicitously expressed in the mood of demands, however. Holding one another accountable for comportment around our moral obligations (via resentment, guilt, and indignation) is analogous to the kind of holding at issue with Strawson’s remaining candidate reactive attitudes, it seems to me, because fitting instances of the latter constitute persons as responsible by holding them to nondeontic normative expectations. This is how I would cash out the stance that disposes us to Darwall’s “attitudes of the heart.” Such are the normative expectations whose flouting is at issue, for example, when one does something suberogatory, prompting another’s fitting blaming response; or when one’s lack of common decency evokes another’s fitting reactive contempt and calls for one’s shame; or when one’s living up to the ideals proper to a valuing relationship properly elicits reactive love, or one’s failure another’s fitting reactive disappointment.[6] So, too, it seems to me, are they often at issue when we place what Adrienne Martin (2014) calls “normative hope” in a person. Indeed, Darwall himself suggests that hope is “built into the structure of all attitudes of the heart, just as love is” (11) and that “The call and response character of reciprocating attitudes of the heart. . .is invitational rather than [as in the case of attitudes of the will] mandatory” (137). He does not pursue, however, the possibility that the normative hope that invites a person to comply with certain nondeontic normative expectations is what renders us susceptible to attitudes of the heart that constitute them as responsible, if not accountable, beings.
To be clear, I find Darwall’s treatment of attitudes such as love, trust, hope, gratitude, remorse, personal anger, and others throughout the book psychologically astute, philosophically rich, and intrinsically interesting. His treatment of the attitudes of the heart thus can stand on its own. In doing so, it sets a high bar for subsequent philosophical discussion of the essentially reciprocating emotional susceptibilities that mediate our personal and social relationships.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I presented a previous version of these comments at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Workshop on Relational Ethics dedicated to themes from The Heart & Its Attitudes in July 2024. Many thanks to Jonas Vandieken and Monika Betzler for organizing the conference and for helpful comments from them and other workshop participants, especially Steve Darwall, Claudia Bloeser, Brendan de Kenessey, Laura Valentini, Quinn White, and Ariel Zylberman.
REFERENCES
Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. (2011). “Love as a Reactive Emotion.” Philosophical Quarterly 61, no. 245: 673–99.
Bennett, Jonathan. (1980). “Accountability.” In Philosophical Subjects, edited by Zak van Straaten, 14–47. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Calhoun, Cheshire. (2004). “Common Decency.” In Setting the Moral Compass, edited by Cheshire Calhoun, 128–44. New York: Oxford University Press.
Darwall, Stephen. (2006). The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Driver, Julia. (1992). “The Suberogatory.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 3: 286–95.
Martin, Adrienne M. (2013). How We Hope: A Moral Psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mason, Michelle. (2017). “Reactive Attitudes and Second-Personal Address.” In Ethical Sentimentalism: New Perspectives, edited by Remy Debes and Karsten Stueber, 153–70. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Strawson, P.F. (2003). “Freedom and Resentment.” In Free Will, by Gary Watson, 72–93, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Telech, Daniel, and Leora Dahan Katz. (2022). “Condemnatory Disappointment.” Ethics 132, no. 4: 851–80.
Wallace, R. Jay. (1994). Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Harvard University Press.
[1] Strawson includes among the reactive attitudes “gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings” as well as “feeling bound or obliged (the ‘sense of obligation’); feeling compunction; feeling guilty or remorseful or at least responsible; and the more complicated phenomenon of shame.” Strawson (2003), 75, 84–85. Notably, Darwall strikes shame from Strawson’s list.
[2] This is an aim Darwall embraces more than once; see, e.g., 33. He elsewhere notes, “[N]othing turns on how we use the phrase ‘reactive attitude.’” (6, footnote 10). To anticipate, the question I mean to press is not a verbal one but the substantive question of whether holding one another accountable for comportment around our moral obligations (via resentment, guilt, and indignation) is sufficiently analogous to the stance Darwall takes to be at issue with Strawson’s remaining candidate reactive attitudes to warrant viewing the two classes of attitude as two species of the same genus and, if so, why.
[3] Stephen Darwall (2006). Such a strategy is likewise employed by R. Jay Wallace (1996).
[4] I explore such a route in Michelle Mason (2017).
[5] An exception is in Darwall’s Chapter 6 account of trust, which does suggest that trust is constitutively tied to normative expectations of a person.
[6] For discussion of such cases, see respectively: Julia Driver (1992); Cheshire Calhoun (2004); Kate Abramson and Adam Leite (2011); Daniel Telech and Leora Dahan Katz (2022).
Reviewed by Michelle Mason Bizri, University of Minnesota