[...]... plausibility which cannot be explained on the idea that what one pretends to have is a feeling Emotions are intentional and rational, not disruptive and "irrational." Emotions are judgments and actions, not occurrences or happenings that we suffer Accordingly, I want to say that emotions are choices and our responsibility Yet I am never aware of making such a choice Emotions, we argued, are hasty and typically... selfesteem.) Emotions and Choice My most cavalier move in "Emotions and Choice" was my easy inference from "emotions are judgments" to the idea that we "choose" them The suppressed sequence of moves was something like this: emotions are judgments and we "make" judgments; ergo emotions are activities, and activities are "doings"; "doings" are voluntary and what is voluntary is chosen So, emotions are... feeling as well.) But the emotions are not merely the feelings, and the feelings are not what distinguishes one emotion from another (The same sort of argument applies to any number of other emotion pairs—for example, love and hate, anger and indignation, resentment and envy, sadness and remorse, guilt and despair.) A second objection to this familiar equation between emotions and feelings consists of... associated with certain feelings and sensations, the flushing and pulsing and tightness of the throat, tensions in our arms and legs and mild cramping in the stomach, slight breathlessness and nausea, an over-all feeling of readiness and excitement But it does not follow from this regular association that these feelings and sensations are the emotion Thus, I have noted that Freud and a great many other psychologists... defense and modification, but I remain convinced that no noncognitive view of emotions 12 will ever allow us to understand them and no view that does not involve the idea of responsibility will have any but a deleterious effect on both moral philosophy and psychology But let me review the arguments Emotions Are Intentional In "Emotions and Choice, " my defense of the distinction between the object and cause(s)... noting, by the way of a clue rather than a full-blown argument, that we often say of our emotions that they are "reasonable" and "unreasonable," "warranted" and "unwarranted," "justifiable" and "unjustifiable," "legitimate" and "illegitimate," "sensible" and "foolish," "self-demeaning" and "enhancing," and even "right" and "wrong." Yet no such evaluations are appropriate in the realm of headaches and. .. in "Emotions and Choice" that emotional judgments are essentially nonreflective and prior to deliberation This was, however, an overreaction, and in The Passions I discussed several examples of deliberate emotions, for example, making oneself angry In the book I also stress the affinities between my notion of judgment and Kant's concept of "constitutive judgment," but what is "constituted" in emotions. .. phenomenon that our emotions change with our opinions and argued that this was not a causal matter and not a coincidence, but a consequence of the thesis that emotions are themselves judgments We can now add that our emotions change with our knowledge of the causes of those emotions If I can discover the sufficient cause of my anger, in those cases in which the cause and the object are different (and in which... childhood and so seem entirely "natural." This certainly places harsh restrictions on my original "choice" thesis, but I still take the notion of responsibility as inescapably central Emotions Are Purposive In "Emotions and Choice, " I insist that emotions can be accounted for in terms of "in order to" type explanations This is suggested by the fact that desires are part of emotions What I do not do in... connection between emotion and object and the "essential" or "natural" connections between emotions and beliefs What a judgment is about defines the judgment Similarly, what an emotion is about defines the emotion In "Emotions and Choice, " I attack what I call a "components" analysis of emotions, for just this reason As soon as one distinguishes between the "feeling" of emotion and its object, as Kenny . I begin with " ;Emotions and Choice& quot; from 1973, and a few brief selections from The Passions from 1976. I am not one to hide or deny my previous excesses and errors, and so I include two. analysis. Emotions are not occurrences and do not happen to us. I would like to suggest that emotions are rational and purposive rather than irrational and disruptive, are very much like actions, and. marooned and miraculously living alone on a desert island, we would have no need for and no opportunity to learn most complex emotions. But we do need emotions and we do need to learn them and to