Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
There is a significant difference between keeping our feelings to ourselves and acting as if we had an emotion that we do not have. All other things being equal, outright deception is not permissible but privacy is. Even on occasions when it might be wise to share our feelings, a failure to do so need not involve any moral failure. We are entitled to reticence or restraint. By contrast, expressing an emotion that we do not have seems to involve something more reprehensible, if not lying at least deception of self or others. Neither of these options look particularly attractive. We might be inclined to hold that, as a default position, acting as if we are in some emotional state when we are in no such state is to be avoided unless lying or the deception of others would also be justified under the same conditions.
I will argue that there is an exception to this default position. What I will call 'false emotions' (in a sense defined below) can be part and parcel of bringing about genuine emotions of a sort that we might reasonably desire but which we might be unable to bring about in a more direct manner. That is to say, there is a justification for expressing an emotion that we do not have, and this justification is independent of any reason that we might have for misrepresenting ourselves to others.
By 'false emotions' I mean genuine states of some sort that mimic familiar emotions while lacking some necessary feature of the latter. I am not concerned with mere pretence, but with a particular class of real states. The existing literature on such states is critical of those who experience them. David Pugmire echoes concerns raised by Stuart Hampshire about the 'sincerity' of a certain class of emotional responses and writes of 'factitious' emotions. 1 'A factitious emotion fails to be a real example of the sort of emotion it seems to be'.2 It is faked up. And both D.W. Hamlyn and Ilham Dilman have attempted to locate the 'falsity' of such emotions in the 'falsity of the person' who experiences them.3 Similarly, Gabriele Taylor writes about the dangers of violating 'integrity'...