The Plurality of Emotions in Social Cooperation

Dra. Sofia Stein

PPGFil/UNISINOS

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I will discuss the relevance of neuroscientific research that tries to find neural correlates of moral sensitivity when investigating moral judgements. I think that, if we accept that emotions are central for moral judgements —though these are at some degree culture relative and interact with rational values and inferences—, neuroscientific research is vital to identify the link between emotions and this kind of judgements. This neuroscientific research will prompt us to revise some philosophical concepts, as proposed by Moll et al., to break them “down into clear cognitive components” or to substitute some of them or to create new ones. But, even if neurosciences are finding neural correlates to moral evaluations and judgments, these correlates are still quite vague when we consider the emotions involved, in the sense that many of the activated brain areas during moral evaluations are related to emotions in general and not just to specific emotions.  And even if one tries to link these activations to a specific (basic or secondary) emotion, the kind of connectivity that instantiates an emotion is broad and complex, rendering identification of a basic or secondary emotion during moral evaluations indeed very difficult in the current state of the art.

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When Other’s Will Matter

Prof. Dr. Adriano Naves de Brito

Department of Philosophy
Unisinos University

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Where is the source of moral normativity? Me, the law or the other? The predominance of the first-person perspective in ethics, whose root is undoubtedly Kantian, makes the question redundant. Korsgaard (2007, p. 11), for instance, speaks of “a second-personal voice within”. In this tuning fork, the source of normativity is the self, which catapults itself above itself into a universal dimension to turn, now as a legislator, upon itself. I, the law, and the other collapse into a higher-order subjectivity—transcendental as Kant would say—which, in the end, also subsumes the third person. This dominant subjectivism is modern and of Cartesian origin, so that the problem of the second person in ethics is ineluctably intertwined with the problem of recognising other minds, or, from a practical point of view, other wills. In this text, I want to explore the idea that the source of moral normativity is the relationship between myself and another, one numerically and qualitatively different from me, and without whose will, moral normativity is not set in motion. In no moral virtue is the other so essential as on justice, the measure of which is inexorably relative to those concerned. I will defend in this contribution that the structure of reciprocity inherent to justice expresses tout court the structure of moral normativity, a structure for which the will of the other, the second person, is originally constitutive and not reducible to the first person, be it the subjective will of someone, a particular self, be it the will of an impersonal self, the third person. My starting point will be analysing how, on justice, the reciprocal relationship between wills constitutes motives for action. Reasons that, by reciprocity, constitute reasons to act.
 

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Perceiving emotions in (and through) social interactions

Felipe de Carvalho

Pesquisador de pós-doutorado em Filosofia
Programa CAPES-PrInt
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

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Emotion perception has been traditionally studied as a passive perceptual task, where subjects are presented with photographs of facial expressions and must report on which emotion category is perceived. In this picture, to give an account of emotion perception is to describe the processes through which the observer’s visual system is able to extract and integrate information from the face and the overall visual context in which it is perceived. Gendron & Barrett (2018) have recently criticized this approach, on the grounds that it does not do justice to the inherently dynamic and interactive nature of emotion perception in ecologically valid scenarios. The purpose of this talk will be to argue that, although Gendron & Barrett make plausible methodological prescriptions, their account over-intellectualizes emotion perception and fails to capture the sense in which it is a skillful, practical embodied activity. To overcome these difficulties a new sociodynamic model will be proposed inspired by John Dewey’s theory of emotions (1895).