Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
criticizing yourself for deliberating so badly.
Conclusion
To conclude, I want to suggest that the distinction between consequentialist and
deontological emotions is important in two ways: first, by strengthening and
enriching our understanding of the nature of emotions; and second, by raising
some important new questions about emotions in general. First, this distinction
between consequentialist and deontological emotions deepens our understanding
of the nature of emotions. Recall that consequentialist emotions focus on the
outcome, whereas deontological emotions focus on the causal pathways that bring
about the outcome. Again, this is not a normative ethical claim. Rather, it is a
claim about the essential nature of emotions in terms of what their focus is. We
have seen that regret focuses on a bad outcome, not bad deliberation. This led us
to identify a broader pattern between two different types of emotions:
consequentialist emotions like regret and gladness that focus on outcomes and
deontological emotions like self-reproach and self-pride that focus on causal
pathways. This suggests that there is a feature of emotions more broadly that has
been unappreciated in the existing literature. Second, this distinction between
consequentialist and deontological emotions also raises some interesting questions
about the nature of emotions in general. For example, what is the relationship
between consequentialist and deontological emotions? Do they play distinct roles
in our emotional lives? Should we care about one category more than the other?
And to take a concrete example, what should we think about a central emotion like
love? Is love a consequentialist or deontological emotion, and how does the answer
impact our understanding of love? All these questions seem important for
achieving a fuller and richer understanding of the nature of emotions and their
roles in our lives. While these questions are obviously outside this paper's scope,
raising them will hopefully promote further investigation.
Volume VI (2023)
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