The Fitness of Fittingness


Though your judgments in matters of speculation, though your sentiments in matters of taste, are quite opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition…But if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another.
                    Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments



Attitudinal fittingness is enjoying a revival in ethics, especially in application to emotion.  A typical rendering is something like: under what conditions does an emotion’s evaluative “presentation” – the way an emotion internally represents the world to the person feeling it – match the evaluative “facts”? Or what amounts to the same thing: Is the object of any emotion F “really” F-able? Essentially, that is the question of fittingness.

In this paper I want to play the skeptic against the fittingness proponent. I grant plausibility to the basic notion. To ask of any emotion whether it is fitting is straightforwardly distinct from other normative questions we might ask. Thus, if you envy a colleague’s influential status, to ask whether her influence is in fact enviable is easily distinguished from asking whether it is prudent to envy her influence, or morally appropriate, or even if envy is what to feel all-things-considered. Or to use an even more obvious example, just because a joke is in poor taste and laughing at it might get you in trouble, doesn’t mean the joke isn’t actually funny.  Whether your colleague’s influence is in fact enviable or the joke actually funny is clearly a distinct kind of question.

What is not clear, however, is how we determine what is “really” or in fact funny, enviable, shameful, sorrowful, or whatever. Consider: The internal representation of an object by any given emotion F is simply as F-able, at least at first blush within experience. Envy presents its object as enviable; amusement presents its object as funny, etc. But the fittingness proponent can hardly leave it at that. One problem is that a principal application of fittingness is in so-called Fitting Attitude (FA) accounts of value, those accounts that explain the nature of value by reference to what response is “appropriate” towards the valuable object. And according to the FA theorist, fittingness is the relevant sense of appropriateness. It is the sense in which the emotion “fits” its object. Thus, the problem: because the property being explained just is something like “the enviable,” rendering fittingness simply in terms of the F-able makes FA accounts look circular. The enviable is what it is fitting to feel envy towards, and what it is fitting to feel envy towards is what is enviable.

Granted, fittingness proponents have offered some reply to this fairly worn problem, and if one doesn’t subscribe to an FA account of value, the problem is irrelevant. However, there is a further, more basic problem with characterizing fittingness in terms of the F-able. Regardless of one’s metaethical ambitions, to say F is fitting just in case its object is F-able is vacuous. This is especially clear in cases of criticism. If I rebuke you for feeling F, but all I can say against you is that the object of your emotion is not “F-able,” my criticism must appear incomplete. Next to your experience, anyway, and without the support of reasons, I must come off as claiming a brute ability to detect properties, which by implication you somehow lack.

The point here isn’t that judgments bottoming out in the F-able are obviously incoherent. After all, I’ve already granted the prima facie distinctness of fittingness. We can thus imagine a “flatfooted” version of fittingness (perhaps like that of Derek Parfit ) where simplistic property reference is all there is to criticisms of fit. Correspondingly, I should revise my remark in the previous paragraph. In principle, a fittingness proponent could leave it that – she could leave fittingness merely as a matter of the F-able. The point I’m trying to make, however, is that to do so is practically hollow. Because the flatfooted account requires positing sui generis properties like “the enviable,” nothing remains to settle contrasting judgments of fitness or offer explanations of the judgments being made. Rational discourse over emotion thus ends rather more quickly than our everyday normative ambitions would lead us to expect. Call this, the practical vacuity problem.

Assume these problems are motivating. To avoid either one, fittingness proponents must say something more substantive about how we can fix on the F-able. And this is where my skepticism begins. I think existing theories have so far failed to explain adequately how this “fixing” is done. To make my argument, I adopt a foil for all other (non flatfooted) fittingness theories: the account developed by Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson.  D’Arms & Jacobson have furthest advanced from their predecessors (those similarly motivated to avoid the problems just sketched, such as Richard Brandt, A.C. Ewing, Gabrielle Taylor, Ronald de Sousa, and Patricia Greenspan ) the crucial idea that emotions have particular ways of representing their objects within experience, which representations do not simply bottom out in the F-able. Given that I’ve just identified this possibility as precisely what is needed to maintain the plausibility of fittingness, any worries that remain after analysis of D’Arms & Jacobson’s account will arguably also apply to other fittingness accounts.

Briefly, then, according to D’Arms & Jacobson, emotions can be fitting (or unfitting) both in terms of “shape” and “size.” An emotion is correctly shaped if its evaluative presentation (i.e. the internal representation of the object) matches the properties of the object. Shape thus captures the basic idea of fittingness discussed so far. Alternatively, an emotion is correctly sized if its evaluative presentation is proportionate to the object. This idea is made clearest by cases of incorrect size. In such cases, the evaluative presentation still matches the properties of the object – i.e. it is well shaped – but that presentation somehow over- or under-represents the properties in question. As a consequence, the emotion doesn’t fit the circumstances: it is too “big” or too “small.”

Most important, as already alluded, D’Arms & Jacobson develop a strategy to “gloss” the shapes of the various emotion kinds like anger, envy, etc., and to gloss them in a way that eschews characterizations merely in terms of the F-able. The idea is to fix on the F-able through a partially reductive analysis of the nature of the given F response. For example, according to D’Arms & Jacobson, envy doesn’t present its object as simply enviable. Rather, envy (1) presents another person as your rival; (2) presents this person as having something good which you lack; and (3) presents this difference in success or possession, as such, as being bad for you.  If they are right, we no longer need to determine what is enviable per se in order to judge whether an emotion is fitting. Instead, we fix on the enviable via its component evaluations (1-3), which jointly make up envy’s shape. Or at least, these evaluations make for the broad brushstrokes of envy’s shape. To reiterate, they are offering what they call a gloss of that shape. Even so, this gloss purports to assure the utility of fittingness by both delimiting the set of relevant considerations for the fitting object of envy and by laying some minimally describable correctness conditions on those considerations. There is no characterization of the object as simply enviable.

However, there are reasons to doubt the adequacy of the glossing strategy. In particular, it is unclear whether such glosses can be sustained in a way that supports meaningful criticism in terms of shape or size. In what remains of this Introduction, I sketch an argument on each point, shape and size. Section 2 then elaborates the argument for shape, and Section 3 for size.

And yet, to be clear, my argument does not aim at subverting fittingness. Much of what I say amounts to an effort to clarify what is otherwise potentially problematic in D’Arms & Jacobson’s account, with one exception as follows. In the case of size, the “clarification” I present will displace the theoretical import of fittingness, at least in some cases. Even here, however, the point won’t be that fittingness is mistaken. Instead, I will argue that fittingness is overextended. More exactly, fittingness potentially distracts us from an alternative way of assessing emotion size. This alternative comes apart from fittingness and thus requires a further, not yet appreciated normative measure.

But first, here are the outlines of my two principal arguments...