The Moral Psychology of Amusement

The Moral Psychology of Amusement
Author: Brian Robinson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786613301

Amusement is an emotion with power. It has the power to make us laugh, but it can also have a power over us (for good or for ill) to control our attention or memory. Amusement can empower our resistance to oppression, or it can itself become an oppressive force. Our amusement can make others feel shame. Amusement even has the power to affect (and be affected by) out moral assessment of others. This volume offers twelve essays from leading and emerging scholars that explore the moral quagmire that is the emotion of amusement. It is a collection that considers the moral psychology of amusement from a range of perspectives, going as far back as ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy up to the most current psychological and sociological findings.

The Moral Psychology of Amusement

The Moral Psychology of Amusement
Author: Brian Robinson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781538161647

This volume offers twelve original essays that explore the moral quagmire that is the emotion of amusement. It considers its moral psychology a range of perspectives, going as far back as ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy up to the most current psychological and sociological findings.

The Moral Psychology of Trust

The Moral Psychology of Trust
Author: David Collins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1666921602

Is it good to be trusting, or should we be wary of trusting others? Trust seems to be the basis of large-scale social cooperation and even of democracy itself, but in recent years many commentators and researchers have lamented the dawn of a post-trust era. Edited by David Collins, Iris Vidmar Jovanović, and Mark Alfano, The Moral Psychology of Trust examines trust from a variety of perspectives in philosophy and the social sciences. The contributors explore topics such as the nature of trust and its connection to a range of other emotions, conditions under which it is good to be trusting and trustworthy, and what role trust might play in our intellectual, moral, and political lives. The chapters apply theoretical perspectives on trust to a number of issues of current concern, including how trust can and should function in conditions of social oppression, trust and technology, trust and conspiracy theories, the place of trust in medical ethics, and the ethics of trust in a variety of interpersonal relationships.

The Moral Psychology of Boredom

The Moral Psychology of Boredom
Author: Andreas Elpidorou
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2022-01-31
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1786615398

Whether we like it or not, boredom is a major part of human life. It permeates our personal, social, practical, and moral existence. It shapes our world by demarcating what is engaging, interesting, or meaningful from what is not. It also sets us in motion insofar as its presence can motivate us to act in a plethora of ways. Indeed, in our search for engagement, interest, or meaning, our responses to boredom straddle the line between the good and the bad, the beneficial and the harmful, the creative and the mundane. In this volume, world-renowned researchers come together to explore a neglected but crucially important aspect of boredom: its relationship to morality. Does boredom cause individuals to commit immoral acts? Does it affect our moral judgment? Does the frequent or chronic experience boredom make us worse people? Is the experience of boredom something that needs to be avoided at all costs? Or can boredom be, at least sometimes, a solution and a positive moral force? The Moral Psychology of Boredom sets out to answer these and other timely questions.

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology
Author: Manuel Vargas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1121
Release: 2022-03-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019264551X

Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state-of-the-art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology's fifty chapters, authored by leading figures in the field, cover foundational topics, such as character, virtue, emotion, moral responsibility, the neuroscience of morality, weakness of will, and the nature of moral judgments and reasons. The volume also canvases emerging work in applied moral psychology, including adaptive preferences, animals, mental illness, poverty, marriage, race, bias, and victim blaming. Collectively, the essays form the definitive survey of contemporary moral psychology.

The Moral Psychology of Hate

The Moral Psychology of Hate
Author: Noell Birondo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2022-02-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1538160862

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title The Moral Psychology of Hate provides the first systematic introduction to the moral psychology of hate compiling specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars with a wide range of disciplinary orientations. In light of the recent revival of interest in emotions in academic philosophy, and the current social and political interest in hate, this volume provides arguments for and against the value of hate through a combination of empirical and philosophical methods. The authors examine hate not merely as a destructive feeling but as an emotion of great moral significance that illuminates how we understand each other and ourselves. The book will be of major interest to anyone concerned with the dynamics and the moral and political implications of this most powerful of human emotions.

The Moral Psychology of Envy

The Moral Psychology of Envy
Author: Sara Protasi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-08-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1538160072

Envy is a vicious and shameful response to the good fortune of others, one that ruins friendships and plagues societies—or so the common thinking goes, shaped by millennia of religious and cultural condemnation. Envy’s bad reputation is not completely unwarranted; envy can indeed motivate malicious and counterproductive behavior and may strain or even tear apart relations between people. However, that is not always the case. Investigating the complex nature of this emotion reveals that it plays important functions in social hierarchies and it can motivate one to self-improve and even to achieve moral virtue. Philosophers and psychologists in this volume explore envy’s characteristics in different cultures, spanning from small hunter-gatherer communities to large industrialized countries, to contexts as diverse as academia, marketing, artificial intelligence, and Buddhism. They explore envy’s role in both the personal and the political sphere, showing the many ways in which envy can either contribute or detract to our flourishing as individuals and as citizens of modern democracies.

The Moral Psychology of Shame

The Moral Psychology of Shame
Author: Alessandra Fussi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2023-02-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1538177706

Few emotions have divided opinion as deeply as shame. Some scholars have argued that shame is essentially a maladaptive emotion used to oppress minorities and reinforce stigmas and traumas, an emotion that leaves the self at the mercy of powerful others. Other scholars, however, have argued that the absence of a sense of shame in a subject—their shamelessness—is tantamount to a vicious moral insensitivity. As the eleven original chapters in this collection attest, however, shame scholars are entering a new phase, one in which scholarship no longer attempts to defend one side of shame against the other, but rather accepts both faces as faithful to the phenomenon to be explained. At the core of our understanding of shame there are profound disagreements about the importance of the Other in shaping our moral identity. As this collection shows by its study of shame, the difficulty of the connection between Self, Other, and morality spans over millennia and cultures and currently animates important debates at the core of feminism and disability studies. Contributors: Mark Alfano, Alessandra Fussi, Lorenzo Greco, JeeLoo Liu, Katrine Krause-Jensen, Heidi L. Maibom, Tjeert Olthof, Imke von Maur, Alba Montes Sánchez, Raffaele Rodogno, Alessandro Salice, Krista K. Thomason, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

The Untold Help of Harmful Visual Jokes

The Untold Help of Harmful Visual Jokes
Author: Mary Gregg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031399811

This book argues that when visual jokes are harmful, they harm in a specific way: a subject’s personhood is revoked in a way that differs both in kind and degree depending on whether that person is depicted or described. Such revocation can occur in every role and any stage within the joke’s context, from character to audience member, from moment of depiction to uncritical exposure. Unlike a mere unhumorous insult, which doesn’t require the sympathy of its audience but can operate solely between the target and the bully, a joke requires a particular kind of response from its audience to complete itself—to “deliver”, which requires not only some degree of complicity from audience members, but a complicity earned at the expense of the joke’s referent. This book shows how we need not prevent the occurrence of these things in order to undermine their oppressive power—we only need the right kind of recontextualization: turning those utterances into jokes or turning those jokes against themselves. Unlike other forms of visual oppression, the harms contained within visual jokes can be reconfigured to affirm those they were created to harm, changing their function from jokes which attack others to jokes which attack themselves, empowering those they were created to target by calling into question the problematic conceptions of audiences who are sympathetic to the harmful joke’s initial formulation.