The Ethics of Affectivity: Being Wronged

Anne Jeffrey

From the Introduction:

While moral philosophers like me tend to focus on the frames of human life punctuated by decision and action—what we do—so much of ordinary life is characterized by what happens to us. Our agency does not leave the frame entirely in such scenes. How we undergo what happens to us, not just what we do, can make a difference to who we are and how well we live.

… If Noah takes great delight in his child’s flower drawing, this speaks well of him, says something about who he is that is not morally neutral. And it is not morally significant simply in virtue of its connection to some past or future action towards his child or the correctness of an appraisal of the value of the child’s drawing.

We could try to shoehorn our analysis of these kinds of affective habits and castes of mind into more familiar categories. Maybe they are good because they tend to promote the satisfaction of some desires or they produce beliefs about value that tend to be accurate, or downstream they lead to intentions and behaviors that are themselves valuable. Or, we could treat them separately, as belonging to a different part of the moral terrain and deserving of a distinct line of inquiry. Think of this as the ethics of affectivity.