The Heart and Its Attitudes

Stephen Darwall has had a change of heart. He remains committed to the Strawsonian analysis of moral accountability and obligation memorably articulated in The Second-Personal Standpoint (2006). Still, The Heart and Its Attitudes reflects the growth of a new conviction: in focusing narrowly on ‘reactive attitudes of the will’ (resentment, guilt, blame) and their contributions to deontic morality, philosophers have failed to properly reckon with the true scope of reactive attitudes’ significance for ethical life. Yes, it is through resentment, guilt, and blame that we respect others and lay claim to others’ conscientious consideration. But what of those attitudes’ less-studied, softer kin: remorse, gratitude, trust, hope, fellow-feeling? Darwall argues that these latter ‘attitudes of the heart’ bind us together in distinctive forms of deeply valuable but nonobligatory mutual relation. Attitudes of the heart share a common theme: they are all somehow keyed to our love-worthiness. They also share a characteristic form of address. Unlike the sort of impersonal admiration we might feel for a soaring vista, but like the attitudes of the will, the heart’s attitudes bid for reciprocation. Crucially, though, the heart’s attitudes neither issue nor respond to claims. They only invite; they do not demand.Much of The Heart and Its Attitudes is devoted to rich, engaging studies of individual heartfelt attitudes and relations. Some of these studies cast new light on attitudes that philosophers have recently puzzled over, such as forgiveness and trust. Others limn relational phenomena that have gone unnamed and mostly unnoticed. For example, ‘heartfelt being with’, the state of mutual conscious emotional openness that we enjoy when we are fully present with each other, does not have a dedicated philosophical literature (yet). But it is a phenomenon whose contours we readily recognize, at least once Darwall points them out. And he is surely right that it is essential to living well with others; precisely because of the vulnerability it involves, heartfelt being with relieves a loneliness that no amount of mutual respect can touch.Darwall’s vivid portraits of this and other forms of fellow-feeling are independently illuminating. One need not embrace his broader picture of second-personal ethics in order to learn a lot from them. Nevertheless, there are questions to ask about this broader picture, which divides second-personal ethics in two—deontic morality and attitudes of the will on one side, attitudes of the heart on the other. We can begin with this question: Should we accept Darwall’s reasons for locating the heart’s attitudes fully outside the space of moral obligation?On Darwall’s view, respect is both the principal attitude of the will and within the scope of moral obligation. We are always entitled to others’ recognition respect, the attitude “through which we register and appreciate the dignity of persons” (7). Conversely, we are never entitled to love, the principal attitude of the heart, nor to any of its affiliates. Darwall explains why not: “We can only claim what is within the control of someone of whom we make the claim” (70). He seems to offer us a crisp and straightforward contrast. Whereas respect is within our control, love is outside it, and thus not demandable. One might wonder, though, whether things really are quite this stark.Consider love. If love were like a sensation of headache, if it were a thoughtless state totally insensitive to our appreciation of reasons, that would clearly make love undemandable. We do not think of love as unreasonable in this sense, though. In loving, we take it both that our beloved’s qualities make our love fitting, and that we love her in light of those qualities. We represent our beloved’s charm and warmth (say) as our fitting reasons for loving her. Plausibly, for some fact or feature to function as our reason for an attitude, we must be able to form the attitude directly on the basis of our consideration of that fact or feature. Our ordinary way of thinking about love therefore implies that there is indeed a kind of control we enjoy over it. If we can love for reasons, then presumably we enjoy what is sometimes called rational or evaluative control over love: we can form the attitude directly through our consideration of (right-kind) reasons for that attitude.To hold onto the view that a lack of control places heartfelt attitudes beyond moral obligation, Darwall could either deny that we enjoy rational control over heartfelt attitudes or maintain that, while we do enjoy such rational control, this is not the sort of control we need for an attitude to be claimable. Either option will come with difficulties, though.Here is a problem for the first option: one of Darwall’s attractive core claims about attitudes of the heart looks hard to reconcile with the proposal that they are beyond our rational control. Darwall insists that we “invite” others’ love by means of our own (137); the hearts’ attitudes issue an “R.S.V.P.” (17). Now consider how invitations work. When I invite someone to a party, what do I presume of my invitee? Certainly not that my invitation could simply trigger their attendance. Rather, I presume that my invitee can appreciate the invitation for what it is and accept it on that basis. Only then will my invitation be successful qua invitation. The point should generalize: all sincere invitations by their nature seek appreciative acceptance. If Darwall is right that love can aptly extend an invitation to love in return, then it would seem to follow that love is an attitude we can form for reasons, and more particularly for the reason that it has been invited. But, in that case, it is not clear how love could also be outside our rational control.How about the second option? Darwall could allow that we enjoy rational control over our heartfelt attitudes but specify that for an attitude to be claimable, it needs to be not just under rational control but more narrowly under voluntary control. That is, the attitude needs to be something the will in particular, and not just any one of our reasons-responsive faculties, could author directly on the basis of right-kind reasons for it. This may in fact be Darwall’s considered position. He does repeatedly refer to our lack of “voluntary control” and “agential control” over the heart’s attitudes, which implicitly suggests a contrast with some other type of control (see, e.g., 39, 69).A first concern for this option is just that it is not obvious why we should accept this tighter restriction on claimability. If we grant that we ‘make up’ our hearts and our wills in essentially the same way, directly through the consideration of right-kind reasons, then why should we also hold that we can only claim that which is specifically under voluntary control? The restriction does not seem to be plainly mandated by our ordinary concept of claimability, insofar as we have one. A supplementary concern is that this restriction may threaten the appealing notion that recognition respect is always demandable. There is at least something initially tempting in this line of thought: full-blown recognition respect consists in full appreciation of the other’s dignity, and the full appreciation of another’s dignity is not a job for the will alone. It constitutively involves a registration of that dignity through our judgments and emotions, too. Thus, full-blown recognition respect is not fully under our voluntary control (and so, by the lights of the restriction we are considering, not demandable).None of these worries should lead us to conclude that love and its affiliates actually can be demanded. At most, they give us reason to suspect that love’s unclaimability is not really a matter of its imperviousness to control. An alternative way of thinking about love’s unclaimability is actually suggested by some of Darwall’s own language. He sometimes talks about love as a “gift” that is “freely given” (69). Our common concept of gift contains both of these elements: First, the giving of a gift must be within the gifter’s control (if my handing over a “#1 Dad” mug does not reflect my own decision to do so, the mug cannot count as my gift). And second, we cannot give any gift in response to a demand. Along the same lines, we could say that it is simply part of our concept of love that it is gift-like, in that it is requestable but unclaimable despite the rational control we enjoy over it.This might seem like an unacceptably thin ‘explanation’ for love’s unclaimability, in comparison to one that invokes the generic inaptness of demanding uncontrollable responses. However, it could perhaps be thickened by further reflection on why we place a special value on love and its affiliates so conceived, why it matters to us to be cared for specifically in ways we think we have no claim to, and what we would lose if these categories of ethical call-and-response were to disappear. To wish that we could aptly demand gifts would be to make a mistake, because the whole point of gifts is that they are gratuitous. Likewise, maybe, for the intangible attitudinal offerings of trust, hope, and love.Darwall maintains that moral obligations do spring up around the heart’s attitudes, despite their unclaimability. We may be required to take steps to protect our hearts or to try and warm hearts that have gone cold. In two especially thought-provoking chapters, Darwall brings this thought to bear on a deep American problem, the heart wounds inflicted by chattel slavery and its grim legacy. Looking to the past, Darwall celebrates James Baldwin’s efforts to stir loving fellow-feeling across the racial divide, as a needful compliment to the sort of accountability-oriented address exemplified by Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” And, looking toward the future, Darwall offers two sets of prescriptions for the country, one oriented toward accountability, the other toward addressing hurt. Reparations, affirmative action, massive carceral reform—these are morally required, but Darwall contends that they are “simply not the kind of thing that can heal wounds of the heart” (172). For that healing, we need public memorials that stir empathy and grief for white supremacy’s victims. We need opportunities to learn about and sit with the pains endured, and we need open, repeated exchanges of sorrow.In arguing that accountability is not enough to address dual crises of regard like the one rooted in American slavery, Darwall does not dwell on a possible friction between the projects of restoring respect and fostering love. Nevertheless, in light of his adamance that these two attitudes involve fundamentally different ways of receiving and responding to each other, we might inquire further about how the pursuits of love and respect fit together—or fail to. Adam Smith, the most serious early student of the reactive attitudes, built a whole moral psychology around the idea that our ethical energies are limited; Smithian moral life is largely about taking care not to overburden others’ capacities for recognition and heartfelt connection. I would like to think that Smith doesn’t give humans quite enough credit. Even if our resources are less limited than Smith makes out, though, it is not obvious that these two kinds of projects Darwall envisions—the project of overcoming a great shortfall in recognition respect and the project of healing grievously broken hearts—won’t sometimes impose competing material and psychic demands. For profoundly alienated parties, the challenge may also run deeper than that of resource management. While perfect love and perfect respect are, plausibly, perfectly compatible, an imperfect respect may be easier to sustain from the kind of abstracting distance inimical to heartfelt being with, which requires attending to people in all their particularity.These are only anxious ‘maybes’. Perhaps they will turn out to be inconsequential. If not, though, then Darwall’s moving and timely discussion should also inspire new questions about when and how (if ever) we ought to prioritize matters of the heart

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy