4 - Emotional Expression, Commitment and Joint Value

Summary

We human beings are social animals, and our social nature is in part revealed through our emotions and their expression: by expressing an emotion, we communicate to others something about our attitudes towards them or towards our circumstances more broadly. Yet standard accounts of the emotional expressions tend to consider a relatively narrow range of relatively simple cases, ignoring more complex cases such as expressions of the reactive attitudes – emotions like gratitude and resentment, approbation and guilt – that are central to our ordinary interpersonal relationships. Indeed, as I shall argue, thinking about what is required in these more complex cases can shed light on how we ought to understand the simpler cases.

One aspect of our social nature as human beings is that we share not only our things and our actions but also our cares and values. Emotions are, we might expect, important for valuing in general, both for our attunement to value and even for things being valuable to us in the first place (Helm 2001). In the case of joint values– those values we share jointly with others as members of some group – we might expect emotions to play an even more central role. For to have a joint value together with others in a group, it is not enough simply that each member of the group in fact has that value; rather, the coincidence of these individual values must be non-accidental in that each values something because we do, where (other things being equal) one would in some sense be failing as a member of the group if one did not value it. Consequently, there must be some means by which such joint values are instituted among all members of the group, and this is plausibly where emotions come in: in addition to enabling us to attend and respond to values generally, we might expect emotional expressions to play an important role in communicating these values to our fellow members and thereby reinforcing the shared sense of value – and shared sense of community – joint values seem to require. My aim here is to explore that role and thereby to argue for a distinctive account of emotional expression, which I shall call the commitment account.