Democratic values, emotions and emotivism

In: Filozofija i društvo, Volume 27, Issue 4, p. 723-738

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the relation between democratic values
and emotions. The author argues that democratic values and emotional
judgments are inter-reducible: political agents use emotional judgments to
reflexively evaluate normative paradigms of political life. In the first part
of the paper, the author describes the state of emotions in contemporary
political philosophy and identifies Charles Stevenson?s ethical conception of
emotivism as the first comprehensive attempt to neutrally conceptualize
emotions in moral and political thinking. The second part of the paper
explores the shortcomings of emotivism and finds an adequate alternative in
Martha Nussbaum?s concept of emotional judgment as the one that contains
beliefs and values about social objects. In the final part of the paper, the
author identifies that moral and political disagreements emerge in
democracies from ranking of the importance of political objects. The
evaluation criteria for this type of ranking is derived from democratic
values which are reducible to agents? emotional judgments.