Table of Contents

Preface vii

Part I The range of emotions

Refined emotions 3

Imagining in emotions 8

Seeing as 17

Emotions and thinking 22

Keeping mood and emotion distinct 29

Pressure 37

Categories of emotion 44

Part II Imagining vile emotions

Imagining what we shouldn’t feel 53

Imagining minds: emotions and perspectives 56

Imagining a point of view 63

Misimagination 74

Imagining invented characters: fiction and philosophy 83

Invisible everyday failures 88

Imagining awful actions 94

Sympathy versus empathy 101

The tradeoff 108

Part III Memotions

The threat of irrelevance 117

Retracting emotions 122

Emotions with multiple points of view 128

The variety of moral emotions 134

Emotional learning 142

Smugness 149

Part IV Families of emotions

The ideas and the questions 157

Shame, regret, embarrassment, remorse 159

Shame-like versus regret-like 164

Ghosts 170

Looking backward and looking inward 175

Gaps in the pattern: shame versus guilt 180

Two kinds of pride 184

The smug family 189

Dark humour, radical possibilities 194

Shaping our emotions 198

End: a virtue if imagination 206

Notes 210

References 219

Index 229

About the Author

Adam Morton is visiting emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia.

Reviews

"Friends of Adam Morton's work will find familiar strengths in this essay in moral psychology: detailed attention to the peculiarities of cases and a hostility to easy formulations, matched by lucid arguments that keep the general aim in view. He has surprising things to say about imagining; mice do it, apparently. But we, unlike mice, can use imagination to help to shape our own emotions, and hence to structure our own moral lives. All in all, this is a splendid attempt to think through the complex issue of what the imagination can and cannot do for us."
Gregory Currie, University of Nottingham

"Adam Morton is a pioneering and original thinker whose provocative and insightful work on emotion and imagination has pushed the field in important new directions. It's exciting to have a book-length treatment of these issues from such an interesting and creative mind."
Tamar Gendler, Yale University

"Morton takes us on a journey of the imagination into the imagination. His kaleidoscope of examples compels us to believe that emotions involve the imagination in sometimes unexpected, but always fascinating ways. A great read!"
Heidi Maibom, Carleton University