Under what circumstances can love generate moral reasons for action? Are there morally appropriate ways to love? Can an occurrence of love or a failure to love constitute a moral failure? Is it better to love morally good people? This volume explores the moral dimensions of love through the lenses of political philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It attempts to discern how various social norms affect our experience and understanding of love, how love, relates to other affective states such as emotions and desires, and how love influences and is influenced by reason. What love is affects what love ought to be. Conversely, our ideas of what love ought to be partly determined by our conception of what love is.

This book offers an analysis of shame (as a state, disposition, activity, and social relation) and develops an interdisciplinary and comparative interpretation of Confucian shame as a moral disposition, the ability of critical moral-development and self-cultivation.

Shame is a Jekyll-and-Hyde emotion--it can be morally valuable, but it also has a dark side. Thomason presents a philosophically rigorous and nuanced account of shame that accommodates its harmful and helpful aspects. Thomason argues that despite its obvious drawbacks and moral ambiguity, shame's place in our lives is essential.

Amusement is an emotion with power. It has the power to make us laugh, but it can also have a power over us (for good or for ill) to control our attention or memory. Amusement can empower our resistance to oppression, or it can itself become an oppressive force. Our amusement can make others feel shame. Amusement even has the power to affect (and be affected by) out moral assessment of others. This volume offers twelve essays from leading and emerging scholars that explore the moral quagmire that is the emotion of amusement. It is a collection that considers the moral psychology of amusement from a range of perspectives, going as far back as ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy up to the most current psychological and sociological findings.

In most Western societies, guilt is widely regarded as a vital moral emotion. In addition to playing a central role in moral development and progress, many take the capacity to feel guilt as a defining feature of morality itself: no truly moral person escapes the pang of guilt when she has done something wrong. But proponents of guilt's importance face important challenges, such as distinguishing healthy from pathological forms of guilt, and accounting for the fact that not all cultures value guilt in the same way, if at all. In this volume, philosophers and psychologists come together to think more systematically about the nature and value of guilt. The book begins with chapters on the biological origins and psychological nature of guilt and moves on to discuss the culturally enriched conceptions of guilt and its value that we find in various eastern and western philosophic traditions. In addition, numerous chapters discuss healthy or morally valuable forms guilt and their pathological or irrational shadows.

Whether we like it or not, boredom is a major part of human life. It permeates our personal, social, practical, and moral existence. It shapes our world by demarcating what is engaging, interesting, or meaningful from what is not. It also sets us in motion insofar as its presence can motivate us to act in a plethora of ways. Indeed, in our search for engagement, interest, or meaning, our responses to boredom straddle the line between the good and the bad, the beneficial and the harmful, the creative and the mundane. In this volume, world-renowned researchers come together to explore a neglected but crucially important aspect of boredom: its relationship to morality. Does boredom cause individuals to commit immoral acts? Does it affect our moral judgment? Does the frequent or chronic experience boredom make us worse people? Is the experience of boredom something that needs to be avoided at all costs? Or can boredom be, at least sometimes, a solution and a positive moral force? The Moral Psychology of Boredom sets out to answer these and other timely questions.

Few emotions have divided opinion as deeply as shame. Some scholars have argued that shame is essentially a maladaptive emotion used to oppress minorities and reinforce stigmas and traumas, an emotion that leaves the self at the mercy of powerful others. Other scholars, however, have argued that the absence of a sense of shame in a subject—their shamelessness—is tantamount to a vicious moral insensitivity. As the eleven original chapters in this collection attest, however, shame scholars are entering a new phase, one in which scholarship no longer attempts to defend one side of shame against the other, but rather accepts both faces as faithful to the phenomenon to be explained. At the core of our understanding of shame there are profound disagreements about the importance of the Other in shaping our moral identity. As this collection shows by its study of shame, the difficulty of the connection between Self, Other, and morality spans over millennia and cultures and currently animates important debates at the core of feminism and disability studies. Contributors: Mark Alfano, Alessandra Fussi, Lorenzo Greco, JeeLoo Liu, Katrine Krause-Jensen, Heidi L. Maibom, Tjeert Olthof, Imke von Maur, Alba Montes Sánchez, Raffaele Rodogno, Alessandro Salice, Krista K. Thomason, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran