The Appropriateness of Political Emotions

Emotions can get things right and serve us in many productive ways. They can also get things wrong and harm our epistemic or practical endeavors. While this is equally true of political and nonpolitical emotions, assessing the appropriateness of political emotions is a particularly contested endeavor. In our paper, we explore political emotions from a meta-normative perspective. Building on existing discussions on the fittingness and appropriateness of emotions in general and distinctive types of political emotions in particular, we investigate which different standards of appropriateness political emotions have qua being political. We develop a novel taxonomy that distinguishes the focus-, target-, subject-, and aim-appropriateness of political emotions. As we argue, our focus-based account of fittingness allows us to assess the fittingness of political emotions from a first-personal perspective by reflecting on the question of whether the emotion adequately mirrors what really matters to the emoters. While the standard of target-appropriateness assesses whether the target of the emotion has the right scope, the standard of subject-appropriateness allows us to assess whether the emotion adequately mirrors one’s group membership. The standard of aim-appropriateness, finally, assesses the political legitimacy of political emotions based on one’s underlying understanding of the political itself.