Emotion, Cognition, and the Virtue of Flexibility

Chapter 5: Spontaneous Aversion and Attraction in “Good Thinking”

So far, I have argued in this book that spontaneous emotional responses, in the form of an aversion or attraction, have been a neglected kind of mental state in our philosophy of mind. I then argued that feeling states, of which these emotional responses are paradigmatic cases, play the important role of keeping our character flexible by disrupting engrained habits and beliefs. This gives rise to a hitherto neglected (meta‐)virtue, the virtue of flexibility. That is, discovering the important role these feeling capacities play in our ethical and moral decision-making also made us discover that we neglected the virtue of being able to reconsider our ways.

Now, is flexibility ...