Abstract

In this essay, I raise a puzzle concerning rational emotions. The puzzle arises from the fact that a handful of very plausible claims seem to commit us to the idea that whether a subject ought to have a certain emotion at a given time in part depends on the fittingness of the intensity of the feelings it involves, and the fittingness of these feelings in part depends on the intensity of the feelings the subject has at that time. Yet this idea is incompatible with another plausible claim: namely, that the deontic properties possessed by a subject having an emotion with a certain intensity are not counterfactually dependent on her having that emotion with that intensity.