Sharon Krause offers a significant reinterpretation of the relations among reason, emotion, morality, and politics. Civil Passions will become a major reference point for philosophers, political theorists, and legal theorists working on a broad range of issues, including moral psychology, metaethics, deliberative democracy, and legitimacy. Krause draws with admirable fluency upon contemporary scholarship; with comparable command, she considers David Hume. She usefully addresses certain works in neuroscience and empirical political science as well. Without minimizing these achievements, I will suggest that excessive partisanship limits this otherwise excellent book.
Krause's introduction offers an admirable summary of her predecessors and their basic contributions. Civil Passions begins by analyzing both the dominant, rationalist paradigm of deliberation in political theory and the more recent, affective alternatives to it. In chapter 1, Rawls and Habermas are taken as the leading representatives of rationalism, and Krause argues that their accounts of the right and the good are more nuanced and ambivalent than is often realized. They do have a place for the good—which necessarily entails affective attachments—but they attempt to subordinate strictly such attachments to the right, which consists of “forms of reason that aspire to be immune to the actual sentiments of real persons” (27). This is shown to generate certain inconsistencies, largely derived from the “motivational deficit” such forms of reason cannot overcome.
Chapter 2 offers a fascinating survey of affective alternatives to rationalism. These alternatives are placed into three main camps: those advocating the ethics of care (Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, Nel Noddings), those emphasizing the role of emotions in practical judgment (including Martha Nussbaum, Antonio Damasio, Herbert Marcuse), and Humean-inspired accounts of moral judgment (Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, and Simon Blackburn). Significant scientific arguments are drawn from Damasio, plausibly suggesting that emotions play an essential role in many basic rational functions such as assessing the significance of facts and events and remaining focused upon goals, including deliberation. Contemporary theorists of care are shown to be useful in revealing the limits of pure rationality in ethics and politics, but they end up affirming (rather than overcoming) the sharp dichotomy between reason and emotion. Furthermore, they have not adequately theorized the difference between good and bad forms of care. Chapter 6 offers parallel criticisms of both rationalism—in positivist (Joseph Raz, Jeremy Waldron) and moralist (Ronald Dworkin) forms—and affective alternatives (especially John Deigh).
Among the Humeans, Krause is closest to Blackburn, who (unlike Smith) retains an integrated, sentimental account of moral motivation, while he also (unlike Williams) avoids relativism. Yet he overcomes relativism not through a Kantian, disengaged intellect, but through achieving “impartiality by sympathetically experiencing the sentiments of others” (73). For Krause, a fully integrated and holistic model of reason and emotion is needed, which can itself support objective standards of judgment. Her main basis for this is precisely the sort of impartiality that rationalists champion and their more affective critics deride, but she conceives of impartiality not as resulting from a separate faculty of reason, but rather from inclusive, deliberative engagement and affective sensitivity. The author also distinguishes the moral objectivity of Blackburn and Krause from Nussbaum's “self-described Aristotelianism” (224 n. 39), which aspires to “the true perception of moral value that inheres in the world” (62) and to “an ideal of human perfection, or the ‘complete’ human life” (73). Krause favors Humean approaches for thus being less controversially grounded than rival objective theories, seeking objectivity in the empirically verifiable concerns, needs, purposes, and values of humans (60; see also 14, 89–93, 126, 176).
Chapters 3 to 5 form the positive heart of the book. Krause begins with Hume's theory of moral judgment “as a reflective passion, a form of sentiment in which thought and feeling are integrated at the deepest level” (77). Although she offers a particularly strong and balanced statement of a Humean-inspired ethic, this metaethic remains controversial, particularly with regard to the bases of normativity. Regarding moral phenomenology, she accepts Hume's view that mere reason—apart from all sentiment or affective concern—cannot motivate action, while also showing several ways in which he specified that reason can, in fact, motivate moral behavior and change our moral perceptions or habits (99; 102–3; 220 n. 4; 224 n. 38). Given the basis of morality in sentiment and sympathy and the fact that moral sentiment is largely “socially constituted,” Krause carefully avoids the charge of mere conventionalism. Hence, she argues that there are sound Humean grounds to move beyond Hume's own politics. In order to cultivate and civilize sentiments, rather than allowing them merely to reflect “prevailing social inequalities and exclusions,” we require “democratic equality, liberal rights, and contestatory public debate” (77f), largely in order to expose the public increasingly to marginalized voices.
At this point, the book begins to disappoint somewhat. In illustrating her theories with any sort of political example, Krause's tone shifts from philosophically balanced and fair-minded to partisan and uniform. Of course, advancing one's partisan platform is not intrinsically or necessarily aphilosophical, but in a book specifically dedicated to advancing civility and inclusiveness in public deliberation—and which theoretically insists upon considering the sentiments of everyone affected by a policy—one might at least expect serious engagement with opposing views. In advancing her egalitarian and multiculturalist positions, Krause may implicitly justify her neglect of conservative arguments through narrowly defining what it means to be affected by a policy. Apparently, one never has a legitimate concern that a certain ideal be advanced or upheld, or that people may eventually be harmed by the undermining of an ideal. For instance, in her most sustained example, gay marriage is advanced as just because it is “useful and agreeable” to those affected by it and poses no threat to others or to the institution of marriage (119–29). Opposing views are never engaged and tend to be presented as arising from lack of sympathetic exposure to gays or lesbians. However much support this may find empirically, the argument displays a limitation of Krause's civil passions approach, in that it may encourage the dismissal or endorsement of policies on grounds of personal identity or social exposure rather than rational engagement. Krause never pauses to consider, for instance, how her main arguments for the parallel grounds of gay marriage and heterosexual marriage (see 119–20, 128–29) would equally entail bisexual marriage rights. (The latter would pivotally relativize the ideal of monogamy. Thus, although it may be the most just solution, it is not self-evidently harmless to the institution of marriage as Krause insists of gay marriage; cf. 124; 231 n. 29.) Finally, Krause rightly argues that not all sentimental responses deserve to be weighted equally, and that those based on exclusionary social systems do not meet the standard of impartiality. Yet she may go too far in reducing properly formed sympathy to the optimizing of inclusiveness (25, 116, 135, cf. 191). Here society may be better served by one of the subtler theories of sympathy from which Krause partially draws—those of Hume, Smith, and Tocqueville, not to mention Montesquieu and Rousseau—which delicately balance compassion and humanity with self-command, social restraint, and exhortation in behalf of long-term and common goods. One might hope, then, that in the future scholars (and perhaps Krause herself) will build upon Krause's major contributions on the integration of reason and emotion with a more comprehensive analysis of the nature of sympathy and its potential for advancing civil deliberation, justice, and every human excellence.
