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First published 2018
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Silva, Sara Graça da, editor.
Title: New Interdisciplinary Landscapes in Morality and Emotion / [edited by]
Sara Graça da Silva.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054791 (print) | LCCN 2017059050 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315143897 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781138500594 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics—Psychological aspects. | Emotions. | Moral
development.
Classification: LCC BJ45 (ebook) | LCC BJ45 .M674 2018 (print) |
DDC 155.2/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054791
ISBN: 978-1-138-50059-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14389-7 (ebk)
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Contents

Note on contributorsvii
Acknowledgmentsxiii

Introduction: Morality and emotion, or why “this is a very

complicated case, you know, a lot of ins, a lot of outs,
a lot of what-have-you’s . . .” 1
SARA GRAÇA DA SILVA

1 Empathy and the moral self 12

JESSE PRINZ

2 Emotions and irrationality 27

VASCO CORREIA

3 Situations, emotions and character within a situated

approach to emotions 41
DINA MENDONÇA

4 Driven by shame: how a negative emotion may lead

to prosocial behaviour 52
AUGUSTA GASPAR AND MARIANA HENRIQUES

5 Jealousy: evolutionary, cultural and moral perspectives 67

LUDWIG KRIPPAHL

6 Morality and what’s love got to do with it 82

KATRIEN SCHAUBROECK

7 What makes a good society? Happiness and the role

of contextual and psychological factors 96
CATARINA RIVERO AND CHRISTIN-MELANIE VAUCLAIR
vi Contents
8 Morality as emotions in process: neuropsychoanalysis,
behavioural economics and global citizenship 110
ÂNGELA LACERDA NOBRE

9 Towards more humane machines: creating emotional

social robots 125
ANA PAIVA, SAMUEL MASCARENHAS, SOFIA PETISCA, FILIPA
CORREIA, AND PATRÍCIA ALVES-OLIVEIRA

10 The “hydrologist’s weapons”: emotions and the moral

economy of internationalism, 1921–1952 140
ILARIA SCAGLIA

11 Neville Heath and the politics of sadism in

mid-twentieth-century Britain 153
JOANNA BOURKE

12 “The moral muddle about murder”: the decrease

in sympathy for the murder victim in late
Victorian detective fiction 165
MARJOLEIN PLATJEE

13 “The feelings, and revealings, and memories of Home!”:

emigration and the primrose 178
RUTH BRIMACOMBE

Index193
Contributors

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira is a PhD student at ISCTE-IUL in the field of psychology

applied to human–robot interactions. Prior to her PhD, Patrícia was involved
in the study of empathy in robots and how the empathic capabilities embed-
ded in robotic agents can foster and influence learning amongst children. Pat-
rícia has worked as a researcher in the EU FP7 EMOTE project, developing
an empathic robotic tutor aimed at supporting children in the acquisition of
curricular topics. In her PhD, Patrícia is studying how we can use robots to
boost creativity. More specifically, she is interested in how robots can be used
to stimulate creative abilities in children and ultimately contribute to a new
generation of children that can more easily adapt to creative and innovative
societies.
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and
Fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of twelve
books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology
and psychiatry, the emotions and rape. Among others, she is the author of
Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (1996), An
Intimate History of Killing (1999), Fear: A Cultural History (2005) and Rape:
A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007). Her book What It Means to Be
Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present was published by Virago in 2011. In
2014, she was the author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (OUP)
and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Are Invading Our
Lives (Virago). Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Span-
ish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish and Greek.
Ruth Brimacombe is an independent scholar who formerly worked for the
National Portrait Gallery in London as Collections Curator – 19th Century.
She was awarded her doctorate in art history from the University of Mel-
bourne in 2008 for a study entitled Imperial Avatars: Art, India and the Prince
of Wales 1875–6. Her thesis explored the work of the artist-reporters and pho-
tographers who accompanied the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) on his
royal tour of India in the late nineteenth century. She recently contributed
a chapter on the subject to a collected book of essays titled Virtual Victori-
ans: Networks, Collections, Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has
viii Contributors
co-curated an online exhibition titled Picturing the News: The Art of Victo-
rian Graphic Journalism with Professor Cathy Waters at the University of Kent
(launched February 2017).
Filipa Correia received an MSc in Computer Science from the University of
Lisbon, Portugal, 2015. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Human–Robot
Interaction and Artificial Intelligence applied to games at the University of
Lisbon, Portugal, and is a teaching assistant in the courses of Artificial Intel-
ligence and Multi-Agent Systems.
Vasco Correia received his PhD from the Paris-Sorbonne University with a dis-
sertation on “Self-Deception and the Problem of Irrationality”. He is currently
a research fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (Universidade Nova de
Lisboa), where he develops a project on the topic of cognitive biases in argu-
mentation and decision making. He is the author of La duperie de soi (2010),
La pensée irrationnelle (2016) and numerous papers on the topics of rationality,
cognitive biases and the philosophy of mind.
Augusta Gaspar is an Assistant Professor and the Pedagogical Director of the
Undergraduate program in Psychology at the Catholic University of Portugal.
She is also a full researcher at the CIS – Centro de Investigação e Interven-
ção Social at ISCTE-IUL – Lisbon University Institute. At ISCTE-IUL, she
teaches and coordinates interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses
(bridging psychology, biology and anthropology) and is principal researcher
at CRC-W, Catolica Research Center for Psychological, family and Social
Wellbeing, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa, Portugal. Her research
addresses the ontogeny and evolution of empathy, morality and the behav-
ioural expression and physiological correlates of emotion. Her work has been
published in international and national peer-reviewed journals and proceed-
ings. Examples of books where she has published chapters are Personality and
Temperament in Nonhuman Primates, edited by Alexander Weiss, James King
and Alison Murray (2011, Springer-Verlag) and The Evolution of Social Com-
munication in Primates: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Marco Pina and
Nathalie Gonthier (2014, Springer -Verlag).
Mariana Henriques holds a Masters in Psychology of Emotions from ISCTE-IUL
and a Bachelor in Management from Nova School of Business and Econom-
ics. Her master’s thesis on the role of individual differences in shame-induced
behaviour has been presented at the VIII National Psychology Research Sym-
posium in Aveiro (June 2013). Mariana has also participated in a nationally
funded research project at CIS – Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social
at ISCTE-IUL – Lisbon University Institute, coordinated by Augusta Gas-
par and focusing on inter-individual differences in emotional empathy. Her
research interests include morality, empathy and emotions and how these
interact with individual differences and situational factors. Mariana currently
works in the technology industry driving innovation and digital transforma-
tion programs in companies of all sizes.
 Contributors ix
Ludwig Krippahl obtained his PhD in structural biochemistry from Universidade
Nova de Lisboa in 2003, with a thesis on the integration of protein structural
information. He is an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department
of Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia/UNL and a researcher at the NOVA-
LINCS computer science centre. His main research interests bridge machine
learning and bioinformatics. His teaching experience includes bioinformatics,
machine learning and critical thinking, and he has always been interested in
the interface between biology, cognition and informatics.
Samuel Mascarenhas is currently a post-doctoral researcher at GAIPS, INESC-
ID, in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2015 he received his doctoral degree in Informa-
tion Systems and Computer Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico
(IST), University of Lisbon in Portugal. His research interests are in artificial
intelligence, culture, affective computing, virtual agents and socio-cognitive
sciences. In his PhD, he studied the integration of cultural aspects in virtual
agents to improve their ability to act with other humans in social contexts.
As a developer/researcher in two EU-funded projects (eCircus and eCute),
he applied the work of his PhD in the development of two serious games for
raising intercultural awareness (ORIENT and TRAVELLER). His participa-
tion focused on the creation of characters whose artificial intelligence follows
a flexible model of socio-cultural biases. He was also an active member of two
other EU-funded projects, LIREC and SEMIRA.
Dina Mendonça is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the Instituto de
Filosofia da Nova, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. After a Masters in Philoso-
phy for Children under the supervision of Matthew Lipman and Ann Marga-
ret Sharp, she took her Doctoral Degree at the University of South Carolina
with a dissertation on “The Anatomy of Experience – An Analysis of John
Dewey’s Concept of Experience”. She is currently working on a situated
approach to emotions, a novel and ground-breaking account that takes emo-
tions as dynamic and active situational occurrences (Mendonça 2012) and
explores and identifies further complexities of our emotional world in numer-
ous papers. Recently she has been expanding the application of this perspec-
tive to argumentation theory and ethics. In addition to her research work in
philosophy of emotion, she promotes and creates original material for applica-
tion of philosophy as an aid in the creative processes to all schooling stages.
Ângela Lacerda Nobre, born in Lisbon in 1960, has an academic background
in nursing and economics, has a master in applied economics, a master in
philosophy and psychoanalytical training, and a PhD in management and
information system streams (Semiotic Learning: A Conceptual Framework to
Facilitate Learning in Knowledge-Intensive Organisations). A. L. Nobre has
professional experience as a nurse and as an economist; she has been working
at a management school (www.esce.ips.pt) since 1998 and has published her
research in the areas of semiotics, psychoanalysis, practical philosophy, knowl-
edge management and organisational learning.
x Contributors
Ana Paiva is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at
Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) from the University of Lisbon and Coordi-
nator of GAIPS – “Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group” – at
INESC-ID. She has founded and leads the GAIPS research group at INESC-
ID (http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/gaips/). The group investigates the creation of
complex systems using an agent-based approach, with a special focus on social
agents. Professor Paiva is recognised worldwide for her contributions in the
areas of virtual agents, multi-agent systems, social robotics and affective com-
puting. She has coordinated the participation of INESC-ID and IST in more
than 20 European and national research projects in the areas of her expertise,
edited six books and published more than 200 papers in scientific journals
and conferences. Her main research focuses on the problems and techniques
for creating agent-based systems (both virtual and robotic) that can simulate
human behaviour or establish natural interactions with humans.
Sofia Petisca took a master’s degree in Psychology of Emotions in 2013 at Insti-
tuto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL),and since 2014 she has been
working in the field of human–robot interactions at GAIPS and INESC-ID,
having been part of the EU FP7 EMOTE project. Recently, she has started her
PhD with the topic of morality in human–robot interactions, with the aim to
understand how can we better equip our social robots to promote more honest
behaviours from people.
Marjolein Platjee is a doctoral student with the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation focuses on rep-
resentations of the dying and dead body in British Victorian literature and
culture. Having developed a particular interest in popular fiction, her thesis
includes a variety of popular genres such as penny bloods, as well as sensation
and detective fiction. She has recently contributed to The Companion to Victo-
rian Popular Literature which will be published by McFarland Publishing & Co.
Jesse Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of Interdisci-
plinary Science Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate Center.
His research focuses on the perceptual, emotional and cultural foundations of
human psychology. He is author of Furnishing the Mind (2002), Gut Reactions
(Oxford, 2004), The Emotional Construction of Morals (2007), Beyond Human
Nature (2012) and The Conscious Brain (2012). Two other books are forthcom-
ing: The Moral Self and Works of Wonder and Emotions, Morality, and Identity:
An Empirical Approach.
Catarina Rivero is a Clinical Psychologist, Faculty of Psychology, University
of Lisbon, with training in Family Therapy by the Portuguese Association of
Family and Community Therapy. She holds a Masters in Family and Systems
Therapy (Faculty of Medicine of the University of Seville) and an Executive
Master on Applied Positive Psychology (Lisbon University). She is president
of the Portuguese Association of Studies and Intervention in Positive Psychol-
ogy (APEIPP) and a member of the Portuguese Association of Family and
 Contributors xi
Community Therapy. She co-authored the book Positiva-Mente (2011) and
Manual of Collaborative and Positive Practices in Social Intervention (2013). She
works as a psychotherapist and collaborates with several entities as a trainer.
She is an invited professor at the Piaget Institute. Currently, she is concluding
her master’s thesis on society, risk and health (Lisbon University), where she
is relating income inequality, institutional trust, wellbeing and depression in
European citizens.
Ilaria Scaglia is Assistant Professor of Asian and International History in the
Department of History and Geography at Columbus State University. She is
also the recipient of a Volkswagen-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research
in Germany. In 2016–2017, she was affiliated with the Dahlem Humanities
Center and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the
Free University Berlin, and she is also a Visiting Researcher at the Center
“History of Emotions” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
She is the author of “The aesthetics of internationalism: Culture and politics
on display at the 1935–1936 International Exhibition of Chinese Art”, Journal
of World History, 26(1), March 2015, 105–137. She is currently working on a
project exploring the interplay of emotions and internationalism, focusing on
institutions active in the Alps in the 1920s and 1930s.
Katrien Schaubroeck is tenure track lecturer at the Philosophy Department of
the University of Antwerp. She has published on normative reasons, moral
responsibility, morality and love. She is the author of The Normativity of What
We Care About. A Love-Based Reason Theory (2013, Leuven University Press).
Together with Esther Kroeker she edited Love, Reason and Morality (2017,
Routledge). At the moment she supervises the PhD project “The Ethics of
Love: (How) Ought Parents and Children to Love Each Other?” financed by
the Special Research Fund of the University of Antwerp.
Sara Graça da Silva received her PhD from Keele University in 2008 with a the-
sis on the rich interplay between nineteenth-century science and literature:
‘Sexual Plots in Charles Darwin and George Eliot: Evolution and Manliness
in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss’. Her main research interests include
the relationship between science and literature, Darwinism and evolutionary
theories, gender studies, the application of phylogenetic methodologies to the
study of human cultural diversity and morality. She is currently a post-doctoral
researcher at the Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition, New Uni-
versity of Lisbon, Portugal, working on evolutionary readings of folktales. She
has contributed to the Victorian Literature Handbook, Dictionary of Nineteenth
Century Journalism, Utopian Studies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Royal
Society Open Science, PNAS and Routledge, amongst others.
Christin-Melanie Vauclair is a cross-cultural psychologist and research fellow
at ISCTE-IUL’s Centre for Psychological Research and Social Intervention
(CIS-IUL) in Lisbon. One of her academic specialisations is the psychology
of morality across cultures. In 2004, she received an MSc in social psychology
xii Contributors
from the University of Regensburg (Germany) studying intercultural contact.
In 2011, she completed her PhD at the Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural
Research at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) examining
moral attitudes and values across cultures. She then studied issues of stereo-
typing and discrimination across cultures at the University of Kent (UK) as
a post-doctoral fellow. She was granted a four-year Marie Curie Fellowship to
continue this line of research at CIS-IUL. She is currently an FCT research
fellow continuing her work on cultural aspects of morality and stereotyping.
Vauclair publishes in the leading scholarly journals across different disciplines
and has received several awards for her work.
Acknowledgments

The colloquium on morality and emotion which I organise annually with IELT –
Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition – at the New University of
Lisbon has now become a tradition every October. This second book is inspired
by the latest editions of the meeting, and includes chapters by keynote speakers
at the event and other invited contributors. I am greatly indebted to the Morality
and Emotion team, to IELT and to The Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology (FCT) for their support.
The number of chapters almost doubled in size in comparison with the previous
book, which is a testament to the ever-growing and ebullient interest these topics
originate. My most sincere thanks to all the contributors for their enlightening
studies, patience and cooperation. Thank you also to the editors at Routledge
for their professionalism and understanding during all the phases of the process,
especially Ceri Griffiths, Anna Cuthbert, Hannah Kingerlee, and Kate Fornadel.
As always, I owe my deepest gratitude to my family, Alberto Augusto Oliveira
da Silva, Maria Anita Marinho Graça and Rita Graça da Silva, for their daily
encouragement, knowledge and creativity. And love.
Introduction
Morality and emotion, or why “this is a very
complicated case, you know, a lot of ins,
a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-you’s . . .”
Sara Graça da Silva

What is it?
When studying emotions and morality, this is the question everyone wants an
answer for. However, this is also the question no one truly interested in knowing
what they mean should ever ask. There are just too many ins and outs. Trying to
reduce either of these two concepts to a single definition is therefore reductive,
misguided and even harmful. Whilst categorising morality and emotion as “it”
might appear to make things easier at first glance, it is ultimately impossible. Just
as individuals are composed of many layers, so do morality and emotion share
multiple disciplinary standpoints, constraints and forms of significance, being
incredibly fluid across time and space. A true grasp of this reciprocity can only be
attained by a meaningful interchange of all of these paradigms. Moreover, neither
is morality merely an abstract set of rules, nor is emotion simply a fixed set of
mental expressions. So let’s stop acting as if they have to be, and instead direct
our energy towards more interesting and answerable questions, including the way
emotions and morals are regulated and manipulated (and the motivations behind
these transactions). As the ensuing chapters will show, morality and emotion are
mutually dependant and deeply indicative of specific cultural and social determi-
nants which in turn influence the way we experience life and place value on the
most varied cognitive and social phenomena, both consciously and unconsciously.
As with the previous book, the multidisciplinary framework of the present
volume was specifically designed to explore these intersections in an intention-
ally provocative fashion, focusing on rampant and highly debated topics and
research trends through an unusual but carefully intertwined combination of
chapters. These range from reflections on complex philosophical and psychologi-
cal arguments; examinations of the role emotions (both negatively and positively
charged) play in shaping our needs as citizens; considerations on contemporary
practical and empirical approaches on the best ways to participate and cooperate
in intimate social relations; contemplations on technological enhancement of
emotions and morals; historical discussions of emotions and moral deliberations;
and literary and artistic perspectives that expose our understanding of ourselves
and the other – an increasingly pressing and worrying theme in today’s society
given the current state of affairs.
2 Sara Graça da Silva
Most human primates are creatures of habit. We feel comfortable knowing
where we stand with things, where we are going, at what time and, if possible, with
whom – it makes us feel in control of our emotions and environment, and gives
us a sense of security. We like to know what to expect and whom we can trust.
The question of trust is an essential requirement for a healthy social life. However,
trusting is not easy. We have a tendency to believe we always know best and that
our opinion is always more sensible. In his book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
(2010), Robert Kurzban argues that people often fail to see their own inconsisten-
cies, leading us to believe that everyone else (but us) is phony. When elaborating
on human behaviour, Kurzban also recognises that people use morality strategi-
cally in social environments, in both cooperative and competitive situations:

The very constitution of the human mind makes us massively inconsist-

ent . . . the human mind consists of many, many mental processes, think of
them as little programming subroutines, or maybe individual iPhone appli-
cations – each operating by its own logic, designed by the inexorable pro-
cess of natural selection; and, further, that what you think and what you do
depends on which process is running the show – your show – at any particu-
lar moment. Because which part of the mind is in charge changes over time,
and because these different parts are designed to do very different things,
human behavior is – and this shouldn’t be a surprise – complicated.
(Kurzban, 2010, p. 4)

The proven volatility of our character is reflected in the ambivalent relationship

we have with our emotions and moral codes, and impacts greatly on the deci-
sions we make (or fail to make), as well as on the way we exert self-control. This
particular inconsistency and subjectivity is something every discipline, from the
purest neurosciences to aesthetics, have been trying to untangle. Over the last
decades, there has been an explosion of studies aimed at better understanding the
neurobiological basis of the interaction between cognitive and affective processes
(Damásio, 1994, 2013; LeDoux, 2000; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2007), including how
we respond to emotional challenges, such as anxiety disorders or depression (Sol-
omons et al., 2015; Heller et al., 2013). Other studies have suggested that we
make different moral deliberations depending on whether we are judging some-
thing in our native language or in a foreign one. Recent research, for example,
has found that reading stories in a foreign language made subjects judge actions
as less wrong because it eliminated the gut-feeling level of processing and implied
a more prolonged consideration (Geipel et al., 2015).1 Other works have focused
on the ability to read others’ expressions, which is considered crucial to empa-
thetic responses and Theory of Mind (ToM), that is, the capacity to understand
and reflect on our and other’s mental states (Decety et al., 2014; Wood et al.,
2016; Baron-Cohen, 2017). Indeed, empathy is an unavoidable concept when
considering moral judgment, altruism, cooperation and pro-social behaviour, and
its study remains central to discussions about human and non-human primate
social relations (Bekoff and Pierce, 2009; de Waal, 2010).