Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon R. Krause is associate professor of political science at Brown University. She is the author of Liberalism with Honor.

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"'Our minds are changed when our hearts are engaged,' With these words, Civil Passions takes a giant step forward in understanding the affective dimensions of political deliberation. Krause's challenge to the reason-based theories of Kant, Rawls, and Habermas, among others, will be debated--perhaps fiercely--by the next generation. She lays bare the fault lines of the issue and makes a compelling argument for basing moral motivation in affect. She also suggests how we might base moral norms themselves in reflective sentiments, or impartial feelings about feelings. The book is thoughtful and inspired, powered by acute powers of analysis and a lively sensibility."--Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University

"In recent years scholars have increasingly argued that affect plays a greater role in our practical reasoning than is traditionally admitted. Krause agrees, but she also knows that this insight is really only the announcement of the need for a major undertaking: understanding exactly how passions necessarily inform our reason and how 'civil passions' and 'affective impartiality' ought to guide our judgment, deliberation, and decision making in moral and political life. Her book takes up this task with real imagination, careful argumentation, and original insight."--Stephen K. White, University of Virginia

"Civil Passions is an ambitious attempt to restore Hume's account of moral sentiment as an alternative to the Kantian perspective that dominates contemporary political theory, and to flesh out the significance of the Humean approach for contemporary liberal democracy. This is an important book."--William A. Galston, Brookings Institution

"This superb book is beautifully written; contains an elegant and finely honed argument; and makes a highly original contribution to contemporary deliberative democratic theory, contemporary theories of emotions in politics, and the philosophical literature on David Hume. Krause puts forward a clearer and more convincing account of the role played by sentiments and concerns in the processes of democratic deliberation and norm justification than any other contemporary theorist of affect."--Christina Tarnopolsky, McGill University

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"'Our minds are changed when our hearts are engaged,' With these words, Civil Passions takes a giant step forward in understanding the affective dimensions of political deliberation. Krause's challenge to the reason-based theories of Kant, Rawls, and Habermas, among others, will be debated--perhaps fiercely--by the next generation. She lays bare the fault lines of the issue and makes a compelling argument for basing moral motivation in affect. She also suggests how we might base moral norms themselves in reflective sentiments, or impartial feelings about feelings. The book is thoughtful and inspired, powered by acute powers of analysis and a lively sensibility."--Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University

"In recent years scholars have increasingly argued that affect plays a greater role in our practical reasoning than is traditionally admitted. Krause agrees, but she also knows that this insight is really only the announcement of the need for a major undertaking: understanding exactly how passions necessarily inform our reason and how 'civil passions' and 'affective impartiality' ought to guide our judgment, deliberation, and decision making in moral and political life. Her book takes up this task with real imagination, careful argumentation, and original insight."--Stephen K. White, University of Virginia

"Civil Passions is an ambitious attempt to restore Hume's account of moral sentiment as an alternative to the Kantian perspective that dominates contemporary political theory, and to flesh out the significance of the Humean approach for contemporary liberal democracy. This is an important book."--William A. Galston, Brookings Institution

"This superb book is beautifully written; contains an elegant and finely honed argument; and makes a highly original contribution to contemporary deliberative democratic theory, contemporary theories of emotions in politics, and the philosophical literature on David Hume. Krause puts forward a clearer and more convincing account of the role played by sentiments and concerns in the processes of democratic deliberation and norm justification than any other contemporary theorist of affect."--Christina Tarnopolsky, McGill University

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Civil Passions

Princeton University Press

Introduction

HOW DO WE DISTINGUISH, as citizens, between laws that are worthy of our allegiance and those we should reject or resist? Democratic procedural criteria are important here, but ostensibly democratic procedures sometimes go wrong, generating laws that endanger civil liberties or obstruct social justice. And while the principle of judicial review gives the courts a role in evaluating legislative outcomes, citizens in liberal democracies also have a responsibility in this regard. As citizens, our relationship to the laws should not be one of blind obedience, after all; it should reflect critical engagement and sound judgment. In fact, we have a political obligation as liberal-democratic citizens to evaluate the laws and to resist (or try to reform) laws that do violate liberty or obstruct justice. How do we carry out this evaluation? What faculties of heart and mind do we use? Americans today are in the process of publicly deliberating about the justice of gay marriage, for instance. In deliberating about an issue such as this one-which brings together questions of politics, morality, and law-what capacities do we employ? In particular, what is the right combination of thinking and feeling, of reason and passion, of cognition and affect, within such deliberation?

The common response to this question is to insist that there is no right combination of reason and passion, at least when it comes to deliberation about important political questions and matters of basic justice. The only way to achieve good deliberation, in other words, is to excise passions from the deliberative process entirely. The worry is that these affective modes of consciousness will cloud our reason and therefore impede the impartiality that is needed for sound moral judgment, equitable adjudication, and fair political deliberation. This is the dominant view (although certainly not the only one) in the history of political thought in the West. It is also the dominant view in political theory today. This book challenges that view. The practical deliberation that we use to assess laws and public policies inevitably incorporates emotions and desires-and these passions can contribute in a positive way to the impartial standpoint that makes public decisions legitimate. To be sure, passions also can impede impartiality, and when they do so they cause problems for the legitimacy of democratic decision making and the justice of its outcomes. Cruelty and bigotry, for instance, should never determine the direction our collective deliberation takes. And a spirit of civility, not jingoism or destructive rage, should guide it. Like civility, the ideal of impartiality is crucial to legitimate deliberation and to justice, and it should never be abandoned. Yet the real possibility of conflict between passion and impartiality does not tell the whole story of their very complex relationship. Civil Passions develops an account of affective but impartial judgment, loosely inspired by the moral sentiment theory of David Hume, and provides a systematic statement of the role the passions might properly play in moral judgment and public deliberation.

In articulating the affective dimensions of impartiality, the book addresses a problem that has plagued normative theories of democratic decision making for a generation. The rationalist models of deliberation and norm justification that predominate in political theory today (as represented, for instance, in the work of John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas) suffer from a motivational deficit. The ideal of reason as a faculty that abstracts from sentiment, which undergirds impartiality on this view, disconnects the deliberating subject from the motivational sources of human agency, which are found in the affective attachments and desires from which subjects are asked to abstract. The self as deliberator comes apart from the self as agent. To be sure, both Rawls and Habermas make a place for affect in their theories of justice. Specifically, both recognize the importance of engaging citizens' attachments and desires as a means of fostering allegiance to the rational procedures of norm justification and their results, thereby generating a feeling for justice that lends it stability. Yet both views aspire to limit the contributions of affect to the realm of application, while norm justification itself is conceived as a function of a form of reason that transcends affective influences. In effect, what they give us is a two-stage model: first, reason tells us what justice means and what it requires in terms of laws and public policies; then once this normative matter is settled, we move to the realm of application where we can begin to think about how to socialize citizens into the affective dispositions that support the norms that reason has justified. The forms of judgment modeled by Rawls's original position and Habermas's moral standpoint betray a familiar fear about affect, which is that our passions will impugn the impartiality on which deliberation in matters of justice ought to rest. So the dominant paradigms can accept that affective concerns help motivate right action but not that such concerns figure in the justification of action or the norms that guide it. They are reluctant to tie the content and authority of moral and political norms to the psychological states of individuals. The rationalists see affect as antithetical to impartiality, and they find the source of normativity in a form of reason that opposes passion. Yet to insulate deliberation from affect is to disconnect it from the passions that motivate action.

Action is not the only thing to suffer either, for decision making itself is hindered by efforts to abstract too fully from the influence of the passions. In the last fifteen years a revolutionary new literature has emerged in neuroscience and neuropsychology that calls into question the human ability to conduct practical reasoning in the absence of sentiments. These studies, which involve patients who have impairments to regions of the brain associated with feeling, suggest that decision making depends on the affective experience of concern-specifically attachments, aversions, and desires. Patients with affective impairments may be perfectly capable of logical analysis; often they can reason effectively about the costs and benefits of various courses of action. What they cannot do effectively, the studies show, is decide on a course of action. The implication of these findings is that practical reasoning-deliberation that results in decisions about what to do-necessarily incorporates sentiments. Affect has a role in motivating decisions as well as actions, and therefore the motivational deficit associated with rationalist models of deliberation undermines not only compliance but the very process of deliberation itself. This new literature thus poses a fundamental challenge to the rationalist paradigms of deliberation and norm justification that dominate political theory today.

Political scientists have recently begun to explore the implications of these findings for political behavior in such areas as party identification, negative campaigning, the formation of social movements, and international conflict mediation. The point they all press is that our analytical perspectives on political behavior should reflect the fact that sentiments are as...