CONCEPT
Emotions as Cognitive Judgments
Nussbaum's thesis that emotions are not irrational disturbances but cognitive evaluations — judgments about the significance of events for a person's flourishing, and therefore legitimate forms of moral perception.
Against the dominant Western tradition that treats emotions as bodily eruptions interfering with reason, Nussbaum argues that emotions contain intelligent judgment. Fear is the judgment that something one values is threatened. Grief is the judgment that something one valued has been lost. Anger is the judgment that something one values has been wrongly damaged. Each emotion involves a perception of the world, an evaluation of its significance, and a motivational impulse proportioned to the evaluation. Applied to the AI transition, this framework transforms the meaning of the grief of the displaced and the exhilaration of the empowered: both are accurate cognitive evaluations that the policy response must honor, not pathologies to be overcome.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The dominant Western view — running through Stoicism, Kant, and much of contemporary cognitive science — treats emotions as non-cognitive or sub-cognitive phenomena. Nussbaum's counter-argument, developed most fully in Upheavals of Thought (2001), is that this view is empirically false and