Emotions As Vices
Marc Jackson in his book Emotion and Psyche puts forward a new development of what the vices are. He identifies the vices as what he calls the evil emotions "The fourth group consisting of hate, greed, vanity, envy and cruelty is evil" These vices differ from more traditional accounts of vice because they are not character traits expressed by action but emotions that are felt. These emotional vices are to be overcome not through suppression but through feeling and cultivating the opposite virtues, as Jackson writes here: "This will diminish the amount of evil by building up the amount of good such that good will become more active and the evil will not have room to be so active, and thus will diminish"
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Famous quotes containing the words emotions and/or vices:
“Virtues are not emotions. Emotions are movements of appetite, virtues dispositions of appetite towards movement. Moreover emotions can be good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable; whereas virtues dispose us only to good. Emotions arise in the appetite and are brought into conformity with reason; virtues are effects of reason achieving themselves in reasonable movements of the appetites. Balanced emotions are virtue’s effect, not its substance.”
—Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)
“One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us, and whereto our passions transport us; but those which by long habits are rooted in a strong and ... powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)