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:
“The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread.... The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The next forenoon we went to Oldtown.... The Indian is said to cultivate the vices rather than the virtues of the white man. Yet this village was cleaner than I expected, far cleaner than such Irish villages as I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)