Abstract

Emotional experience has long been ignored or marginalized by the philosophical tradition because of its irrational or unrationalizable character. Ethical formation, a developmental approach to moral philosophy developed by virtue theorist Sabina Lovibond and others, is a rationalizing approach to character formation which does not ignore or marginalize the affective area of human experience. But neither does it develop in significant detail a method to include emotional experience within its main aims. This thesis intends to eliminate this problem by showing how we can sensibly 'rationalize' our emotional experience without, as some more recent approaches have tended to do, over-rationalizing them. In order to do so, I will focus on Ronald de Sousa's account of emotional rationality and illustrate how his notion of 'paradigm scenarios' can help us to include the emotions within ethical formation. Paradigm scenarios enable us to develop emotional intentionality and, thereby, enable us to give our emotional experiences teleology---the minimal elements necessary for any rationality. In order to best illustrate that emotional experience can helpfully be included within the rational project of ethical formation I go on (in chapters two and three) to show how these paradigm scenarios are acquired and applied. In the end, the thesis stresses that neither project (de Sousa's emotional rationality or Lovibond's ethical formation) is complete without supplementation from the other. My specific focus on the emotions requires situation within a wider perspective just as Lovibond's broad perspective requires a finer-grained focus in order to appropriately value emotional experience.