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Political Psychology, Vol. 36, No. 6, 2015 doi: 10.1111/pops.12288

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Political Psychology, Political Emotions and Their Implications for Good Governance and Citizenship Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics. By George E. Marcus. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2013. 314 pp. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. By Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 2013. 457 pp. Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong. By David Edmonds. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press. 2014. 220 pp. Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics, a textbook by George Marcus, begins by emphasizing that the discipline—and indeed political science as a whole—exists primarily to understand and promote good citizenship and governance for virtuous democracy (p. 13). Political psychology for Marcus is fundamentally an inquiry into human nature, seeking to explain the link “between our nature in all its variety and the possibility of government, both corrupt and virtuous” (p. 4). Martha C. Nussbaum and David Edmonds also aim to understand the nature of virtue required for exercise of citizenship and governance in liberal democracy. However, both Nussbaum and Edmonds rely more heavily on accounts of the human that are drawn from disciplines outside political psychology, instead of foregrounding the study of human nature itself. Is political psychology the study of human nature, and so a science of human nature? Or is it the application of various scientific approaches—genetics, neuroscience, psychology—to understanding the values, attitudes, schemas, decisions, ideologies, behaviors, coalitions, communities, and conflicts that influence citizenship and governance? If on the one hand political psychology really is meant as the study of human nature, then it is superordinate with respect to the sciences whose methods it appropriates for its own topics of interest. It is a metadiscipline. A few political psychologists have made this claim, even arguing, with perhaps a nod to Theodosius Dobzhansky, that nothing about the human mind makes sense except in the light of politics. The superordinate view informs a kind of interdisciplinarity that prioritizes political science—particularly its questions and theory—over other scientific approaches to human minds, behaviors, and groups. On the other hand, a different kind of interdisciplinarity is on view if political psychology is instead a rigorous but pluralistic engagement of various scientific fields—not just their methods but their theories as well—for the purpose of understanding politics at multiple levels. Accordingly, this pluralistic view takes the disciplines on their own terms while seeking a shared semantic space in which to advance understanding about topics in political science. The superordinate view frames other scientific approaches in terms of how they can best serve theory in political psychology: political psychology “borrows from” other disciplines for its own purposes, rather than engages them. The pluralistic view is more open to alternative accounts and more interested in accurately understanding the details of methods and findings in the 769 C 2015 International Society of Political Psychology 0162-895X V Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, and PO Box 378 Carlton South, 3053 Victoria, Australia

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other sciences as it seeks to engage them. In reality, this typology is too extreme, and neither the superordinate nor the pluralistic view is advanced in strict form by any single political psychologist. Yet the dichotomous schematic helps to illustrate the divergences along a prominent and often unrecognized axis characterizing the practice of political psychology. Other axes index a program’s focus on basic research questions or on applications in the field and in policy, along with axes of receptivity to empirical data, to various scientific approaches (e.g., evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience, development), and to concerns of political philosophy; these others are well-recognized. The superordinate-pluralist heuristic helps to organize the three books considered in this review, all of which make significant contributions to how political psychology relates to concepts of societal, legal, and moral justice. George E. Marcus’ comprehensive overview of political psychology is certainly the most current textbook on the topic and would make a terrific addition to any introductory course seeking to relate cognitive neuroscience to political psychology (though the number of textual errors in the 2013 edition may favor waiting for a revision). His approach is closer to the superordinate view in that he presents political psychology as a “metadiscipline” (p. 19, n.6) that seeks to understand the qualities of human nature by explaining governance, or “who rules, why, and with what consequences” (p. 19). This emphasis will help students in political science to more easily integrate social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience (i.e., “SCAN”) into their other course preparation, and it will help students in the cognitive sciences learn how the concepts familiar to them are leveraged and even modified to advance the work of political psychology. Martha Nussbaum’s book is more pluralist in its integration of political emotions with a capabilities approach to justice. It builds on her previously published arguments that emotional life has rich cognitive content (though without the requirement of language) and a kind of intelligence (Upheavals of Thought, 2003) and that justice in society is more broadly and firmly grounded in a recognition of inherent capabilities, as opposed to an emphasis on reciprocity and mutual advantage in implicit or explicit social contracts (Frontiers of Justice, 2006). In Political Emotions, Nussbaum develops a theory for the cultivation of public emotion that robustly answers the central challenge of the capabilities approach, which she notes, “requires people to have very great sympathy and benevolence, and to sustain these sentiments over time” (Frontiers, p. 409). For the capabilities approach to work in practice requires public emotions to be fostered and restrained as appropriate, via cultural and developmental influences. Nussbaum answers this requirement by advancing a theory of “civil religion” that will provide frameworks for such influences. Edmonds is a pluralist who provides us with a journalist’s view of historical and philosophical moral dilemmas, of the relationship between historical events of moral interest and the more practically limited but, for Edmonds, the ultimately clearer insights of the philosophy and science of moral action. He is a believer in the central relevance of dilemmas in moral philosophy for shaping moral and political life; they “hold the key” (p. 182) to finding answers to the real-world moral dilemmas at the heart of so many politically charged debates. He sketches impressions of real-world dilemmas, from Churchill’s controversial decision to keep V1 rockets falling on London’s East End rather than risk governmental offices in central London, to the wrenching dilemmas of saving families stranded atop houses in the storm surge following Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, his engaging, breezy prose invites a reader not only to question her own stance regarding the very real stakes of Harry Truman’s Fat Man (p. 24), but on the myriad examples featuring the philosophically imagined Fat Man ostensibly highlighted in the book’s title. This latter is the Fat Man of trolleyology and the thought experiments begun by the “founding mothers,” Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson, taken up by the psychology and neuroscience of moral action over the last 15 years. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics (2010) provides a much more nuanced and convincing analysis of thought-experimental ethics and experimental ethics and of trolleyology’s import for moral psychology, moral philosophy, and politics. However, Edmonds’ writing rarely disappoints and is a lovely introduction to the topics.

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Read together, the works of Marcus, Nussbaum, and Edmonds highlight two themes of ongoing and central importance to political psychology, especially in relation to understanding how to foster societies of civil justice and liberal democracy: the role of affective life in deliberative decision making and, perhaps more pressing, the reach of deliberation in shaping affective life that is compatible with and sustaining of a just society. A more detailed look at both Marcus and Nussbaum in turn will inform a consideration of each of these themes in all three books. Marcus’ Political Psychology is presented in three sections, aiming primarily at undergraduates interested in the discipline and obliquely at more advanced scholars of political psychology who contest the discipline’s purview. Nonetheless, his use of the political psychology literature on the topics he engages is highly selective, especially for an introductory text. Some important treatments that would surely benefit students, such as published work on the benefits and limitations of psychophysiological, neuroimaging, and neural lesion methodologies (relevant especially to Sections 1 and 2 of the book), are largely omitted from Marcus’s discussion. Particularly worrisome is the thin treatment of work from several prominent scholars in the discipline. Also, despite the “genetics” of the subtitle, neuroscience dominates biologically relevant treatments in the book. Throughout, the book is highly concerned with generating taxonomies of concepts, because for “science to proceed, as science, we have to generate a plausible (and revisable) taxonomy. . .” (p. 263). Often, however, the intended taxonomies are really typologies, since they depend on conceptual distinctions across a range of features (typology) rather than on empirically demonstrable differences (taxonomy). The introductory section begins (Chap. 1) by addressing what political psychology is, why it is important to both politics and scholarship about human nature, and how political psychology ought to be done. The superordinate leanings of the work quickly become clear. Marcus lists economic theory, biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, sociology, psychology, and literature as topics and theories in the discipline of political psychology, rather than seeking to approach them as disciplines in their own right that might inform certain aims in political psychology (Table 1.1, pp. 6–7). In so doing, he separates psychology from cognitive science (of which it is a constitutive member discipline) and neuroscience (with which it is linked, as in cognitive neuroscience) and defines psychology primarily in terms of its methods rather than its theoretical content and aims. Thought, feeling, cognition, and affect are not of central concern to psychology in Marcus’ typology; they appear under other topics/theories of political psychology such as cognitive science and neuroscience. This view of psychology as a subfield of political psychology coheres with other statements in the book, such as when “the discipline of psychology” is said to lack a focus on “the roles of brain and mind” (p. 139). Many scholars of psychology would in fact see these roles as central to their discipline, and they are prominent in most issues of Psychological Science, the journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The rest of the introductory section skims basic social scientific methodology for political psychologists (Chap. 2); presents an historically informed account that highlights the genealogy of and promotes the questioning of highly cherished received concepts, such as the nature of progress and the complete opposition between reason and emotion, in the light of evidence (Chap. 3); and provides a brief introductory argument for how political psychology should draw on social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience in developing its knowledge of human nature (Chap. 4). Serious students of political psychology would be advised to regard these chapters as light appetizers leading to main courses in psychological statistics and research design, philosophy of science and of mind, and cognitive neuroscience, respectively. Section 2 begins with Chapter 5 reviewing neuroscientific evidence regarding how subliminal processing influences choice and how this evidence supports a theory of affective intelligence that ultimately serves a disciplinary “search for autonomy.” The search for autonomy “remains at or near the top of the discipline’s scholarly agenda” (p. 148) in order to avoid the corruption of democracy. The theory of affective intelligence presented in the book provides a summary of previous work by Marcus and colleagues over the last 28 years, strongly influenced by theories developed by Jeffrey Gray and John Cacioppo in the 1970s and 1980s (pp. 143–153). According to the theory, people

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implicitly encode learned representations of adaptive behaviors in familiar contexts (i.e., scripts, schemas, “procedural memory” [p. 144]), conditioned on implicit—or subliminal—and explicit—or conscious—goals. Implicit affective processing assesses the performance of learned patterns with respect to goals, providing positive and negative feedback regarding the success or failure of those patterns in a given context. Significantly, however, whenever novel contexts render learned patterns sufficiently suboptimal or even irrelevant, novel affective processing arises in the form of anxiety. Anxiety activates a “surveillance system” (p. 144) that simultaneously inhibits ongoing patterned responses while enhancing attentional processing of novel information in the service of new pattern formation and, possibly, new goals. If the new context is sufficiently perplexing and attention is sufficiently activated, then information intake, assessment, and learning will all transition from being driven primarily by implicit processing in the absence of conscious awareness to being under conscious control. The theory holds that once conscious control is engaged, people can “consider alternatives without being limited to or favoring the historical orientations that normally direct our choices, and to rely on explicit deliberative choices within conscious awareness” (p. 144). In other words, consciousness elicited by anxiety eliminates bias: “[C]itizens will set aside their defended reliance on extant convictions, the heuristics of ideological and partisan values, and consciously investigate, learn, consider their options, and make explicit deliberative choices reliant on unfettered consideration of the now and newly available choices” (p. 145). The theory of affective intelligence solves the problem of autonomy in the form of anxiety and surveillance and continues the long tradition in the West of dichotomizing affect and cognition, on the one hand, and implicit and explicit processing, on the other. These “dual process models” are tremendously influential. Affect is quick, implicit, and largely aconceptual and content-free, more of a signal or trigger to the system of information processing than a part of the system itself. Implicit cognition is also quick but is reliant on learned patterns such as heuristics and on their past successes and failures. These can give rise to biases that are only revealed in the cold light of conscious reflection. According to the theory, these insights imply that for political psychology, autonomy and deliberation are distinct from collective action and action in solidarity with others (p. 153). The theory also calls for an intensified study of the shifts between these dichotomous systems that could better help elucidate decision-making dynamics among elites, voters, and within and between groups. Following the presentation of the theory, Section 2 continues by taking up some of these challenges, with chapters discussing the implications of affective intelligence for understanding political attitudes, beliefs, values, and ideology (Chap. 6); for investigating politically relevant traits, using personality, temperament, and character as models (Chap. 7); and for explaining specifically democratic decision processes in political action (Chap. 8). Each chapter includes a section highlighting the advantages that the book’s theory of affective intelligence, especially its dual-process and anxiety-surveillance components, bring to the topics under consideration. Section 3 of the book, “Political Social Psychology,” shifts the focus of discussion to social organization (Chap. 9), specifically considering challenges presented by incorporating social context. Table 9.3 (p. 279) provides a “taxonomy of context” which recapitulates affective intelligence theory: contexts of uncertainty lead to deliberative modes of judgment (“explicit consideration within consciousness”), while contexts providing familiar rewards and punishments lead to activation of heuristics that automatically regulate decision and action “by preconscious control mechanisms.” The book concludes (Chap. 10) with reflections both on the future of political psychology as a discipline, with helpful guidance for beginning students, and on the importance of political psychology on the formation of good citizens in a virtuous democracy. Future concerns of the discipline center around two questions forming the core of the study of the human: sociability and individual autonomy, and they require taking full account of the brain’s “multiple ways of knowing” (p. 289). This emphasis in particular means scholarly attention to the route of anxiety and surveillance. Marcus finds that democracies function best if people are uncertain and anxious. In this context, they will be more vigilant, more thoughtful, and more reasoning in their choices.

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Martha Nussbaum’s (2013) work in Political Emotions also aims at more deliberatively democratic societies. Her main emphasis, however, is on proposing ways that virtuous societies—those that aspire “to justice and equal opportunity for all” (p. 3)—can “engender and sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that require effort and sacrifice” while simultaneously minimizing “tendencies to protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others” (p. 3). Nussbaum calls these latter tendencies “radical evil” and identifies them with emotions of disgust, envy, and desire to shame others. The book begins by identifying “A Problem in the History of Liberalism” (Chap. 1), and she seeks to supply political philosophy with an account of “the psychology of the decent [and liberally democratic] society,” which she does not find in liberal political philosophy from Locke onward. Possession of such a psychological theory is required for liberal states to know how to foster among their citizenries the stable motivations that serve the principles and laws on which those citizens depend, while at the same time remaining liberal states. While Nussbaum acknowledges an apparent paradox that pits liberal value neutrality against a need to “encourage love and devotion” to liberal ideals, she denies the reality of the paradox. Rather, she finds instead that neutrality in a liberal society “does not extend to the fundamentals of its own conception of justice” (p. 7). In other words, liberal societies require and entail a valuational alignment with certain conceptions of justice and against others. Counter to rational-principle systems that marginalize valuational/emotional commitments, such as the theory of John Rawls, Nussbaum proposes a ratioemotional-principle system. In her system, principles “are connected to a particular set of perceptions, memories, and symbols that have deep roots in the personality and in people’s sense of their own history” (p. 10). They are deeply eudaimonistic, meaning that their motivational power depends upon a “circle of concern” defined within a “person’s evolving conception of a worthwhile life” (p. 11). Section 1, “History” (Chaps. 2– 4), provides interpretations of the relationship between sentiment and politics, beginning with musings on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, “by any account, a key text in the history of liberalism” because of the example it provides for “the cultivation of emotions that are required to make fraternity more than a nice word” (p. 29). The emotional mission that emerges is one that frees love and happiness from links to homogeneity, to “protect spaces for the free play of mischief, craziness, humor, and individuality” (p. 30). Rousseau’s theory of political sentiments opposes such openness in favor of hegemony, while “Herder and Mozart are in harmony” (p. 49). Nussbaum identifies a “need to feminize the culture of male one-upmanship if civic love is to be productive of true happiness” (p. 49), which means a love of heterogeneity. Only a civic love of this sort can support Herder’s seven dispositions of fraternity: a horror of war, a lessened regard for glory, a horror of inauthentic rule, a feeling of patriotism whose growth is independent of any comparison with other nations, a feeling of justice for all nations, a commitment to reducing inequality in trade, and “delight in useful activity” (p. 49). Nussbaum considers proposals for civic religions from Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Rabindranath Tagore. Ultimately, she concludes that Mill and Tagore are helpful in identifying a workable civil religion, one that begins by “respecting existing religions and seeking to include them in a politics of reciprocity” but that is “prepared to throw out all dead traditions and to improvise solutions to problems in a spirit of experimentalism suffused with love and aspiration” (pp. 112–113). Nussbaum’s “Aspiring Society” is set out in Chapter 5, where she develops in greater detail the themes that constitute a worthwhile life at the national and global levels. These aspirations begin with the equal worth and dignity of all human persons, requiring a recognition of self-determining agency whenever possible. This requirement is especially the case in circumstances of profound vulnerability, with a societal commitment to support in those circumstances. Full claims to and recognitions of worth and dignity are impossible absent ensuring “equal political and civil liberties” (p. 122) and equality before the law. But worth and dignity also require, in accordance with New Deal liberalism, sustained efforts at redistribution of wealth so as to minimize inequality in social and economic domains. Social and economic inequalities—not just those in political and legal domains—strongly

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inhibit the ability to strive for a worthwhile life. Equal access to education and health care are necessary to minimize these inequalities, especially for those persons and communities with heightened vulnerabilities due to developmental or historical conditions. At the same time, no nation can be compelled by force to enact these aspirations of New Deal, liberal democracy (p. 22), since all nations have a moral claim to sovereignty (p. 121). Finally, although Nussbaum argues that all of these aims require the cultivation and stability of particular emotions, she requires the effort to shape the emotional lives of citizens in support of liberal democracies to be free of any hint of forcing people to be “reliable agents of the political ideal,” since the foremost commitment is to “equal respect” (p. 131). Political emotions are necessary both to alter unjust political and institutional systems and to maintain and improve systems that have met the threshold of being “reasonably just” (p. 135). But Nussbaum argues for coercing actions in certain contexts (e.g., racial equality in hiring) and against coercing agency, meaning ratioemotional commitment to valuationally grounded principles. To guard against coercing agency, or agent formation, Nussbaum maintains that political emotions need to remain both narrow and shallow, at least “compared to the comprehensive doctrines that citizens hold” (p. 133). Narrowness constrains political emotions to arenas of equality of dignity and worth. Shallowness constrains political emotions against seeking a basis in a comprehensive, single metaphysical/theological cosmology or anthropology. Cultural symbols, rituals, and perhaps even aspects of doctrine are welcome and in fact needed to shape and enhance the political emotions that liberal democracies require. However, the task for public cultivation of emotion is to draw from places where diverse cultures and doctrines overlap with the fundamental concepts of justice. Such intersections are likely, in Nussbaum’s view, to be quite narrow. They also favor shallowness in claims about what is real or true, claims limited to evidence that garners the widest public agreement, using the standards of knowledge fundamental to liberal democracies. Nussbaum’s positions in the book draw on arguments about political objectivity that she more fully addresses elsewhere, but they rest on her certainty that “shared understanding about basic metaphysical and epistemological matters, and matters of ultimate value, can be maintained in a modern society only by the oppressive use of state power” (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 890). Liberal democracies rely instead on reasoned, deliberative engagement over “a reasonable basis of a mutually respectful political life, and. . .respect for the reason of all citizens” (2001, pp. 895–896). Nussbaum’s account of political emotions then, much like the treatment of anxiety by Marcus, places emotion in the service of facilitating deliberative process and practice but keeps emotion separate from the deliberation itself: “Political emotions are a source of stability for good political principles, and of motivation to make them effective” (2013, p. 134). Having detailed the just society that requires emotional cultivation for its continuation, Nussbaum outlines how challenges to justice can be met by a renewed, rationally guided cultivation of compassion, emphasizing empirical psychology and sociology (Chap. 6), and she identifies a psychology of radical evil that just societies need to understand in order to counter (Chap. 7). Her emphasis is different than that found in Marcus’ theory, even though both privilege rational, and distanced, deliberation in the creation of just societies. Where Marcus was keen to stress the utility of anxiety as a conduit to bias-free deliberation, Nussbaum argues that love—a eudaimonistic inclusion of others in our circle of concern—and compassion both engender support for just institutions. She does not argue for a direct enhancement of deliberative capacity via love and compassion, rather she argues that these emotions motivate and provide direction for the ongoing work of justice and support the outcomes of justice. Similar to Marcus, Nussbaum requires the use of empirical science in supporting policy recommendations that are in accord with human nature and with the aspirations of a just society. Only armed with empirical data, or at least empirically related interpretations, can nations that “are firmly committed to political liberalism” avoid basing “policy recommendations on any overarching religious or ethical view about human nature” (p. 138). The arts also provide some basis for understanding human nature and human life in contemporary contexts, but they must be

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taken “with critical alertness, since literary works frequently prove sectarian, articulating some partisan religious or secular view of society’s goals and purposes” (p. 138). Also, like Marcus, when Nussbaum seeks emotional support for justice in a liberal democracy, she grounds it in negative emotion. For Marcus, anxiety—a signal of uncertainty—provides the necessary suspension of biased, heuristic processing for conscious deliberation to take place; for Nussbaum, compassion—“a painful emotion directed at the serious suffering of another creature or creatures” (p. 142)—is required to spur deliberation and action for greater justice. Like Marcus, Nussbaum engages a wide scientific literature, but sadly she does not treat recent work in the neuroscience of mindfulness and moral action. Still, in light of the audience and purposes of the book, her inclusion of scientific approaches is admirable. She argues for the importance of considering research with nonhuman species. Her reasons deserve attention from those debating about the place of nonhuman animal research within the field of political psychology, since she provides useful insights to recommend the animal literature. First, the study of nonhumans is generally “illuminating in the way that the study of other cultures is illuminating, showing us to ourselves in a clearer light” (p. 140). Second, and more specifically, nonhumans with which we share recent evolutionary ancestry—particularly the apes—reveal areas of needed change in what we consider to be our own unique and uniquely suited capabilities. Third, because nonhuman animals do not respond according to our societal norms, we might discover how those norms impede rather than promote full consideration of all humans, especially those deemed outside of our circle of concern. Nussbaum uses Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest to contrast the actions of a faithful dog, Rollo, with two parents’ rejection of their own daughter: “Their hearts are frozen; Rollo’s is not” (p. 141). Through Rollo, we might “learn to love like an animal, unconditionally, but with a human being’s power of reasoning and social critique” (p. 142). Nussbaum’s model of compassion requires love to be present, understood as the eudaimonistic thought “that places the suffering person or persons among the important parts of the life of the person who feels the emotion” (p. 144). Her description of eudaimonism in this section is somewhat difficult to follow. On the one hand, she “strenuously” (p. 145) denies that her eudaimonism is egoism. On the other hand, she defines eudaimonism as the thought that people who suffer “count for me; they are among my most important goals and projects” (p. 144). This sense of eudaimonism overlaps with its current meaning in positive psychology, but the central importance of “me” and “my” is absent in some influential models of compassion, for example in some Buddhist and Christian traditions. Another limiting characteristic of Nussbaum’s model of compassion is a requirement that the person who is suffering be blame free or at least is not to blame for the conditions causing her suffering (“we typically don’t feel compassion if we think the person’s predicament chosen or selfinflicted”; p. 143). Again, while Nussbaum locates this requirement in Aristotle’s treatment of the fallen hero, there are abundant cross-cultural resources that say otherwise. Nevertheless, Nussbaum draws on several examples from the animal and human psychology literature to show that the circle of concern and blamelessness are critical to compassion. She also uses the science to argue that compassion is limited in its capacity to support justice because it is “wavering and inconstant, often diminishing over time and failing to sustain helping efforts required to address chronic problems”1 and because “empathy-induced compassion” often causes people to support injustice. Further, Nussbaum advocates a psychological theory that separates compassion—grounded in imaginative perspective—from justice—grounded in principled thought. Though these two psychological “systems” (p. 157) complement one another, they provide separate information and insight into a situation of injustice, and in that way do not really converge. When they diverge and conflict, principled thought—deliberation—must win out. For this reason, Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions 1

Nussbaum’s treatment of compassion as wavering and unstable would benefit greatly from a consideration of empirical studies of mindfulness and long-term, stable communities of compassion.

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eschews what she calls “emotional foundationalism.” Her dichotomous psychology—separating emotion from deliberation—supports her argument “for a continual, and watchful, dialogue between vivid imagining and impartial principle, seeking the best and most coherent fit” along with building a “bridge from the vividly imagined single case to the impartial principle by challenging the imagination” (p. 157). Discarding compassion is unwise for a theory of political emotions and for liberal democracies, since then we might fail to show the importance of principles upholding justice and so fail to move the citizenry to uphold them. Discarding principle, by contrast, is not just unwise but is by definition injustice. Compassion provides us with “some seeds of the moral attitudes that sustain [but do not establish] just institutions” (p. 157), but compassion is limited because it is psychologically separate from principled deliberation. Nussbaum cites Daniel Batson’s (2011) book, Altruism in Humans, for “the research supporting the distinction in my text” (p. 418, n.46). However, in that book, Batson’s view of the psychological evidence does not support this distinction in the way that Nussbaum advances it. Rather, he states quite clearly that, “I do not think we know whether principlism is a distinct form of motivation or only a form of egoism” (2011, p. 224). Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Nussbaum holds to the appraisal theory of emotions detailed in her 2001 Upheavals of Thought, she excludes the assessment of principles from that appraisal and so, in agreement with Marcus, holds a dual-system theory of deliberative and emotional processing. In addition to this dual-system theory, Nussbaum mines empirical research into the psychology of “radical evil,” toward developing the “core of a ‘reasonable political psychology’ that people of many different overall views may endorse as a basis for political thought” (p. 163). These “human tendencies to bad behavior” (p. 165) result in unjust exclusion of others, particularly the vulnerable, from opportunity. Neither sympathy nor respect, no matter how much they are expanded, can overcome these tendencies. Love in the form of “a vigorous imaginative engagement with another person’s particularity” is only able to overcome bias toward those unjustly excluded or denuded of their humanity. Nussbaum follows Kant’s doctrine of radical evil that posits an aversion to sociality arising from anxiety, anxious about being found unworthy of human dignity, fostering “competition and aggressive behavior” (p. 167). Nussbaum, unlike Marcus, finds that anxiety does not promote more reasoned deliberation; it promotes injustice instead, leading to envy, aggression, disgust for others, and a desire to control others. The root of this anxiety, following the clinical psychologist Donald Winnicott, is a pervasive sense of helplessness—of deep unmet need and uncertainty—that can only be overcome by receiving parental love that conveys “a delighted recognition of the other as valuable, special, and fascinating; a drive to understand the point of view of the other; fun and reciprocal play; gratitude for affectionate treatment, and guilt at one’s own aggressive wishes or actions; and. . .trust and a suspension of anxious demands for control” (p. 176). The book advances a theory of developmental psychology in which just principles themselves cannot overcome anxiety and “trust cannot be generated out of rules of fairness alone; it really has little to do with such rules” (p. 176). Love is necessary for liberal democracy because only love can counter the radical anxiety that gives rise to “egoism, greed, and anxious aggression” (p. 177), along with other outflows of anxiety that reoccur throughout adulthood. Nussbaum also treats the psychology of projective disgust toward the human body and other groups (“a form of anthropodenial”; p. 184), along with conformity and authoritarianism. Her discussions of the experiments of Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram are standard and suffer from lack of any serious consideration of the variability in their datasets. For example, although she gives a nod to personal history and character development, her account is in keeping with situationist views. Little consideration is given to stable character or habitus, while all the emphasis is placed on deliberative capacities of “independent thought, personal accountability, and critical dialogue” (p. 197). Nussbaum’s deliberative emphasis is most clear at the end of Section 2, when she surprisingly conflates compassion and empathy (p. 198), which she differentiated earlier on (pp. 145–146).

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Nearly half of Nussbaum’s book is devoted to Section 3, “Public Emotions.” In this section, rather than develop a theory of how to foster the right public emotions in general, Nussbaum draws on the arts, literature, and examples of political elites both to illuminate what is beneficial and dangerous in certain views of public emotions, along with proposals for how to follow more beneficial paths. Surprisingly, she abandons empirical psychology entirely during her chapters on patriotism (Chap. 8) and on “Shaping Compassion, Transcending Disgust” (Chap. 9). This marginalization of empirical evidence during two critical chapters of the book is shocking given the volume of peerreviewed papers on these topics, including articles from the field of political psychology. Only when she again takes up the obstacles to cultivating compassion, in “Compassion’s Enemies: Fear, Envy, Shame” (Chap. 10), does she again incorporate some perspectives from empirical psychology. She draws on Joseph LeDoux’s work on fear to argue that it is a “narrowing emotion,” and she comes close to Marcus’ understanding of anxiety when she says that fear “is a form of heightened awareness” (p. 321). Ultimately, though, she diverges from Marcus’ account of anxiety in her insistence that fear, far from opening consideration of multiple novel possibilities, has “a very narrow frame” (p. 321). Unfortunately, Nussbaum does not consider the adaptive role of fear in human social interactions, shown in numerous articles by Ralph Adolphs and Elizabeth Phelps, among others. Her focus on a very narrow nonhuman animal literature—on “fear” in rats in this case2—limits her ability to explore what empirical psychology might provide her account. In addressing envy, Nussbaum again fails to seriously engage empirical research in the social sciences. Social science reappears in the discussion of shame, which draws on sociological and psychological work from over 50 years ago. In these chapters, Nussbaum spends a great deal of time deftly delving into rich, historical detail to demonstrate the plausibility of her model of public emotions, though she does not bolster her interpretations by marshalling historiographical evidence. Further, not once does one encounter any scientific evidence to support the model of why and how certain public rhetoric, display, or action would elicit, engender, or cultivate certain public emotions. The reader is left wondering what happened to the central dependence upon science for constructing a publicly accessible account of human nature in support of public emotions for a just society. In her final chapter, “How Love Matters for Justice,” Nussbaum’s inattention to the scientific literature is particularly acutely recognized. Instead of drawing on abundant evidence that shows how a lack of emotional engagement severely impairs the practical application of justice in real life, Nussbaum retreats into imaginary scenarios of New Deal body snatchers and a thin consideration of what it might mean to have a citizenry of “empty automata” (p. 395) who are “just going through the motions of caring about one another” (p. 394). Nussbaum’s final appeal against wanting such a citizenry and nation is grounded in an illustration from virtue theory rather than human nature. She presents a parable by the novelist Iris Murdoch, though without providing Murdoch’s nuanced argument, nor even support from her own careful developments in the rest of the book. It is an unusual way to end a book that promised a theory of public emotion that could ground, sustain, and even transform an imperfect deliberative democracy aiming to be a just society. Perhaps, after all, Nussbaum’s theory of liberal democracy does not really depend all that strongly on empirically based theories of human nature that are simultaneously publicly accessible, engaging, motivating, and helpful for directing policy. Yet, Marcus and Nussbaum, despite their disagreements about the role of anxiety the kind of emotions that foster democracy, both share and rely at least somewhat on a theory of human nature. That theory relates human autonomy and emotion by separating emotion from and shaping emotion by conscious deliberation. At the same time, both 2

It is unclear whether the cited work refers to fear, since it uses “freezing” responses by the rat rather than an aversive/ avoidance responses, as the main behavioral measures. Freezing responses may be behavioral inhibition that indexes anxiety rather than behavioral activation of aversion/avoidance in fear, according to the theory by Jeffrey Gray that informs Marcus’ discussion.

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Book Review

Marcus and Nussbaum disavow any attempt to reduce or marginalize the adaptive roles that emotion can and does play in a just society under liberal democratic rule. For Marcus, anxiety triggers conscious, deliberative thought that supplants, at least for a time, biased, implicit patterns of information processing. For Nussbaum, love and compassion over time remove the narcissism that breeds anxiety, which is the radical core of envy, projective disgust, and shame. Edmonds, in his delightful tour of trolleyology, also offers up a virtuous politics that depends on a dichotomized deliberative-motivational theory. Like Marcus, Edmonds draws heavily on neuroscientific studies, especially of moral action. Again like Marcus, Edmonds sees emotions primarily as “automatic settings,” that are suspended in the encounter with novelty, when “we want to mess around, try something fresh and unusual, be a bit arty and avant-garde” (p. 138). Trolley dilemmas trigger for Edmonds a “fight between the two settings” (p. 139) that explains both the principle of the Doctrine of Double Effect and the emotional tension even when following the principle. Like Nussbaum, Edmonds punctuates his text with meaningful illustrations drawn from historical examples, though he rarely is as thorough as is Nussbaum in presenting their context or implications. He goes beyond both Marcus and Nussbaum when he follows the moral philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene in holding that “the feeling and the thought are distinct” (p. 137). For Edmonds, emotion really is just an “alarm bell in your brain” (p. 138), and trolley problems elicit “a furious bout of neural wrestling between the calculating and emotional bits of the brain” (p. 138). Ultimately, however, Edmonds sides with overcoming emotion and activating calculation, not always in terms a utilitarian might endorse, but in situations when calculation serves the normatively correct course of action. Edmonds is often slippery on what that course of action might be—and he is just as difficult when it comes to what brain science means for the existence of human freedom. But at times, he brilliantly highlights an important point from the empirical literature that should have received similar attention in both Marcus and Nussbaum. For example, he points out that people “with [bilateral] damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex” (p. 149)—who are able to deliberate abstractly but who have profound difficulty emotionally relating to their loved ones or forming circles of concern—“are more blase about the fate of the fat man” and about “parents hiding from Nazis who must suffocate their child to prevent the entire group being discovered and killed” (p. 149). Edmonds uses these findings to ask if they are “evidence that there is something not fully rounded about utilitarianism—and that those who advocate the pushing of the fat man have a fundamental flaw in their ethical apparatus?” (p. 149). It is a pity that Edmonds did not persist in his inquiry and also ask whether the findings suggest that deliberation in moral contexts is inseparable from emotion. For, as Marcus notes in his section on moral judgment, “the dual process model view of human psychology provides an account of the neural basis of both vengeance and explicit contemplation as a prerequisite to moral judgment. That we can do either recommends an active research program to better understand the inclinations that move some of us to rely on the embedded habits of moral judgment and others to the more contemplative approach to moral judgment” (p. 238). But if the findings from bilateral ventromedial prefrontal patients are taken seriously, something else is really required for a political psychology in support of a just society. We require new research programs to test whether humans are better viewed through integrative models, in which compassion is constitutive of reflective deliberation, and that recommend against keeping the citizenry in a state of uncertain anxiety as being the best way to a just and deliberative democracy. Michael Spezio Scripps College REFERENCES Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). Political objectivity. New Literary History, 32(4), 883–906.