Moral Emotions and Morals

My aim in this paper is to explore the ambivalent role played by the so called moral emotions in moral thinking, overall when the concept of responsibility is concerned. In the first part of this paper I show how moral emotions such as guilt and shame can appear in circumstances that are not under the agent’s control, and therefore the agent could be though of free or responsibility for them. By contrast, in the second part of this essay I put how the absence of moral emotions, or their twisted development, makes as well the flourishing of individual morality impossible.