Abstract

Could you tell which food tastes best, or which painting is the more beautiful, with the emotion stripped out? The chapter argues that you could not, and builds a structural account of why. Evaluative differences, on its view, are constituted by emotional responses to non-evaluative input, in the same way that colours are constituted by visual responses to wavelength: remove emotion and the differences between things remain detectable, but the differences between better and worse, attractive and repulsive, beautiful and ugly, go dark. This is a response-constitutive account of value — emotion is the modality through which sentient beings bring evaluative differences into being — and it locates the feature that sets evaluative differences apart from non-evaluative ones: orientation, the pull toward and the push away. The account is offered as a deepening of the perceptual theory of emotion (Tappolet, Döring), explaining why the perceptual analogy holds, and as a member of the response-dependent realist tradition (McDowell, Wiggins) that supplies what that tradition has wanted — a structural reason why evaluative properties depend on response. From the account a three-fold taxonomy of goodness is drawn — aesthetic (emotion responding to representational input), empathic (emotion responding to emotion), and orthotic (conformity to a standard, assessed cognitively and without affect) — and morality is identified with empathic evaluation of conduct stemming from sufficiently complex choice, the identification the book’s ethics will go on to use. The chapter takes up feeling theories (James, Damasio), judgement theories (Nussbaum, Solomon, Roberts), intentionalist and somatic accounts (de Sousa, Helm, Prinz), and projectivism (Hume, Blackburn, Mackie). The chapter is part of the larger project developed in Dyology: On Diversity and Equality (Mains, 2026), where its result, graded ‘constructed’, is the hinge between the book’s philosophy of mind and its metaethics.