<p><i>Ceteris paribus</i> increasing one’s psychological resilience seems to be a good thing because resilience better allows one to cope with the world. However, increasing one’s resilience may come with a cost, namely sacrificing one’s virtue. This paper defends the claim that resilience and virtuous indignation may conflict with one another. Specifically, the person with virtuous indignation will exhibit a lower degree of a key component of psychological resilience, psychological acceptance, than someone who has a deficiency of indignation. To make this case, I investigate and circumscribe indignation as an emotion. Indignation includes an apparent epistemic paradox where one accepts the world, but one does not accept the world. To solve this paradox, I appeal to an epistemic distinction between belief and acceptance to show that indignation includes a belief that something has happened in the world but also resistance toward accepting this belief. After this, I construct a paradigm for evaluating virtuous emotions. I provide a framework to demonstrate how indignation qualifies as a virtuous emotion. Next, I explore representative examples of psychological resilience literature that outline psychological acceptance as a key component of cognitive flexibility and, thus, a key component of resilience. Lastly, I argue virtuous indignation and psychological acceptance may be opposed to one another because psychological acceptance requires one to diminish indignation’s accurate judgment, indignation’s virtuously motivating affect, or both. I conclude by considering the implications of the main thesis.</p>

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The viciousness of psychological resilience

  • Adam Blehm

摘要

Ceteris paribus increasing one’s psychological resilience seems to be a good thing because resilience better allows one to cope with the world. However, increasing one’s resilience may come with a cost, namely sacrificing one’s virtue. This paper defends the claim that resilience and virtuous indignation may conflict with one another. Specifically, the person with virtuous indignation will exhibit a lower degree of a key component of psychological resilience, psychological acceptance, than someone who has a deficiency of indignation. To make this case, I investigate and circumscribe indignation as an emotion. Indignation includes an apparent epistemic paradox where one accepts the world, but one does not accept the world. To solve this paradox, I appeal to an epistemic distinction between belief and acceptance to show that indignation includes a belief that something has happened in the world but also resistance toward accepting this belief. After this, I construct a paradigm for evaluating virtuous emotions. I provide a framework to demonstrate how indignation qualifies as a virtuous emotion. Next, I explore representative examples of psychological resilience literature that outline psychological acceptance as a key component of cognitive flexibility and, thus, a key component of resilience. Lastly, I argue virtuous indignation and psychological acceptance may be opposed to one another because psychological acceptance requires one to diminish indignation’s accurate judgment, indignation’s virtuously motivating affect, or both. I conclude by considering the implications of the main thesis.