Recorded live and in person at the Annual Research Forum of the Geneva Centre for Affective Sciences, Prof. David Shoemaker (Cornell University) talks about the nature and ethics of amusement, as well as how amusement can deflate anger and contribute towards living a good life. Read more about Dave and his work: https://sites.google.com/site/dshoemakr/home https://philosophy.cornell.edu/david-shoemaker https://philpeople.org/profiles/david-shoemaker Find the interview transcript below: The Philosophy of Emotion podcast Matheson: We laugh at things we find funny and we often laugh at things that aren't funny. Amusement is big business with many people making a living from being stand-up comedians, comedy writers and so on. It's also a big part of our social lives. We joke around, we tease, we mock our friends and we often make light in harrowing circumstances. But what is amusement and when is it merited? And even if amusement is merited in response to something, should we always be amused,all things considered? Matheson: Today we're joined by Professor David Shoemaker. He is the Wynn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University. His research spans moral psychology, agency and responsibility, The Nature of Self, Personal Identity and Ethics, and the Philosophy and Moral Psychology of Humour. He's the author of Responsibility from the Margins, published in 2015, and Wisecracks and The Architecture of Praise and Blame, both published in 2024. He's here to shed light on the nature and ethics of amusement. Matheson: Hello Dave. Shoemaker: Hello Ben, thanks for having me. Matheson: So let's get into it then. So, first question. Emotions are often thought to have certain key features, including an appraisal, an action tendency, and a phenomenology. Can you start by telling us what you think about these with respect to amusement? Shoemaker: Yeah, so just to fill in the gaps on what the view is about emotions generally. So take something like fear, and it's got the three A's, as you said. So there's an affect, which is sweaty, heart-pounding, that kind of thing. And we're all familiar with that. And then there's an appraisal of something typically construed as dangerous or a threat. And then you've got an action tendency. And we like to think of action tendencies relative to the aim of the action tendency. So fear has multiple action tendencies. It could be the three Fs, so fight, flight, or freeze. But they have the aim of avoiding the danger. So your question is quite controversial because some theorists who talk about humor and amusement don't think amusement is an emotion. And they do so because they don't think that it has a clear or coherent action tendency. So the affect is, we're all familiar with it, some people describe it as levity, it's a feeling of being lifted in a way, or there's a lot of enjoyment of positive feelings of pleasure. And the appraisal is just in response to something that you take to be funny. So what's the action tendency? Well, you might want to say it's to laugh, and clearly we do laugh sometimes at what's funny, but there's lots of times, say you're alone, you're watching a comic, and you're judging that it's funny throughout, but you're not really laughing, and we laugh at things all the time that aren't funny. It's a kind of social grease. So just to kind of get along, we'll laugh at the boss's terrible jokes. That's the typical response. So laughter doesn't help us with respect to what the action tendency. I favor something that's pro-social. So amusement is a lean-in emotion, and it's the kind of thing that we want to share. So we're in the middle of a group of people, and we're having a great time. We're going back and forth with the one-liners and teasing and mocking and so forth. And we're leaning in, and we want to top each other or contribute to the game. And laughter also contributes to that pro-social thing. If you can't think of the witty one-liner, then you're at least laughing and you're joining in in the kind of celebration. So I think we can make sense of it, we really must think of amusement as an emotion and that's what you have to do totry to make sense of the action tendency. Matheson: That's very helpful. So on your view when we're amused — when we laugh, for example — we appraise something as amusement worthy and so identify it correctly or incorrectly as being an instance of something funny. A notable feature of your view is that funniness is response-dependent. It is a response-dependent value because amusement worthiness is a response-dependent property. Can you say a bit more what it means for something to be response-dependent and whether there are competing views of response-dependent? Shoemaker: Yeah, this is a tough and controversial issue these days. So I think here about response dependent most closely associated with values. Certain human values are best construed as response dependent. That simply means you can't understand or articulate the nature of the value without some essential reference to to the responses that we've got. So I can't make sense of what's admirable, say, without making some kind of essential reference to our admiring responses and what that admiration consists in. Same thing with the disgusting, or the enviable. These are values, or in some cases disvalues, that we can't describe independently of our responses of disgust So I'm very attracted to the response-dependent view here, and I think the case is very easily made for amusement, even though lots of theorists of amusement have not taken it that way. Matheson: Response-dependent theories of amusement suggest there's also response-independent theories. Could you say a bit more about them and say why you should prefer response-dependence to response-independence about amusement? Shoemaker: Yeah. So as I mentioned, there have been lots of theories over the years, and it stretches back to at least Hobbes and probably before Hobbes. Theories of, as Hobbes puts it, those grimacing faces called amusement. He says something like that. And he looked down on it because he had a theory of amusement that it has something to do with superiority. We are amused by people who fail. And we feel superior to them. And so, ha, ha, ha, ha. And that's supposed to be a response independent theory. So response independent theories of amusement say that certain things are funny or the amusing, I should say, that's the relevant value. Certain things are funny independently of our amused responses. And so they'll point, they try to give these monistic theories. There's one thing that makes things funny. And so Hobbes thought superiority makes things funny. And Freud and others have thought that the one thing that somehow makes things funny has something to do with It's relief of tension that we've got. By far, the favorite theory that responds independent theory of the musing is an incongruity theory. And so this has come from many different quarters. And so the thought is, look... What makes the thing funny is just a kind of mismatch between our expectations and the reality in some way. Or there's a pattern that we're expecting and it's upended. So these are all response-independent theories. What that applies is that something can be funny regardless of whether or not any of us find it funny. Matheson: So we can all be mistaken. Shoemaker: Yes, and we can all be thoroughly mistaken in both ways. So we find things that are funny that actually aren't. And I just find these views to be wildly implausible, certainly taken as independent monistic views. And that's because they're just vulnerable to a ton of counterexamples. For Hobbes, there are lots of things that are funny that have nothing to do with superiority. A pun or a knock-knock joke, right? There are lots of things that are funny that have nothing to do with relief of tension, for crying out loud. I mean, we're just going back and forth in our teasing and fun, mocking way, and there's just nothing there. There was never any tension to be relieved in the first place. And when it comes to incongruity, there are tons of things that are incongruous that aren't funny. I come home to find my family slaughtered. Incongruous, unexpected, but by God, it's not funny. And so some people have shifted it. I'm not going to go into the weeds on this. And so I think that any attempt that you give, any attempt at a response independent theory of the funny is going to be rife with counterexamples. So what do you have? You have a bunch of different things that we find amusing. And you're looking for some kind of unity to the group. And they're trying to put it into the incongruity box or the superiority box or whatever. And I think because of the raft of counterexamples and because it's such a weirdly disjunctive group of things that we find funny, that the more plausible explanation is that what makes these part of the rubric of the value of the funny is simply that these are the kinds of things that we humans find amusing. Matheson: So, next question. So in your work you distinguish between different types of response dependent accounts and you defend a normative response dependent account. A problem that's been cited for normative response dependent understanding of amusement is that it can seem hard to explain what makes an instance of amusement merited. What some people also call fitting, accurate or correct. So while the response-dependent theorists can appeal to some factor beyond funniness to explain this, like incongruity or one of the other factors you mentioned, the response-dependent theorists can appeal to this. So how do you think this problem can be solved? Shoemaker: Yeah, so I'm glad you noted this. The view that I prefer is the normative response dependent theory. That differs from something like a dispositional response dependent theory. And so that makes sense of something like colors. Rednes
