Inducing Fear
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Inducing Fear Ami Harbin 1 Accepted: 7 July 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
This paper offers an ethical consideration of how fear can be a tool of agents, used to deliberately shift people away from existing beliefs, commitments, or habits, or towards new ones. It contends that properly understanding the ethical dimensions of such uses of fear depends in part on a clear understanding of the dynamics of disorientation that can be involved in such uses. Section two begins with a clarification of the connections between fear, orientation, and disorientation. It suggests that experiences of fear are in some cases either orienting or disorienting, and that the disorienting aspects of fear are in need of more attention. Section three shows how experiences of fear can be tools—they can be cultivated and wielded by agents deliberately for multiple reasons, including sometimes in order to disorient or re-orient others. Section four turns to a moral evaluation of these uses of fear, attending specifically to why the dynamics of disorientation and orientation often involved in experiences of fear are important for understanding the moral status of uses of fear. Keywords Disorientation . Fear . Manipulation . Paternalism
1 Introduction In this paper, I consider the ways in which fear can be a tool of agents, used to deliberately shift other people away from existing beliefs, commitments, or habits, or towards new ones. I offer an account of how fear may be cultivated with the end goal of either orienting or disorienting, and I provide a moral evaluation of these uses of fear. I suggest that such an evaluation depends in part on first establishing a clear understanding of the dynamics of disorientation that can be involved in such uses. In section two I begin with a clarification of the connections between fear, orientation, and disorientation. I suggest that experiences of fear are in some cases either orienting or disorienting, and that the disorienting aspects of fear are in need of more attention. In section
* Ami Harbin [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309, USA
A. Harbin
three, I show how experiences of fear can be tools—they can be cultivated and wielded by agents deliberately for multiple reasons, including sometimes in order to disorient or re-orient others. In section four, I turn to a moral evaluation of these uses of fear, attending specifically to why the dynamics of disorientation and orientation often involved in experiences of fear are important for understanding the moral status of these uses.
2 Fear, Orientation, and Disorientation 2.1 Characteristics of Fear Intense emotions such as fear, anger, and shame can alter individuals’ capacities for decisionmaking, emotional regulation, and relating to others. As Heilman and colleagues note, “It is well established that emotion plays a key role in human social and economic decision making…People evaluate objective features of alternatives such as expected return in a subjective way…and emotions
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