From Psychology to Morality: Essays in

Ethical Naturalism John Deigh

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/from-psychology-to-morality-essays-in-ethical-naturali
sm-john-deigh/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Essays on Biblical Historiography: From Jeroboam II to

John Hyrcanus I 1st Edition Israel Finkelstein

https://ebookmass.com/product/essays-on-biblical-historiography-
from-jeroboam-ii-to-john-hyrcanus-i-1st-edition-israel-
finkelstein/

Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to Morality

Stephanie Collins

https://ebookmass.com/product/organizations-as-wrongdoers-from-
ontology-to-morality-stephanie-collins/

Morality from Compassion Ingmar Persson

https://ebookmass.com/product/morality-from-compassion-ingmar-
persson/

From Aristotle to Cicero. Essays in Ancient Philosophy

Gisela Striker

https://ebookmass.com/product/from-aristotle-to-cicero-essays-in-
ancient-philosophy-gisela-striker/
Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes from John
McDowell Matthew Boyle

https://ebookmass.com/product/reason-in-nature-new-essays-on-
themes-from-john-mcdowell-matthew-boyle/

Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes from John

McDowell Matthew Boyle

https://ebookmass.com/product/reason-in-nature-new-essays-on-
themes-from-john-mcdowell-matthew-boyle-2/

Discovering John: Essays by John Ashton 1st Edition

John Ashton

https://ebookmass.com/product/discovering-john-essays-by-john-
ashton-1st-edition-john-ashton/

Ethical Practice in the Human Services: From Knowing to

Being – Ebook PDF Version

https://ebookmass.com/product/ethical-practice-in-the-human-
services-from-knowing-to-being-ebook-pdf-version/

The Psychology of Ethical Leadership in Organisations:

Implications of Group Processes 1st ed. Edition
Catarina Morais

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-psychology-of-ethical-
leadership-in-organisations-implications-of-group-processes-1st-
ed-edition-catarina-morais/
i

From Psychology to Morality

ii
iii

John Deigh

From Psychology to Morality

Essays in Ethical Naturalism

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​087859–​7

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

In loving memory of Sarah Lynn Hill

1948–​2014
vi
vi

Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Sources xi

Introduction: Naturalism in Ethics 1

one Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 13
two William James and the Rise of the Scientific Study
of Emotion 38
three Freud 59
four Psychopathic Resentment 83
five Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision 101
six Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments? 129
seven Williams on Practical Reason 150
eight Sidgwick’s Conception of Ethics 179
vi

viii Contents

nine Moral Ideals 195

ten The Emotional Significance of Punishment 219
eleven Punishment and Proportionality: Part 1 231
twelve Punishment and Proportionality: Part 2 249

Index 271
ix

Acknowledgments

I tried out most of the essays in this volume before various audiences at con-
ferences, meetings of professional organizations, departmental colloquia, and
research institute workshops. I am grateful for the interest that was shown and
for the many helpful comments I received at these events. I have benefited
too from the input of friends, colleagues, and students who read one or more
of these essays in draft. I wish, particularly, to thank Daniel Brudney, Brad
Cokelet, David Dolinko, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Kane, Herbert Morris,
Martha Nussbaum, Larry Sager, Michael Stocker, and Paul Woodruff. My
discussions with them over the years about my ideas have been immensely
valuable. Similarly, years of discussions with Jonathan Adler and Robert
Solomon, and a memorable seminar on emotions that Solomon and I jointly
taught, were enormously helpful to me. Unfortunately, their untimely deaths
prevent me from also thanking them on this occasion.
The three essays on punishment with which the collection concludes
came about from my participation in a working group on the problems of rein-
tegration into society that confront felons who have served significant time in
prison. The group was sponsored by the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics
at John Jay College, and I am grateful to Jonathan Jacobs, Director of the

ix
x

x Acknowledgments

Institute, and the other members of the group for the rich and illuminating
discussions we had about these problems.
I wish to thank Peter Ohlin, my editor at Oxford University Press, for his
interest and support as well as his help in putting this collection together.
Abigail Johnson and Isla Ng also helped with the Press’s editing and pro-
duction of the collection, and I thank them too for their assistance. Sarah
Shamburg assisted me in preparing the manuscript for production and
securing the needed permissions for reprinting the previously published
essays. I am very grateful to her for her help. I am grateful too for the institu-
tional support in the form of research leaves, funds, and assistance that I re-
ceived from the University of Texas at Austin.
I had the good fortune early in my career to study with Herbert Morris,
who supervised my Ph.D. dissertation. Many of the seminal ideas in my work
came from our conversations and his guidance during the years I worked
on the dissertation. Since then he has continued to be a friend and mentor
whose encouragement and support, comments and criticism, I treasure. Not
long ago he introduced me to the depth of thought in Poussin’s paintings.
My choice of Spring as cover art for this collection was made in tribute to a
wonderful friendship of more than forty years.
xi

Sources

1. “Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology” was first

published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Peter Goldie, ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). I presented a version of it at the Fifth
Annual Royal Conference on Ethics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008.

2. “William James and the Rise of the Scientific Study of Emotion” is a contri-
bution to a special section on William James’s theory of emotions in Emotion
Review 8 (2016): 56–​61. It is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.

3. “Freud” is a considerably revised and expanded version of the article with

the same title in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Simon Critchley and
William Schroeder, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). Parts are reprinted
by permission of Wiley-​Blackwell.

4. “Psychopathic Resentment” first appeared in Self-​Evaluation: Affective and

Social Grounds of Intentionality, Anita Konzelman Ziv, Keith Leher, and Hans
Bernhard Schmid, eds. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011) and was based on my contri-
bution to a conference on self-​evaluation at the University of Basel in 2009. It is
reprinted with permission of Springer.

xi
xi

xii Sources

5. “Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision” is a revised version of my

contribution to Morality and the Emotions, Carla Bagnoli, ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011). It originated as a paper I gave at the “Emotions in
Context” conference at the University of Chicago Law School in 2008.

6. “Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?” appeared in Forms of

Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency, Neil Roughley
and Thomas Schramme, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). It
was my contribution to a conference on fellow feeling at the University of Essen
in 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

7. “Williams on Practical Reason” has not been previously published. An earlier

version was my contribution to a memorial conference for Bernard Williams at
the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for Ethics at Georgia State University in 2006.

8. “Sidgwick’s Conception of Ethics” was first published in Utilitas 16

(2004): 168–​183. It originated as my contribution to an American Philosophical
Association symposium honoring the work of Jerome Schneewind, which took
place at the Pacific Division Meeting in 2003. It is reprinted by permission of
Cambridge University Press.

9. “Moral Ideals” appeared in Rationality, Rules, and Ideals: Critical Essays on

Bernard Gert’s Moral Theory, Walter Sinnott-​Armstrong and Robert Audi, eds.
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). I presented part 1 of this essay at
a conference on Bernard Gert’s Moral Theory at Dartmouth College in 1999 and
later at an author-​meets-​critics session at a meeting of the American Society for
Value Inquiry in 2001. It is reprinted by permission of Rowman and Littlefield.

10. “The Emotional Significance of Punishment” was published in Emotion

Review 8 (2016): 56–​61. It is my contribution to a special issue on law and
emotions edited by Susan Bandes and Terry Maroney. It is reprinted by permis-
sion of Sage Publications Ltd.

11. “Punishment and Proportionality: Part 1” was published in Criminal Justice

Ethics 33 (2014): 185–​199. It is a product of my participation in the working
group on prison practices and conditions in liberal democracies organized by the
Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at John Jay College, CUNY. It is reprinted
by permission of Cambridge University Press.

12. “Punishment and Proportionality: Part 2” appeared in Criminal Justice Ethics

35 (2016): 20–​36. Like essay 11, it is a product of my participation in the working
group on prison practices and conditions in liberal democracies organized by
xi

Sources xiii

the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at John Jay College, CUNY. The last
part is taken from my contribution to the Fred Berger Prize symposium on Kit
Wellman’s article “The Rights Forfeiture Theory of Punishment” at the American
Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meeting in 2015. It is reprinted by
permission of Cambridge University Press.
xvi
xv

From Psychology to Morality

xvi
1

Introduction: Naturalism
in Ethics

Naturalism has a long tradition in ethics. Arguably, it goes back to the

beginnings of moral philosophy when Protagoras held forth at Callias’s
salon on the origins of justice and conscience in human beings. The speech
he delivered, notwithstanding its fabular character, was a piece of natural
history about the emergence in human life of cities and the practices that
kept them from breaking up and returning their citizens to an existence of
scattered and vulnerable families.1 Its pivotal thesis was that all citizens of a
city were equipped with justice and conscience just as other animals were
equipped with great strength or great mobility. These traits were therefore
unlike the skills of craftsmen, each of which only a small number of specially
trained citizens possessed. Indeed, that they were possessed by all or nearly
all citizens was crucial to the city’s stability and cohesion. Socrates, in asking
Protagoras to back up his promise to young men who would put themselves
under his tutelage that he would teach them how to excel at being citizens,
had expressed skepticism about the possibility of teaching such virtue. He
was certain that no one had expertise in looking after a city comparable to
the expertise of skilled craftsmen, and he was equally certain that only those

1. Plato, Protagoras 320c10–​328d3.

1
2

2 Introduction

with such expertise could teach a craft. His mistake, according to Protagoras,
was due to his looking in the wrong place for teachers of virtue. Because all
or nearly all citizens were equipped with justice and conscience and all or
nearly all exhibited these traits in their daily lives, any citizen, with the ex-
ception of the few who had turned against the city, were suitable teachers. In
fact, Protagoras maintained, one often found ordinary as well as distinguished
citizens in their engagement with the young teaching them virtue as natu-
rally as they taught them Greek.
Naturalism reached its zenith in ancient philosophy with Aristotle’s eth-
ical writings. Aristotle’s program in ethics was to answer through the study
of human psychology the questions that Socrates had asked about how one
should live and about the nature of virtue. A deep understanding of the parts
and workings of the human soul, Aristotle believed, would show what a good
life consisted in and how through the development and exercise of the in-
tellectual and moral virtues it could be achieved. To be sure, Plato too un-
dertook to answer the same Socratic questions through a study of human
psychology. He too thought that our coming to understand the parts and
workings of the human soul would show us which life was the best for human
beings and how one could acquire the virtues necessary to live it. And Plato,
needless to say, was no naturalist. The difference between the two, however,
is that Plato, unlike Aristotle, attributed to the rational part of the soul powers
that gave it access to an intelligible world whose constituents were immu-
table and eternal and that made the soul itself immortal. Aristotle opposed
Plato on these points. While he held that the rational part of the soul distin-
guished human beings from other animals, he understood the human soul
to function entirely within the natural world. Its rational part belonged to the
natural world no less than the parts that he identified as common to all ani-
mals. His answers to Socrates’s questions thus came entirely from a study of
natural phenomena.
The naturalist tradition in ethics went into hibernation during the
Middle Ages. Its dormancy was due to the dominance of Christian thought
throughout the period. Christian thought had merged with Neoplatonism in
the last century of the Roman Empire, and this merger, abetted by Augustine’s
making the doctrine of free will one of its fixtures, effectively excluded nat-
uralism from moral philosophy for the millennium that followed. Indeed,
the doctrine of free will, which Augustine had advanced to absolve God
of any responsibility for human sin, was the most important contributor to
the silencing of naturalism during the medieval period. The rediscovery of
Aristotle’s ethical treatises in the thirteenth century initiated some movement
towards a change in this situation. The great influence of these treatises on
3

Introduction 3

Aquinas led to his promoting natural reason as a source of knowledge in-

dependent of revelation, and his doing so in turn prepared the way for the
tradition’s revival. But it took more than three centuries of philosophical
study after Aquinas’s death and the rise of modern science to bring it about.
The most important early modern contributors to the tradition’s re-
vival were Hobbes and Spinoza. Neither man was a friend of Platonic forms
or their progeny, and both opposed the doctrine of free will that had long
since become Christian dogma. Hobbes thought the very notion of a free
will was incoherent. Spinoza thought free will was an illusion. Both pursued
ethics—​the science of virtue and vice, as Hobbes called it—​on the basis of
the naturalist-​cum-​egoist theories of human psychology that they expounded.
As a consequence of their radical views, both were targets of vigorous attacks
by the defenders of religious orthodoxy, Judaic as well as Christian in
Spinoza’s case.
Philosophical resistance to Hobbes’s thought was also fierce. Spinoza, by
contrast, spent years in the philosophical wilderness until late in the eight-
eenth century, when several prominent German thinkers began to take him
seriously. In Britain, the impact of Hobbes’s philosophy was immediate. The
debates over egoism that his ethics ignited produced two generations of ra-
tionalist, particularly Platonist, responses. In time, though, it also produced a
new set of defenders of naturalism in ethics. The greatest of these was Hume,
whose Treatise of Human Nature surpassed in the depth and subtlety of its
theory of human psychology all previous works in British moral philosophy.
Hume, like Hobbes, rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of freedom
of the will. At the same time, he went beyond Hobbes in explaining how
human actions could be effects of antecedent causes compatibly with their
being freely chosen. He then turned to expounding a theory of ethics based
on his naturalist psychology. This exposition too went beyond Hobbes, not
only in its rejection of egoism, but also in its account of justice as a virtue
whose origins lay in the natural history of human beings. Hobbes had built
his account of justice on the idea of the natural condition of humankind,
but he did not understand this idea historically. The natural condition of
humankind, in Hobbes theory, was the condition human beings would be
in if they lived without benefit of a government, and such a condition could
be the result of a civil war, as Hobbes feared, as well as the original condition
of savages. Human behavior, in his view, would be the same in either case.
Hume’s use of natural history to explain the origins of justice cancelled
the advantage rationalist opponents of naturalism had seemingly held given
the difficulty of reducing justice to either self-​ interest or benevolence.
Nonetheless, naturalists were not alone in using natural history to support
4

4 Introduction

their theories. It did not belong exclusively to their toolkit. The outstanding
example of its use outside of naturalism is Rousseau’s account in his Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality of the birth and growth of human injustice and
cruelty.
Rousseau agreed with Hume in taking justice to have originated in
the conventions of property. Unlike Hume, however, who explained these
conventions as the consequence of cooperative schemes that human beings
invented for their mutual advantage, Rousseau explained them as the conse-
quence of consent to the appropriation of land by those who worked it. This
difference between the two views is crucial. For Rousseau, in making con-
sent to being excluded from the use of land by another’s declaring it his own
the origin of justice, implied that justice and consequently injustice derived
from the operations of the human will. Of course, if Rousseau had thought
that a man’s will was itself determined by natural forces, his view would not
have been crucially different from Hume’s. But Rousseau held exactly the
opposite view:
I see nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine . . . I perceive exactly the
same things in the human machine, with this difference, that in the operations
of the brute, nature is the sole agent, whereas man has some share of his own op-
eration, in his character as a free agent. The one chooses and refuses by instinct,
the other from an act of free will.2

Rousseau’s project was to explain the wretchedness of the human condition

as entirely the work of men. He reiterated his theme in the opening sentence
of Emile, “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things;
everything degenerates in the hands of man.”3 It is hard to think of a better
coda for Augustine’s doctrine.
The brilliance of Rousseau’s natural history lay in its developmental story
of how humans began their sojourn on earth as innocent, solitary beings with
simple desires for the necessities of self-​preservation and then, as the result
of their entering into stable and complex social relations of increasing extent
and complexity, acquired new desires that eventually made them capable of
both moral virtue and moral vice, with a decided tendency towards the latter.
What is striking about this history is its implication that human beings create
the social structures that make it possible for them to achieve moral virtue
or sink into moral depravity. Morality, in other words, on this history, is an
artifact of human culture, and therefore human beings, rather than possess a

2. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and
Discourses, G. D. H. Cole, trans. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1959), p. 207.
3. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 37.
5

Introduction 5

conscience and moral sensibilities innately, acquire them through accultura-

tion. While this view may have had earlier exponents, no one had expounded
it more forcefully or imaginatively than Rousseau.
Of course, the view itself poses no threat to naturalism in ethics. After all,
it is open to defenders of such naturalism simply to disagree with Rousseau
about the origins of morality. They could, as against Rousseau, explain con-
science and moral sensibilities as being among our inherited powers and
dispositions. No doubt, many followers of Darwin would explain them in this
way. Nonetheless, a growing disenchantment with teleological explanations
of human nature, accelerated by the appearance and acceptance of Darwin’s
theory, increased the attractiveness of Rousseau’s thesis that morality is
wholly an artifact of human culture as an alternative to the supposition that
conscience and moral sensibilities are part of man’s natural endowment. It
remained then for thinkers in the naturalist tradition to construct theories
of the development of conscience and moral sensibilities that substantiated
Rousseau’s thesis.
The two most influential theories of this sort were Nietzsche’s and
Freud’s. Both men expounded thoroughly naturalist accounts of the workings
of the human mind. Their understanding of these workings, however, was
decidedly different from that of the associationist psychology that Hume
had expounded and bequeathed to nineteenth-​century British empiricism.
Nietzsche and Freud based their accounts of the mind’s workings, not on
principles of association, but rather on the dynamics of unconscious conflict
among instinctual forces, and they used these dynamics to explain the for-
mation in human beings of a conscience and moral sensibilities. Nietzsche
weaved his explanations into the natural histories he offered in On the
Genealogy of Morals. Freud made his explanations central to the individual
psychology he developed and then fit them to a historical account of the
emergence of conscience in human beings. Both took up Rousseau’s theme
of representing the emergence of conscience as involving a transformation
of human nature. Of the two theories, Freud’s had the farthest reach in its
influence on subsequent thought. And to the extent that the view of morality
as an artifact of human culture was widely accepted, his theory did more to
advance naturalism in ethics than any other theory in psychology or social
science put forward in the last century.
The essays collected in this volume belong to the naturalist tradition
whose course I have just sketched. The first ones are studies in psychology
that bear on questions of ethics. Before one can take up the central question
of ethics concerning how to live, one must come to some understanding
of the place of desires and emotions in our lives and how reason works to
6

6 Introduction

direct their promptings. On a naturalist understanding of human nature,

desires and emotions are the ultimate springs of our action, while reason
provides us the intelligence we need to act well. The first essay is a critical
survey of the major concepts of emotion in modern philosophy and psy-
chology from the older, empiricist concepts of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries to the present. The discussion highlights the importance
of the theories of William James and Sigmund Freud first in overthrowing
these older concepts and then in shaping later conceptualizations of the
phenomena. The next two essays focus on James’s and Freud’s theories re-
spectively. The essay on James explains how his concept of emotion derived
from Hume’s distinction in the Treatise between calm and violent passions
and then argues for the unsuitability of James’s concept for ethics and, in-
deed, for any field in which emotions are conceived of as motives. I con-
clude that recent attempts in neuroscience and philosophy to resurrect
James’s theory are dead-​ends. The essay on Freud has two movements. In
the first I trace the development of his thought from his original theoretical
work on the neuroses exhibited in hysteria and obsessive behavior to his
construction of a general theory of human personality and its disorders. In
the second, I explain the philosophical import of his theory as a contribu-
tion to the naturalist tradition in Western thought and how it made signifi-
cant advances over its predecessors.
The two essays that follow deal obliquely with the doctrine of free will.
Their aim is to vindicate the strategy for dealing with the doctrine that P. F.
Strawson pursued in “Freedom and Resentment,” his landmark address to
the British Academy. Strawson’s strategy was to give a naturalist account of
our practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions. Such an
account, if successful, would negate the proposition that a person is morally
responsible for an action only if the action resulted from his or her exercising
a free will, and Strawson used a study of certain emotions that he called “reac-
tive attitudes” to show how one could give such an account. He thus supplied
naturalism with a powerful argument against one of the main bulwarks of the
doctrine. His address has had enormous impact on subsequent philosophical
treatments of the question of free will. Many philosophers, writing under the
influence of his argument, have drawn their accounts of moral responsibility
from considerations of the reactive attitudes. Yet despite this impact, his argu-
ment has won few converts to naturalism. The reason is that it has been poorly
understood. The misunderstanding is twofold. First, philosophers who have
taken themselves to be following Strawson commonly mischaracterize the
way he understood resentment. Second, the same philosophers have failed to
grasp the crucial role of naturalism in his argument, and, consequently, their
7

Introduction 7

accounts of moral responsibility do not threaten views on which moral respon-

sibility implies an exercise of free will or at least do not threaten such views
in the way Strawson saw his argument as doing. “Psychopathic Resentment”
corrects the first misunderstanding. “Reactive Attitudes Revisited” corrects
the second.
The sixth and seventh essays in the collection shift the focus to nat-
uralist accounts of moral judgment and practical reason. The sixth
essay examines the place of our capacity for empathy in making moral
judgments. Hume’s ethics is commonly interpreted as taking empathy—​
what Hume called “sympathy”—​to be a necessary factor in our making
moral judgments, and its role in his theory supports his thesis that moral
judgments are inherently motivational. Against Hume, I argue for a more
capacious understanding of moral judgment. This more capacious under-
standing fits Piaget’s account of how moral judgment develops in children,
and Piaget’s account, I further argue, offers a better framework than Hume’s
for investigating the motivational character of moral judgments. The sev-
enth essay is a partial defense of Bernard Williams’s view that the source of
an agent’s reasons for action is, in every case, some element in the agent’s
set of desires, emotions, evaluative dispositions, inclinations, and the like.
Williams’s view is defensible when one takes reasons for action as facts an
agent considers when deliberating about what to do, given an Aristotelian
notion of deliberation. It is indefensible when one takes reasons for action
to be facts an agent considers when determining whether doing the action
would be or was justified. Much of the controversy that Williams’s view
stirred, including some of the most virulent objections to it, is due to con-
fusion of these two different ways of understanding reasons for action.
After explaining the confusion, tracing its origins to the beginnings of the
philosophical literature on reasons for action in Anglo-​American philos-
ophy, and dispensing with the objections that were based on it, I defend
Williams’s view against objections, Christine Korsgaard’s, in particular,
that were not based on it.
The eighth essay also focuses on practical reason. Sidgwick’s conception
of ethics is its specific topic. Sidgwick, in his masterwork The Methods of
Ethics, proposed to treat each of the main theories of ethics as being rooted
in a rational procedure for determining what one ought to do. In short, he
conceived of ethics as the study of practical reason. He took egoism, utilitar-
ianism, and dogmatic intuitionism as the main theories to be examined with
the aim of showing that they could be unified. Such unification requires
that the theories agree on the sense in which ‘ought’ is to be understood
in moral imperatives of the form A ought to φ, where A is the name of an
8

8 Introduction

individual and φ is a verb of action. When egoism is formulated as a naturalist

theory, however, the sense ‘ought’ has in these moral imperatives is different
from the sense it has in the moral imperatives of dogmatic intuitionism.
The reason is that on such a formulation, on Hobbes’s formulation, for in-
stance, the starting assumption is that a brute desire for one’s own’s happiness
predominates among the moving forces in one’s life. Consequently, on this
formulation, moral imperatives of the form A ought to φ are hypothetical in
Kant’s sense. By contrast, on dogmatic intuitionism, the sense ‘ought’ has
in moral imperatives of this form is categorical in that, unlike hypothetical
imperatives, the conditions of their validity do not include A’s having a desire
that A would satisfy by φing. To be sure, a naturalist formulation of egoism
was not Sidgwick’s preferred formulation. He preferred a rationalist formula-
tion. Its starting assumption was that reason prescribed one’s own happiness
as the ultimate end of action. But he allowed the possibility of a naturalist for-
mulation. The upshot of his doing so, as I argue, is that his project of unifying
the three theories was foredoomed.
The ninth essay is a contribution to a volume of critical essays on Bernard
Gert’s moral theory. It is chiefly a critical discussion of Gert’s treatment of
moral duties and moral ideals. The central aim of Gert’s theory is to represent
morality as a set of precepts that all rational and impartial persons would favor
everyone’s following. Construction of such theories was common in ethics
in the latter half of the twentieth century, and Gert’s construction is an espe-
cially clear and uncomplicated example of this type of theory. Gert divided
the set of moral precepts into rules and ideals, though in truth he could have
called them all rules and divided them into those that were meant to con-
strain action and be enforceable by punishment and those that were meant to
promote action without the threat of punishment. He thus conceived of mo-
rality as a set of rules regulating behavior. This conception too was common
to the type of theory his exemplified.
The thrust of my criticism is that Gert’s is an impoverished conception
of morality. Morality is as much concerned with our inner life as it is with
regulating behavior. It contains, for instance, a duty of benevolence as well
as duties not to kill and to keep one’s promises. Gert thinks the very notion
of a duty of benevolence is problematic. Moral duties, he declares, corre-
spond to rules that either forbid or require that certain actions be done, and
requiring general benevolence would mean, he then argues, that a person
would have to act benevolently all of the time towards everyone, which is
impossible. If, however, one takes morality to guide the will or prescribe
dispositions and not merely to regulate behavior, the problem Gert alleges
does not arise. On this conception of morality, the duty of benevolence is the
9

Introduction 9

duty to maintain a good will or a benevolent disposition towards all, which

means that what is required to fulfill it is a commitment of the will and not
an action. Such a commitment, I argue, is certainly possible. I conclude by
sketching an account of moral ideals on which they are understood as models
or exemplars and not rules.
The collection closes with three papers on punishment. The standard
treatment of the topic in philosophy has for decades taken legal punish-
ment as the paradigm case. Accordingly, philosophers writing on punish-
ment have commonly understood its infliction as an institutional response
to a breach of an institution’s rules. My treatment of the topic in these three
papers rests, instead, on a broader understanding of punishment. On this
understanding, punishment is as much at home in a natural context as
an institutional one. The broader context is that of a stable social group.
Outside of an institutional context, punishment is pain or loss inflicted by a
member of the group on another member who is equally or less powerful in
retaliation for the latter’s having displeased or angered the former. Within
an institutional context, it is pain or loss inflicted by an agency formally
empowered to enforce the rules of the institution in retaliation for their
having been violated. In either case, it works to preserve the group’s social
order, which is either natural or civil according as the relations of power
among the members are unmediated or mediated by rules. This under-
standing covers not only legal punishment but also punishment that one
country inflicts on another in retaliation for the latter’s having attacked its
citizens or property, punishment that mob bosses inflict on underlings in
retaliation for the latter’s having betrayed them to another mob or to some
government authority, and punishment that husbands or wives inflict on
their spouses and parents inflict on their children in retaliation for being
angered by their spouses or children. All three papers take as their point of
departure this broader understanding of punishment.
The first of the three, “The Emotional Significance of Punishment,”
explains how punishment works to preserve a group’s social order. I identify
three functions that it has in this respect. It deters those inclined to act in
ways that disrupt the order from doing so; it strengthens the disposition to
maintain the order of those who are not so inclined by assuring them that dis-
ruptive acts are not tolerated; and it provides a means by which its recipients
can repair the social relations they had ruptured. The explanation of the last
function, punishment’s reparative function, proceeds from an account of
the dynamics of these social relations that reprises the discussion of reac-
tive attitudes in the collection’s earlier essays. Punishment has these three
functions, not by design, but by virtue of how retaliatory behavior within a
01

10 Introduction

social group between members of equal power or by more powerful members

towards less powerful ones works to maintain the group’s stability.
The final two essays deal with questions of justice with regard to making
the severity of punishment in the penal law match the gravity of the offense
for which it is inflicted. The requirement of justice that the severity of pun-
ishment match the gravity of the offense is a requirement of proportionality.
The first of the two essays examines whether a legislator’s or a legislative
assembly’s determining the severity of punishment for an offense with the
aim of optimally fulfilling the deterrent function of punishment would meet
this requirement. This way of determining the severity of a punishment for
a given offense, I argue, yields harsher punishment than that of aiming at
preserving the social order, and for this reason it tends to yield punishments
that are disproportionately severe. The second of the final two essays takes up
the strict retributivist’s way of determining the severity of a punishment for a
given offense. This way of determining such severity, I argue, is morally prob-
lematic. It represents the view that justice requires retaliation for its own sake,
and such a view contravenes principles of humanity basic to Western ethics,
specifically, our general duty of benevolence towards human beings. At the
same time, punishment is not similarly problematic when it is inflicted for a
larger social end than mere retaliation, when it is inflicted, for instance, to
promote public safety or preserve social order.
Oxford University Press solicited two scholars to review this collection.
Both made several good suggestions for improving its presentation. One of
them, noticing the affinity of some of my views to Hume’s, suggested that
I identify the kind of naturalism the collection’s essays represent as a version
of sentimentalism. This suggestion, however, overstates the affinity of my
views to Hume’s. Hume’s naturalism combines sentimentalism with an op-
position to rationalism on the question of reason’s power to motivate action.
I share Hume’s opposition to rationalism. The seventh essay, the essay on
Williams’s account of practical reason, makes clear my acceptance of his
view that reason lacks the power to motivate action on its own. I do not,
however, share his subscription to sentimentalism. Yet given the tendency
of scholars in a field to place a set of ideas in a familiar niche so as to better
understand their complexity, it may be helpful to explain the separability of
these two aspects of Hume’s naturalism.
Sentimentalism is a thesis about how human beings tell the difference
between virtue and vice. Specifically, it is the thesis that our affective
responses to people’s behavior rather than our cognitions of its character are
what ultimately determine whether we find it virtuous or vicious. “Morality,”
Hume said in summarizing his sentimentalism, “is more properly felt than
11

Introduction 11

judg’d of.”4 Hume rested this thesis on his account of what he called indirect
passions, the sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, in particular.
These passions are built into the human frame, which means that as soon
as a child’s affective capacities have developed enough to experience them,
the child is conscious of virtue and vice. They are, in this respect, like visual
impressions of color. That is, a child becomes conscious of different colors as
soon as its visual powers are sufficiently developed to be capable of discrimi-
nating among them. Hume, indeed, affirmed the analogy between colors and
virtues, colors and vices.5 One can reject this analogy, though, and therefore
sentimentalism while at the same time opposing, as Hume did, rationalism
on the question of reason’s power to motivate action. Thus the two aspects of
his naturalism come apart.
In fact, I do not accept the analogy. I do not believe it can be sustained.
My discussion in the first essay of problems with the perceptual model of
emotions explains why.6 The gist of the discussion is that one cannot tell
the difference between virtue and vice unless one understands what would
make a feature of a person’s character a virtue and what would make it a vice.
It is not sufficient, contrary to Hume, that the motives one discerns behind
people’s actions please or displease one when one views them disinterestedly.
One must also have the concepts of benefit and harm so as to understand
how actions that spring from such motives tend to benefit or harm the agent
or others. By contrast, one does not need to understand anything about colors
to see them. The failure of the analogy is evident in the difference between
how one teaches a child the words for different colors and how one teaches
it the words for different values. On the account of the latter teaching that
I favor, it serves to retarget the child’s desires and emotions away from some
of the objects they have as inherited dispositions and towards others that did
not previously arouse them. Such teaching corresponds to the training of
desires Aristotle takes to be necessary to one’s acquiring the moral virtues.
The account, then, fits a naturalist theory of ethics on which our telling the
difference between virtue and vice is a matter of cognition and not feeling
compatibly with reason’s lacking the power to initiate action.

4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., L. A. Selby-​Bigge, ed. with rev. by P.
H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 470.
5. See David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning Principles
of Morals, 3rd ed., L. A. Selby-​Bigge, ed. with rev. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), p. 294.
6. I give a more extended critique of Hume’s analogy in an earlier essay “Emotions and
Values,” which appears in my collection Emotions, Values, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
21

12 Introduction

At the same time, the account yields an explanation of Hume’s thesis

that morality is essentially practical. This result may strike some as untenable
for any naturalist theory on which our telling the difference between virtue
and vice is a matter of cognition. One cannot, so it is commonly thought,
side with Hume in opposing rationalism on the question of reason’s power to
initiate action without having either to reject Hume’s thesis or to deny, as he
did, that we know the difference between virtue and vice through cognition.
Yet the choice between these two options is a false dilemma. One can de-
fend a naturalist account of ethical evaluation without being forced to decide
between them.
Words for values enter our vocabulary when we are young through
teaching intended to reinforce or adjust the targets of the desires and emotions
the liability to which we inherit from our simian ancestors. The aim of the
teaching is the same as that of teaching us to live well as civilized human
beings and members of the human society into which we are born. Our grasp
and use of these words continue to guide us long after childhood when they
have ceased to refer only to things that spark desire and arouse emotion either
innately or through teaching. Though we learned the difference between
danger and safety in learning what to fear and what inspires confidence,
our ability to recognize things and situations as dangerous or safe outstrips
our disposition to feel fear or confidence—​to be afraid or confident—​in the
presence of those things once we have mastered the words and learned how
to navigate our lives. We know that a gun if loaded or a car if speeding at high
velocity is dangerous, and we thus take care in how we handle the gun or drive
the car. We do this without having to be afraid of the former’s discharging or
the latter’s crashing. Nor do we think, when we recognize the danger, that
it would be rational or fitting to feel fear or that we have reason to feel it or
ought to feel it. The thought guides our action, though the danger is not an
object of fear. Philosophers who require a definition of the word ‘danger’, a
verbal account of its meaning, that explains why applying the word to things
and objects guides action are destined to be forever trapped in Wittgenstein’s
fly bottle. I believe the account of ethical evaluation I give shows the way out.
13

Concepts of Emotions
in Modern Philosophy
and Psychology

Two major themes characterize the study of emotions in modern philosophy

and psychology. One is the identification of emotions with feelings. The
other is the treatment of emotions as intentional states of mind, that is, states
of mind that are directed at or towards some object. Each theme corresponds
to a different concept of emotions. Accordingly, the study has divided, for
the most part, into two main lines of investigation. On one, emotions are
conceived of as principally affective states. The concept on which this line
proceeds is feeling-​centered. On the other, emotions are conceived of as prin-
cipally cognitive states. The concept on which this line proceeds is thought-​
centered. Both concepts reflect revolutionary changes in the theoretical study
of emotions that began to take place at the end of the nineteenth century and
continued for several decades into the twentieth. The two main lines of in-
vestigation come out of objections to the concept of emotion that dominated
philosophy and psychology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
revolution in our thinking about emotions begins with the abandonment of
this older concept.

13
41

14 From Psychology to Morality

I
The older concept is a fixture of empiricist psychology in the modern tradi-
tion. Empiricists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the mind as a
single field of thought and feeling, fully conscious and transparent to itself. Its
chief inhabitants are distinct ideas and impressions. The latter include visual,
auditory, and tactile impressions as well as other sensations of external things.
The former are products of these impressions. They are either simple or com-
plex, and if complex, then one can always understand them as combinations of
simples. In Hume’s wonderful simile, impressions and ideas are “like players
in a theater who successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away,
and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (1978, p. 253).
The class of impressions includes more, though, than sensations of external
things. It also includes both localized and unlocalized feelings of pleasure
and pain. The latter are the emotions. They are in Locke’s words “internal
sensations” (1975, pp. 229–​230) and in Hume’s “secondary” or “reflective”
impressions (1978, p. 275). The basic ones are simple impressions of pleasure
or pain whose connection to ideas, physiological activity, and conduct is ei-
ther that of cause to effect or conversely. Specifically, on Locke’s view, these
internal sensations result from ideas of good and evil; on Hume’s their im-
mediate causes are impressions of pleasure and pain along with, in some
cases, ideas of external things. At the same time, on the empiricist’s view, we
can conceive of these basic emotions in abstraction from their typical causes
and effects, just as we can conceive of simple sensations of color or sound.
Abstracted from their causes and effects, according to classical empiricism,
emotions are discrete, episodic, and purely affective states of consciousness.
The traditional empiricist concept of emotions came under a withering
attack by William James. The attack was part of James’s broadside, in the
famous ninth chapter of The Principles of Psychology, against traditional
empiricism’s general understanding of mental states as either wholly simple
states or complex states composed of these simples. Hume’s simile nicely
presents James’s target. The empiricist understanding of mental states, James
observed, presupposed that “sensations came to us pure and single” (1950,
vol. 1, p. 233), that they recurred at different times in our experiences of the
world, and that the great mass and constantly changing flow of thought in
our minds was due entirely to the combination and recombination of these
simple sensations and their corresponding simple ideas. None of these three
suppositions, James argued, can be sustained. Sensory experience is no more
made up of individual units of sensation than rivers are made up of indi-
vidual drops of water. Our thought, James argued, naturally appears to us as
15

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 15

“sensibly continuous,” like a stream (1950, vol. 1, p. 237). It can no more be

broken down into mental atoms whirling in a void than its correlative brain
activity can be broken down into discrete, concatenated events. Secondly, this
stream of thought is Heraclitan. One never, James insisted, had the same sen-
sation twice. Indeed, sensations, according to James, are unrepeatable items
of experience. Because each sensation corresponds to some modification of
the brain, there could be no recurrence of the exact same sensation. For that
to happen, the second occurrence would have to occur “in an unmodified
brain,” which is “a physiological impossibility” (1950, vol. 1, pp. 232–​233).
Thirdly, if, contrary to Locke’s supposition, there are no simple, recurrent
sensations, then there are no corresponding simple, recurrent ideas either.
Consequently, human thought does not break down into elementary units of
feeling and thought. The continuous change in what we feel and think does
not consist in the combining and recombining of the same set of simple, im-
mutable sensations and ideas.
We are led to think otherwise, James observed, by our habit of identifying
sensations of sight, sound, taste, and so forth by their objects. We speak of the
same sounds when we hear the same thing on different occasions, a musical
note, say, or a bird’s chirp. Inattentive to variations in our sensory experience,
we say that the sensations are the same when, in fact, there is no individual
sensation on any of these occasions and therefore no relation of identity
holding between sensations on different occasions. What is the same is the
object of sensation. When we listen to the performance of a sonata, for ex-
ample, we hear the same notes repeated at different intervals and in different
arrangements, yet it would be wrong to think that each time we heard some
note during the performance, we had a distinct auditory sensation that was
separate from and a successor of an equally distinct auditory sensation we had
in hearing the previous note and that was identical to an auditory sensation
we had when we last heard this note. The experience of hearing the sonata
does not consist of separate, individual sensations of sound experienced se-
quentially and repeated at different intervals. It is only the tendency to con-
fuse these sensations with their objects that leads us carelessly to think of the
experience in this way and to speak of having the same sensation when we
hear the same note.
We are not, of course, liable to confuse emotions with their objects, for
we do not identify them with their objects. Fear, after all, is fear whether
it is fear of spiders or fear of earthquakes. Nonetheless, emotions too are
misconceived on the traditional empiricist understanding of them as either
simple, recurrent states of mind or compounds of such states. “Pride and
humility,” Hume tells us, at the very beginning of his discussion of these
61

16 From Psychology to Morality

passions, are “simple and uniform impressions” (1978, p. 277). So too, he says,
are the other passions (though later, in book II of the Treatise, he identifies
several passions, respect, contempt, and amorous love, as mixtures of two
other passions (1978, pp. 389–​396)). The traditional empiricists’ misconcep-
tion, in this case, is due, not to their mistaking emotions for their objects,
but rather to their modeling emotions on external sensations. Thus, Locke,
having begun his study with simple, external sensations, then introduces
pleasures, pains, and passions, which arise with external sensations, either
through impact on the body of some external object or with our thoughts of
good and bad. The latter are emotions, and we experience them, Locke says,
as internal sensations. Similarly, though more elegantly, Hume identifies ex-
ternal sensations as primary impressions, the simple ones being the starting
points of his investigations, and then, when he takes up emotions, identifies
them as secondary impressions. The understanding of emotions, in either
case, therefore inherits the mistakes James criticized in the traditional empir-
icist treatment of external sensations. And James then went on in c­ hapter 25
of The Principles to level the same criticisms of the traditional empiricists’ un-
derstanding of emotions. “The trouble with the emotions in psychology,” he
wrote, “is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. So
long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like
the old immutable species in natural history, so long all that can be done with
them is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points, and effects”
(1950, vol. 2, p. 449).
James’s objection to the traditional empiricist concept of emotions was
thus continuous with his objection to the traditional empiricist understanding
of mental states generally. To identify each type of emotion as a distinctive,
recurrent inner sensation or feeling, James argued, is to misunderstand the
nature of emotional states of mind. At the same time, James accepted the tra-
ditional empiricist characterization of emotions as feelings. The feelings that
he identified with emotions, however, were feelings produced by changes
in the body. Emotions, according to James, were those feelings that arose
as the result of the physiological and neurological changes that typically
occurred as the result of the perception of some exciting fact. As James put
it, “My theory . . . is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of
the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the
emotion” (1950, vol. 2, p. 449). By so identifying the emotion with these
feelings, James reversed the commonsense order of events in an episode of
emotion. For common sense has it that what excites the emotion is the per-
ception of a fact, and the emotion then causes the bodily changes that ex-
press it. According to common sense, a person perceives a charging bear,
17

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 17

for example, feels fear, blanches, and runs, whereas on James’s account, the
perception of the charging bear causes the person to blanch and run, and
the feeling of these bodily movements is the fear. In effect, then, on James’s
account, the emotion does not cause the behavior that expresses it or the
behavior it is commonly said to motivate. Rather such behavior is the direct
effect of the perception of some fact, and feeling the bodily changes the be-
havior consists in is the emotion. Emotions, on James’s account, are therefore
epiphenomenal. They are the products of bodily changes, but they do not
themselves cause any action.1

II
James’s identification of emotions with bodily feelings is one of two major
innovations behind the abandonment of the traditional empiricist con-
cept of emotion. The other emerged in treatments of emotion that oppose
the epiphenomenalism in James’s account. James, to be sure, regarded his
reversing the commonsense account of the relation of emotions to their be-
havioral expressions as an advance in the study of emotions. But not every
contributor to the study did. Some stuck with common sense. On the
commonsense account, emotions are springs of action. They have motiva-
tional force. In reversing common sense, James implicitly denied that they
had such force, and this consequence of his program is the rub. For it is not
easy to give up citing emotions to explain actions.2
The traditional empiricist concept of emotions supported such
explanations. On traditional empiricism, emotions are motives of actions.
Specifically, they arise from thoughts or perceptions and immediately move
their subjects to action. A good example is Hume’s account of the emotions

1. In taking James’s rejection of the commonsense order of events in an episode of emotion

as affirmation of the view of emotions as epiphenomenal, I do not mean to suggest that James
held that all mental states were epiphenomenal. In The Principles of Psychology, ­chapter 5,
James appears to reject the latter view on grounds of common sense. Hence, his express
challenge to common sense in his theory of emotions implies that he is making an exception
in this case to the rule of common sense that he invokes in rejecting epiphenomenalism as a
general theory of the mind. See James, 1950, vol. 1, pp. 128–​144, esp. p. 144.
2. Indeed, while James’s considered view was to deny that emotions had motivational force
(lest they precede rather than succeed the bodily movements that express them), he too some-
times fell back to the commonsense understanding of emotions as springs of action. Thus, in
the chapter on instincts, c­ hapter 24, he wrote, “Sympathy is an emotion . . . [s]‌ome of [whose]
forms, that of mother with child, for example, are surely primitive, and not intelligent forecasts
of board and lodging and other support to be reaped in old age. Danger to the child blindly and
instantaneously stimulates the mother to actions of alarm and defense” (1950, vol. 2, p. 410).
81

18 From Psychology to Morality

he called “the direct passions.” The direct passions, on Hume’s account, in-
clude desire and aversion, joy and grief, hope and fear, anger and benevo-
lence, among others. Like all secondary impressions in Hume’s psychology,
they are inner feelings, each being qualitatively distinct from the others. At
the same time, instances of each vary according as the feeling they consist
in is more or less turbulent and as it is more or less forceful. Hume, that
is, distinguished between the phenomenal character of an emotion and its
motivational strength. Emotions are either violent or calm depending on
how much agitation in the mind they entail. They are either strong or weak
depending on the amount of force with which they motivate action. In other
words, on Hume’s account, the degree to which an emotion is calm or vio-
lent is independent of the degree to which it is weak or strong (1978, p. 419).
Consequently, a passion may be calm; it may produce little agitation in the
mind; yet it may be stronger than some violent, co-​occurring passion and so
move its subject to actions that are contrary to the actions the more violent
passion is prompting. As Hume put it, “’Tis evident passions influence not
the will in proportion to their violence, or the disorder they occasion in the
temper; but on the contrary, that when a passion has once become a settled
principle of action, and is the predominant inclination of the soul, it com-
monly produces no longer any sensible agitation” (1978, pp. 418–​419).
Indeed, any passion, Hume observed, “may decay into so soft an emo-
tion, as to become, in a manner, imperceptible” (1978, p. 276). Certain calm
ones, in particular, “are more known by their effects than by the immediate
feeling or sensation” (1978, p. 417). What I shall call “Hume’s doctrine of
the calm passions” implies both that we can know of an emotion independ-
ently of its phenomenal character and that we can conceive of it as present
and operative even though it lacks a phenomenal presence. The doctrine,
consequently, suggests a different concept of emotion from that employed
in traditional empiricism. It suggests a concept focused on the motivational
rather than the affective character of emotions. Hume of course did not make
this concept explicit. He could hardly have done so and kept quiet, as he did,
about the seeming incoherence he introduced into his system in referring to
an imperceptible impression. An unfelt feeling, after all, is a contradiction
in terms. Hume, in other words, could not have maintained the doctrine
of the calm passions unqualified without having to abandon his notion of
an emotion as a secondary impression. More generally, he could not have
maintained the doctrine without abandoning the framework of traditional
empiricist psychology within which he worked. On that framework the mind
is a field of consciousness, and its states, therefore, are essentially conscious.
The doctrine of the calm passions, to the contrary, implies the possibility of
91

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 19

some emotions, though states of mind, occurring outside of this field. Some
emotions may be, in a word, unconscious.
The idea that emotions need not always be conscious states is the second
major innovation behind the abandonment of the traditional empiricist un-
derstanding of emotion. While Hume’s doctrine of the calm passions suggests
this innovation, it was not until Sigmund Freud developed his theory of the
unconscious, 150 years later, that it was fully realized. Freud was not the
first thinker to propose that there were unconscious mental states. He readily
acknowledged predecessors. But those precedent proposals did not present
much of a challenge to the traditional empiricist framework. Typically, what
was proposed was that some thoughts and ideas existed just beyond the pe-
riphery of the mind, in a subconscious part, and if not easily retrievable,
could become conscious nonetheless without effort. Examples were ideas
corresponding to words that are “just on the tip of our tongues,” as we say, that
we struggle to recall only to have them suddenly appear clearly in conscious-
ness, and ideas that must occur to us during sleep since it is not uncommon
for one, upon waking up in the morning, to see immediately the solution to
a problem that had vexed one the night before. Freud, by contrast, held that
some ideas and thoughts were deeply buried in an unconscious part of the
mind and were blocked from being retrieved by repression. One’s mind, as it
were, generated force to keep them from becoming conscious. Such repres-
sion was necessary because the repressed thoughts and ideas were themselves
charged and energetic and would immediately rise to consciousness if there
were no counterforce to keep them in check. Examples of such repressed
ideas and thoughts were beliefs about being personally responsible for some
traumatic event that occurred when one was very young. Such beliefs, while
they may never become conscious, reveal themselves in dreams, self-​defeating
behavior, even illness. That they manifest themselves in this way is Freud’s
reason for understanding them as charged. Unconscious thoughts and ideas
could not have the influence on people Freud saw in their dreams, irrational
behavior, and illnesses that lack organic causes unless they were forceful in
their own right. Freud called the tension between their force and that of re-
pression “the dynamic unconscious.” The great originality of his theory of
mind was due to this way of conceiving of unconscious thoughts and ideas.
Freud took emotions too as capable of being repressed (Freud, 1915,
1923, 1924). They too could be unconscious. Consequently, he could not
conceive of emotions as feelings. Nonetheless, he is commonly interpreted
as having so conceived of them, notwithstanding the evident incoherence
his taking emotions as feelings would, as in Hume’s case, introduce into his
theory. (See, e.g., Lear, 1990, pp. 88–​90.) The passages that are commonly
02

20 From Psychology to Morality

cited to support this interpretation are not decisive, however, and, I would
argue, are better read as supporting an interpretation on which Freud gives
meaning to the term ‘unconscious emotion’ while acknowledging that the
term ‘unconscious feeling’ is self-​contradictory (Freud, 1915; Deigh, 2001).
Emotions may be unconscious, but feelings are necessarily conscious.
Hence, Freud did not identify emotions with feelings. He identified them
instead with states whose expression included feelings or that had the poten-
tial for such expression, a potential that was blocked from being realized by
repression. Be this as it may, ideas of unconscious love, fear, hate, anger, and
the unconscious sense of guilt are fixed points in Freud’s theory, and because
of the theory’s great influence on twentieth-​century thinking about human
psychology and culture, reference to them has become commonplace in our
everyday thought and talk about the human mind. Freud’s theory, therefore,
whatever Freud’s express opinion of the possibility of unconscious emotions
was, offers a concept of them, a concept that is a major alternative to James’s.
It remains then to define this concept.
To begin with, Freud took emotions to be states of mind we are con-
scious of through the feelings that manifest them. As such, they are distinct
from those feelings, and they may exist and operate in us even when we are
unconscious of them. In addition, Freud sought, in the operations of uncon-
scious emotions, explanations of a great range of phenomena of human life
including odd behavior like parapraxes, unconventional sexual conduct such
as fetishism and bestiality, inappropriate feeling or lack thereof, excessive
fear, for example, or flat affect, and somatic illnesses that had no obvious or-
ganic cause. Such explanations were among the most distinctive explanations
of psychoanalytic theory. They required, not only identification of an emo-
tion that was either not manifest in what, if anything, the subject was feeling
or, though manifest in the subject’s feeling, concerned with something
other than the ostensible object of those feelings, but also identification of
the person, thing, event, or state of affairs towards which the emotion was
actually directed. The latter requirement indicates Freud’s special concern
with the true objects of people’s emotions. While these were often people,
things, events, etc. that produced the emotion, they were sometimes merely
the products of the subject’s fantasies. As Freud put it, when he came to ex-
plain certain hysterical symptoms in his patients as the products of repressed
pseudo-​memories of sexual trauma in early childhood, whether incidents of
sexual abuse really occurred or were fantasized made no difference from the
patient’s viewpoint. Because the fantasized events seemed to the patient as
real as if they had actually occurred, the repressed pseudo-​memories and the
terror they instilled in the latter case had the same effect on him as genuine
21

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 21

memories of real abuse. In effect, then, Freud, in giving these explanations,

fixed on emotions as intentional states of mind. He saw, with each, how it was
related to its object so as to give meaning or import to the feelings, behavior,
and conditions that manifested it. For Freud, such intentionality was the core
element of the concept of emotions he invented in introducing unconscious
emotions into the theory of the mind.
At the same time, Freud did not expressly consider what an emotion’s inten-
tionality consisted in or what constituted its distinctive relation to its object. To
introduce a concept of emotion that was a genuine alternative to the one James
defined, it was sufficient for Freud to have made the intentionality of emotions
and the import it gave to them the focus of his conception. Accordingly, on
the concept he introduced, emotions are not, as distinct from the one James
defined, epiphenomena. Rather they can be causes, and what they cause are
actions. Secondly, being sometimes unconscious states, emotions are not, con-
trary to James, identical with feelings. Rather they are expressed by feelings.
Thirdly, the feelings that express emotions are meaningful phenomena,
whereas for James they are merely indices of bodily processes. Feelings of grief,
shame, fear, or the like, on Freud’s view, have the same meaning or import
as the emotions they express, and indeed that import is transmitted from the
emotion to them. Grief, for example, has the import of loss, and in feeling grief
one feels the loss over which one is grieving. Shame has the import of one’s
appearing unworthy before others whose esteem one values, and in feeling
shame one feels unworthy of them. On the concept James defined, by contrast,
the feelings an emotion consists in, being nothing over and above the feelings
of bodily changes, are not meaningful in this way. Their being feelings of grief,
say, or shame is, rather, mere happenstance, a consequence of the concept that
ultimately yielded telling empirical criticism.3

III
The concept of emotion that Freud introduced thus stood in need of an account
of the meaning that he located in an emotion’s intentionality. In the last third
of the twentieth century, many philosophers and psychologists, often without
recognizing their debt to Freud, converged on such an account.4 While the
theories of emotion they advanced differed from each other in specifics, they

3. Experimental work by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962) is generally thought
to have established that the bodily processes a person who is feeling some emotion undergoes
are not by themselves sufficient to determine the type of emotion the person is feeling.
4. Some, however, clearly recognized this debt. See Solomon 1976, pp. 180–​182.
2

22 From Psychology to Morality

agreed in taking some form of evaluative judgment as an essential element of

an emotion and in citing the thought content of such a judgment to explain the
intentionality of emotions. On these theories, for instance, judgments about
good fortune are essential to joy, and judgments about undeserved misfortune
are essential to pity. Accordingly, the import of the feelings expressing joy or
pity derives from these judgments. Feelings of joy, therefore, concern some-
thing good that has happened to one, and feelings of pity concern undeserved
misfortune that has befallen someone. The feelings that express emotions are,
therefore, importantly different from feelings and sensations that merely reg-
ister some physiological disturbance. The latter, being symptoms of bodily
changes, do not concern anything. They have no import. When after sudden
exertion, say, one is short of breath and feels weak or wobbly, the feeling is
symptomatic of respiratory difficulty and nothing more. If, by contrast, upon
a sudden attack of panic one is short of breath and feeling wobbly, the feeling
is not just a symptom of respiratory difficulty. It concerns, rather, something of
which one is intensely afraid and what determines the object of one’s fear is
the judgment that one is in danger. The object of one’s fear, in other words, is
what one thinks is endangering one. And the same pattern of analysis, so these
theories hold, applies to emotions generally. Every emotion, that is, is neces-
sarily about something, however vague or indeterminate, and what it is about
is determined by the evaluative judgment it contains. Consequently, such a
judgment is an essential element of the emotion.
To take such a judgment as an essential element of an emotion, and not
merely a common concomitant, is therefore to understand an emotion as
essentially a cognitive state. This understanding, which now prevails among
philosophers and psychologists who study emotions, represents a recovery
of ideas about emotions that were prominent in the thought of the ancients.
Indeed, Aristotle is often cited in the expositions of contemporary cognitivist
theories of emotion as a source of their central thesis. And the boldest of
them go so far as to endorse the ancient Stoic theory on which emotions are
taken to be identical to evaluative judgments of a certain kind (Solomon,
1976; Nussbaum, 2001; see also Nussbaum, 1994, chs. 9–​13). Most of these
theories, however, are less bold and give accounts of emotions that include,
as essential elements, other things besides evaluative thought and articulate
some complex relation among these elements. Agitation of the mind, auto-
nomic behavior, and impulses to action are the usual additions. But even in
these theories evaluative judgment is the primary element in the mix, for it
is the element by which each emotion is principally identified. It is the ele-
ment the theories principally use to define different types of emotion (Deigh,
1994, pp. 835–​842).
23

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 23

A theme that is common to these theories is that emotions, like other cog-
nitive states, belong to intelligent thought and action. They are in this respect
on a par with beliefs and other judgments, decisions, and resolutions. They
are, that is, states that one can regard as having propositional content, which
their subjects accept or affirm. Accordingly, one can treat them as warranted
or unwarranted, justified or unjustified, by the circumstances in which they
occur or the beliefs on which they are based. Thus fear would be warranted if
its object evidently posed some threat to one and unwarranted if it evidently
posed no threat. Likewise, anger would be justified if it were a response to a
genuinely demeaning insult and unjustified if based on one’s mistaking an
innocent remark for such an insult. In either case, the emotion is warranted
or unwarranted, justified or unjustified, because the evaluative judgment in
which the emotion consists, either in whole or in part, is warranted or unwar-
ranted, justified or unjustified. In general, then, on these theories, an evalu-
ative judgment is an essential component of an emotion. It is, moreover, the
component by which one type of emotion differs from another. If you want to
understand the difference between contempt and anger, say, then according
to these theories the difference lies in the type of evaluative judgment that is
essential to each emotion. When you have contempt for someone because
he has behaved badly, you judge the person to be low or unworthy of your
esteem in view of that behavior. When you are angry at someone because
he has behaved badly, you judge that the person has injured or insulted you
or someone close to you by so behaving. I will call this model of cognitivist
theory “the standard model.”
The standard model is subject to two powerful and related objections.
First, sometimes one can experience an emotion towards something that one
knows lacks the properties it must have for the emotion to be warranted.
Consider, for example, the fear people typically experience when looking
down from a precipice. They may know that they are perfectly safe and in no
danger of falling, yet fear falling nevertheless. Similarly, common phobias
such as snake and spider phobias supply examples of fear of an object the
subject knows is harmless. Again, people sometimes feel disgust at foods they
know are nutritious, benign, and perhaps even tasty.5 Defenders of cognitivist
theories that fit the standard model must, to account for these examples, de-
scribe the subjects of these emotions as making contradictory judgments or
holding contradictory beliefs. Yet familiarity with such experiences tells us
that when, for example, one feels fear on looking down from a precipice,
knowing that one is perfectly safe, one doesn’t judge or believe that one is in

5. See Rozin and Fallon 1987.

42

24 From Psychology to Morality

any danger of falling. To react with fear, it is sufficient that one look down
and see the steep drop below. The reaction is automatic, as it were. It does
not depend on one’s making a judgment or forming a belief about one’s
circumstances’ being dangerous. Cognitivist theories that fit the standard
model cannot, then, satisfactorily account for such fear.
The second objection to the standard model is that it cannot satisfacto-
rily account for the emotions of nonhuman animals and human infants—​
beasts and babies. Like the first objection, this second objection identifies a
class of emotions that resist being understood as consisting either wholly or in
part in evaluative judgments of the kind that the standard model identifies as
the essential cognitive element in emotions. The reason for this resistance is
plain. Such judgments, like beliefs, are states of mind that imply acceptance
or affirmation of propositions. Consequently, to have emotions requires being
capable of grasping and affirming propositions. That is to say, one must have
acquired a language. Since beasts never acquire a language and babies have
yet to acquire one, the standard model cannot account for their emotions.
The result is not entirely surprising. The most important antecedent of the
standard model, the cognitivist theory of emotions that the ancient Greek
and Roman Stoics advanced, denied that beasts and babies ever experienced
emotions. Because beasts and babies lacked language, the Stoics argued, they
were incapable of making evaluative judgments of the kind with which the
Stoics identified emotions. But their view, like Descartes’ cognate view that
only human beings have minds, has long since been reduced to a histor-
ical curiosity. Consequently, any theory of emotions must acknowledge that
beasts and babies are capable of having emotions, and it must account for
these as well as the emotions of mature human beings. Cognitivist theories
that fit the standard model fail in this respect.

IV
In view of these objections, recent defenders of cognitivist theories have
dropped the standard model in favor of a broader account of the evaluative
cognition that is essential to emotions (see Nussbaum, 2001 and Roberts,
2003). Such cognition, they argue, need not be an evaluative judgment of
the kind that implies grasping and affirming a proposition. It may, instead,
be a perception. Indeed, some defenders of cognitivist theories now argue
that emotions are primarily forms of perception. The theories they defend
fit what I’ll call “the perceptual model.” Since perceiving something does
not imply that you make any judgment or form any belief about it, the first
25

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 25

objection does not threaten cognitivist theories that fit this model. When
you look down from a precipice, knowing you are in no danger of falling,
the fear you experience need not consist in or involve a belief or judgment
that you are in danger of falling. You perceive danger in falling, but you do
not believe or judge that you are in danger of falling. Hence, in feeling fear
of falling you do not make contradictory judgments or hold contradictory
beliefs. And the same goes for other examples that generate the first objection
to the standard model.
Does the perceptual model also escape the second objection? Can it
account for the emotions of beasts and babies? Defenders of this model
maintain that it can. Because perception is sometimes a more primitive form
of cognition than the kind of evaluative judgment that the standard model
identifies as essential to emotions, they argue, it is possible on the perceptual
model for beasts and babies to have evaluative cognitions of the kind that is
essential to emotions. Specifically, because not all perception requires prop-
ositional thought, attributing perceptions to beasts and babies does not pre-
suppose that either have any linguistic capabilities. The fear a dog feels, say,
when a man threatens him with a stick consists at least in part in the dog’s
seeing the threatening motions his would-​be attacker makes with the stick
as dangerous. The dog’s perception, so defenders of the perceptual model
would argue, is like the perception we have when we look at a straight stick
partially submerged in a deep pool of water. We see it as bent. Our so seeing
the stick does not require any propositional thought on our part, and by the
same token the dog’s seeing the man with the stick as dangerous does not re-
quire any propositional thought on the dog’s part.
This argument for recognizing that the perceptual model is beyond the
reach of the second objection would succeed if the point of that objection,
when pressed against the standard model, were a point about the mode of
cognition that on this standard model characterizes the evaluative judgments
the model represents as essential to emotions. It would succeed, that is, if
the reason the standard model fails to account for the emotions of beasts and
babies is that the model takes such evaluative judgments to be states or acts
of mind in which some proposition is affirmed or denied. Some perceptions,
after all, are cognitive states in which the mind neither affirms nor denies a
proposition. They are of a different mode of cognition. Hence, the second
objection would have no force against the perceptual model since this alter-
native mode may characterize some of the perceptions the model represents
as essential to emotions. But one could be making a different point in
advancing the second objection. One could be making a point about the cog-
nitive content of the evaluative judgments that the standard model represents
62

26 From Psychology to Morality

as essential to emotions. In that case, the argument has not succeeded in

showing that the perceptual model is beyond the reach of this objection. For
the cognitive content of a perception of someone, the man with the stick, say,
as dangerous is the same as the cognitive content of a judgment that this man
is dangerous. In either case, the concept of danger is deployed in a cognitive
representation of the situation, and to have and deploy a concept of danger is
to be capable of propositional thought. Hence, the perceptual model too runs
afoul of the second objection.
Defenders of the perceptual model will of course balk at this result. They
will argue, in response, either that one does not need to have a concept of
danger to see something as dangerous or that it is possible to have concepts
even if one has no language or has yet to acquire one. Neither response, how-
ever, rescues the model from defeat by the second objection. Let us consider
the second response first. By a concept, I understand, following the standard
view in Anglo-​American philosophy, what words, particularly, substantival
words, express when they are used in sentences that express propositions.
They are, that is, what such words mean when they occur in meaningful
sentences.6 Thus, the meaning of a word, its sense, as we sometimes say, is the
concept it expresses. To have concepts independently of one’s having a lan-
guage implies either of two possibilities. On the one hand, it may imply that
one’s concepts are innate and that part of what takes place, when one learns
language, is one’s matching words to them and constructing sentences that
match the combinations of them one has created. On the other, it may imply
that one first acquires concepts through sensory and affective experiences
and later learns how they are encoded in language. The first possibility
captures a view of language acquisition according to which it follows and
results from the emergence and development of rational thought in children.
Since animals other than human beings are not rational and never acquire
language, the first possibility is not available to defenders of the perceptual
model. The second possibility treats concepts as ideas in the mind that derive
from one’s sensory and affective experience. On this possibility, the acquisi-
tion of such ideas is not exclusive to human beings. At the same time, this
possibility entails a semantics for natural language according to which the
meanings of our words are these ideas in our minds. While such a semantics
was once widely held by classical empiricist philosophers and the positivist

6. On this understanding of what concepts are, having the concept of x entails more than
having the power to discriminate between x’s and other things. The point is as old as Plato’s
early dialogues, but it sometimes needs to be brought forward because of the tendency among
writers on topics in psychology to use the words ‘concept’ and ‘idea’ interchangeably.
2
7

Concepts of Emotions in Modern Philosophy and Psychology 27

philosophers whose theories of meaning dominated Anglo-​American philos-

ophy in the first half of the twentieth century, powerful objections to these
views that critics of positivism developed in the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury have shown this semantics to be untenable.7 Consequently, the second
possibility is also a nonstarter. Defenders of the perceptual model must avoid
attributing concepts to beasts and babies if they are to save the model from
defeat by the second objection.
We are left, then, with the alternative response, that one does not need
to have a concept of danger to see something as dangerous. With regard to
this response, the first thing to ask is what seeing something as dangerous
amounts to. Specifically, is it like seeing a straight stick as bent when it is
partially submerged in a pool of water? Or is it more like seeing an extended
hand as an offer of friendship when you first make someone’s acquaintance?
In the latter case, the perception entails an interpretation that consists in
applying a concept, the concept of an offer of friendship, to a gesture. So
if seeing something as dangerous is like this latter case, then the alternative
response fails to save the perceptual model. In the former case, the percep-
tion, by contrast, arguably need not involve any application of a concept.
In describing our perception as one of seeing a straight stick as bent, we de-
scribe how the stick appears to us in circumstances in which we know it
would appear differently if we looked at it through a uniform medium. The
expression ‘seeing as’ is apt in this case, not because we are interpreting how
the object appears to us, but because we are perceiving the object through
one of our sense modalities, vision, and the circumstances are ones in which
we know that the way it appears to us visually is not the only way in which
it can visually appear to someone. We are thus remarking a sensory property
an object appears to have but may not in fact have. It is a property of a kind
of which we are directly aware through one or more of our sense modalities.
The question, then, is whether being dangerous is similarly a sensory prop­
erty of objects, whether it is a property of a kind of which we are directly
aware through one of our sense modalities.
If it were, then we would teach children what the word ‘dangerous’
meant in the same way that we teach them the meaning of words for sen-
sory properties like ‘yellow’ and ‘sweet’. When one teaches a child words for
such properties one assumes prior acquaintance with the properties. That
is, one assumes that the child’s sense modalities have developed, work well,
and been exercised. When one teaches a child color words, for instance, one
finds objects that display the colors vividly, presents those objects to the child,

7. See Putnam 1975.

82

28 From Psychology to Morality

and has it apply the different words to them. Other objects that are similar in
color are also presented to the child, and it is taught to group them according
to color. On the assumption, then, that the child can recognize the objects
in each group as similar to each other, it is taught to apply the word to what
each member in the group has in common with every other.
Plainly, a different method is used to teach children what the word ‘dan-
gerous’ means. Children are not presented with a collection of objects such
as pencils with sharp points, rubber balls, plastic bags, matches, and billfolds
and invited to group them according as they are dangerous or benign. One
does not assume prior acquaintance with the property. That is, one does not
assume that children can recognize, prior to their learning the meaning of
the word ‘dangerous’, similarity among objects all of which are dangerous.
Otherwise one would naturally teach them what the word means by teaching
them to apply the word to what they already recognize as the property the
objects have in common. Rather children are taught the meaning of the word
by being told which things are dangerous and which are not. Teaching them
the meaning and teaching them how to recognize the property are therefore
one and the same. One assumes, that is, that the child is ignorant of which
things have the property and which do not, that it cannot, without instruc-
tion, recognize a thing’s being or not being dangerous. Whether it’s strangers
or matches or busy streets, a child is taught about the danger each poses, and
the teaching typically includes some explanation of the harm that each can
cause. Likewise, one teaches a child not to be afraid of things that initially
frighten it when they are not dangerous. In so doing, one is not correcting
a child’s misperception of danger. Rather, one is teaching the child that not
everything scary is dangerous, and this teaching too may include a demon-
stration that these scary things do not cause harm. If being dangerous were
a sensory property, such teaching would be unnecessary for getting children
to recognize danger. A method of teaching like that of teaching children the
meaning of color words would be sufficient.
What then should we say about the dog that is afraid of the man threat-
ening him with a stick? It is tempting, of course, to say that the dog sees
the man as dangerous. After all, if a man threatened you with a stick, you
would certainly see him as dangerous. But we need not suppose that the dog
can perceive the property of being dangerous to understand the dog’s fear.
We need only suppose that the dog sees the man as an imminent source of
pain in that the dog anticipates pain from this man owing, say, to the man’s
threatening behavior and the dog’s having previously experienced being vi-
olently struck with a stick. The previous experience and the perception of
the man are jointly sufficient to explain the dog’s fear. For having once been
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The Cherub lying near the Essex, the crews sang original songs
directed at each other. It is said that the Yankee songs had the most
point, which is likely, for the average English nautical mind is not
very brilliant. The officers encouraged this amusement, which took
place in the fine, calm first watches, to the frequent annoyance of the
English and the great amusement of neutrals. Captain Hillyar
requested Porter to put a stop to it, but the latter refused to do so
unless the Cherub ceased first.
At length the quasi-friendly relations between the Commanders
became very much “strained,” as the diplomatists say, by the
harboring of an escaped prisoner from the Essex on board the
Cherub. This led to an exchange of strongly-worded letters. Porter
and Hillyar continued to meet on shore quite frequently, and at this
time Porter proposed an exchange of prisoners by sending one of
the prizes to England as a cartel, to bring thence to the United States
an equal number. This proposition came to nothing, but Porter
liberated his English prisoners on condition that they should not
serve until exchanged; and Hillyar undertook to write to England and
have as many Americans liberated.
In the meantime the Essex Junior had gone outside to reconnoitre
a strange sail, and was very nearly cut off by the English vessels
both going out, but the Essex manned her boats, sent them out and
towed her in in safety.
The English ships then continued to cruise outside, and Porter, to
try his rate of sailing with them, chose an opportunity, when they
were well to leeward, to get under way and let them chase him. He
found he could outsail them both, and could escape at almost any
time, but he was led to remain in Valparaiso by the hope of bringing
the Phœbe to single action. This resolution, though chivalric, was not
exactly prudent.
One day Porter towed the ship Hector, a prize, to sea. The two
British ships were then far in the offing, and Porter had the prize set
on fire. He then returned to his anchorage, unmolested, although the
English made every exertion to come up with him. This insult
seemed to have the desired effect, and on the afternoon of the 22d
of February, 1814, the Cherub was seen to be about three miles to
leeward of the harbor, while the Phœbe was standing in alone. At 5
p.m. she hove about, a short distance from the Essex, with head off
shore, shortened sail, fired a gun to windward (a nautical challenge),
and hoisted her motto flag.
Porter instantly accepted the challenge, hoisted his motto, fired a
gun and got under way.
The Phœbe made sail and stood off shore, while Porter followed,
under all sail. He was nearing the English frigate fast, when to his
astonishment, she bore off before the wind, and ran down for her
consort. Porter fired two shots across her fore-foot, but they did not
bring her to, and the Essex hauled her wind and returned to port,
where she anchored before the two British vessels could reach her.
Porter did not spare some caustic remarks upon this affair, and
they reached Hillyar, through British residents on shore.
Defiant letters were interchanged between the ships’ companies.
Porter wrote to Hillyar, and Hillyar to Porter, and, as was natural,
angry feelings increased.
About the middle of March the First Lieutenant of the Phœbe (who
was afterwards killed in the action) came on board the Essex, under
a flag of truce, with a message from Captain Hillyar.
Presuming it was a challenge, Porter required the presence of
some of his officers, and then asked the English officer the purport of
his message.
The Englishman said that Captain Hillyar had heard that Captain
Porter had publicly stated that Hillyar had acted in a cowardly
manner, by running away from the Essex after challenging her, but
that he could not believe the report, and had sent his first Lieutenant
to ascertain the truth.
Porter at once told him that he had said so, and still thought so.
The English Lieutenant then stated that he was instructed to tell
Captain Porter that the hoisting the flag and firing the gun, by the
Phœbe, was not intended as a challenge, but as a signal to her
consort.
Porter replied that Captain Hillyar had informed him that the flag
was intended for the Essex, and there “was not a man, woman nor
child in Valparaiso who did not think it a challenge.” The Lieutenant
repeated that Captain Hillyar desired him to assure Captain Porter
that it was not intended for a challenge.
 Porter said he was bound to believe Captain Hillyar, if he said so;
but that he should always consider such a proceeding a challenge:
and that, whenever he chose to send away the Cherub, and repeat
the manœuvre, he should act as he had before done. The Lieutenant
once more assured Porter that it was not a challenge, and that
Captain Hillyar did not approve of challenges, as he was a religious
man.
Such a state of things as we have been describing could not, of
course, last very long.
Exasperation was fast taking the place of self-control, on both
sides; and as more British vessels were expected, it was necessary
for Porter to take some decided step. A crisis was evidently
approaching.
The relative strength of the two nations, in Valparaiso, was then as
follows:—
The Phœbe carried thirty long eighteens; sixteen thirty-two pound
carronades; one howitzer, and six three-pounders in the tops; in all,
fifty-three guns. Her crew consisted of three hundred and twenty
men.
The Cherub carried eighteen thirty-two pound carronades; eight
twenty-fours; two long nines; and had a crew of one hundred and
eighty men.
On the American side, the Essex mounted forty-six guns. Forty of
these were thirty-two pound carronades, and six were long twelves.
Her crew, reduced by those in prizes, was only two hundred and fifty-
five men.
The Essex Junior, built for whaling, was principally a store-ship, or
tender. She mounted twenty guns, taken from captured whalers. Ten
of these were eighteen-pound carronades, and ten were short sixes.
She had a crew of sixty men.
For six weeks the English ships had been mostly under way, and
cruising off the port; and Porter was finally induced to put to sea by
the certain intelligence that the Tagus, 38, and two other English
frigates, were on their way to the Pacific. The Raccoon was also
expected; which sloop had been sent up to the northwest Coast of
America for the purpose of destroying the American Fur Company’s
establishment, on the Columbia river.
 Having agreed upon a rendezvous where he could meet the Essex
Junior, Porter determined to allow the two British vessels to chase
him off the coast, and thereby to permit his tender to escape.
On March 28th the wind came out fresh from the southward, and
the Essex parted one of her cables, and dragged the other anchor
directly out to sea; so that it was necessary to get sail on the ship
instantly. The enemy were, at the time, close in with the western
point of the bay; but when Porter had made sail, and opened them,
he saw a chance of passing them to windward; and, taking in top-
gallant-sails, which had been set over single-reefed top-sails, he
braced up for that purpose.
Unfortunately, as the Essex came up with the point, and was
passing it, it happened (as it often does in such localities) that a
heavy squall struck the ship, and carried away her main-top-mast;
and all the men aloft, furling the top-gallant-sail, were lost.
Admiral Farragut said, in after years, that the reason why they lost
the main-top-mast was, that the yard jammed, and would not come
down when the halliards were let go—the top-gallant-sail being
clewed down.
The loss of this spar was most disastrous. Both the English ships
at once gave chase, and the crippled Essex endeavored to regain
the port. Finding he could not reach the usual anchorage, Porter ran
into a small bay, about three-quarters of a mile to leeward of a small
Chilian battery, on the east side of the harbor, and anchored within
pistol-shot of the shore; intent upon repairing damages as soon as
possible. The enemy’s vessels continued to approach, and showed
every intention of attacking him, regardless of the fact that the Essex
was anchored close to neutral shores. They bore down with caution,
however, hoisting a number of motto flags and jacks.
Porter went to quarters and got his ship clear of the wreck and
ready for action as soon as possible, but he had not time to get a
spring upon his cable, for at about 4 p. m. the attack was made, the
Phœbe assuming a position under the Essex’ stern, and the Cherub
one on her starboard bow. Their fire was promptly returned, and the
Cherub soon found her position a hot one, and she bore up to join
the Phœbe under the Essex’ stern, whence they delivered a severe
raking fire. The Essex could not get her broadside to bear, but fought
three long twelve-pounders out of the stern ports, which were
worked with such bravery, skill and rapidity, that in half an hour both
English ships were obliged to draw off to repair damages.
During the firing, the Essex succeeded, by dint of great exertion, in
getting a spring upon the cable no less than three times, but the fire
of the enemy was so heavy that it was each time shot away before
her broadside could be brought to bear.
The Essex was already much damaged and had a good many
killed and wounded, but the ship’s company were in good spirits, and
though they were caught at such a disadvantage, resolved to resist
to the last.
The gaff, with the motto flag and ensign, had been shot away, but
“Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights” continued to fly at the fore. The
ensign was now made fast in the main rigging, and several jacks
displayed at different points. The enemy soon repaired damages and
were ready to renew the attack, and both his ships now placed
themselves on the Essex’ starboard quarter, out of the reach of her
broadside carronades, and where her stern guns would not bear.
They then opened and kept up a galling fire, which the Essex could
not return at all, and there was no chance for the American ship,
unless she could get underway and assail in turn. The Essex’ top-
sail sheets and halliards were all shot away, as well as the jib and
stay-sail halliards. Indeed, the only rope of that kind not cut was the
flying-jib halliards. This, the only available sail, was set, the cable
cut, and Porter steered down upon the English vessels, intending to
lay the Phœbe aboard. The firing on both sides was now incessant.
Porter let fall his fore-top-sail and fore-sail, but the want of tacks and
sheets rendered them almost useless. Yet he approached his enemy
slowly, and although the decks were thickly strewn with dead, and
the cockpit filled with wounded, and although the ship had been
several times on fire and was almost a wreck, they still had some
hopes, for the Cherub was just then compelled to haul off. This ship
did not come into close action again, although she kept up a distant
fire from her long guns. The disabled state of the Essex enabled the
Phœbe, by edging off, to choose her own distance, and use her long
guns, with which she kept up a tremendous fire, which mowed down
the Essex’ crew in a fearful way. Farragut, in his recollections,
praises the Surgeons for their coolness and dexterity, although they
had, at this time, patients killed under their hands.
Many of the American guns had been rendered useless, and many
had their entire crews destroyed by this fire.
The remaining guns were again manned, however, and one gun
was three times re-manned—fifteen people having been killed at that
one piece during the action. The captain of this same gun alone
escaped, with a slight scratch.
Finding that the enemy had it in his power to choose his distance,
and thus destroy him at leisure, and as the wind at the moment
favored, Porter determined to run his ship on shore, land his men,
and destroy her. When he was within musket-shot of the beach the
wind suddenly shifted right off shore, and paid the Essex off, with her
head towards the Phœbe; exposing her again to a deadly raking fire.
The Essex was by this time totally unmanageable, yet as her head
was towards the enemy, and the latter was to leeward, Porter still
had a faint hope that he might be able to board her.
Just then Lieutenant Downes, the Commander of the Essex
Junior, thinking that the Essex would soon be taken, pulled out in his
boat, and came on board to receive Porter’s orders. In the wretched
condition of the ship Downes could be of no use, and finding that the
enemy had put his helm up and ran off, so that he could not board
her, Porter directed Downes to return to his own ship, prepare for her
defence, and if necessary, destroy her. Downes, therefore, took
several of the wounded, left three of his own crew, and rejoined the
Essex Junior.
The slaughter on board the Essex was now horrible; and the
enemy continued to rake her, while she could not bring a gun to
bear.
Porter then bent a hawser to his sheet-anchor, and cut the anchor
away, thus bringing her head round.
Her broadside was then again brought to bear, and as the Phœbe
was much crippled, and unable to hold her own, it is probable he
would have drifted out of gunshot before he discovered that the
Essex had anchored again, had not the hawser unfortunately parted.
The case of the Essex now seemed hopeless. Several fires had
been extinguished during the engagement; but now fire made
headway both forward and aft; and flames, supposed to come from
near the magazine, were shooting up the hatchways. At this juncture
they were about three-quarters of a mile from the shore, and there
was a bare chance for those of the crew who could swim well to
reach the land. The boats were all destroyed by the enemy’s shot,
and the fire was now burning fiercely, close to the after magazine.
Orders were given for those who could swim to jump overboard
and make for the shore. Many did so, some with clothes already on
fire. Some reached the beach, some were captured by the enemy’s
boats, and some perished. Most of the surviving officers and crew
preferred to share, with the Captain, the fate of the ship. These were
now wholly employed in endeavors to extinguish the flames; and in
this they finally succeeded.
They then once more manned the guns, and renewed the
engagement; but the crew were now so weakened that all saw the
impossibility of further resistance, and entreated Captain Porter to
surrender, as the ship was entirely disabled, and such a step was
necessary, to save the wounded. Porter sent for the division officers,
to consult them; but found only Lieutenant McKnight remaining. He
confirmed the reports of the bad condition of the ship, below, and the
disabled state of the guns, and their crews. Lieutenant Wilmer had
been knocked overboard by a splinter, while getting the sheet-anchor
overboard, and had been drowned, after fighting gallantly through
the whole action. Acting Lieutenant Cowell had lost a leg. The
Sailing Master, Mr. Barnewell, was badly wounded. Acting Lieutenant
Odenheimer had been knocked overboard, but managed to sustain
himself upon some floating wreck, not succeeding, however, in
regaining the ship until after her surrender. The cockpit, steerage,
wardroom, and berth-deck were full of wounded; some of whom
were killed while the Surgeons were operating upon them. More than
this, it was evident that unless something was done the ship must
soon sink, with all on board, from the numerous shot-holes below the
water line.
The Carpenter reported that all his men were either killed or
wounded; and he himself had narrowly escaped drowning, as the
slings in which he was suspended, while overboard, stopping shot-
holes, had been shot away. It was impossible to reach the enemy
with the carronades; while they, from the smoothness of the water,
and immunity from shot, were enabled to use their long guns upon
the Essex, as upon a target.
It is said that, at this time, Lieutenant Ingram, of the Phœbe,
wanted Captain Hillyar to bear down and board the Essex—saying it
was deliberate murder to lie off and fire in this way. This gallant
English officer was killed, among the last, that day.
The American ship continued to be hulled at every shot, and was
cut up in a way seldom witnessed. In a word, there was no hope of
saving her, and at half-past six in the evening Porter was forced to
strike his colors.
Only seventy-five officers and men remained fit for duty; and many
of these were wounded, and some afterwards died.
In spite of the colors being down, the enemy continued his
deliberate fire, and the survivors continued to fall. Porter ordered an
opposite gun to be fired, to intimate his surrender, but the fire
continued, and several more men fell.
Porter now believed that they intended to show no quarter; and he
was upon the point of hoisting his flag again, when, about ten
minutes after the colors had been struck, the enemy ceased firing.
It is only fair to suppose that the smoke prevented them from
seeing that the flag was down.
Porter, and his officers and crew, had shown unparalleled bravery,
skill, zeal, and patriotism; and nothing but the absolute requirements
of humanity caused their surrender—to save the helpless wounded.
Had they been disposed of, there is little doubt they would have let
the Essex sink under them, and have taken the chance of gaining
the shore.
The action had been fought almost entirely with the great guns;
musketry being only used during the first half hour. During most of
the time the Essex could only use her six long twelves; and it is fair
to say that every one did his whole duty. Farragut, then a mere child,
was mentioned, among others, for gallantry, but was “too young to
recommend for promotion.”
The Essex’ ship’s company were unfortunate, but not disgraced.
Out of them fifty-eight were killed, or died subsequently of wounds;
thirty-nine were severely wounded; twenty-seven were slightly
wounded; and thirty-one were missing—mostly drowned. Lieutenant
Cowell, whose leg was shattered, insisted upon waiting his turn, with
the other wounded, for amputation, and thereby lost his life.
The enemy’s loss, which was comparatively light, from the
circumstances under which the battle was fought, included the First
Lieutenant of the Phœbe, killed, and Captain Tucker, of the Cherub,
severely wounded. Both the Essex and the Phœbe were in a sinking
state, and were with difficulty kept afloat until morning, when they
anchored in the port of Valparaiso.
The Essex was afterwards repaired, and sent to England, when
she was added to the British navy. The Phœbe had eighteen shot-
holes through her, below the water line, and nothing saved both
ships but the fact that the water was very smooth.
During the action the American Consul General, Mr. Poinsett,
demanded from the Governor of Valparaiso that his batteries should
protect the Essex.
This was refused; but he was promised that, if she fought her way
in to the usual anchorage, he would send to the British Commander,
and request him to desist, but would not use force under any
circumstances. This, and other evidences of bias in favor of the
British were so strong, that Mr. Poinsett left the country, having no
hope that any claim for the restoration of the ship would be
entertained.
The change of feeling in the authorities of Valparaiso, Porter
attributed to a revolution, which had lately put new people into
power; beside the fact that the South American nations always
favored the strongest force.
Soon after their capture Captain Hillyar allowed the prisoners to
proceed to the United States in the Essex Junior, which ship was
disarmed, and furnished with a passport, to prevent recapture.
Porter, in his remarks upon the battle, says that while he could
never be reconciled to Hillyar’s course in attacking the Essex in
neutral waters, he must do the English Captain the justice to say
that, after the capture he did all he could to alleviate the misery of
the wounded and prisoners. Their private property was pilfered, to be
sure, but it was against Hillyar’s positive orders. Porter also very truly
remarks that the Essex would almost certainly have escaped to sea,
but for the accident to her mast, and that it was a wonderful thing
that the two ships should not have captured or destroyed her in a
much shorter time.
The English frigate Tagus arrived a few days after the battle. She,
with other English ships, had been sent to look for Porter in the
China Seas, Timor and Australia. Porter estimated the cost to the
English government of the capture of the Essex as, at least,
$6,000,000.
We now pass to the singular termination of the voyage of the
Essex Junior, which ship left Valparaiso with the paroled American
prisoners. She made a remarkably good passage of 73 days, to
Sandy Hook, the prisoners hoping to be in time to be exchanged, fit
out a vessel, and intercept the prize on her passage to England. But
off Sandy Hook they fell in with the British ship Saturn, the Captain of
which at first passed them, but two hours after boarded them again,
and revoked the pass. As Captain Hillyar’s pass was thus violated,
Captain Porter revoked his parole, and declared himself the Saturn’s
prisoner. The Essex Junior was directed to remain all night under the
Saturn’s guns. The next morning the ships were some thirty miles off
Long Island, within musket-shot of each other, and in a dense fog.
Porter determined to escape. A boat was lowered and manned, and
Porter entered it, leaving with Lieutenant Downes a message for
Captain Nash, of the Saturn, to the effect that he was “satisfied that
British officers were destitute of honor, and regardless of the honor
of each other. That he was armed and intended to defend himself
against boats sent out after him.” He got nearly a gunshot off, in the
fog, before it was discovered that he had left, and when he was
pursued he eluded the enemy’s boats and landed at Babylon, Long
Island. The English asserted breach of parole in his case, but the
Government took up the matter, and it was finally satisfactorily
arranged.
In connection with the homeward passage of the Essex Junior, we
must not omit to mention the sad fate of Lieutenant Stephen Decatur
McKnight, the only Lieutenant of the Essex who escaped unhurt from
the sanguinary engagement with the Phœbe and Cherub.
Lieutenant McKnight and Midshipman Lyman had remained
behind, and went to Rio Janeiro in the Phœbe, to make the affidavits
necessary to condemn the Essex as a prize. They were then allowed
the option of going to England in the Phœbe, or to be allowed to go
to Europe in a merchant vessel, and thence home, on parole. They
preferred the latter, and sailed from Rio in a Swedish brig called the
Adonis. On the passage they met, at sea, the United States ship
Wasp, Captain Blakely, on a cruise, and left the Adonis and joined
the Wasp, in mid-ocean. The Wasp was never seen again after the
Adonis left her.
It may further be of interest to have Admiral Farragut’s
recollections of this battle, as well as his comments thereon, when
ripe in years and experience.
Farragut was only thirteen years old at the time of the battle; but,
as we have seen, he was commended for his coolness and conduct.
He said that, when the English ships first came in, and while the
Essex and Phœbe were close together, and the Captains talking to
each other, a young fellow stationed at a gun-deck gun of the Essex,
who had just come off from liberty, rather tipsy, fancied he saw a
man on board the Phœbe grinning at him.
“My fine fellow,” said he, “I’ll soon stop your making faces!” and
was about to fire his gun, when Lieutenant McKnight saw him, and
knocked him over. Farragut remarks that, if this gun had been fired,
the battle would then have taken place, under such circumstances
that the Phœbe would most likely have been taken.
He also mentions (which Captain Porter does not), that one night,
while the English ships were outside, the Americans manned all
boats, to board and capture them; but finding them prepared, and
their men lying at their quarters, they returned.
In his later years the gallant Admiral gave his opinion as follows:
“In the first place, I consider our original and greatest error was in
attempting to regain the original anchorage, as, being of very fine
sailing qualities, the Essex should have borne up and run before the
wind. If we had come in contact with the Phœbe, we could have
boarded her. If she avoided us—having all her masts, and ability to
manœuvre—then we could have taken her fire, and passed on,
leaving both vessels behind, until we could have replaced our
topmast. By this time they would have separated, or it would have
been no chase, as the Cherub was a dull sailer.
 “Secondly. When it was apparent to everybody that we had no
chance of success, under the circumstances, the ship should have
been run on shore, throwing her broadside to the beach, to prevent
raking; fought as long as was consistent with humanity, and then set
on fire. But, having determined upon anchoring, we should have bent
a spring on the ring of the anchor, instead of upon the cable, where it
was exposed, and could be shot away as fast as it could be put on.
This mode of proceeding would have given us, in my opinion, a
better opportunity of injuring our opponents.” Farragut further says,
“It has been quite common to blame Captain Hillyar for his conduct
in this affair; but when we come to consider the characteristics of the
two Commanders, we may be inclined to judge more leniently;
although Porter’s complaints in the matter will excite no surprise.
Porter was then about thirty-one years of age, and the ‘pink of
chivalry,’ and of an ardent and impetuous temperament; while Hillyar
was a cool and calculating man, of about fifty; and he himself said,
‘had gained his reputation by several single-ship combats; and only
expected to retain it on the present occasion by implicit obedience to
his orders, viz: to capture the Essex with the least possible risk to his
vessel and crew;’ and as he had a superior force, he had determined
not to leave anything to chance, believing any other course would
call down on him the disapprobation of his government.”
Among other reminiscences by Farragut, we find that when
Lieutenant Ingram visited the Essex, under a flag of truce, he was
shown all over her, and made a very good impression by his frank
and manly bearing. He said the happiest moment of his life would be
to take her to England should she be captured in equal combat.
Porter replied that, should such an event occur, he knew no British
officer to whom he would more readily yield the honor. Poor Ingram
was killed by a splinter, and the American officers who survived
attended his funeral, in Valparaiso.
“During the action,” says Admiral Farragut, in his later years, “I
was, like ‘Paddy in the Catharpins,’ a man on occasions. I performed
the duties of Captain’s aid, quarter-gunner, powder-boy, and, in fact,
did everything that was required of me. I shall never forget the
horrible impression made upon me at the sight of the first man I had
ever seen killed. He was a boatswain’s mate, and was fearfully
mutilated. It staggered and sickened me at first, but they soon began
to fall around me so fast that it all appeared like a dream, and
produced no effect upon my nerves. I can remember well, while I
was standing near the Captain, just abaft the main-mast, a shot
came through the water-ways and glanced upward, killing four men
who were standing by the side of a gun, taking the last one in the
head, and scattering his brains over both of us. But this awful sight
did not affect me half as much as the death of the first poor fellow. I
neither thought of nor noticed anything but the working of the guns.”
During the action Midshipman Farragut was knocked down a
ladder by the body of a heavy man, who was killed. Farragut was
only bruised.
The Admiral also tells an amusing story of a fight he had, on board
the English frigate, after the action, when they were taken on board,
prisoners. He saw an English midshipman who had captured a pet
pig, called Murphy, belonging to him, and he stoutly claimed it. The
English midshipman refused to surrender it, but his older messmates
told Farragut that if he licked the English midshipman he should
have his pig. A ring was formed, and, encouraged by shouts, of “Go
it! my little Yankee! if you can thrash Shorty you shall have your pig!”
he went in and licked the Englishman handsomely.
 BATTLE OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN. SEPTEMBER
11th, A. D. 1814.

he battle of Lake Champlain, or Plattsburg, as it is

often called, was one of the most important, in its
results, of all fought during the war with Great
Britain which began in 1812.
At the same time that the naval battle was
fought, the Americans, under General Macomb,
obtained a decided victory over the British land
forces, which had advanced, on the west side of
Lake Champlain, as far as Plattsburg.
Although Lake Champlain had been the scene of
so many important events in the previous wars on
this continent, two years of the “War of 1812”
elapsed before anything of importance occurred
there. Nor would it have then been the scene of any stirring event, if
English military men had been capable of learning anything from
previous operations there.
Towards the end of 1814 large reinforcements had arrived in
Canada, from England, and an army of twelve or fifteen thousand
men was collected in the vicinity of Montreal.
With this force the enemy intended an invasion of the northern
counties of New York; undeterred by the fate of General Burgoyne,
whose route, practically, they intended to follow.
In spite of the obstinacy and stupidity of the English military mind
during these operations, many people have supposed that this
expedition was not intended to be pushed very far into a country
much more capable of resistance than in Burgoyne’s time, but that
the officers were probably directed to penetrate as far as Crown
Point and Ticonderoga, perhaps with a view to attempts at further
conquests in the spring.
 Some thought that they hoped to reach Albany; a measure that
would have involved the loss of their whole force, as double the
number of men could hardly have accomplished such a feat in
Burgoyne’s time, through a sparsely settled country.
It is altogether probable that they intended to occupy a portion of
the frontier, in the expectation of turning the occupation to account in
the negotiations which were known to be impending; as the English
Commissioners soon after advanced a claim which would have the
effect of driving the Americans back from their ancient boundaries,
with a view to leaving to Great Britain the entire possession of the
lakes.
In such an expedition as this, with Canada as a base, the
command of Champlain became of great importance, as it flanked
the march of the invading army for more than a hundred miles, and
offered great facilities for forwarding supplies, as well as for
annoyance and defence.
Until the year 1814 neither nation had had a force of any moment
on Lake Champlain; but the Americans had built a ship and a
schooner, during the previous winter and spring. When it was found
that the enemy had serious intentions, both by water and by land,
the keel of a brig was laid, and a number of “row-galleys,” or gun-
boats, were also constructed.
During this period the English were not idle. In addition to several
small vessels they already possessed on these waters, they built a
brig, and, as soon as she was in frame, laid the keel of a ship. The
latter vessel was to be of the greatest force and size possible for
those waters, and great care was taken to make her so. The
American brig, which was called the Eagle, was launched about the
middle of August, and the English ship, which was called the
Confiance, on the 25th of the same month. As the English army was
already collecting on the frontier, the utmost exertions were made by
both sides, and each ship appeared on the lake as she was got
ready.
Captain Thomas McDonough, who commanded the American
naval force, was an officer who, though young, had repeatedly
distinguished himself since he had entered the service, in the year
1800, being appointed from the State of Delaware.
 McDonough got out on the lake a few days before his adversary,
and as cruising, in the ordinary sense of the term, was impossible
upon such a long and narrow body of water, the American Captain
advanced as far as Plattsburg, the point selected for the defence
against the invaders, and anchored, on the 3d of September, on the
flank of the American troops, which occupied entrenchments at that
place.
Previously to this the English had made an attempt to sink a
vessel in the mouth of the Otter Creek, to prevent the Americans
from getting their vessels out, but they were beaten off. Otter Creek
is some distance down the lake, on the Vermont side.
About this time Sir George Prevost, the English Commander-in-
chief, advanced against Plattsburg, then held by Brigadier General
Macomb. The latter had only fifteen hundred men fit for duty, while
Sir Geo. Prevost’s army was estimated at twelve thousand.
Prevost’s army was divided into four brigades, which were
commanded by Lieutenant General De Rottenberg, Major Generals
Brisbane, Power and Robinson, and Major General Baynes was
Adjutant General.
With this formidably officered force Sir George Prevost advanced
slowly down the right shore of the lake, waiting for the flotilla to get
ready and to appear on his left flank.
From the 7th to the 11th of August the American skirmishers and
scouts kept the English advance well upon the alert, while the latter
were engaged in bringing up their battering trains, stores and
reinforcements. Some fighting took place amongst detached bodies,
on shore, but no move was made upon the water.
Cooper will be chiefly followed in the account of the battle which
took place upon the lake, although Roosevelt does even more justice
to McDonough than Cooper does. Like Cooper, too, Roosevelt ranks
McDonough as much higher in the scale of ability, as a naval
commander, than Perry, the commander on Lake Erie, while in
regard to courage and conduct under fire, their claims are
undoubtedly equal.
The English naval Captain, Downie, late in command of the
Montreal, on Lake Ontario, had been sent by Sir James Yeo, the
British naval Commander-in-chief, to take the command on Lake
Champlain. He came, with the express understanding that he was
not to come out until he considered his vessels ready.
In one sense, neither the English nor the American vessels were
in a very forward state of preparation. The largest English vessel had
been in the water but sixteen days when she was brought into
action. The second vessel in size of the Americans had been
launched but thirty days when she was fought in the battle. In point
of fact, the American Eagle was ready for service but eight days
before the English Confiance. As all these vessels had little need of
the stores supplied to a sea-going ship, and as the action between
them was fought at anchor, they were, really, not much more than
floating batteries.
But to illustrate the difficulties under which naval operations in
those parts were carried on, we may say that when Captain
McDonough first arrived, to build and fit out a squadron, he was so
short of skilled seamen that he was obliged to turn to and strop
blocks, and do other seaman’s work, with his own hands.
Ready-witted Yankee landsmen soon learned to do a great deal,
and after a time, seamen, in small numbers, were procured, such as
had seen powder burnt.
On the 6th of September Captain McDonough ordered his galleys
to the head of Plattsburg Bay, to annoy the British land forces, which
they cannonaded for two hours. The wind then came on to blow a
gale, which menaced the galleys with shipwreck, and they were
ordered to retire. The boat which carried the order was in charge of a
midshipman named Duncan, and it is supposed the enemy thought
McDonough himself was in the boat, about to join the galleys, for
they concentrated a fire upon it, and Mr. Duncan was severely
wounded, losing an arm.
The general direction of Lake Champlain is north and south, but,
at a point called Cumberland Head, in coming south, the land bends
north again, forming Plattsburg Bay, which is a deep indentation of
the shore, that leaves a basin open to the southward, and which,
consequently, lies nearly parallel to the main lake. The east side of
this bay is protected by the long, narrow neck of land that terminates
in Cumberland Head. Its bottom, or northern end, and its western
shore, are encircled by the main land, while to the southward and
eastward is the entrance. Near the centre of the western shore the
Saranac enters the bay, and on both banks of that river stands the
town of Plattsburg.
About a mile and a half from Cumberland Head, in a southwesterly
direction, and quite near the western shore, is an extensive shoal
and a small, low island, which commands the approach to the bay in
that direction.
At this spot, called Crab Island, the naval hospital was established,
and a one-gun battery erected.
Captain McDonough had chosen an anchorage a little south of the
outlet of the Saranac. His vessels lay in a line parallel to the shore,
extending north and south, and distant from the western shore nearly
two miles. The last vessel to the southward was so near the shoal as
to prevent the English from passing that end of the line, while all the
American vessels lay out so much toward Cumberland Head that
they brought the enemy within reach of carronades, should he enter
the bay on that side.
The Eagle, Captain Henley, lay at the northern extremity of the
American line, and what might, during the battle which followed,
have been called its head; the wind being to the northward and
eastward. The Saratoga, Captain McDonough’s own vessel, was
second; the Ticonderoga, Lieutenant Commanding Cassin, the third;
and the Preble, Lieutenant Budd, last. The Preble lay a little further
south than the pitch of Cumberland Head.
The first of the vessels just mentioned was a brig of twenty guns
and 150 men, all told; the second, a ship of twenty-six guns, and 212
men; the third, a schooner of seventeen guns, and 110 men; and the
last, a sloop of seven guns and 30 men.
The metal of all these vessels, as well as of those of the enemy,
was unusually heavy, there being no swell in the lake to make a
heavy armament dangerous.
The Saratoga mounted eight long 24s, six 42s, and twelve 32-
pound carronades. The Eagle had eight long 18s, and twelve 32-
pound carronades. The Ticonderoga had four long 18s, eight long
12s, and four 32-pound carronades, beside one 18-pound
columbiad. The Preble had seven long 9s.
 In addition to these four vessels, the Americans had ten galleys or
gun-boats—six large and four small. Each of the large ones mounted
a long 24 and an eighteen-pound columbiad, while the smaller ones
had each a long 12.
The galleys had, on an average, about thirty-five men each.
The total force of the Americans consisted, therefore, of fourteen
vessels, of all classes, mounting 102 guns, and containing about
eight hundred and fifty men, including officers, and a small
detachment of soldiers, who did duty as marines, none of that corps
having been sent to Lake Champlain.
To complete his order of battle, Captain McDonough directed two
of the galleys to keep in shore, and a little to windward of the Eagle,
to sustain the head of the line. One or two more were to lie opposite
to the interval between the Eagle and the Saratoga; a few opposite
the interval between the Saratoga and Ticonderoga; and two
opposite the interval between the Ticonderoga and the Preble. If any
order had been given to cover the rear of the line it was not carried
out.
The Americans were, consequently, formed in two lines, distant
from each other about forty yards, the large vessels at anchor, and
the galleys under their sweeps. Owing to the latter circumstance, the
inner line soon got to be very irregular, “some of the galleys pressing
boldly forward, while others were less impelled by the ardor of their
commanders,” which is certainly a good way of putting it.
The known force of the enemy was materially greater than that of
the Americans.
The largest English vessel, the Confiance, commanded by Captain
Downie in person, had the gun-deck of a heavy frigate, and mounted
on it an armament of thirty long 24s.
She had a spacious top-gallant-forecastle, and a poop which came
as far as the mizzen-mast. On her forecastle she mounted one long
24, on a circle, and four heavy carronades; and on the poop, two
heavy carronades, making an armament of thirty-seven guns, in all.
Her complement of men is supposed to have been more than three
hundred.
The next vessel of the enemy was the Linnet, a brig of sixteen
long 12s, with a crew of about one hundred men.
 They had two sloops; the Chubb and the Finch. The first carried
ten 18-pound carronades, and one long 6; the second six 18-pound
carronades, one 18-pound columbiad, and four long 6s. Each of
these sloops had about forty men.
To these four vessels were added a force of galleys, or gun-boats,
in number, either twelve or thirteen; Captain McDonough gives the
latter number; Captain Downie, the former. Thus, Downie’s whole
force consisted of sixteen or seventeen vessels, mounting, in all, one
hundred and fifteen or sixteen guns, and manned by about one
thousand men.
On the third of September the British gun-boats sailed from Isle
aux Noix, to cover the left flank of their army, then marching on
Plattsburg. The boats were under the orders of Captain Pring, and
on the 4th that officer took possession of Isle aux Motte, where he
constructed a battery, and landed some stores for the troops.
On the 8th, Captain Downie arrived, with the four large English
vessels, and remained at anchor until the 11th. At daylight of that day
the whole force weighed anchor and proceeded, in a body.
The American guard-boat pulled in, soon after sunrise, and
announced the approach of the enemy. As the wind was fair—a
good working breeze from the northeast—the English came down
the lake rapidly, and Captain McDonough ordered the ships cleared
for action, and preparations made to fight at anchor.
Eight bells were struck in the American squadron as the upper
sails of the British vessels were seen passing along the neck of land
in the main lake, on their way to double Cumberland Head, in order
to enter the bay. They had the wind a little on the port quarter, the
booms of their small vessels swinging out to starboard. The Finch
led, followed by the Confiance, Linnet and Chubb, while the
gunboats, which, like those of the Americans, each carried two latine
sails, followed without much order; keeping just clear of the shore.
The first vessel which came round the head was a sloop, which is
reported to have carried a company of amateurs, and which took no
part in the engagement. She kept well to leeward, standing down
towards Crab Island, and was soon lost to observation in the events
which followed. It is this vessel, undoubtedly, which has made the