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Amusement is an emotion with power. It has the power to make us laugh, but it can also have a power over us (for good or for ill) to control our attention or memory. Amusement can empower our resistance to oppression, or it can itself become an oppressive force. Our amusement can make others feel shame. Amusement even has the power to affect (and be affected by) out moral assessment of others.
This volume offers twelve essays from leading and emerging scholars that explore the moral quagmire that is the emotion of amusement. It is a collection that considers the moral psychology of amusement from a range of perspectives, going as far back as ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy up to the most current psychological and sociological findings.
List of contents
Introduction: The Moral Psychology of Amusement
Brian Robinson
PART I: Amusement and Moral Judgments
1LOL: What We Can Learn from Forced Laughter
Dan Shargel
2An Interactional Sociolinguist Engages The Moral Psychology of Amusement
Catherine Evans Davies
3It's All Fun and Games until Someone Gets Hurt: Amusement's Negative Influence on Moral Judgment
Nathan Stout
PART II: Moral Judgments of Amusement
4Beyond A Joke: A Defence of Comic Moralism
Alan Roberts
5That's Not Funny
Brian Mondy
6The Ethics of Humour
Tristan Nash
PART III: Social Moral Judgments of Amusement
7You Shouldn't Have Laughed! The Ethics of Derogatory Amusement
Andrew Morgan and Ralph DiFranco
8Amused by the Outrageous: The Morally Tempering Effect of News Satire
Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen and David Sackris
9Eutrapelia and the Normativity of Social Humor
Andrew Jordan and Stephanie Patridge
PART IV: Ancient Perspectives on The Moral Judgments of Amusement
10Amusement, Happiness, and the Good Life in Plato's Dialogues
Oksana Maksymchuk
11Zhuangzi's Moral Psychology and Humor: The Playful Liberation of Self, Others, and Society
Carl Helsing
12Starting from the Muses: Engaging Moral Imagination through Memory's Many Gifts
Guy Axtell
About the author
Brian Robinson is assistant professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.
Summary
This volume offers twelve original essays that explore the moral quagmire that is the emotion of amusement. It considers its moral psychology a range of perspectives, going as far back as ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy up to the most current psychological and sociological findings.
