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58 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi58 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Value Inquiry (2024) 58:1-12 https:I/doi.org/l 0.1007/si 0790-021-09859-1 REGULAR PAPER Experiencing the Conflict: The Rationality of Ambivalence Dario Cecchinil Accepted: 3 September 2021 / Published online: 12 October 2021 © The Author(s) 2021 1 Introduction Attitudinal ambivalence is generally understood as the simultaneous holding of negative and positive evaluations toward the same object. This essay concerns what being in such evaluative conflict means for a subject: what its distinctive psycho- logical features are and whether experiencing ambivalence can be rational in some circumstances. Although it is an empirically well-documented phenomenon (Schneider and Schwarz 2017; van Harreveld et al. 2015) and an important aspect of ordinary experience, ambivalence has not received enough philosophical attention. Frank- furt's (1999) and Frankfurtian (Swindell 2010) accounts understand ambivalence as a conflict between desires. It is also argued that ambivalence can be generated by conflicting emotions (Greenspan 1980; Koch 1987) or value judgments (Razinsky 2014). However, these philosophical theories of ambivalence have not sufficiently highlighted that ambivalence is more than the mere co-occurrence of two opposite attitudes. As I will argue, experiencing ambivalence entails having a distinctive kind of attitude characterized by cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Under- standing ambivalence as a distinctive attitude elegantly unifies the different perspec- tives from which ambivalence can be observed. The rationality of ambivalence has been debated (Frankfurt 1999; Marino 2011). This debate is mainly focused on whether ambivalence is rational in contexts where an agent is committed to acting, which I will call practical situations. However, it should not be neglected that an ambivalent attitude can be elicited in situations where a decision is not required. In this paper, I will provide considerations in defense of the rationality of ambivalence in both types of situations: practical and nonpractical. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part (sections 2-4), I will provide a comprehensive, empirically informed account of ambivalence. I will state three necessary conditions according to which ambivalence can be experienced (sec- tion 2). I will show how these conditions are sufficient to distinguish ambivalence E Dario Cecchini dario.cecchini@edu.unige.it Department of Classics, Philosophy, and History (DAFIST), University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy I_) Springer