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Part 1
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Chapter 1
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2 The rational appropriateness
3 of collective emotions
4
5
6 Mikko Salmela
7
8
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1011
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2
3111 How to evaluate collective emotions?
4
Collective emotions have several functions in the emergence and maintenance of
5
social groups and their identities (e.g. Salmela 2013). Accordingly, collective
6
emotions can be evaluated for their adaptiveness in relation to those functions.
7
For instance, negative collective emotions such as guilt, shame and disappointment
8
are often maladaptive for the group because they weaken social cohesion and
9
alienate members from the group, provided that dissociation from the group is
20111
possible (e.g. Lawler 2001; Kessler and Hollbach 2005; Smith et al. 2007). Anger
1
towards out-groups is an exception: a common enemy increases social cohesion.
2
Yet the adaptiveness of an emotion is not the same thing as its appropriateness.
3
Collective guilt, for instance, is a maladaptive emotion insofar as it has negative
4
implications to the social identity of the group members and contributes to the
5
disintegration of the group. Still, guilt is an appropriate collective emotion if the
6
group has violated against some other group (Gilbert 2002; Konzelmann Ziv
7
2007). In general, a collective emotion is rationally appropriate if it is a fitting
8
response to its eliciting situation from the groups epistemic perspective, whereas
9
adaptiveness is a consequential standard of warrant that refers to the beneficiality
30111
of an emotion from the groups practical perspective. Therefore, it is a contingent
1
matter to what extent the appropriateness and adaptiveness of a collective emotion
2
coincide.
3
In spite of intuitive examples of appropriate and inappropriate collective
4
emotions, there is no previous theorizing on the rational appropriateness of col-
5
lective emotions. One reason for this lamentable state of affairs is historical:
6
collective emotions were branded as a prime source of human irrationality in the
7
crowd theories of Le Bon (1896), McDougall (1921) and Freud (1922) that
8
flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand,
9
this view emerged from crowd theorists distrust of emotions as motives of
40111
collective behaviour (McClelland 1989). Yet, on the other hand, crowds in the
1
sense of loose, random and temporary associations of individuals are not the kind
2
of social groups whose participants emotions we can plausibly evaluate in terms
3
of rational appropriateness in the first place. The reason is that crowds do not have
44111
an epistemic perspective with shared intentional attitudes and rational practices
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22 Mikko Salmela

of forming and revising those attitudes in light of new evidence. Yet this kind of
epistemic group agency is a precondition without which discussion on the rational
appropriateness of collective emotions does not make much sense. This means
that my account of the rational appropriateness of collective emotions is somewhat
idealized. However, I believe that many actual social groups, such as research and
sports teams, workgroups, religious sects, theatre ensembles, bands and orchestras,
can meet these criteria. To other, more loosely organized social groups, such as
fan groups or social and political movements, the proposed account will apply with
reservations.
The question of rational appropriateness is particularly interesting in the context
of collective pride, because it relates to another distinction between authentic and
hubristic pride, introduced by Tracy and Robins (2007) in the research of
individual pride. The notions authentic and hubristic suggest a dichotomy
between appropriate and inappropriate pride, even if Tracy and Robins do not
make this equation. Instead, they distinguish authentic and hubristic pride from
each other on the basis of dissimilar attributions of success and behavioural
consequences. Both types of pride are felt in accomplishments and achievements,
but whereas authentic pride attributes these outcomes to unstable and controllable
aspects of the self, such as ones efforts, hubristic pride attributes success to stable
and global aspects of the self, such as ones identity or abilities. In behaviour,
authentic pride associates with joy of achievements and prosocial behaviour,
whereas hubristic pride associates with narcissistic self-aggrandizement and
aggressive behaviour that are defences against excessive shame.
The problem with applying authentic and hubristic pride at the group level in
a straightforward manner is that many innocent and seemingly appropriate
instances of collective pride appear to come out as hubristic. I mean such
phenomena as the collective pride of sports fans in the success of their favourite
team with which the fans identify themselves by virtue of some stable and global
aspect of their social identity, such as nationality or academic affiliation. The idea
of basking in the reflected glory of other people and bragging about their
accomplishments to the fans of other teams seems hubristic. Worse still, a similar
conclusion appears to apply to gay pride parades for any homosexual person who
takes pride in a stable and global aspect of their identity, their sexual orientation,
that they may have been ashamed of earlier in their lives. If these cases of
collective pride qualify as hubristic, we must ask if the distinction is useful in the
study of collective pride at all.
I believe it is, but with caution, as Sullivan (2014) suggests, and supplemented
with the distinction between rationally appropriate and inappropriate collective
pride.

What are collective emotions?

Discussion of the rational appropriateness of collective pride must begin from
a general understanding of collective emotions. Even if social scientists since
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Rational appropriateness 23

1111 Durkheim and Le Bon have been fascinated by collective affective phenomena,
2 the research of collective emotions has not been part of the emotional turn in
3 the sciences and humanities until recently. Consequently, there is no consensus
4 on the nature of collective emotions, but only divergent research programmes with
5 their more or less tentative definitions. Therefore, I introduce my own approach
6 that views the collectivity of emotions as a matter of sharing them with others.
7 This applies to both main dimensions of emotion: intentionality and embodiment.
8 I first describe how individuals can share the intentional content of an emotion
9 and then explain the sharing of embodied experiences (for more detailed accounts,
1011 see Salmela 2012, 2013).
1 There is a wide interdisciplinary agreement among emotion researchers that
2 emotions could not exist without underlying concerns. Therefore, when a group
3111 of people experiences a collective emotion, it is plausible to assume that they have
4 some shared desires or goals or norms or values representations with the world-
5 to-mind direction of fit that I henceforth, following Roberts (2003), call
6 concerns for brevitys sake. Sharing the intentional content of emotion is
7 therefore a matter of appraising the particular object of emotion similarly with
8 other people on the basis of shared concerns. The appraisal process need not be
9 collective, even if it in some cases can be, such as when an emotional appraisal is
20111 formed as a result of public discussion (see Halperin 2014). However, emotional
1 appraisals are often so fast and modular that it is impossible to make, let alone
2 commit oneself, to them collectively, even if Margaret Gilbert (2002) has defended
3 such a position. Instead, I have proposed that we can commit ourselves to the
4 underlying shared concerns of collective emotions in importantly dissimilar ways.1
5 A commitment to a shared concern is in an I-mode when it is made privately,
6 believing that others in the group have the same concern, and also believing this
7 is mutually believed in the group. In contrast, a commitment is in a we-mode when
8 it is made collectively, either explicitly or implicitly, with other group members,
9 with a mutual belief that the group members share the same concern. Empirical
30111 researchers of group-based emotions (e.g. Smith et al. 2007) do not distinguish
1 between these two types of commitment when they talk about emotions that
2 individuals experience by virtue of identifying themselves with groups. However,
3 philosophers have emphasized normative differences between private and
4 collective commitment. The main difference is that a private commitment may
5 be revised or renounced for private reasons alone, whereas a collective
6 commitment may be revised or renounced only for reasons that are acceptable
7 from the groups point of view (Tuomela 2007).
8 Shared concerns provide both psychological causes and rational reasons for the
9 emergence of collective emotions. However, they do not suffice to explain the
40111 kind of non-reflective absorption in shared emotional experience that sometimes
1 takes the form of a phenomenological fusion of feelings into our feeling that
2 Hans Bernhard Schmid (2009) highlights as the core of collective emotions. I do
3 not believe that a phenomenological fusion of feelings alone indicates strong
44111 collectivity because it seems possible to experience such fusion in the context of
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24 Mikko Salmela

otherwise dissimilar emotions. The emotion felt as ours must also have
underlying shared concerns to qualify as robustly collective. Still, the experience
of phenomenological fusion is an outcome of the synchronization of individual
emotional responses physiological changes, facial expressions, action tendencies
and subjective feelings in the manner proposed by ritualistic theories of emotion
(e.g. Durkheim 2001; Collins 2004). Causal mechanisms that contribute to the
synchronization of emotional responses include attentional deployment (Collins
2004), emotional contagion (Hatfield et al. 1994), facial mimicry (Bourgois and
Hess 2008), motor mimicry and imitation (Chartrand and Bargh 1999), and
neural mirroring (Decety and Meyer 2008).2

The appropriateness of collective emotions

With this background, we can return to the question of the rational appro-
priateness of collective emotions. I suggest that the standards of appropriateness
for collective emotions are twofold. First, the emotion must be warranted by group
reasons that derive from the group members shared concerns. And, second, the
group ethos of which those concerns are part must be rational. Accordingly, I
propose that a collective emotion is appropriate if it is felt for a group reason that
emerges from an internally coherent group ethos whose aspects have not been adopted
or maintained by ignoring counterevidence that is available to the group members.
Below, I elaborate the two aspects of this proposal, group reasons and the
rationality of a group ethos.

Group reasons
Shared concerns provide psychological causes and rational reasons for the
emergence of collective emotions in situations in which the group members
shared concerns are affected favourably or adversely in particular ways. Thus,
Parkinson et al. (2005: 97) point out that:

anger will be experienced to the extent that group goals are unjustly thwarted
or threatened, sadness will be experienced to the extent that the group loses
something that is important to its goals, pride will be experienced to the
extent that the groups goals are achieved as a result of group members own
efforts, shame will be experienced to the extent that respect for the group is
diminished as a result of group members actions, and so on.

Here, Parkinson et al. identify core relational themes (Lazarus 1991) or

formal objects (Kenny 1963) that provide standards for the appropriateness of
several collective emotions. Thus, when the group members shared concerns are
affected in the manner specified by formal objects, the corresponding collective
emotions are appropriate for the members. For instance, when a group goal is in
danger, the group members have group reasons to fear, or when the group
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1111 members have reached their goal by their own efforts, they have group reasons
2 to be proud of themselves. In this way, core relational themes and formal objects
3 define the first dimension of emotional appropriateness, the shape of emotion
4 (DArms and Jacobson 2000). The other dimension of emotional appropriateness
5 is size. An emotion is appropriate in terms of size when the emotional response
6 to the particular object is neither too strong nor too mild but of proper intensity,
7 both in feeling and display.
8 Yet group reasons provide only a necessary condition of the rational appro-
9 priateness collective emotions. To see why, consider, for instance, a racist groups
1011 disdain of immigrants. This emotion is warranted by group reasons that emerge
1 from the groups ethos: its racist beliefs and values. Yet this emotion is inappro-
2 priate since the groups ethos is maintained by ignoring counterevidence to racist
3111 beliefs and values that is available to the group members. To remove this problem,
4 we must require that the group ethos is rational itself. Yet it is not obvious what
5 this means.
6
7
The rationality of a group ethos
8
9 There is little research on the rationality of collective attitudes. A possible reason
20111 for this neglect is the view that standards of rationality are held to be the
1 same for all subjects, both individual and collective. Thus, Pettit (2007: 4967)
2 proposes the following three standards of rationality for all agents:
3
4 Attitude-to-evidence standards will require, among other things, that the
5 systems beliefs be responsive to evidence. Attitude-to-attitude standards will
6 require that, even as they adjust to evidential inputs, its beliefs and desires
7 do not assume such an incoherent form that they support inconsistent
8 options. And attitude-to-action standards will require that the system tend
9 to act, and to form intentions to act, on the lines that its beliefs and desires
30111 support.
1
2 A rational agent is capable of satisfying these criteria by means of forming meta-
3 propositional attitudes about its first-order propositions and their relations, and
4 the activity of doing so counts as reasoning. Agents that engage in reasoning,
5 however successfully, display a minimal sense of rationality. These agents may
6 include both individual persons and their groups. Pettit argues that rational group
7 agents require a system-level feedback mechanism for detecting inconsistencies
8 among their attitudes, as well as a procedure for resolving such inconsistencies.
9 He prefers the straw vote procedure in which decisions on individual group
40111 attitudes are made on the basis of a majority vote and emergent inconsistencies
1 with existing attitudes are reconciled by revising one of the conflicting attitudes.
2 Even so, it is not clear what it means for different kinds of attitudes to be con-
3 sistent or coherent with each other. Pettit focuses on the problem of maintaining
44111 diachronic coherence among group attitudes over time, whereas the primary
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26 Mikko Salmela

question about the rationality of a group ethos concerns synchronic coherence,

coherence among group attitudes at any given moment. It is also important to
distinguish between doxastic attitudes with the mind-to-world direction of fit such
as beliefs and judgements, on the one hand, and evaluative and motivational
attitudes with the world-to-mind direction of fit such as desires, intentions, norms
and values, on the other hand.3
Synchronic coherence for doxastic attitudes with the mind-to-world direction
of fit amounts to logical consistency. Thus, an internally coherent group ethos
cannot contain beliefs that p and q where q implies not-p. Examples of such beliefs
could be Our currency is euro and Our currency is pound, where the latter
implies the negation of the former belief. In general, rules of inferential reasoning
determine the internal coherence of attitudes with the mind-to-world direction
of fit.
For evaluative and motivational attitudes with the world-to-mind direction of
fit, we have two criteria of synchronic coherence (Green 1992; de Sousa 2002).
One is their joint satisfaction of satisfiability, and the other is their joint success, or
metaphysical and normative compatibility, respectively. Two intentions are jointly
satisfiable if the states of affairs that those intentions aim to realize can exist at the
same time, whereas they are jointly successful if the states of affairs they aim to
realize are desirable in some respect. Thus, the criterion of joint satisfiability
enjoins groups to reject goals, intentions or values whose joint realization is not
metaphysically possible, such as the goals to cut taxes and increase public spending.
If two goals are not jointly satisfiable at a particular point of time, it may be possible
to reconcile them by placing their satisfaction into a temporal order. This requires
that the realization of the goal scheduled to be realized at an earlier point of time
does not pre-empt the possibility of realizing the other goal at a later point of time.
The joint success of desires, intentions, goals and values is a more complicated
story. The success of a desire (I focus on desires for brevitys sake) depends on
the desirability of its satisfaction, but how can we evaluate the desirability of
desires? I believe we must distinguish between two cases: the desirability of instru-
mental desires, and the desirability of intrinsically valued goals.
The desirability of an instrumental desire depends on its usefulness in the
attainment of some intrinsically valued goal. For instance, an environmentalist
groups desire to organize a protest march against the construction of a new nuclear
power plant is desirable if the march serves the groups goal of preventing the
construction of new nuclear power plants. An instrumental desire can fail to be
desirable in two ways: its satisfaction may fail to serve the attainment of the
relevant goal, or the costs of its satisfaction may outweigh its utility. A violent protest
march may turn public opinion against the protesters, thus jeopardizing the
attainment of their goal, or even if it does not, some sacrifices, such as permanent
damage to some protesters health, may be too high for the action to remain
desirable. Therefore, two or several instrumental desires are jointly desirable if their
satisfaction contributes to the attainment of an intrinsically valued goal, and the
consequences of their satisfaction do not defeat or seriously undermine this utility.
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Rational appropriateness 27

1111 If a social group has just one overarching goal, as many task-oriented groups
2 have, the joint success of the groups wants, intentions and goals depends on their
3 utility in the service of that goal. However, this account is insufficient for groups
4 with several intrinsically valued goals, such as political parties or religious sects.
5 Groups may accept several intrinsic values, such as freedom, equality and well-
6 being, to the ethos of their group. Groups of this kind face the challenge of
7 balancing their action so that they can satisfy all of their intrinsic values without
8 sacrificing any particular value. One possibility is to introduce priority rules
9 between values in conflict situations in the manner of Rawls (1971), who
1011 prioritizes liberty to utility in his theory of justice. Without such procedural rules,
1 groups must try to balance the satisfaction of their several intrinsic values on a
2 case-to-case basis so that the satisfaction of one value does not pre-empt the
3111 possibility of satisfying other values. This means that the joint success of several
4 intrinsically valued goals boils down to their joint satisfiability.
5 Together, these criteria allow us to evaluative the internal coherence of any group
6 ethos at any given point of time. However, synchronic coherence is not sufficient
7 for the rationality of group ethos because we also need diachronic coherence to
8 maintain synchronic coherence over time. Without going into particular accounts
9 of collective reasoning, I focus on a further condition for the rational
20111 appropriateness of collective attitudes that emerges from the challenge to maintain
1 diachronic coherence on a group level. This condition is that synchronic coherence
2 within a group ethos may not be achieved or maintained by neglecting evidence
3 that is available to the group members. The rub of this condition is how to interpret
4 available evidence. One way to approach the matter is to consider what kinds of
5 limitations may nonculpably keep evidence unavailable to groups. These include
6 historical, cultural, social, normative and psychological limitations. Below, I briefly
7 characterize each type of limitation to available evidence, charting boundaries of
8 culpable negligence and ignorance, without aiming at exhaustive and precise
9 analyses, which, due to the nature of the topic, are not available.
30111
1
Limitations to available evidence
2
3 Historical limitations to available evidence are relatively unambiguous, especially
4 in comparison to other kinds of limitations. They concern information that is
5 not available because no one had discovered it yet. An example is the belief that
6 the Earth is a globe. This belief is now regarded as true by virtually every even
7 rudimentarily educated person. However, the situation was different in the
8 Middle Ages, or even several years after Galileo made his observations, because
9 the Catholic Church rejected and censored Galileos views for centuries. Yet the
40111 limitations to available evidence transformed from historical into social after
1 Galileos discoveries because, since then, it was the Catholic Church that withheld
2 the fact about the shape of the Earth from the public.
3 Cultural limitations to available evidence are salient if communities are either
44111 geographically or linguistically so isolated from each other that evidence discovered
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28 Mikko Salmela

in one community does not travel to the others. An example is the isolation of the
Japanese culture from Western influences until the mid-nineteenth century.
However, mere ideological detachment does not qualify as an acceptable limitation,
because if counterevidence were available, the communitys members would seek
it. The Amish culture within the contemporary American society is a borderline
case in this respect because it deliberately maintains isolation from broader
American society. From this perspective, the Amish are a subculture that upholds
social limitations to evidence that could conflict with the groups ethos.
Nonculpable limitations of this kind often emerge from discrimination against some
population on the basis of ethnicity, gender, class, religion or several such factors.
Discrimination creates and maintains sharp group boundaries that are enforced by
violence. An example is the apartheid society of South Africa before 1994. Instead,
contemporary class societies, for instance in Britain, are not segregative in the
sense that members of subcultures could not access evidence that conflicts with
the respective ethos of each group. Groups may have norms that prohibit their
members from accessing or considering counterevidence to their group ethos, even
if such evidence is available. However, such normative limitations to available
evidence are acceptable only insofar as they concern institutional beliefs.
Tuomela (2013) distinguishes between two kinds of group beliefs: institutional
beliefs and non-institutional beliefs. The difference between these two types of
beliefs concerns their truth conditions. Group members can make institutional
beliefs true for the group by collectively accepting those beliefs as true. One way
to put this idea is that institutional beliefs such as Our currency is euro have
both directions of fit: the groups collective acceptance makes it the case that this
belief is true for the group, which the belief also represents as being the case.
However, not all group beliefs are institutional. Some group beliefs concern the
mind-independent world, and the truth of those beliefs depends in part or
entirely upon the way the world is. A belief of this kind is the Earth is flat. Groups
may treat non-institutional beliefs as if they were institutional; indeed, there is an
actual Flat Earth Society that still holds this belief. However, groups cannot decide
the institutional or non-institutional status of beliefs; this depends on the content
of belief. Therefore, insofar as group members ignore counterevidence to their
non-institutional group beliefs, they make a category mistake in treating those
beliefs as if they were institutional beliefs. Consequently, groups may not
legitimately control their members access to evidence that may conflict with the
groups non-institutional beliefs.
Psychological limitations include shortcomings that prevent group members
from gathering, processing and understanding information that is relevant to the
acceptance of their shared attitudes. Limitations of this kind appear to be very
common, because, as Kunda (1990: 480) points out, there is evidence that
motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive
processes: strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. Further
still, psychological research suggests that motivated reasoning is adaptive as it
promotes mental health (Taylor and Brown 1988). Fortunately, these worries are
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Rational appropriateness 29

1111 inflated: people are capable of detailed and careful reasoning when accuracy is
2 their goal (Kunda 1990). Therefore, the tendency of motivated reasoning
3 alone does not constitute a nonculpable psychological limitation to availability
4 of evidence. Limitations of this kind emerge only in the context of mental
5 illnesses and disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive
6 disorders, PTSD, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and so on. These
7 disorders associate with more or less severe distortions in reasoning that cannot
8 be removed or alleviated by striving towards accuracy alone. Since mental disorders
9 are usually individual rather than collective, they do not seriously limit the
1011 amount of evidence from the perspective of groups.
1 Finally, it is important to realize that what is available to groups is the totality
2 of evidence that is available to individual group members, not only as members
3111 of particular groups, but in all their social and private roles and identities. If a
4 group is very homogeneous, paternalistic and closed, this amendment does not
5 expand the group members available evidence significantly. However, in con-
6 temporary liberal societies, the members of organized groups typically belong to
7 several groups. In this way, the amount of available evidence to the group may
8 grow almost exponentially. This is the case especially if we assume that members
9 of all groups, whether epistemically, ideologically or pragmatically oriented, have
20111 an epistemic duty to share with their fellow group members evidence that is
1 relevant for the continued acceptance of (or constitutes good grounds for
2 resisting) the groups shared attitudes. Likewise, groups must assume a corres-
3 ponding epistemic duty to take dissenting evidence presented by its members
4 seriously so as to give it a fair hearing in the groups collective reasoning. I
5 therefore side with Mathiesen (2006: 169, original emphasis), who argues that
6 from an epistemic point of view, not only should group members be permitted
7 to question the group belief, they are obligated to do so if they think that it is
8 false or poorly supported by the evidence.
9
30111
Back to authentic and hubristic collective pride
1
2 After this lengthy discussion on the rational appropriateness of collective emotions,
3 let us return to the distinction between authentic and hubristic pride whose
4 straightforward application to the group level I found problematic in the case of
5 sports fans and homosexuals collective pride. I suggest that the distinction
6 between I-mode and we-mode collective emotion helps us to clarify the relation
7 between authentic and hubristic pride, and appropriate and inappropriate pride
8 at the group level in a manner that retains the plausibility of the former distinction.
9 The collective pride of homosexuals is the easier case. Homosexual pride
40111 definitely does not qualify as hubristic even if it is associated with shame because
1 this group was made to feel inappropriately ashamed of their sexual identity by
2 others for centuries. Expressions of pride manifest rejection of shame caused by
3 oppression, and even if pride is felt primarily in identity, it is also pride in the
44111 still ongoing emancipation from oppression, which is a collective achievement
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30 Mikko Salmela

of the gay and lesbian communities that calls for proud celebration. The ongoing
struggle for equality may also explain occasional aspects of aggression, defiance
and flamboyance in the manner of celebration, especially if there is a particular
enemy group.4
The sports fans are a more complex case. The attraction of attending sports
events, either at stadiums or via live broadcasts in pubs or elsewhere, together with
fellow fans emerges from the opportunity to experience shared emotions in the
event from the perspective of the common favourite team. These intrinsically
rewarding experiences reinforce group identity as they involve feelings of closeness
and solidarity, which foster affective bonds, cooperative ties and loyalty to the
group. Yet collective pride experienced in these contexts has the nagging
impression of basking in reflected glory because the fans have not achieved or
accomplished anything; instead, they take pride in the successes of their favourite
teams whose members, both the athletic and the supportive personnel, have
proper group reasons for feeling authentic and appropriate pride in their
achievements. Therefore, the question remains: are the fans narcissists who take
credit for the achievements of others in order to promote their own feelings of
hubristic pride?
The phenomenon of football hooliganism with hostile confrontations between
some fan groups of rivalling teams suggests that some sports fans take hubristic
collective pride in their identity as fans of their favourite teams whose actual
successes are less significant to these fans than their status as members of those
fan groups. Similar pattern emerges in the context of racist and nationalist groups,
or street and motorcycle gangs, for instance. Here, hubristic collective pride
coincides with rationally inappropriate pride, both in terms of its shape and size.
Focusing on hubristic sports fans, their pride is inappropriate in terms of shape
insofar as it either does not associate with the favourite teams actual successes,
or takes credit for those successes in a literal sense, and it is inappropriate in terms
of size insofar as it manifests as arrogant and aggressive bragging and boasting
rather than as peaceful celebration. Indeed, joy is a more appropriate emotion than
pride for fans who bask in the reflected glory of their favourite teams, because joy
does not claim causal contribution to the relevant success.
Even so, collective pride may still be authentic and rationally appropriate to fans.
First of all, loyal fans who stand by their favourite team in wins and losses alike
may have claim to some causal influence to the teams performance through their
faithful support. Accordingly, these fans who often are members of official fan
clubs have group reasons to feel authentic and rationally appropriate collective
pride in the triumphs of their favourite team as literally our success in the
stronger we-mode sense of collective emotion. However, more occasional and
opportunistic fans who are more sensitive to their favourite teams success in their
support of it may also feel rationally appropriate collective pride, albeit in the
weaker I-mode sense, provided that they understand our success in a properly
metaphorical sense. In both cases, authentic collective pride also requires initially
peaceful celebration of the favourite teams success.5
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Rational appropriateness 31

1111 Conclusion
2
I have outlined the first theoretical account of the rational appropriateness of
3
collective emotions and applied it to collective pride. My proposal is that a
4
collective emotion is rationally appropriate if it is felt for a group reason that
5
emerges from an internally coherent group ethos whose aspects have not been
6
adopted or maintained by ignoring counterevidence that is available to the group
7
members. This is a tall order, for groups tend to ignore counterevidence in order
8
to protect their identity and existence. Indeed, some groups have epistemic norms
9
that prohibit their members from accessing or processing information that may
1011
challenge the group members shared attitudes. I argued that such norms are
1
acceptable only when they concern institutional beliefs whose truth is up to the
2
group members to decide. Otherwise, group members are both permitted and
3111
obligated to bring evidence that is available to them and relevant to the continued
4
acceptance of some aspect of their group ethos to collective consideration in the
5
group, and groups have a corresponding epistemic duty to give a fair hearing to
6
such evidence. Again, many social groups may not function in this manner.
7
Protection of the group identity is often more important than the rational
8
appropriateness of the group members collective emotions and other shared
9
attitudes. This makes sense insofar as belonging to social groups as such increases
20111
the fitness of their members. Critical inquiry that leads to the dispersion of ones
1
group may therefore be a too high price for the rational appropriateness of
2
collective attitudes.
3
4
5 Notes
6 1 In Salmela (2012, 2013), I distinguish between three types of collective emotions
7 weakly, moderately and strongly collective on the basis of their underlying
8 shared concerns. Here, I have dropped the weakest type because its underlying
9 concerns are overlapping private concerns of individuals, such as their own health,
wealth and security, rather than concerns shared on the basis of a group
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identification in either I-mode or we-mode.
1 2 For a more thorough theoretical account on the elicitation of collective emotions
2 compatible with my account, see von Scheve and Ismer (2013).
3 3 For more elaborate expositions of the two directions of fit, see Searle (1983).
4 4 My thanks are due to Gavin Sullivan for pointing out these occasional aspects in
homosexuals pride parades.
5
5 The qualifier initially is important because a peacefully celebrating group may be
6 provoked by members of other groups or authorities who deny the warrant of
7 the groups celebration to become aggressive and hostile in defending its right
8 to celebrate. For an example, see Sullivans (2014) account of Atletico Madrid fans
9 celebrations of the teams win of the UEFA Europa League in 2012.
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