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.
Brian Robinson is assistant professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.
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
The academic study of humor is marvelously interdisciplinary. It draws on insights from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, sociology, classics, and the actual performance of humor in everyday life to create a rich body of work on a complex part of the human experience. In this lively, much-needed volume, Robinson brings together a wide-ranging selection of writing on amusement (the characteristic emotion of humor) and its various moral implications. Written by contributors across the disciplinary spectrum, the essays cover subjects from the basic question of what amusement is and how its relationship with moral judgment works to deeper matters, such as amusement's actual moral effects. The book also includes some helpful groundwork in the ancient sources (Plato, Zhuangzi) on which more contemporary accounts may distantly depend. Although the underlying themes of the book are philosophical in nature, each essay looks at its subject in terms of social, linguistic, and psychological concerns, making the volume a largely applied rather than purely theoretical endeavor. The writing is engaging and accessible, and the contributors do a very good job of connecting readers to current debates on the subject without resorting to confusing cross-referencing. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice Reviews * The Moral Psychology of Amusement is what would happen if a philosopher, a psychologist, a sociolinguist, and a classicist walked into a bar. As interdisciplinary as it is rigorous, this is a tour de force that is sure to become a must-have in the field. -- Steven Gimbel, Gettysburg College
