1 Prepared for the symposium “Emotions that matter”, University of Tennessee March 6-7, 2003 EMOTIONS AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE by Jon Elster Columbia University I. Introduction Emotions matter in two ways. They matter because of what psychologists call their “valence”: they can be intrinsically pleasant or painful, desirable or undesirable. They also matter because of their “action tendencies”: they can shape behavior. Often, they matter in the second way because they matter in the first. The six Frenchmen who killed themselves in June 1997 after being caught in a roundup on consumers of pedophiliac material did so (I assume) because they could not stand the unbearably painful emotion of shame. The same motive must have been at work in two French women, a mother and her daughter, who killed themselves in 1815
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8/7/2019 Elster - Emotions and Transitional Justice