Olivia Bailey (University of California, Berkeley): 'Growing up and getting better: on some neglected costs of sensibility change'
A sensibility is a world orientation that ultimately manifests in one’s patterns of emotional evaluative apprehension. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. Sensibility change is a familiar part of growing up, but its practical and moral stakes remain under-theorized. I make the case that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions of value. I explore some questions that these observations invite, including this one: (when) is it fitting to feel regret or ambivalence about losing first-personal access to prior sensibilities and their deliverances, even if one judges that those prior sensibilities were comparatively benighted?
