This chapter argues for the relevance of emotion and affect to the anthropology of ethics. It begins with a discussion of philosophers who take emotion seriously as an area of human life that exposes the limits of ethical inquiry, so as to establish emotion as a relation in which something is at stake in a first-person way. With this understanding, the chapter goes on to highlight how classic studies in the anthropology of emotion depicted local moral worlds, relating emotion to the pragmatics of social life and its many problems. A certain strand of affect theory is then brought to bear to make the key formulation more robust by accommodating a broader multiplicity of relations of interest and passion. This discussion highlights the way ethnography – as a genre of writing – can capture a pile-up of affects in unique historical circumstances, revealing how moral agency and states of depression may be found together. Vitalist in spirit, the chapter aims to show how a focus on emotion and affect illuminates a moral agent defined by her vulnerability and responsiveness to matters at stake in the web of relations that constitutes her world.

In Chapter 6, we first review ideas about how illness disrupts ongoing narratives and how narrative reorganization is required to make sense of illness. We touch on the role of communicating suffering through narrative and how listening to narratives allows healthcare professionals to take the perspective of service users. We then discuss proposals that constructing adaptive narrative identity may be essential in psychotherapy. Following this, we review studies demonstrating that individuals with psychopathology construct their narrative identity with less agency, communion, and positive meaning and that these same features are related to lower well-being. We outline possible relations between trauma, narrative identity, and psychopathology. Finally, we describe relevant studies of first-person perspectives on mental illness and explain how previous research relates to our life story analyses.

In this first chapter, we present two main questions that we seek to answer by analyzing life stories from 118 individuals with severe mental illness: 1) What do life stories reveal about subjective consequences of suffering from mental illness and 2) What do life stories reveal about experiences bringing well-being when living with mental illness? We show how these questions touch upon themes in well-known autobiographies of authors with mental illness. Further, we discuss how answering these questions supplements diathesis-stress models by focusing on identity salient consequences rather than causes of mental illness, and on narrative identity as a source of well-being rather than symptom remission. We argue for the importance of life stories in fully comprehending the subjective side of mental illness. Finally, we provide a roadmap for the remaining chapters in the book.

Since half of this book is devoted to advocating a particular ethical attitude, readers might reasonably conclude that the author feels ethical evaluation is a very good thing. In fact, I believe it is often (though not invariably) good when aimed at one’s own actions, but almost always a fairly bad thing when aimed at other people’s actions. To make matters worse, we appear to have a greater inclination toward the latter than toward the former. This brief afterword turns from descriptive and normative ethics to a third form of ethical study, metaethics. In it, I summarize arguments bearing on the very idea of free will, maintaining that it is a plausible notion only from a first-person perspective on a necessarily incompletely described world. That view of free will entails that, in general, ethical blame should be very narrowly restricted to the first-person perspective. Indeed, with regard even to oneself, it is confined to the present and future.