Darwall shows that emotions such as resentment, guilt, gratitude, and anger are not human versions of responses that we might observe in other animals but ways in which the demand for accountability, which arises spontaneously between creatures who can know themselves as “I,” translates into the language of feeling.3 At the heart of these emotions lies the belief in the freedom of the other, a belief that is irreducible, in that we cannot discard it without ceasing to be what we fundamentally are. For what we are is what we are for each other—relation is built into the very idea of the human
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