Admiration and Motivation

Introduction

What is the motivational profile of admiration? According to some philosophers, the typical motivation that arises from admiration is a desire to emulate. Linda Zagzebski (2010, p. 54), for example, claims that “the feeling of admiration is a kind of attraction that carries with it the impetus to imitate.” Similarly, Mark Schroeder (2010, p. 42) claims that admiration “is the kind of state to motivate you to emulate the people you admire, insofar as you are able.” This claim was also popular amongst philosophers of the Enlightenment. Moses Mendelssohn argued that admiring character traits produces the wish “to be equally capable of such a sublime disposition” and as a result produces a “desire to emulate” (Lessing, Mendelssohn, & Nicolai, 1972, p. 168). It is not just philosophers who find this view appealing. In his literary essay on the subject of admiration, the American author W. D. Wetherell (2010, p. xiii) claims that “Admiration leads to emulation, which is anything but passive; the mentors described in this book, almost every one of them, stirred me to action, if only in my thoughts and dreams.” Similarly, the Scottish author and Chartist reformer Samuel Smiles (1876, p. 82) claimed that “Admiration of great men, living or dead, naturally evokes imitation of them in a greater or less degree.”

Despite the popularity of this view, there has been very little attempt by philosophers to evaluate the plausibility of this claim. This is unfortunate, as not everyone finds this view plausible. Gotthold Lessing (Lessing, Mendelssohn, & Nicolai, 1972, p. 59), for example, claimed that admiration is a paralyzing emotion rather than a motivating one.

The issue of whether admiration leads to a desire to emulate is important for several reasons. First, it is important for the project of classifying different emotions. One way in which certain emotions can be distinguished from others is by their motivational profile. For example, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p. 69) claims that the motivational profile is crucial in distinguishing pity and compassion, as “readiness to assist the object is much more evident in compassion.” In the same way, clarifying the motivational profile of admiration may help in the task of distinguishing admiration from other related emotions.

In addition, this issue has important practical implications for how we should utilise admiration in education. Admiration has been claimed by Zagzebski (2017) and Mendelssohn (Lessing et al., 1972) to have an important role to play in education (particularly moral education) and development. It is no coincidence that both also saw a close connection between admiration and a desire to emulate. In order to be capable of properly assessing the role that admiration should play in education, we need to first get a proper understanding of the motivational profile of admiration.

Finally, the issue of whether admiration is connected to a desire to emulate has consequences for philosophical debates in value theory. The fitting attitude account of value is one that has received a great deal of attention in recent years. According to this view, something is of value if and only if there are reasons to have a certain proattitude towards it (see the formulation given in Rowland, 2015, p. 1455). This view has been claimed to face a problem, as there appear to be cases where we have good reasons to have proattitudes towards things that are not valuable (Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen, 2004). According to one recent attempt to defend the fitting attitude account, this problem can be solved in part by appealing to the claim that admiration is linked to a desire to emulate (Schroeder, 2010). The question of whether admiration is connected to a desire to emulate will be important for determining whether or not this approach to solving the problem is successful.

The aim of this article is to investigate this issue. I will start by investigating Linda Zagzebski’s arguments in favour of the emulation view. These arguments are based on appeals to phenomenological and empirical evidence. I will then provide three objections to the emulation view. First, I will argue that it struggles to accommodate the fact that we can experience admiration for nonhuman animals and objects. Second, I will argue that it struggles to accommodate typical cases of admiration for other people. Finally, I will argue that it fails to explain the plurality of responses that can be appropriate when one admires someone or something. These problems give us good reason to search for an alternative account of the connection between admiration and motivation. I will turn to this task in The Value Promotion Account section, where I will argue that admiration typically involves a desire to promote the values that people appraise the object of admiration to possess. This view of admiration presents an expanded picture of the connection between admiration and motivation. Rather than viewing a desire to emulate as fundamental to admiration, we should instead view it as one of several appropriate responses. I will argue that this account of the connection is able to accommodate the problems facing the emulation view and fits more easily with both the empirical evidence and our intuitive thoughts about the kinds of motivation we associate with admiration. Finally, I will briefly consider the implications of my view for education, arguing that it can provide a fuller account of the motivational uses of admiration in education.

Before I begin, it is worth making explicit two assumptions I will be making in this article. First, I will follow Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p. 56) and Zagzebski (2006, p. 60) in assuming that admiration is properly classed as an emotion. However, I will not follow Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt (2009, p. 106) in distinguishing between the emotion of elevation (roughly moral admiration) and admiration (all other forms). My reason for this is that I intend to contribute to the philosophical discussion on the concept of admiration, which makes no distinction between the two. The philosophers whose views I am discussing in this article all use the term “admiration” rather than “elevation” to refer to the moral form of admiration. As Zagzebski (2017, p. 41) explains her position: “‘admiration’ is a perfectly good term for our emotional responses to both morally and non-morally exemplary persons.” In order to avoid making this discussion unnecessarily confusing for the reader, I will follow this usage of the term admiration. We might worry that using admiration in this broader way could obscure a potential difference between moral and nonmoral admiration. To avoid this worry, I will ensure that the arguments I make apply to both moral and nonmoral forms of admiration. ¹

The Emulation View

How should we understand the claim that admiration leads to a desire to emulate? The first kind of connection we might posit between admiration and emulation is a necessary one. This seems to be the kind of connection that Zagzebski (2012, p. 89) has in mind in the following: “To admire someone is to see the person as attractive in the sense of a model or an exemplar, and to feel a desire to imitate the person.” Zagzebski’s claim here is that to admire someone is both to see them as a model and to desire to emulate them. The reason for this is that a desire to emulate is, according to Zagzebski, part of what the emotion of admiration involves. As she puts it, “The power to move us is present [emphasis added] in the emotion of admiration” (2006, p. 20). It is present because this is a key part of what admiration is. Zagzebski (2015a, p. 209) claims that one of the “fundamental features” of admiration is that it “gives rise to the motive to emulate the admired person in the way in which she is admired.” ²

What exactly is meant by emulation here? Zagzebski (2017, p. 43) explains that admiring someone “gives rise to the motive to emulate the admired person in the way she is admired [emphasis added]”. If I admire a kind person for her kindness, then, according to Zagzebski, this will give rise to a desire to become kind myself. The desire to emulate, then, is a desire to possess for ourselves the features we admire in the other person. Zagzebski supports her view with an appeal to phenomenology. In her description of her admiration for Sir Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, she claims that although she has no overriding desire to emulate him, “I do find that my admiration for his sense of dignity includes [emphasis added] an impulse to have that sense myself” (2012, p. 89; see also Zagzebski, 2017, p. 20). Zagzebski’s point is that, when we examine what it is like to experience admiration, we find that a desire to emulate, albeit a defeasible one, is part of this experience.

In addition to Zagzebski’s phenomenological claims, this view is also supported by empirical psychological research into admiration. For example, Immordino-Yang and colleagues (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009; Immordino-Yang & Sylvan, 2010) conducted a study in which participants were exposed to stories about the virtuous acts of others. The participants then spontaneously brought up in subsequent discussion the desire to be a morally better person and perform noble actions. This led Immordino-Yang and Sylvan (2010, p. 110) to conclude in their analysis of the implications of their findings that admiration is a “profoundly motivating” emotion. Similarly, a set of studies conducted by Algoe and Haidt (2009) asked participants to report their experiences of admiration and then asked them about the motivational impact of this emotion. The results of the experiments showed a positive relationship between (both moral and nonmoral) admiration and a desire to emulate (for further empirical support for this connection, see Aquino, McFerran, & Laven, 2011; Cox, 2010; Freeman, Aquino, & McFerran, 2009; Landis et al., 2009; Schnall, Roper, & Fessler, 2010; Thrash & Elliot, 2004; Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, 2010).

These studies, together with Zagzebski’s (2012) phenomenological claims, seem to give us good reason to accept her initial claim of a necessary connection between admiration and a desire to emulate. However, in more recent work, Zagzebski (2017) refines her earlier position by denying that a desire to emulate should be viewed as a necessary part of admiration. Instead, Zagzebski claims that admiration involves finding the object of admiration attractive in some way and “the way in which the object is attractive typically [emphasis added] gives rise to the urge to imitate or emulate the object of emulation if possible [emphasis added]” (2015b, p. 254). This position places two restrictions on the connection between admiration and emulation. First, the motivation to emulate is only a typical rather than a necessary response. We should not expect all instances of admiration to involve a desire to emulate. In fact, Zagzebski (2017, pp. 50–90) says that deviant cases of admiration may become distorted and lead to an envious desire to “see the admired person deprived of her admired features.”

Second, Zagzebski claims that we would not expect admiration to lead to a desire to emulate when emulation is impossible. According to Zagzebski (2017, pp. 39–40), a desire to emulate is only a feature of admiration for “acquired excellences,” those that are achieved through hard work, and it is not a feature of admiration for “natural talent,” those talents that one is born with. To support this claim, she gives the example of her own admiration of any man who can sing the last verse of “Walk the Line.” Her admiration here is combined with a doubt that there is any way for her to emulate those who sing in such a deep voice, which she takes to be an ability people are either born with or not (2017, p. 38). This contrasts with her admiration for someone’s generosity of spirit. This is something that can be emulated and also gives rise to the desire to emulate. Zagzebski (2017, pp. 35–40) proposes then that a desire to emulate is a feature of admiration for acquired excellences but not of admiration for natural talents. The emulation view should be understood as positing a connection between typical experiences of admiration for acquired excellences.

Given the examples Zagzebski gives, we might be tempted to understand her as making a distinction between moral and nonmoral virtues. However, this is not how she intends the distinction. As she points out, “the main division in admirable traits is not the division between intellectual and moral traits. It is the division between the natural and acquired” (2017, p. 39). The important feature here is not the domain of excellence, be it moral or otherwise, but whether the talent being admired is a natural or acquired excellence.

It is also important to note that the claim that Zagzebski is defending is not simply an empirical one. After all, Zagzebski (2015a, p. 209) maintains that a desire to emulate is one of the “fundamental features” of admiration. How should we understand this claim given that Zagzebski thinks that a desire to emulate is not a necessary feature of admiration? The most natural way to understand this claim is that this is the motivation that is a feature of prototypical cases of admiration. As Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p. 6) has argued, it is a mistake to try and provide clear necessary and sufficient conditions for emotional categories. Rather, inclusion in an emotional category is determined by the degree of similarity to prototypical instances of the emotion. In giving an account of an emotional category, then, we should seek to identify features that prototypical instances of the emotion will possess. Adopting this prototype approach to emotional categorisation enables the following plausible interpretation of the emulation view:

This formulation is not committed to the claim that a desire to emulate is a necessary feature of admiration, as it is only making a claim about prototypical instances of the emotion. Moreover, it is only making a claim about cases of admiration for acquired talents. However, it is doing more than making an empirical claim about a statistical connection between admiration and motivation to emulate. Rather, it is claiming that the cases of admiration that should be considered prototypical, involve a desire to emulate.

Objections to the Emulation View

In this section, I will introduce three objections to the emulation view before going on to provide an alternative account in The Value Promotion Account section.

The Value Promotion Account

I have raised three objections to the emulation view. These problems may not by themselves give us conclusive reason to reject this account. However, if we can find an alternative account that can retain what is attractive about the emulation view while avoiding these problems, we will have good reason to prefer that alternative account. In this section, I will provide such an account.

The starting point for my proposal is suggested by Adam Smith (1759/2007, Part 1, Section 1, 4.3), who says that “Approbation heightened by wonder and surprise, constitutes the sentiment which is properly called admiration.” Smith is not alone in suggesting a link between admiration and approval. Charles Darwin (1872/1998, p. 269) claimed that admiration is “surprise associated with some pleasure and a sense of approval.” This suggestion that admiration involves approbation or approval of the object being admired provides a useful starting point for thinking about the connection between admiration and motivation. Smith’s claim picks out a central feature of admiration. When we consider typical instances of admiration like our admiration for saints or heroes, film stars, or great works of art or literature, these all involve an approval of the person or object being admired. Approval then seems to be a core feature of prototypical cases of admiration.

This approval seems plausibly understood as a form of positive evaluation of the object being admired. The idea that emotions involve appraisals of some kind is a popular one amongst philosophers of emotion. As Michael Brady (2013, p. 13) points out, “Emotions . . . involve an appraisal or assessment of a situation.” This claim is uncontroversial. To fear something is to appraise it as dangerous, while to feel pride is to appraise oneself as having achieved something. What is controversial is the issue of how exactly the appraisals involved in emotions are to be understood. According to cognitivists (e.g., Nussbaum, 2001; Solomon, 1976/1993), these appraisals should be viewed as judgements, others hold that these appraisals should be viewed as perceptions (e.g., Döring, 2003; Goldie, 2000; Prinz, 2004), and these appraisals may also be viewed as “concerned construals” (e.g., Roberts, 1988). On Zagzebski’s own account, emotions involve both a perception of value and a characteristic feel (2003). When we experience admiration, we see the object of our admiration as admirable (Zagzebski, 2017, p. 33). The differences between these different accounts are important but, for my purposes, it is enough to note that emotions typically involve appraisals and leave the precise nature of these appraisals aside.

Not only does it seem plausible to think that emotions generally involve appraisal, it seems particularly compelling in the case of admiration. When we admire a dancer’s grace or a hero’s courage, we are making a positive evaluation of their grace and courage. Without such a positive evaluation, it would seem contradictory to claim that these were instances of admiration. It is unsurprising, then, that Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p. 56) claims that admiration involves “A highly positive evaluation of someone,” while William Lyons (1980, p. 90) claims that it involves “An evaluation of their object which can be classed as a pro-evaluation or approval.”

To summarise, I propose the following account of a fundamental feature of admiration:

I am not claiming this to be a complete account of the evaluative component of admiration. More work would need to be done to distinguish the evaluation involved in admiration from that of the related emotions of adoration, love, awe, and reverence. ⁶ What I am claiming, though, is that this is a paradigmatic (and perhaps even necessary) feature of admiration. Moreover, it is one that Zagzebski (2017, p. 33) would endorse, given that she holds the emotion of admiration to involve a positive evaluation of the object being admired.

This aspect of the judgement involved in admiration serves as the basis for my alternative account of the link between admiration and motivation. Given that admiration involves a judgement of value, the right link to motivation is to a desire to promote the value or values that are the focus of the admiration. My account, then, is as follows:

It is worth clarifying one aspect of this view before proceeding. The value promotion view holds that admiration will lead people to be motivated to promote the value they admire in the object of admiration. This does not mean, however, that an admirer will be motivated to maximise that value. For example, one might think that there may be situations in which the value of honesty could best be promoted by being dishonest oneself. Perhaps a business ethics professor could best promote the value of honesty by making up a study that claims honesty is the most profitable strategy for business leaders. In this case, we might think the value promotion view would hold that this is what someone who admired someone’s honesty would be motivated to do. However, this would only be the case if we assume a maximising approach to value promotion. We might equally hold that this kind of case would not really count as promoting the value of honesty. The value promotion view is neutral as to whether such a case would count as promoting the value of honesty, so is not committed to saying that this is the motivation that would result in this case.

This account differs from the emulation view in several ways. First, it offers an account of the motivational profile of admiration that covers a wider range of cases of admiration. While the emulation view covers only instances of admiration for acquired excellences, the value promotion view also provides an account of the typical motivational responses to admiration for natural talents and for nonhuman animals and objects. Second, the value promotion view is also wider in another way, as it includes a wider range of motivational responses to admiration rather than restricting itself only to a desire to emulate.

However, this account shares with the emulation view the belief that admiration will often lead to a desire to emulate. This view of the connection between admiration and motivation can give a clear account of why, in certain situations, we might expect an admirer to form a desire to emulate the object of their admiration. An appropriate response to contemplating those features of a person that we view as valuable is to consider whether we could possess those same features. When the answer to this question is positive, then one way of promoting the values that we admire in the object of admiration is to form a desire to emulate the person. If I admire someone for her kindness, then I may well be motivated to perform similar acts of kindness myself. The reason for this is that if I judge some feature of a person to be valuable, then it will often be appropriate to form a desire to possess that feature myself. This is because value and reasons for action are intimately connected. If something is valuable, then there is often reason to bring it about. ⁷

Importantly, however, this view of the connection between admiration and emulation is not committed to the claim that admiration paradigmatically leads to a desire to emulate. The reason for this is that someone can judge that some feature of a person or object is valuable without judging that it would be valuable for herself to possess that feature. Even if someone judges that it would be valuable to possess that feature, they may also judge that any attempt to acquire it would be unsuccessful. Someone may even judge a feature to be valuable and possible for her to possess, but also judge that there are more effective ways in which she can promote the same value. In all of these cases, the agent judges that there is some feature of the object of admiration that is valuable but that she does not have reason to try to attain it for herself (or if she does have some reason, it is defeated by other reasons). ⁸ In such cases, we would not expect the admirer to be motivated to emulate the object of admiration.

This account fits more easily with the phenomenological evidence examined in the Objections to the Emulation View section. In cases where the admiring agent is judging some feature to be valuable but not one that they have reason to try to attain for themselves, we would not expect them to be motivated. This is a problem for the emulation account, given that it is committed to the claim that in prototypical cases of admiration, a desire to emulate would exist. The value promotion account, on the other hand, allows for a wider range of prototypical responses. Admiration for a moral saint or a more committed marathon runner that is not accompanied by a desire to emulate need not be classified as an atypical instance of admiration for an acquired excellence. Instead, the value promotion view would hold that the admirer will be motivated to promote the values being admired in other ways. For instance, the admirer may promote these values by applauding the runner’s performance thereby encouraging them to continue their training.

This view of the motivational profile of admiration is also capable of explaining why other responses to admiration can be just as paradigmatic as a desire to emulate. There are, after all, many ways to promote values. We can seek to promote a value in our own person or character, in which case, a desire to emulate the object of admiration would be an appropriate response to admiration. However, there are other ways of promoting something that is valuable that do not involve promoting it in our own person. Rather than trying to promote some valuable characteristic in ourselves, we might instead try to promote it in someone else. As discussed before, rather than trying to become a great novelist myself, my admiration of George Eliot may motivate me to encourage my friends and family to read her work. This may be a more fruitful way to promote the aesthetic value of literature than engaging in the hopeless task of attempting to write great or even acceptable literature myself.

In addition, the value promotion view has no problem accommodating admiration for nonhuman animals and objects because, unlike the emulation view, it does not hold that a desire to emulate is a fundamental feature of admiration. The value promotion view is compatible with the object of admiration being nonhuman. The emulation view struggled to accommodate these cases of admiration, as it is unclear what it would mean to emulate the magnitude of the heavenly bodies or the collective workings of an ant colony. It seems implausible to say that admiration will involve a desire to emulate in these cases. However, the value promotion view faces no such problems here, as it can allow for other forms of motivation in these cases. Admiring the collective workings of an ant colony may motivate me to encourage others to appreciate the wonders of nature. Similarly, admiring the magnitude of the heavenly bodies may lead me to try and convey a sense of the wonder they can invoke to others. In both cases, the motivation is one that promotes what I find valuable in the object of my admiration. The fact that the value promotion view is able to accommodate admiration for nonhuman objects means that it is able to present a more unified picture of the motivational profile of admiration than the emulation view.

The final advantage of the value promotion account arises from a careful examination of the empirical literature on admiration. In The Emulation View section, we saw that a number of empirical studies have found evidence to support the claim that admiration often leads to a desire to emulate. However, other empirical evidence supports a less optimistic view of the link between admiration and emulation. A series of studies by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters (2011) found no evidence of a link between admiration and motivation to emulate. In a series of studies, students were prompted with emotions and then asked or tested for motivation levels. They found that benign envy (envy that produces a levelling up motivation) was positively correlated to increased motivation to improve oneself, while admiration and malicious envy (envy that produces a levelling down motivation), on the other hand, were not. These findings, the researchers suggest, support the hypothesis that “envy motivates while admiration equals admitting defeat” (van de Ven et al., 2011, p. 790).

We might think that, given that this study found no correlation between admiration and motivation to emulate, it grounds a straightforward objection to the emulation account. This study, however, appears to be something of an outlier. Indeed, van de Ven (2017), one of the study’s authors, has recently argued that there is a link between admiration and motivation to emulate and that his earlier conclusion was mistaken. Interestingly, van de Ven (2017, p. 197) claims that a possible reason why his earlier study may have failed to find a link between admiration and emulation is that it focused only on narrow and specific tests of motivation, such as the number of hours students intended to study in the coming semester. In contrast, studies that found a connection between admiration and a desire to emulate asked broader questions. For example, the study by Schindler et al. (2015) asked participants whether they would wish to accomplish similar things as those accomplished by the object of their admiration in areas that they deemed important.

Van de Ven (2017, p. 197) offers two possible explanations for the different findings generated by broad and narrow questions. First, admiration may motivate people to pursue more long-term goals, while envy may motivate people more in the short term. Second, while envy may motivate people to copy the object of their envy, admiration may motivate people to engage in a broader search for ways to improve in domains the admirer finds important. These suggestions are supported by a recent unpublished study by Blatz, Lange, and Crusius (2016), who found that benign envy motivates people to copy the envied person and achieve short-term and specific goals, whereas admiration motivates people to achieve more long-term and abstract goals.

These findings present a problem for the emulation view, as it appears that admiration does not typically lead to a motivation to copy the object of admiration. Rather, it seems as if the motivational role of admiration is not limited to emulation but extends, as the value promotion view holds, to broader and more far-reaching ways in which we might seek to promote the values we identify in the objects of our admiration. In some cases, we may be able to promote these values by simply copying the object of our admiration. In others cases, though, discovering the best ways to promote these values will take more time and careful consideration. Simply emulating the object of our admiration may not be an option or may not be the best way to promote what we value.

I have argued that the value promotion view has a number of advantages over the emulation view. First, the value promotion view fits more easily with the phenomenological evidence examined in the Objections to the Emulation View section by allowing for a wider range of prototypical motivational responses. Second, this view is also capable of explaining why other responses to admiration can be just as paradigmatic as a desire to emulate. Third, this view can easily accommodate admiration for nonhuman objects. Finally, this view seems to fit more comfortably with the details of the empirical evidence about the motivational profile of admiration.

However, it could be argued that this account tells us nothing distinctive about admiration. Instead, the motivation this account holds to be distinctive of admiration could be claimed to simply result from the positive evaluation embedded in admiration. This by itself does not explain why a desire to emulate will be an appropriate response to admiration. If we accept some form of normative judgement internalism, according to which judgements about normative reasons are necessarily connected to motivation amongst rational agents, then a clear connection emerges. ⁹ If we accept this view, our judgements about our reasons for action will be necessarily motivating insofar as we are rational. Even normative judgement externalists would accept that judgements about normative reason will generally (as opposed to necessarily) motivate (see, e.g., Svavarsdottir, 1999, pp. 205–206). This is enough to ground the existence of a connection between admiration and a desire to emulate. The worry here is that it is a judgement of an action or person as valuable that brings about a desire to promote that value. This is important, as this judgement can come apart from admiration. Someone can, for example, judge an athletic achievement as highly valuable without feeling any admiration for the action or the person performing it. It might be argued that the value promotion view would also apply to this judgement, as a positive evaluation consists in a desire to promote the values judged to be present in the object positively judged.

In response to this problem, it should be noted that a similar objection might be raised against many accounts of the motivational impact of emotions. For example, we might take fear to motivate withdrawal from a stimulus judged to be dangerous. This is a comprehensible account of the motivational profile of fear. Note, however, that we might take the judgement of something as dangerous to be sufficient to motivate withdrawal by itself. We might think that this leaves little motivational role for fear to play over and above the judgement of danger. This, though, would be a mistake, as fear will motivate more forcibly than a simple judgement of danger. The same point is true about admiration compared to a purely cognitive judgement of value. While a judgement of value on its own may motivate someone to promote that value, the motivation will likely be stronger when someone experiences admiration. This is supported by Algoe and Haidt’s (2009, pp. 116–117) findings that nonadmiration acts as a mediator on skill appraisals, and moral admiration acts as a partial mediator on prosocial motivations. This provides us with reason to think that, while a judgement of value by itself may motivate, the motivational power of admiration is not fully explained by this judgement.

Implications for Education

Before I conclude, I want to briefly outline the implications of accepting my account for the question of how admiration should be utilised in education. We might think that rejecting the existence of a direct connection between admiration and emulation would provide reason to be less optimistic about the benefits of admiration in education. However, this thought is unfounded. I have not claimed that admiration is not linked in any way to emulation. I have defended a broader account of the motivational profile of admiration. On my account, admiration leads to a desire to promote the values we admire in the object of our admiration. One way in which this can be done is through emulation, but this is far from the only way. My account, then, is perfectly compatible with the view that the educational power of admiration comes from its ability to bring about a desire to emulate exemplars.

However, in comparison to the emulation view, the value promotion view can offer a fuller account of the motivational benefits of admiration in education. According to the value promotion view, there are a number of different motivational responses to experiencing admiration for someone. Admiration may motivate people to engage in other appropriate responses to value, such as applauding and supporting the object of admiration and encouraging others to engage in similar acts. This has an important role in education if we think that it should involve more than just teaching us how to develop virtues within ourselves but also how to encourage the development of virtues in others.

In addition, the value promotion view also provides a potential role for admiration to play in motivating us to respond appropriately to exemplars whom we are unable to emulate. It may be that there are some people who are simply unsuited to some forms of exemplarity. Some people may simply lack the sufficient virtues needed to become a saint and may also have little hope of developing them. Even if they could develop the right virtues, some people may dedicate their life to other noble projects such as becoming a moral hero, a great artist, or a groundbreaking scientist. If we accept that there are a variety of worthy pursuits one may dedicate one’s life towards, and a variety of ways in which a life can be considered excellent, then, part of a fully rounded education will be learning to respond appropriately to those whom we cannot emulate. By providing a broader account of the motivational profile, the value promotion view shows how admiration can play an important role in motivating us to respond appropriately to these exemplars.

Concluding Remarks

I have investigated the connection between admiration and motivation. I started by outlining the emulation view—according to which a desire to emulate is a paradigmatic feature of admiration—and the arguments used to support it. I argued that examining all of the available phenomenological and empirical evidence fails to provide support for the claim that a desire to emulate is a paradigmatic part of admiration. I then raised three objections to this view. First, I argued that the fact that we can admire nonhuman animals and objects is problematic, as it shows that the emulation view only covers a narrow range of cases of admiration. Second, I provided a number of counterexamples that cast doubt on the view. Finally, I argued that the emulation view fails to explain the plurality of motivational responses to admiration.

I then provided an expanded view of the motivational profile according to which admiration paradigmatically involves a desire to promote the value that is admired in the object of admiration. On this view, a desire to emulate is one of several ways in which admiration typically motivates. I argued that this view fits better with the empirical and phenomenological evidence and avoids the objections facing the emulation view. Finally, I briefly explained how this view can provide a broader account of the motivational benefits of admiration in education.