In this moral psychology, fear has epistemic rather than merely motivational value

Evidence

These remarks are striking for the ineluctable relationship Hajja Samira draws between the ability to fear God and capacities of moral discernment and action. In this formulation, the emotion of fear does not simply serve as a motivation for the pursuit of virtue and avoidance of vice, but has an episte.. mic value: it enables one to know and distinguish between what is good for oneself and for one’s community and what is bad ( in accordance with God’s program). Notably, according to Hajja Samira, the repeated act of committing sins intentionally and habitually has the cumulative effect of making one into the kind of person who has lost the capacity to fear God, a loss that in tum is understood as the ultimate sign of the inability to judge the status of one’s moral condition. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 978

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Mahmood’s core distinction between emotion-as-motivation and emotion-as-epistemic-capacity, central to her reworking of liberal agency.
• XREF: The claim that an affect enables knowing connects to the vault’s prior work on liberal-feminist assumptions that emotion opposes reason; also recalls Spivak on epistemic frames. — connects to: Freire held that fear naturally attends critical teaching and must not be abstracted away — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 434
• DEEPTHINKING: This is Mahmood’s pivotal theoretical move of the whole book: fear as an instrument of moral knowledge, overturning the secular-liberal equation of fear with heteronomy/coercion.