  FA theory must hold that attitudes such as admiration and approval have standards of fittingness that serve to make certain things, and not others, valuable. Furthermore, these evaluative attitudes must not already contain the thought that their object is good, on pain of circularity. This challenge forces FA theory to engage with the philosophy of emotion. Both Ross and Ewing seem implicitly to accept some version of the feeling theory of emotion, on which emotions—or at any rate “mere emotions”—are simply feelings with no essential cognitive component.