 To shed light on the sense in which emotions can be justified requires a brief detour on the topic of their “object-directedness” or “aboutness” or “intentionality”. The first distinction we need to draw is the one between particular objects and formal objects of emotions. As Kenny (1963) first emphasized, any X that I can have emotion E about is a particular object of E, whereas the formal object of E is the property which I implicitly ascribe to X by virtue of having E about X.