Hope and Positivity

The chapter is an attempt to make sense of a commonly recognized but poorly understood aspect of hope: its positivity, namely, its involving an ability to find goodness and to feel good in circumstances of hardship, danger, suffering, misfortune, injustice, etc. The focus is on two questions: First, what exactly is one positive about when one hopes? Second, why is one positive about that thing, or in other words, what, if anything, makes it rational for one to be positive about that thing? Various proposals for answering these questions on the basis of existing theories of hope are considered and rejected, and a more satisfactory answer is developed on the assumption that hope is fundamentally a form of valuing not so much of the hoped-for outcome, but of the object for the sake of which one hopes for that outcome.