Imagining Moral Emotions
The general point is that we want to know when to hope that someone is regretful (perhaps for a mistake) or contemptuous (perhaps towards a fake), and when to fear that they may be resentful (perhaps that one has told an inconvenient truth) or grateful (perhaps because someone has done their job more thoroughly than required). And we do not want these conclusions to just depend on what is conventionally or intuitively considered good or moral. )
- Our moral terms are motivated by our emotions. [Jesse Prinz, the emotional contruction of morals; Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A social intuitiounist approach to moral judgment.”
- Although the way our emotions make us feel about a situation may be inappropriate, or misguided, we cannot retract the fact that our emotional response was thus. However, we can have other emotions regarding our initial emotional response which are a kind of retraction.
- There are some emotions which allow us multiple perspectives. For instance, we might imagine a subjective perspective, say you feel the pain your friend might have experienced when his girlfriend broke up with him, but you might also have access to a more objective emotion wherein you feel the hurt caused by your friend when he cheated on his girlfriend. “ ‘Objective’ here means, I think, not that it is some sort of physical fact, but that a person who saw the situation objectively — that is, not through one’s own eyes — would react that way” [128]. Moral emotions, given these multiple perspectives then, are imagined “complex emotions built out of two others. . . ” [131]. “The first is an attitude to a real or imagined occupant of a point of view. . . . The second is an attitude from this point of view towards an act or pattern of action” [131].
- There is a great diversity and variety of moral emotions. These can correspond with imagined points of view. Further, “moral emotions, in all their discord and variety, are generated by hanging simple emotions towards people and situations along branching points of view” [139], a point of view which can vary. This might account for the problematic effects that empathy can sometimes manifest in our behaviors to strangers. Yet, having two perspectives which are oppossing [subjective and objective (in part)] to one another, will allow us to act as “impartial observers distant from the immediate situation. And in this direction we come eventually to a completely detached but rather inscrutable point of view valuing only humanity, justice, welfare” [139]. Morton suggests that this process is similar to that expressed by Lawrence Kohlberg in his “stages of moral development.” However, it is not clear whether this is something that occurs when a child matures through the stages of development from child to adult, or is it something relegated only to a kind of moral development which I think can come about later in life also.
- However, this varied perspective can also to not discount immediately our emotional responses to situations. For instance, we might have an emotional experience because someone mentioned a crude remark. We might initially think that we are over reacting, but as we continue to think about it and attempt to imagine scenarios wherein the remark was benign, it appears to us that there was in fact no justifcation for the remark and therefore our initial emotional response is appropriate.
- Moral Emotions which do not necessarily enable moral learning, or possibly prevent it: smugness, hypocracy, etc. For instance, “[w]hen you are smug, you feel approval from some respected source, directed at your general character and actions” [150]. This allows three things:
- An attitude to others wherein you hold some advantage over them.
- You become satisfied in your current state and therefore do not need change of any kind.
- 1 and 2 lead to complacency wherein you become comfortable in maintaining ideas of superiority over others; even if these ideas are not warranted.