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Psychopaths and Filthy Desks

Are Emotions Necessary and Sufficient for Moral Judgment?

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Abstract

Philosophical and empirical moral psychologists claim that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for moral judgment. The aim of this paper is to assess the evidence in favor of both claims and to show how a moderate rationalist position about moral judgment can be defended nonetheless. The experimental evidence for both the necessity- and the sufficiency-thesis concerning the connection between emotional reactions and moral judgment is presented. I argue that a rationalist about moral judgment can be happy to accept the necessity-thesis. My argument draws on the idea that emotions play the same role for moral judgment that perceptions play for ordinary judgments about the external world. I develop a rationalist interpretation of the sufficiency-thesis and show that it can successfully account for the available empirical evidence. The general idea is that the rationalist can accept the claim that emotional reactions are sufficient for moral judgment just in case a subject’s emotional reaction towards an action in question causes the judgment in a way that can be reflectively endorsed under conditions of full information and rationality. This idea is spelled out in some detail and it is argued that a moral agent is entitled to her endorsement if the way she arrives at her judgment reliably leads to correct moral beliefs, and that this reliability can be established if the subject’s emotional reaction picks up on the morally relevant aspects of the situation.

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Notes

  1. The most obvious and straigthforward way for the rationalist about moral judgment to incorporate the necessity-thesis seems to be to argue for a cognitivist position in the theory of emotion. If emotions just are cognitive states (evaluative judgments), then the fact that emotions are necessary for moral judgment does not have to intimidate the rationalist the slightest bit. For an overview over this position, see Deigh 1994. For a defense of cognitivism about emotions, see Solomon 1976; de Sousa 1987; Greenspan 1988; Helm 2001; Stocker and Hegeman 1996; Nussbaum 2001. I do not argue for emotional cognitivism in this paper, because I want to avoid the problems the cognitivist has with offering a psychologically realistic picture of the emotions without overintellectualizing them (a point that Peter Goldie (2000) insists on).

  2. In what follows, I shall argue that emotions are sufficient for moral judgments only if they cause them in a justification-conveying way. On a dispositional view of the emotions, there seems to be a problem with unmanifested dispositions. If there can be such dispositions, and it seems that there can, one might ask how these can convey any justificatory force to the judgments which are based on them. In the theory of moral judgment, the motivation to use a dispositional concept of emotions is to allow for cases in which the respective emotion is not occurrent. The content of the judgment has been committed to memory. This is impossible, however, if the disposition to have a certain emotional reaction that judgment is based on has never been manifested. Thus, the problem of unmanifested dispositions will, though metaphysically possible, typically not be a problem in the case of emotional dispositions.

  3. This, in a nutshell, is Prinz’ “constructive sentimentalism”, cf. Prinz 2007.

  4. The concept of reliability employed here may strike some as odd, because reliability doesn’t seem to be about getting it right in a range of circumstances, but about getting it right on most occasions. In this sense, my use of the concept of reliability is stipulative to a certain extent. Roughly, what I have in mind is that a method of judgment-formation is reliable if it satisfies a sensitivity-condition (a judgment that p is sensitive iff ∼p → ∼Bx(p) and p → Bx(p), cf. Nozick 1981, 176). Both conditions are important because, given the empirical evidence, disgust reponses that pick up on extraneous features are ruled out by the first conjunct, cases of artifical mood induction that prevents people from picking up on morally relevant features are ruled out by the second conjunct. For an overview over the concept of reliability in general epistemology, see Pritchard 2005.

  5. Neo-Sentimentalist accounts of moral judgment analyze moral judgments similarly, namely in terms of conditions of appropriateness for emotional reactions: on that view, to make a moral judgment is to think it appropriate to have an emotional reponse (of guilt, resentment etc.) towards an action, person, or event (see, for example, Wiggins 1998; Gibbard 1990; McDowell 1998). I have argued elsewhere (Sauer 2011) that this account is not successful, particularly because it does not offer a satisfactory response to the so-called “conflation problem” (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000; Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen 2004; Olson 2004).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tom Bates, Pauline Kleingeld and Markus Schlosser for their very helpful comments to an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted to the organizers and participants of the workshop Philosophical Implications of Empirically Informed Ethics at the University of Zürich, March 2010, especially to Anne Burkard, Markus Christen, Jan Gertken, Bert Musschenga, Hichem Naar and Shaun Nichols. Two anonymous referees from Ethical Theory and Moral Practice have made very useful suggestions, for which I would like to thank them as well.

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    Hanno Sauer

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Sauer, H. Psychopaths and Filthy Desks. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 95–115 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9274-y

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