Where We're Going and Where We Started

Sketch of the Ultimate Conclusion

It’s going to take some time to get there, so let me go ahead and tell you where I’m taking you. Pretty much any ethical theory you care to mention thinks of the emotions in one of two ways: the emotions are completely mental phenomena, by which I mean things like the sort of reasoning that goes on when you do algebra or when you’re playing a strategy game; Or they are purely physiological phenomena, nothing more than than the feeling of nausea you might get when going on a roller coaster, or the warmth in your chest you might feel when you’re watching a romantic film and the lovers finally get together, and nothing to do with “reasoning”. Lately, and I mean in the last 10-20 years or so, there have been some thinkers who’ve tried to explain how emotions really are mental and physiological phenomena. That’s the right idea, but unfortunately, we’ll see that nearly all these efforts really are little more than the same old cars with retreads, satellite radio and a new coat of paint. (I promise to defend that when we get to contemporary theories).

The thesis I’m going to take so long setting up maintains that emotions are properly understood by a “pluralistic’ theory that acknowledges them as both physiological phenomena and intimately involved in our decision making in moral situations. This is so in large part because research in neurophysiology and evolutionary psychology and biology show that any theory of the emotions that’s going to agree with the findings and provide insight into emotions’ role in ethics must accept (1) that there are two levels of emotions, (2) that ‘cognition’ and ‘emotion’ are intricately intertwined, and (3), that there is constant duplex communication, two-way feedback, between the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’. Such a theory can be derived out of the psychological and ethical theories of Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius and research from psychology, neurophysiology and evolutionary biology.

In the Beginning

Homer’s Iliad offers one of the best and most thorough depictions of the emotions in ancient literature that we can get our hands on. It is all the more important because Homer is at the core of the Greek culture that later spawned Western philosophy, and the work of Plato, Aristotle and even Lucretius on the workings of the mind, body and emotions grew out of Homer’s baseline. I’ll explain how.

Homer’s depiction of the people who lived during the time of the war for Helen of Troy (@1200 B.C.), people I call Iladics, gives us a picture of cognition that has reasoning thoroughly embedded in emotion and a picture of mind that is completely physical. I call this account the visceral theory because all the action is thought to go on in the viscera. The visceral theory holds that reasoning and emotion are physiologically largely undifferentiated (indistinguishable) responses to intense fleeting desires. To put it more clearly, the emotions, like all mental activity, are nothing but certain physiological changes and the behavior they cause. But as I say, in Homer it is as if there is really no difference between a person who is emoting and one who is thinking – there’s no distinction between “cold” or detached thought and “hot’ or emotion-laden mental activity.

The Homeric concept of mind holds that the work we take to be done by the brain was done by the lungs and a combination of breath and blood they called thymos, which was held to be found in the lungs. This idea of the chest, especially the lungs, being the center of a person, and the thymos as being in some sense you, your living essence, was present in some sense through even Roman times. I don’t know if you find that as fascinating as I do, but I think you’ve got to agree that it means that on this theory the basic, baseline conception of the mind is that it is a physical thing and not a ghost or spirit of some kind. And there’s more evidence for this when we look at the words they used to describe mind and mental activity.

Consider that while for us “to know” something (e.g. that I’m wearing gray slacks, or that Conan is funnier than Jay) means something like acquiring more or less abstract justification (evidence or reasons) for something we experience or for a claim we believe, for an Iladic person, knowing something was described by R.B. Onians as coming to a “stable and active feeling or sentiment”. It’s almost like when Stephen Colbert claims he “knows with his gut” and is therefore very assertive about his beliefs. And if such a person knows Conan is funnier than Jay, they might want to beat Jay senseless for getting back the Tonight Show.

When you read the Iliad with this in mind, its hard not to see how practically any time one of the people in the book perceives something, they automatically have an emotion about it and immediately are compelled to act. I guess in this way they are like your average 3 year old – but they are adults; kings and generals, even. Of course some things make this emotion and compulsion to act stronger than other things, but its very often overwhelming and long-lasting. Here’s a couple of brief passages describing what I mean:

“The man is raving – with all the murderous fury in his heart. He lacks the sense to see a day behind, a day ahead...”

“Achilles – he’s made his own proud spirit so wild in his chest, so savage, not a thought for his comrades’ love...”

It stands out even more when you look at literature from Greeks of the classical age. They exhibit a much greater detachment from the things they experience. Like us they clearly have the ability to think “in cold blood” and without immediately lashing out physically. Basically, since the time of the Iladic people, humanity has learned to make distinctions between different aspects of mental activity. Now consider the flip side of actively knowing something – forgetting.

When Iladic people forgot something, it wasn’t just that they stopped being immediately aware of something, they completely and immediately lost the feeling and compulsion to act. For example

“...a second grief this harsh will never touch my heart while I am still among the living...But now let us consent to the feasting that I loathe”

“Achilles placed the lock in his dear comrade’s hands and stirred in the men again a deep desire to grieve. And now the sunlight would have set upon their tears if Achilles had not turned to Agamemnon so quickly: ‘Atrides – you are the first the armies will obey. Even of sorrow men can have their fill’”

Its as if everything to you felt like an emergency, as if everything as as intense and important as finding yourself at the scene of a horrible accident. You see what is happening and constantly feel compelled to run in and get involved, but then suddenly you want to buy some donuts, so you stop what you were doing and just walk away, wondering whether the crullers were going to be fresh when you get to the store. I guess it makes sense that the word Homer used for ‘to forget’ literally means 'to let escape breath which can be breathed in our breathed out'.

Now I’ve forgotten a lot of stuff in my time, but that’s not how it is with me. I’ll pick up here in the next installment.

The Flip Side

Before beginning in earnest, I want to note one more thing. The flip side to moral realism is basically that there is no actual right or wrong, but that instead morality is relative. Closely tied to this view is non-cognitivism, a family of views which hold that because moral claims, e.g. "murder is wrong" can't really be right or wrong, saying something like "murder is wrong" is really just saying "boo murder". That is, non-cognitivists think of moral claims as being merely emotional expressions of attitudes towards behaviors or people; you don't like how killing, or drinking, or atheists, or polygamy, or what-have-you make you feel and so you express your anger/fear/disgust by saying it is "bad' or "wrong". Someone else who likes how these things make her feel will say they are "good" and "right". And neither person can really claim to be "correct" any more than the other.

I think that non-cognitivism is ridiculous and trying to discredit it was the number one motivation for me writing the dissertation I wrote. As there are different versions of non-cognitivism, however, the task is quite complicated. So I settled on doing my best to see how I could undermine one of the most influential non-cognitive theories, David Hume's sentimentalism or moral sense theory.

The thing is, David Hume is one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and his theories are still very influential, so in order to do a good job of undermining his view, I needed to be thorough. My hope was that if I did a good enough job on this, I could be in a position to undermine any similar ethical theory, maybe even all non-cognitivist theories. I decided the way to go about doing this was to focus on the emotions. Like any ethical theory, sentimentalism has a view on what the emotions are and what they do (we'll get to that later). I charted out a likely story on how sentimentalism got its position on the emotions and the impact of that view on the credibility of sentimentalism.

In fact, I did this for several specific ethical philosophers, who I grouped into three camps based on their views on the emotions. Here's a cheat sheet for later: I found that Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius were Pluralists, philosophers such as the Stoics and Descartes were Cognitivists, and philosophers and thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and William James were Non-cognitivists. These views on the emotions, which I'll explain as we go along, lead these thinkers to conclusions about morality. So to the extent they are right or wrong about the emotions will determine how right or wrong they are about morality. In the next post I will begin from the beginning.

Human Similarities and Ethics

As I explained, I share Aristotle's view that the proper way to ground moral theory is to acknowledge that there are some crucial general abilities, goals and virtues across the human race, but that given varying circumstances, different people will likely reach them by different actions.

The question is what to focus on. I'm already on board with Plato's and Aristotle's view that human intellect is at the core of who we are and of our ethics, but the fact of the matter is that its very easy to get confused as to what this amounts to. For example, in the past people have thought that the importance of the intellect means we should seriously separate mind and body, and others have argued that we must separate thinking from emotions.

In my philosophical studies I've come to find that some of the worst philosophy is done in defense of such distinctions. Unfortunately, its also the case that people defending these distinctions have been quite loud and influential. So I had a strong inclination to see if drilling down into how thinking about the "human intellect" has effected how ethical theory has evolved over time. To me, the obvious choice was to focus on the emotions, to understand how ethical theorists had understood them, and to see what our best current research could tell us about their nature.

I figured that since the emotions seem to be such a major part of our moral lives, it is reasonable to expect a good moral theory to have a solid, justifiable theory about what part the emotions play in how we think and act in moral situations. So I decided it would be quite valuable if could get a good handle on how and why major ethical theories understand the emotions the way they do, and judge them on their own terms as well as in light of contemporary scientific research on the nature of the emotions.

With this research in hand, it would be possible to improve the Aristotelian approach in particular, and 'cognitive' approaches to morality in general. And it might turn out that we can completely dismiss theories that are fundamentally flawed regarding the nature of the emotions. So that's what I did. Let me explain.

Three Influential Moral Theories

As I said in my last post, I’m solidly in the group of people who believe there is a real right and wrong, that morality is not arbitrary. But as I explained, I reject the idea that we can somehow appeal to God to understand what right and wrong are. If he exists, he may well know what right and wrong are, but as I explained, I think it is irrelevant.

So how can we go about figuring out what is right and wrong? That’s a very big question and answering it can lead to a whole lot of other questions. For instance, lurking just behind this question is the question of how we can know anything at all. That is, what makes something count as knowledge rather than opinion? Unfortunately, getting into epistemology is its own project and we won’t be able to tackle that in this blog. Because of space and time limitations, and because I’m not a skeptic about knowledge, I’m going to assume that we have a more or less solid agreement that knowledge is possible and that we have solid ways of acquiring knowledge.

So now I’ll briefly highlight a few popular/influential attempts at getting at moral truths. (I consider them all to be moral realist theories.) Other efforts will be examined when the time comes.

Eudaimonism

Aristotle, building off of Plato, argued that we could discern right and wrong actions and good and bad people if we could first pinpoint an ultimate good. After considering several strong candidates, e.g. pleasure, Aristotle determines that happiness is the ultimate good, because it is good in itself and is what everyone strives for. Nearly all other good things are actually tools for being happy. Further, because human intellect is of fundamental importance, Aristotle reasons that it is legitimate to expect that the pleasures of the mind would be preeminent, so that achieving happiness is in large part an intellectual endeavor. From here Aristotle can argue that, unless you are willfully contrarian or a thorough skeptic, humans, given what they are, will be able to agree that many things are likely to increase the likelihood of happiness and others will increase the likelihood of unhappiness. Some of these things will turn out to be under our control but many others, such as the fate of our family members, or of our nation, are largely out of our control.

Of course, Aristotle also famously counsels that “virtue is the mean”. This sage advice has been the victim of oversimplification and of confusion. So let me explain it by offering a metaphor. Imagine you’re at target practice, firing a gun, or an arrow, or a shooting a basketball at a hoop. Obviously you’re aiming for the target and if you hit the bull’s eye or sink the basket, you’ve done ‘good’ and you’ll be ‘happy’.

But now imagine that the target is moving back and forth or side to side on a rail. And that other people are shooting at the same target even while standing in different positions. Well even though everyone is shooting at the same target, the shot will look different to each person and at different times, and they’ll have to adjust their shot accordingly.

Even though everyone wants to be happy and needs to do things like be brave, be wise, be just, and be self-controlled, what this will look like will vary. So he can allow for some relativity even though there is no relativism. I for one find this sort of analysis astute, but if you’re the sort of person that wants hard and fast rules for how to act in any situation, this is going to leave you wanting more.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is deceptively simple to grasp. The basic idea is that the right thing to do is what will make the most people feel pleasure. So, on its face it might recommend that Spider Man let Mary Jane die in order to save a bus full of people. But of course the situation is much more complicated, for the basic reason that calculating how much happiness is created by an act is really difficult to do. After all, it’s at least possible that Spider Man and Mary Jane’s happiness at her survival could outweigh the happiness created by the survival of everyone on the ill-fated bus. If it’s a bus of school children it would be less likely but if it was a bus of violent criminals it would perhaps be more likely. Still, different models of utilitarianism are quite influential and it’s hard to deny that we all often think in a utilitarian fashion.

Kantian Moral Theory

Kant’s ethics is based on the agreeable-enough notion that humanity is special. Because humans are capable of moral thinking and acting, we are innately special and must all be regarded as precious beings. So basically, all things being equal, we must endeavor that all our actions treat people with the regard they deserve. Kant recommends the Categorical Imperative as a rule that will allow you to do so. Think of what ‘categorical’ and ‘imperative’ mean; something categorical is for every case and something imperative must be done, so the categorical imperative tells you what must be done in every case. And for those of you who want moral rules to follow, this may be your ticket. Kant argues what we must do in every case is treat the people we are in contact with as ends in themselves¸ and not as simply means to our own ends. Let’s not get too caught up in the terminology though. All he is saying is that every human is innately special just because they are human, and your actions must recognize that. And just like you, every other human has their own wants and needs, and are trying as best as they know how to get them. So you should never do anything to another person that uses them as a tool for you to fulfill your wants needs at the expense of their wants and needs. Right away you can see that things like killing and lying are going to be out of bounds in practically every circumstance. As useful as this can be, critics find that there is a pretty straightforward problem here. Ironically, you can make categorical imperatives about almost anything; As long as you define the situation specifically enough, you can probably make it so that whatever you are doing can be made into what absolutely must be done by anyone in the same situation.

So basically there are three very influential ways of trying to ‘ground’ right and wrong, (1) acknowledging that there are some crucial general abilities, goals and virtues across the human race, but that given varying circumstances, different people will likely reach them by different actions; (2) acknowledge that our thoughts and actions are pleasure driven and that maximizing overall pleasure is the goal (3) Find an algorithm or “rule-producing rule” based on the innate specialness of human nature that will allow us to guide all our actions in a way respectful of everyone.

For various reasons I’ll explain soon, I decided that the best overall approach is #1, and my work is an attempt to help strengthen and improve it. Next time I’ll turn to the hows and whys.