Impulsiveness, weakness and knowing what you are doing

If people can’t be held accountable for their actions, then there’s really no such thing as ethics. If “good’ and “bad” are really purely relative, then obviously moral codes or legal codes would simply be arbitrary systems and we could do anthropology or sociology or political science to understand why different groups made the arbitrary choices they did.

What Aristotle has argued so far is that people indeed can be held accountable for their actions when they know what they are doing, even if they don’t necessarily see all the consequences of their choices right off. Now we need to build on this and see if there’s anything else interesting going on ethically.

We humans in fact sometimes do what we know we should not and fail to do what we know we should. And according to Plato and Aristotle, the reason for these failures is the pursuit of pleasure – the satisfaction of our desires. We don’t always choose to pursue pleasure rather than what we are supposed to do, sometimes it can be involuntary – but then again we often succumb to pleasure even after deliberation.

Aristotle says the reason we sometimes choose to go for what is pleasant as if it is good and we avoid pain as if it is bad, is that pleasure often appears to be good even when it isn’t. In a word, the promise of pleasure fools us.

Lack of Self Control: Impulsiveness or Weakness

Understanding how we get fooled by pleasure that is only apparently good requires us to understand what self control is and why it sometimes disappears. Doing this requires having a solid grasp of what the emotions are and how they work to strengthen or undermine our deliberation and resolve. This is so important that failure to do so leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of ethics.

Aristotle explains that there are two ways a person can lack self control: impulsiveness and weakness. Impulsive people have a sensitive temperament and are hasty, irritable, intense and act without deliberation. They have a strong natural inclination to follow perceptual appearances (as we do when we are walking around thinking of nothing in particular) rather than waiting for reason to do its work. In Plato’s terms, these people are ruled by their spirit. In Homer’s terms, the thymos of people like Achilles is calling the shots for them. These people tend to find themselves acting without knowing what they should do. Weak people on the other hand, act after deliberation so they do know what they should do, but fail to stick to their conclusions. In Plato’s terms, these people are mastered by their appetitive part. Aristotle says that weak people are held in greater disdain than impulsive ones because they lose self control from a much more manageable state of emotions.

So lets recap: humans can deliberate and therefore our actions can be voluntary. As long as we know what are doing we are acting voluntarily. So really, its largely up to us whether we are going to do what we believe to be the best thing to do in any given situation. But sometimes we don’t. We either get so riled up that we act without knowing what we are doing or we know what to do but chose not to do it because we think we’ll get more pleasure from doing something else. And if something is done unknowingly it is done counter-voluntarily.

But we still need to know whether emotionally based actions are voluntary or not. Aristotle says all emotional actions are done knowingly. So that would mean that they are always voluntary. But you might recall that if something is done knowingly, it can’t be done out of ignorance. This might ring some alarm bells for you because after all, we do talk of people being “blinded by rage” or “made dumb by fear”. Yet at the same time we do punish people for acts committed under the influence of intense emotion, even if we do often consider the outcome to be mitigated somewhat by the presence of strong emotion (killing someone in a fit of rage for attacking your child or sibling is likely to get you much less of a sentence than calmly killing that same person weeks after the incident.)

So there’s a tension there in the common sense, practical ways we think of and handle emotional action. Aristotle wants to capture this tension rather than hide it and explain whether and how it is that emotional actions can sometimes be voluntary yet lacking in reasoning, at other times completely calculated, and still other times be completely uncontrollable.

The way he captures the tension and explains the three tiers of emotional action is by distinguishing two ways of being ignorant: You can act by reason of ignorance or in ignorance of something. Acting by reason of ignorance means choosing to act based on the wrong reasons. Acting in ignorance means you are literally not in a position to use knowledge you may have or ought to have.  So if you had way to much to drink and then do something stupid, well your actions while so very drunk are done in ignorance of things you probably know. But if you choose to do something like buy a bunch of stuff you really can’t afford because “you deserve it” you know you shouldn’t but you are rationalizing it with a mountain of B.S., so you are acting by reason of ignorance.

Together Aristotle’s weakness/impulsiveness distinction and the two types of ignorance allow us to organically formulate a complicated, insightful distinction between emotions of greater and lesser strength and cognitive content. And thus Aristotle’s ethics has a well-grounded, intellectually legitimate, common-sense understanding of the emotions in ethics.

Taking all this together, we can see that Aristotle identifies for us two types of emotion:

1. Emotions that are rapid, strong and nearly impossible to overcome, those that get the best of us especially those of us who are quick tempered.
2.  Emotions that burn slowly, and are informed by reflection. A person should be able to either decline to follow them or bring their force in line with the conclusions of deliberation.

Aristotle knows that this is everyone’s basic stance since it is everyone’s general assumption that when issuing blame or praise, we ought to have more sympathy or at least understanding for those who do to emotional influence act unintentionally but voluntarily (voluntarily but w/o prior deliberation) and harm others than we do for those who harm others out of, e.g. drunk driving.

In the next post we’ll take on relativism and finalize the explanation for how we act good or bad with respect to the emotions.

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.

A Bit of Background

As my avowed purpose here is to share philosophical research and writing with as broad as possible an audience, I need to give some background on why I chose to write on what I did. That is, I need to answer the question "Who gives a damn?" before I get in too deep. So let's get into the background.

I wrote this dissertation because I believe there is an actual "right" and "wrong", that some behaviors and some people are "good" and some are "bad", and that "right", "wrong", "good" and "bad" regarding morality are not "relative", merely subjective opinion.

Many people these days profess that they think right and wrong are relative, and many more profess to believe that right and wrong are absolute. For example, if you are a follower of one of the major Western religions, you probably count yourself among those who think there is an objective right and wrong. Not only that, but you probably have a list of many "wrong" actions and even quite a few "right" ones.

But moral philosophy is not religion. To put it bluntly, few moral philosophers have much interest in religion as a source of insight into right and wrong. While there are many reasons for this, for me it boils down to what philosophers call Euthyphro's dilemma.

Plato, in my opinion the greatest and most influential of all philosophers, wrote a short book called the Euthyphro in which Plato's mouthpiece Socrates lays out a fatal dilemma for Divine Command Theory.

Divine Command Theory is a short way of saying that the reason one might think that the Bible, or parts of it, is true is because God said so. The following argument makes that belief untenable:

1. Is something good because God says it is?

OR

2. Does God say something is good because it is good?


Perhaps you already see the problem, but if not I'll clarify it below.

If Divine Command Theory is true (e.g., if its true that you must obey the 10 commandments because God said so), then it has to be that either

A. Morally good acts/things like the 10 commandments are good because God said so OR
B. Morally good acts/things are good inherently, independent of God's will, and that's why God tells us to do them.

If you choose A, then what is right and wrong is arbitrary. God could say, as he apparently did, that "Thou shalt not kill", and so it is immoral to kill. But if he had said instead, or were to say tomorrow, "Thou shalt kill", it would be moral to kill. That's bad enough but even if intellectually you want to bite the bullet, common sense tells us that no one believes that; it just isn't moral. The world would be chaos if it were.

So what happens if you choose B? In that case, it doesn't really matter that God told you. God doesn't determine what is right and wrong, there is an independent standard. God may have access to it, but what of it? Is he keeping it away from us? Perhaps if we did some thinking we'd understand for ourselves what is right and wrong and why. Isn't that a major difference between adults and children?

OK, so that argument and other related ones are the reason why philosophers do moral philosophy rather than, say, theology. ("That and a lack of faith!", I imagine you're thinking).

Now then, the big problem is that once you give up on using the authority of God to ground right and wrong, how do you PROVE what IS right and wrong?

And my dissertation is an attempt to help answer that problem

Welcome to My Blog

This blog is dedicated to making use of my PhD dissertation in philosophy, "Anger Et Cetera: Understanding the Emotions in Ethics". I defended it on 13 May, 2009 and have spent the time since then contemplating what to do with my research. I considered trying to get it published as-is, but its not highly likely, nor is it very useful to anyone. People rarely read academic texts.

Instead I want to 'translate' it from 'academese' into plain English. I hope this will allow all the thinking and research I put into my dissertation to be of use to society. If it goes well, I think I'll turn it into a book that I could shop to a mass-market publisher.

I envision my material provoking you into thinking about the emotions; what they are, how they work, how they work to create what you consider right and wrong, how they affect your decisions and actions. But most importantly, I want to show you how we can use the emotions to move beyond the pernicious pull of moral relativism and defend a moral realism. For those of you who don't know, moral realism is at bottom the belief that some moral claims are actually true for everyone.

I hope that if you do get provoked, you'll do me the courtesy of sharing your thoughts in the comments area.

I expect comments to be courteous to me and any other commenters. I reserve the right to deny or delete any comments for any reason. And I reserve my copyright to all that I publish here. Any photos, video or artwork that I publish I assume to be freely available and will take down if the owner requests.

Thanks for checking out my blog,

Damien