Abstract
Emotion is a popular topic, and there are a number of theories that connect emotions to morality and our decision making. Unfortunately, few of them start from an understanding of moral theory and so few can advise us in emotional evaluation in any thorough-going, robust sense. Much of the recent interest in emotion and morality comes from scientific disciplines, and while psychology and neuroscience are, of course, indispensable endeavors, being scientific and observational practices, they are not well suited to presenting arguments about the way that people should behave or about the way we should evaluate our emotions. We shall also see that, far from being the external, unnatural, and awkward constraint those unfamiliar with the meaning of morality fear it to be, moral decision making is internal to the experience of emotion, and denying or insufficiently developing our moral nature frustrates our emotional lives.
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Notes
Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3.
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 25.
Nussbaum makes this point; see Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8.
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (New York: Routledge, 2001);
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral Understandings: Alternative Epistemology for a Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia, 4 (2) (1989): 15–28.
Lawrence Blum, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
Michael Stocker and Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 82.
See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Books, 2003);
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: The Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Wilmington, DE: Mariner Books, 2000).
Ronald de Sousa, “The Rationality of Emotions,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Rorty (Oakland: University of California Press, 1980);
Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Perhaps the latter idea—that emotions break stalemates in rational thinking, like arbitrary whims—should count as a reason that emotions are irrational.
Bechara et al., “Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy,” Science, 275 (1997): 1293–1294.
Roxanne Khamsi, “Impaired Emotional Processing Affects Moral Judgments,” NewScientist.com, March 2007.
Patricia S. Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification (New York: Routledge, 1988).
Richard Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford Press, 1991).
Jesse Prinz, Gut Reaction: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9.
Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 81.
The reasons that we cannot seek to perfect others are a bit harder to understand. Denis canvasses Kant’s arguments for this conclusion and finds them unsatisfactory, so long as we avoid being paternalistic; see Lara Denis, Moral Self-Regard: Duties to Oneself and Others (New York: Garland, 2001), 143–157.
Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
See Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
This is Rachels’ argument about psychological hedonism. See James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006).
Paul Rasmussen, The Quest to Feel Good (New York: Routledge Press, 2010).
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© 2015 Diane Williamson
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Williamson, D. (2015). Emotions, Decision Making, and Morality. In: Kant’s Theory of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498106_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498106_4
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