Emotions & Morals, pt. 5b: Reflections -- British Sense Theorists

Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith in their own distinctive ways were attempting to explore what counts as moral and -- although less explicitly or directly in their writings -- what should count as moral.  They did so by seeking to discover how human psychology worked and by giving due attention to the observation that we humans respond to moral matters powerfully and initially with our emotions.  They were engaging in an interdisciplinary study of ethics and psychology in light of Newton's recent findings of natural laws, and they saw a connection between the way that humans worked and what was proper or fitting for them to do or say in certain situations.  The precise basis for their normative claims is open to question, and the mechanics of human moral psychology are still being explored three hundred years later.

As I reflect on the relationship between emotions and morals through these three British sense theorists, an important consideration emerges, which is the nature of an emotion and its power in and over humans.  Hume seems to view emotions, or passions, as equivalent to but distinct from physical sensations, which is why he posits a separate faculty to process their moral content.  Emotions for him are given in the way that perception of an apple on a table is given. Are they really sensations like that?  Smith seems to have recognized that our feelings are not just given; they are malleable.  That is the basis, in fact, for his view of sympathy, or imaginative exchange with another person, and the device of an impartial spectator to evaluate and to question what was the proper passion to feel morally in a particular situation.  Smith's goal was emotional conformity to the impartial spectator's objective moral assessment of propriety and, to a secondary extent, utility.

Among many things that could be said, let me, in conclusion, mention only two. One relates to the passivity or activity of emotions, and the other pertains to the  narrative structure that emotions imply are connected to ethics.

1) How Passive Are the Passions?

First, although British moral sense theorists like Hume may be faulted for viewing the passions as things that just happen, moral responses within us to which our rational agency (however defined) is passive, Smith saw passions both as feelings that we have as well as feelings that we can modify, curtail, develop, criticize, reject, and adopt.  He also saw a constructive role for them in constructing and strengthening relationships between persons and within communities.  This brought to mind the thesis of Robert Solomon in his suggestive but sometimes overstated and frustrating book The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life:

Against the alleged passivity of the passions, I shall defend the theory that our passions are our own doings, and thus our own responsibility.  And in place of the familiar lack of discrimination which takes all passions to be of equal value, I shall attempt to identify those passions with which I believe people can live best, in the light of reflection, and with the unhesitating acceptance of responsibility for the world we are thereby creating for ourselves.    My goal, in other words, is to break down and destroy the debilitating and unnecessary conflicts between reason and passions, to bolster our appreciation of the passions without thereby denying our "reason."  (The Passions, pp. 25-26)

Part of the way that Solomon tries to do this is by redefining passions and emotions as evaluations and judgments, things we typically say are reached by reason.  This gives an active and constructive dimension to emotions.  On his account, emotions are both things that we feel and things that we do, and in the doing of experiencing emotions we execute a performative effect on the world and others around us:

What is an emotion?  An emotion is a judgment (or a set of judgments), something we do.  An emotion is a (set of) judgment(s) which constitute our world, our surreality, and its "intentional objects." An emotion is a basic judgment about our Selves and our place in the world, the projection of the values and ideals, structures and mythologies, according to which we live and through which we experience our lives. (The Passions, p. 125)

R. C. Solomon (1942-2007)

Solomon seems to me to have in his book and outlook an overly existentialist vision for the place of emotions in life and the agency that he gives to humans to do things with them.  Still, his study is valuable because it is a genuine wrestling with the same basic question that the British sense theorists asked.  Moreover, Solomon may overstate his idea that "our passions are our own doings," as if we have complete control over our emotions and moods; however, he seems on target in insisting that we take responsibility for our emotions.  He so insists that we take responsibility for our emotions because he understands that emotions are not feelings that we keep bottled up inside of ourselves concealed completely from others, and that is because our place in the world is never isolated from interaction with others.

Further, if we see emotions as (sets of) judgments in even something of the way that Solomon suggests, which is to say that they have idea concepts involved with them, then seeing them in this way may position us to trace the implied premises that we understand always to be embedded in emotions. It is only by some move similar to what Smith suggests of imaginative sympathy that we will be able adequately to fathom the implied premises that explain another person's and our own felt judgments and especially our sense of moral agreement or disagreement. Within emotions are implied oughts.

2) Do emotions imply a story? Do ethics imply a story?

Second, the question that keeps returning to my mind as I think about the relationship between emotions and morals is the question of story.  A pressing issue of practical significance for us is not only the nature and function of the interaction between moods and morals, between emotions and ethics; it is also the nature and function of narrative within normativity.

If emotions are entangled with ethics, and if it can be established that emotions assume narrative elements, then by transitivity it could follow that ethics assume or are entangled with narratives.  The associated argument might look like this:

1. Ethics presuppose emotions. 
2. Emotions presuppose narratives. 
3. Therefore, ethics presuppose narratives. 

The argument takes the form:

1. If A, then B. (If there is ethics, then there are emotions.)
2. If B, then C. (If there are emotions, then there are narratives.)
3. Therefore, if A, then C. (If there is ethics, then there are narratives.)

Either or both of the first two premises might be challenged, but let us, given our series on moral sense theory and our own experiences of feeling the strong emotional connection to moral matters, grant premise 1 (even if it is not formulated precisely).  Let me briefly unpack this argument and defend premise 2 by drawing upon two helpers, Robert Nozick and Robert Solomon.

Robert Nozick contends that emotions reflect a full and physiological response to what we sense/feel/belief is valuable, and this response allows us to affirm those things of value, to experience them in our being, and to be filled out in a certain way -- enhanced as human beings.

Our current suggestion is that emotions are a response to value (whatever the correct theory of intrinsic value might turn out to be).
          When we respond emotionally to value, rather than merely judging or evaluating it mentally, we respond more fully because our feelings and physiology are involved. Emotions are a fitting and appropriate response to value. ...

Our emotional capacity, then, constitutes one portion of our value-creating power; and being originators of value is part of our own special value.  Emotions give us a certain depth and substance, too, a fact that becomes clearer when we also consider emotions that are not positive.          This leads us to an additional even shorter answer to the Spock problem.  Emotions make many things -- the situation of having emotions, our lives as they include emotions, and also ourselves as beings with emotions -- more valuable, more intense, and more vivid than otherwise.  Emotions do not simply feel good; intense and fitting emotions make us more.  (Nozick, The Examined Life, pp. 92, 95)

What is implied in his view that intense and fitting emotions make us more?  Implied is an idea of both the progression of time and personal progression.  Emotional experience and enhancement as human beings require temporal duration and a concept of what is good for humans (or a ranking of goods), which permits the comparative evaluation from a positive state to something more.  Progression through time or ontological enhancement, Darwin told us, need not be teleological in the strict sense of having a predetermined goal or fixed concept of the good.  But when we see our lives as valuable, and especially when we see them as enhanced in some way, then we see our lives as directed toward some good, toward some purpose, with a beginning, middle, and on the path to an end.

Robert Nozick (1938-2002)

Emotions, further, as a response to value imply this sort of structure. There is an antecedent action; this action prompts an emotional response, which in turn reflects, or in the response itself makes, a moral judgment (i.e., whether the emotion approves or disapproves of the initial action); and the emotional judgment of approval or disapproval leads to or constitutes some result (e.g., reconciliation with, yearning for, or dismissal of a person).  Emotions imply an assessment that things are right, wrong, or could possibly better or worse.  When we experience an emotion, in other words, our experience presupposes or instantiates a process with a beginning, middle, and end -- a plot or story, and our emotional response is our narrative telling of this story to ourselves.

I am reminded of E.M. Forster's famous distinction between a story and a plot:  "The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot."  Although I might quibble with his definition and distinction of terms, he makes an important point.  What engages us in a story's plot is the emotional element.  What makes ethical subjects so vivid and visceral is the emotional element to the story that we presuppose.

Robert Solomon provides some support for this view of mine by noting that many emotions and moods "recast" the world in narratively-rich terms like hope and redemption, and that is largely because emotions either directly or indirectly pertain to interpersonal relationships, whether to individuals or communities:

Some emotions, and most moods, project all-encompassing systems of metaphysics; guilt, joy, despair, and depression recast my world in purely philosophical terms of sin and redemption, hope and hopelessness. Our emotions carve out our place in the world... Most emotions are concerned, directly or indirectly, with our relations with other people, the distances we enforce between us and the intimacies we seek, the trust with which we share our experiences and the defensiveness with which we wall ourselves off. At the heart of every emotion is a set of fundamental ontological and evaluative commitments, defining the mythologies within which we live and the ideologies we live with. Every emotion, even the pettiest fit of jealousy or embarrassment or the shortest fling of infatuation or indignation, is a micro-metaphysical and ethical system, a bit of philosophy, which is appropriate for us philosophers to make clear. (Solomon, The Passions, p. 194)

This returns me to MacIntyre, through whose summaries of the British moral sense theorists I initially embarked upon this series of posts. In a subtly rich paper about how most people (i.e., non-professional philosophers) approach moral questions and judgments, MacIntyre suggests that the so-called "plain person," whatever the prevailing sociology or cultural forces of the day, "is fundamentally a proto-Aristotelian." What does he mean by saying "fundamentally"?  One key point is just that

every human being either lives our her or his life in narrative form which is structured in terms of a telos, of virtues and rules in an Aristotelian mode or has disrupted that narrative by committing her or himself to some other way of life, which is best understood as an alternative designed to avoid or escape from an Aristotelian mode of life, so that the lives of those who understand themselves, explicitly or much more probably implicitly, in terms set by Kant or Reid or Sidgwick or Sartre, are still informed by this rejected alternative. ("Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy," pp. 13-14)

What this all amounts to, it seems, is the ineliminability of emotions and narrative from human life, which itself is ineliminably ethical in orientation because of our necessary interaction with ourselves, with other individuals, and within communities.  To recognize this is to be confronted with a feature of ethics that it is not clear to me that the British moral sense theorists that we surveyed properly included or explicitly articulated.  What needs to be included sufficiently or articulated explicitly is that the narrative dynamics embedded within both emotions and our lives requires the specification of a goal to which a person's narrative in question is heading. If we plain persons are, as MacIntyre forcefully contends, proto-Aristotelians and potentially fully-fledged Aristotelians, then we must also identify and pursue goods that are both instrumental to that goal and perhaps final in the sense of also being good for their own sake.

Further, we will need, as Adam Smith seemed to grasp, a quiver of virtues, prudence to know what a particular situation requires of us, and self-command to remain on the path that is fitting. The moral life requires imagination to see others and ourselves with different eyes. This enhanced, renewed vision is oriented to the end that we can see others in their human particularity with deeper understanding and see ourselves as fittingly on the path to greater flourishing.  As we proceed, our emotions will both guide and respond in the form of feelings and judgments to the ethical entanglements that shape our advancing story.