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.

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

Since introducing this short series of posts on the interplay between emotions and morals, I have taken a brief look at how the major British moral sense theorists -- Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith -- addressed that question. It is now time for some reflections, which I will break up into two parts.

Each of the moral theories of these thinkers is subject to critique.  It is worthwhile to mention some limitations.  For the most part, however, I want to focus on what I think is perceptive and valuable in these theories and to note some areas that I think deserve additional consideration both in their own right and in their potential application to life.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 4: Adam Smith -- British Sense Theorists

Adam Smith is the last of the three major British moral sense theorists that we will examine in this series.  Smith was a friend of David Hume's, whom we discussed last time. Smith, much like Hume before him, saw himself engaged in moral science, the empirical description of how we as humans think about morals, how we make moral judgments, and how we assess the motivations, words, and actions of others.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 3: David Hume -- British Sense Theorists

Francis Hutcheson importantly influenced fellow Scot David Hume, although Hume would argue against Hutcheson's particular view of benevolent affections (see prior post on Hutcheson here). Before analyzing closely some places where Hume's moral theory differs from that of his mentor Hutcheson, what, first, is the main area of agreement between them?

Emotions & Morals, pt. 2: Francis Hutcheson -- British Sense Theorists

In the previous post that introduced this series on the British moral sense theorists, I noted that these eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers raise fascinating questions about the role of emotions, or passions, in moral judgments.  Some went so far as to posit a separate moral sense, a distinct faculty that engages those subjects, persons, actions, or thoughts that we judge to pertain to the moral sphere. One of those moral sense theorists is Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746).

Emotions & Morals, pt. 1: Introduction -- British Sense Theorists

Have you ever wondered about the interaction between emotion and reason in forming moral views?  The cartoon below reflects interactions that I am sure we have all had, just as it also reflects a presumed dichotomy between fact and value, reason and emotion, that I have in many ways come to question. Still, it humorously points to the "fact" that reason is not always the only or the strongest influence on belief.

What about our moral beliefs, those pertaining to what we consider virtuous? Our daily conversations with others presuppose the need to provide justification for our beliefs. But what exactly counts as justification?

Indeed, what will legitimately serve as adequate grounds for our beliefs and actions is often disputed. Many times the contention revolves around what one party thinks is based on reason (i.e., conclusions reached by deduction or induction from concepts or empirical data) rather than emotion (i.e., internal sentiments, impulses, or feelings). And the other party might take sentiment to be quite adequate grounding, or at least part of it.

Emotionally Invested in the Union

Yesterday Scotland voted on the question of whether it would remain in the United Kingdom or secede to become an independent nation.  Today the results showed that the "No" vote -- no on separating -- carried by a margin of approximately 55% No to 45% yes.  Historic, yes this vote was. But I am writing because of the mystery surrounding how personally I took it.

It was personal in a way that I cannot fully explain.  I was pleased with the outcome.  I wished for Scotland to remain in the union.  But why?

I have Scottish heritage, but I also have English and Irish and French.  I am an American citizen, and so I had no say in the matter regardless.  I do not have living relatives who live in Scotland or England or Northern Ireland and therefore who would be directly affected.  So why was I so anxious leading up to the vote?  And why was I so pleased when I woke this morning early and read before 5 am that Scotland had voted to remain in the union?

I have reflected on my emotional investment for some time, at least in the weeks leading up to yesterday's vote.  The key question was why.

I have long appreciated the Scottish contribution to much of enduring influence.  There is, in no certain order, the valuable legacy of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith to moral philosophy.  There is Smith's broader contribution to global economics.  There is Thomas Reid's common sense realism, which affected so much of certain strands of western epistemology and even Christianity (particularly among Presbyterianism on both sides of the Atlantic).  There is golf.  There are tartans.  There is the brogue.  There is Sean Connery.  There are the picturesque Highlands, poets like Robert Burns, haggis, and contemporary philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre.  And there is, of course, single malt Scotch, smokey, peaty pleasure in a wee dram -- or more than just a wee dram.

But this appreciation, maybe even nostalgia, could equally tend toward favoring Scottish independence.  Why then did I favor union?

It is hard to say.  I agree with Alan Greenspan that a vote for independence would have "surprisingly negative economic consequences."  The unknown -- unknown challenges, unknown blowback -- is a greater risk than the certainty of sovereignty.  Symbolically, at a time when Europe is struggling to preserve its own political/military experiment which is the European Union (and let us not forget that the EU is ultimately an economic union designed to prevent military conflict among countries where there has been so much of it through the centuries), it would have been antithetical to the rhetoric coming out of Brussels to preserve union if a member country, Great Britain, experienced a secession.  (Yes, Britain is not part of the monetary union, but it is part of the political union.)

So maybe it is loving the idea of Scotland and its distinctiveness but also wanting the best for Scotland and believing that independence would have brought hardship beyond the naive aspirations of certain older generations (mostly in Glasgow) and the excitable youth.  Maybe there is some desire to see Britain Great, and realizing that England and Scotland would likely be less if they were not connected beyond sharing a land mass.  David Cameron had a fair point, namely, that parties in power will come and go, but a vote to separate would be irreversible at this point.  And hasty actions of great consequence, especially when they involve such far-reaching effects as reconstructing (or doing it from scratch) a national security apparatus, choosing and implementing a currency, and looking beyond the potential immediate boon that North Sea oil assets would provide.  What happens generations from now?

Maybe it is realizing the something great would be lost if there were Scottish independence that made me want to preserve that greatness by preserving the union.

It remains difficult to say.  And maybe it will always be inexplicable.  In any event, tonight I raise my wee dram to 300 more years of united greatness for Britain.

The Loving Tensions of Peter Singer

In reading a conversation between Peter Singer and Alex Voorhoeve, I was struck by a central tension in Prof. Singer's explanation of his ethical views.  It is this.  On the one hand, the Princeton University professor insists that human persons share equal respective value and should be both considered and treated on radically equal terms.  On the other hand, he acknowledges that meaningfulness in human relationships stems from considering and treating human persons on fundamentally different terms. How do we reconcile these ideas and senses?

The Human Status of Frances Kamm

What if you could have a thirty-minute conversation with each of eleven distinguished people about their views on a subject in which you were keenly interested?  What would you think?  If you are like me -- and if that subject was, say, moral philosophy -- you would be a little giddy.  So you can imagine my excitement when I ran across and began to read a recent book by Alex Voorhoeve, Conversations on Ethics (2009).

As a way of processing these conversations, I intend to post some reflections on each, starting now with the conversation that Frances Kamm has with Alex Voorhoeve.  Professor Kamm points to what she believes is the deep structure of morality.  The impetus for this in her life as a philosopher was a graduate seminar taught by Robert Nozick, who earlier in Anarchy, State, and Utopia had introduced the so-called "paradox of deontology."

The paradox of deontology involves this tension.  Assume that, on the one hand, you believe that everyone possesses the same rights against being harmed in a certain way, but then ask, on the other hand, how would you answer this question:  "If you could save Abby and Betty from being harmed in that way by instead harming Calvin, why would you not harm the one to save the two?"

The Ethical Imagination of Art

Why, when we see acts of apparent selflessness, do we often swell with emotion?

Why, to put an even finer point on this, when we observe even fictional gestures of sincere compassion, do we pause, tear up, reach for a tissue or a nearby loved one, and become seized with something that transcends admiration -- something that feels like melting?

Art, in its various forms, uniquely taps into the human imagination, grips our emotions, and, if we listen, instructs.  Take, for example, the following short video clip, which of late, and deservedly, has been making the social media rounds.

(The YouTube link for the video is here.

The brief article about the video from Gawker is here.)

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 10: Character

This is the last post in my series dedicated to reflections on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense.  The subject, broadly speaking, is character.

In approaching this topic in this final installment, I thought that I would underscore a number of things that stood out in my reading of Prof. Wilson's book.  These are some matters that I think are particularly important and will likely stay with me for some time to come.  They do relate to character, but some of the strands themselves might not immediately seem to have much to do with it.  My catalog of them may even seem a hodgepodge.  Maybe it is.  By the end, however, the tiles of the character mosaic will, I hope, have come into view, and I will have pinpointed some areas where Prof. Wilson's book has prompted me to think most.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 2: Sympathy

In part 1 of this series of my reflections on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I summarized the book's main aims and shared a few of the most salient points that I found of conceptual and practical value.  In this post, I begin to tackle the book's second section, which examines four key moral sentiments:  sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.  Specifically I focus on sympathy.

As preparation for a review of moral senses such as sympathy, it may be helpful to recall what Prof. Wilson is and is not doing by exploring these sentiments:

I am not trying to discover "facts" that will prove "values"; I am endeavoring to uncover the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural origins of our moral habits and our moral sense. But in discovering these origins, I suspect that we will encounter uniformities; and by revealing uniformities, I think that we can better appreciate what is general, nonarbitrary, and emotionally compelling about human nature.  (26)

In the chapters on the four moral sentiments, Prof. Wilson does just this.  He weaves together the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural origins of these respective moral habits and senses.  In doing so, I find his descriptive observations -- which are helpful in their own right as an organizing heuristic for thinking about moral matters -- to pull me toward practical considerations and action.

I offered a few remarks on sympathy, "the human capacity for being affected by the feelings and experiences of others" (30), in the earlier post.  It helped to exemplify the basic approach to the subject that Prof. Wilson takes.  Sympathy, like the other sentiments, functions in human life as both a motivation for moral action and a standard for it.  A few other brief notes are worth mentioning.

In all of his chapters on the sentiments, if to varying extents, Mr. Wilson explores the relevance of evolutionary biology on the moral sense in view.  The theory of inclusive fitness, advanced by William Hamilton after Charles Darwin, fills out the latter's theory of a species' successful self-propagation over time:  "An individual is reproductively successful to the extent that his genes occur in the next generation, and he can assure that occurrence not only by reproducing himself but also by assisting in the reproduction of individuals who have his genes" (41).

Professor Wilson admits that this theory might explain why we humans sacrifice ourselves for our kin, but it does not go very far in explaining why we humans are willing to sacrifice ourselves for our grandmother, who is past childbearing age and cannot deposit genes to future generations.  It also does not explain why we may rush into a burning building to save a dog or adopted children, with whom we have no genetic similarity (42).

Maybe the notion of reciprocal altruism can help:  "we engage in altruistic acts -- such as helping nonrelatives, caring for adopted children, or being affectionate toward pets -- in order to impress others with our dependability and hence to increase our opportunities to have profitable exchanges with these others" (43).  Mr. Wilson points out that as an explanation this utilitarian idea has truth elements to commend it, but a more basic motivation -- "a prior, dominant fact" (44) -- must be recognized.  We more basically value reciprocity in human relationships to which we are naturally drawn because we fear isolation and loneliness and we value human sociable companionship.  This human trait governs the theory of altruism, and it is at the heart of sympathy.

What can be said about evolution and sympathy, then, is this:  "If sympathy is widespread, it must have been adaptive, but what was selected for is a generalized trait that both encourages reproductive fitness and stimulates sympathetic behavior.  That trait, or adaptive mechanism, is attachment or affiliative behavior" (44; emphasis original).

We are naturally more sympathetic to those to whom we are most similar.  Humans naturally think of themselves first in terms of a small group (a nuclear family, an extended kinship, a local community, religious group), but we can imagine ourselves as part of a larger sphere and, with extra effort, behave sympathetically toward those who differ from us in race, religion, and culture.  Earlier, Prof. Wilson makes the keen insight that "life-styles" today is the nonjudgmental word for what used to be called "character," and I might broaden that to say "culture" (7).  This is a point that illumines the linguistic shift which has occurred in morality and permissible moral discourse, on the one hand, and that, on the other, contemporizes the tendency toward small group affiliation, toward those who live life as we do.

Two towering moral philosophers, both Scotsmen, in their own way identified sympathy as either the source of moral sentiments (Adam Smith) or at least as one of the two extremely powerful and basic sources along with utility (David Hume).  Both men viewed moral philosophy as inextricably linked to the study of human nature.  The place of sympathy in the thought of other philosophers could be mentioned, but the central place of it in Smith's and Hume's writings should prompt us to reflect more than we typically do -- or I have done -- on what it is, how it is manifested, and how it might be cultivated.

Sympathy can lead to benevolent feelings and actions, Mr. Wilson notes, but we should not limit sympathy to the rosier side of life:

Sympathy is often expressed by phrases that convey not tenderness or concern, but anger and vengeance.  If we see an abominable act -- say a man laughing while torturing an innocent baby -- our first reaction is not likely to be an expression of sympathy for the child but rage at its tormenter; and this will be true even if it is not our child.  Sympathy is often wrongly portrayed as entirely a tender sentiment:  sympathetic people are sometimes described as soft, warm, or weepy.  They often are; but they are much more than that, and some of the most sympathetic people have no trace of cuddliness in their temperament.  Even so staunch a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill recognized this:  "It is natural to resent and to repel or to retaliate any harm done or attempted against ourselves or against those with whom we sympathize." (40)

If we do not limit sympathy to the soft and warm side of life, then we should perhaps also be prepared to view anger and vengeance as legitimate moral responses that stem from not just a sense of justice but also of sympathy.

In this way, we may also have stumbled upon an important observation:  moral senses such as sympathy and justice are connected.  We may not be able to say (yet) with someone like Adam Smith that sympathy is the primary cause of moral sensibility.  But we recognize that there is interplay between the moral senses.

Moreover, if there is any truth to the commonplace that men and women are different (a truism to which some do in fact object), and if on the whole it is the case that women naturally display the tender and sensitive side of sympathy more than do men, then men would do well to remind themselves that such sympathy may be a manifestation of moral sense.  And it may be a commendable moral expression just as much as the stereotypical male tendency to display the more violent and vengeful side of sympathy.

If they are so tempted, men, in other words, should not diminish women's proclivity to soft sympathy.  Women, likewise, should not diminish men's proclivity to hard sympathy.  Both may be appropriate, admirable actions stemming from a developed moral sense.  If morality is valued, then the various expressions of the moral senses should also be valued.

To be sure, members of each sex can and often do display the moral trait that I have associated as more typical of the other.  The point is not gender stereotypes per se but better mutual appreciation among the sexes.  Professor Wilson's discussion of sympathy, which recognizes its pluriformity, provides men and women enhanced grounds for doing what they already know that they ought to do:  live patiently in an understanding way with one another.  Sympathy has come full circle.