Introduction
In the recent past, studies in the field of cognitive science have brought forth overwhelming evidence on the relationship between moral judgment and emotions. However, research on this topic a couple of decades old. For instance,StanleyMilgram, a social psychologist, carried a research on this topic in the 1970 where he instructed his students to approach strangers in New York subway and request for a sit. The research did not receive the kind of reception Milgram expected, he noticed that most of the students declined to participate. However, one student who offered to do the research aborted it prematurely. Left with no alternatives, Migramdecided to carry out the research himself. From the research, Milgram was able todemonstrate that it is emotionally taxing to do thing against social and moral rules (Blass, 2004).
This report will collect evidence from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and research on psychopathology to demonstrate that emotions and judgment are both correlated and necessary. From secondary sources, the paper will explain that sentimentalism, and further show that to judge that something is ‘bad’ is to have disapprobation toward it. In addition, the paper hopes to show that moral facts are response-dependent. To accomplish the paper, several philosophical theories will be useful.
Evidence for the relationship between moral judgment and emotions
Historically, philosophers have tried to show a link between moral judgment and emotion by armchair reflection. Philosophical analysis uses conceptual questions to conduct studies however, on thepaper, the questions are thorny because many of the concepts in Philosophical analysis are open textured, graded, or polysemous in addition, the philosophical intuitions are divided. The first questions, which is empirical to the study, is that: do ordinary moral concepts have an emotional component? To answer this question the paperwill be demonstrating what goes on in the peoples’ mind when they use the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Principally, the empirical questions can be answeredwith philosophicalmethods however, lab studies can also be useful. By impressing methodological promiscuity, the paper purpose to combine empirical and philosophical results.
Currently, chunks of evidence favor the conclusion that moral judgments are emotion in nature. However, studies show that emotions and moral judgment interrelate. They hold that emotions co-occur with moral judgments. It is understandable that this is controversial; however, it is obvious that when we judge that a moral rule has been broken, is typically a negative emotional response. Many studies that have been conducted in support of this fact based on what goes on the human mind during moral judgment.
In a study by Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, and Eslinger (2003) on moral judgment and emotion, study subjects were evaluated using moral questions for example,‘you should be at work on time on time’ opposed to factual sentences as ‘wood is made of metal.’ It the scenario, the subjects were asked to answer by saying ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They found that when answering moral questions the areas in the brain associated with emotion judgment were active contrary to when the subjects were answering factual questions. In another independent study, Sanfey et al. (2003) recorded brain activity of subjects while playing ultimatum game. In the research, the playswere asked to divide a monetary sum with another player. They found that when the divisions were deemed inequitable the second player experienced brain activity in areas associated with emotion. On the same note, Berthoz et al. (2002) reached to similar conclusions in a study when the test subjects considered violation of social rules. For instance, when a test subject were told a story about dinner and the serving waiter who spills food on a guestswithout apology. Lastly, Greene et al. (2001) attribute emotions activation to moral dilemmas, and Freedman, Kaplan, and Iacoboni(forthcoming) demonstrate emotions activation as subjects stare at images of politicians they oppose.
Essentially, none of these studies is surprising. The brain simply scans and adds empirical support to a pre-theoretical intuition that emotions are triggered with a wide range of morally events, including law breaking, rudeness, saving livesand unfairness. However, at this stage it is impossible to point at the specific role of emotions using neuroscience. So the question is, is the effect experienced in the brain merely influenced withmoral judgments, or are the test subjectsintimately involved? To establish the answer to the questions, the paper needs other sources of evidence.
Arguably, emotions influence moral judgments, it is common that a negative emotion can result to a person making more negative moral appraisal than they would otherwise have. A study by Schnall, Haidt, and Clore (forthcoming) gave subjects a questionnaire with a series of vignettes and asked them to rate the degree of wrongness of the action described. For instance:
A car hit James’s catin front of his house in the morning. Therefore, he cut up the body and cooked it for lunch. How wrong is that?
Half of the study subjects who read the vignettes were sited at a nice and clean desk while the other half were sited at a filthy desk with a crusty drinking cup, a chewed pencil, a used tissue, and a greasy pizza box. They found that the subjects at the clean desk rated the vignette as less wrong to subjects at the filthy desk.
This findings show that negative emotions, perhaps, merely draw our attention to morally relevant features of a situation. It would be nice to establish that negative emotions can be sufficient for making negative moral judgments even when we have no other reason to think that a situation is wrong. Haidt and his collaborators have obtained evidence in support of this stronger sufficiency thesis. In another study, by Wheatley and Haidt (forthcoming) that is set to explain the pang of disgust individual experience when they hear the word often, the test subjects are given vignettes that contain either the word often or it synonym. Part of the vignettes contains morally reprehensible characters, however, the other describe characters who are morally admirable. Subjects who are hypnotized to feel disgust when they hear the word ‘often’ judge that the morally admirable characters are morally wrong when that word appears in the vignettes! This is an indication that a negative feeling may give rise to a negative moral appraisal without any specific belief about some property in virtue of which something is wrong. In another similar study, Murphy, Haidt, and Bjo ¨rkland (forthcoming) asked subjects to verify their belief that a case of consensual incest between siblings is wrong. For every justification subjects provided, he gave a reply that rendered the justification irrelevant to the case. For example, most subjects claimed that if the siblings had sex they might have offspring with birth defects. Murphy replied by saying that the siblings used birth control. After several epicycles like this, a few subjects said that incest might be okay under these special circumstances, but the majority insisted that incest is still wrong in such cases, simply because it is disgusting.
Such findings and many other more suggest that people can form the belief that something is morally right or wrong simply by having a positive or negative emotion directed to it. Essentially, emotions are sufficient for moral appraisal however, are they necessary? I believe there is enough evidence to support the necessity thesis. Particularly, emotions are important component of moral growth and development. To be more specific, contrary to language, the children require training in order to conform with moral rules, consequently, parents spent a lot of time together with the children in order to instill moral instructors to them. Interestingly,parents use three unique techniques to convey moralrules, but all of them recruit emotions (Hoffman 1983). The first technique is the power assertion that involves physical threats and punishments that is intended to elicit fear. In practice, the children opt to conform to what the parent are saying not necessary because they understand but because of fear of being canned or bitten. The second technique is induction, which involves orienting children to some harm they just caused. Essentially, the technique elicits distress, for example, a parent may say, ‘hey John, you made the baby cry!’ The third technique is love withdrawal; in such a case, the parent elicits sadness via ostracism. For instance, the parents may inform the childrencertain behavior will to ‘no playing.’ In practice, the techniques condition the child to experience negative emotions in conjunction with misdeeds (Kennet, 2002). However, the paper does not implying that emotions are necessary for moral development but, it is actually suggestive.
Necessity of emotions in moral development can be drawn from psychopaths’ researches. They are most preferred because they are profound deficient in negative emotions for example fear and sadness. Psychopaths at rare occasions experience these emotions; in fact, they have difficult in recognizing them in either speech or on facial expression (Blair et al. 2001, 2002). Principally, they experience less pain compared to other test subject, they are not amenable to fear conditioning, and theyare not disturbed by images that cause fear in most people (Blair et al. 1997). Meaning that, psychopaths suffer the list from negative emotions. The emotion deficit explains why they cannot acquire empathetic distress, remorse, or guilt. Principally, the indifferent in emotion seem to explain their ant-social behavior. Consequently, it proves difficult for them to make a genuine moral judgment. Mostly, they give lip-service to understanding morality, but there are reasons enough to believe that they do not have understanding of moralconcepts. For instance, they mayacknowledge that their acts of crime are ‘wrong’ but they do not understand the importance of these words. Oneclassic study by Cleckley (1941) compares psychopathy to being blind. He argues that a psychopath may state that he understand and can differentiate between good and evil but the interesting point is that they is no way of them to understand. On the same note, a study by Blair (1995) to investigate moral concepts in psychopaths, he found that these people treat ‘wrongs’ in a manner that they are conventionally accepted in society. In other words Psychopaths treat the word ‘wrong’ as if it simply meant ‘prohibited by local authorities.’ Research on psychopathy demonstrates that emotions are developmentally necessary for a person to acquire the capacity to make moral judgments.
The final thesis for the paper is that emotions are necessary in asynchronicsense. Obviously, it is normal to say that it is wrong to murder without emotion attachment. This rule has been committed to memory. Literally, it is like stating,‘ripe bananas are yellow,’ without trying to form the metal picture of yellowness. The point am trying to bring across is related to dispositional, is it really possible for one to attest that killing is morally wrong without being disposed to the negative emotion of killing? The intuition is that such a person would confused or insincere. In support of this statement, let us consider a person who knows everything non-emotional about killing. Such a person knows that killing diminishes utility, and that killing practically irrationalizes, that is, going by universal maxim, ‘thou shalt kill’. We will all agree that such a person knows that killing wrong. Conversely, if a person harbors a strong negative sentiment towards killing, therefore, it can be concluded he/she believes that killing is morally wrong, even if without any explicit belief on whether killing diminished utility or lead to contradictions in the will. Theintuitions are suggesting that emotions are both sufficient and necessary for moral judgment. However, the requirements necessary for empirical test studies for the necessity of emotions poses a challenge coming up with, but future studies might examine this question and make meaningful conclusions.
Hypothetically, if a subject blockedfrom negative emotions orstrongly induced by positive influence then is asked to make a moral appraisal, it is expectedthat negative appraisals might become attenuated. This is common ifsubjects are presented with casesthan cannot beeasilyassessed using platitudes such as ‘killing is wrong’ (MCdowell, 1985). Moral blindness because of positive influence can be used to explain why peoplewhosuffer frommaniaarefrequently pronetoantisocialbehaviorduringmanicepisodes (American Psychiatric Association 1994, 330).
Sentimentalism
Sentimentalism theory of moral judgment
The above evidence is a theoretical demonstration of moral judgment. Moral judgment might be correlated with and casually related to emotions without involving emotional response. The arguments so far presented on this paper points that link moral judgment with emotion to some level, however they are far from decisive. The rest of the discussion will be on the British moralists theme that has a theory that states:
In this paper, the term sentiment will be used as a disposition of emotion. For example if you love a black forest cake you are bound to feel excited when you see it on the menu and feel disappointed after realizing that they have run out. Sentiments of disapprobation and approbation are constituted by different emotions on different occasions. The paper will be concern with sentiments of approbation because of simplicity. Peoples’ emotions experience hinge onwho is receiving a blame and for what. If someonedoes, something wrongshe/she will feel guilt or shame. There is scientific explanations of transgressions elicit and negative emotions. According to Shweder et al. (1997), there are three broad categories of rule: to protect people, community and pertaining to natural order. Rules to protect persons general protect against harm and violations of rights. Those that protect the community pertain to public goods and ranks. Lastly, the natural order category refers to those related to religiondietary, sexual mores and among others.
Essentially, it is clear that these rules are associated with different emotions (Rozin et al. 1999). To be more specific Crimes against persons elicit anger, crimes against community provokes contempt, and crimes against nature provoke disgust. In addition, the degree of the felt emotion can vary with the wrongness of the action. In other words,his range of disapprobation emotion can vary if you distinguish the subtype in each category. One dimension of variation is intensity. Consider anger. If someone harmsanother person badly, he/she may experience fury, but if the harmnegligible, he/she may just shake the head with vague annoyance. As well, we can also distinguish subtype of anger as a function of the elicited condition. Anger is labeled indignation when provoked by injustice, and rage when provoked by a physical assault. Notably, anger can also change subject to the kind of relationship that transpires between the transgressed and the transgressor (Nicholas, 2002). If it is between friends then we expect sullen brooding, however if a stranger is involved they may expect wrath. A full account of disapprobation limits the boundaries of the variations in question.
The sentimentalist thesis states that when judgment is made on how wrong something is, we expect an occurrence of one or another of these emotions occur, and that the judgment will be because of the underlying emotional disposition. When ruling on how something is wrong, in essence, we are referring of disposition (or its categorical basis), and manifestation of a specific motion disposition. Literally, the emotion part is a vehicle of the concept ‘wrong’ which can be compared to the purpose an image of some specific hue might serve as the vehicle for the thought that bananas are yellow. Tokens of the concept ‘wrong’ may be identical to emotions, however it is possible to have, and self-ascribespecific beliefs about wrongness without any attachment emotions. When it is stated that moral judgments express sentiments, it does not mean that moral judgments are merely expressive. Rather it means that it is better to prefer sensibilitytheories,accordingtowhichmoralconceptsrefertoresponse-dependentproperties (Prinz, 2004). Moral judgments express sentiments, and sentiments refer to the property of causing certain reactions in people. The reactions in question are emotions, which are regard as feelings of patterned bodily changes (Prinz, 2004). Sentiments often refer to response-dependent properties. If some says,‘a chocolate cake is sweet.’ He/she ascribe to chocolate cake the property of causing, e.g., pleasure in them. It is quite confusing but the fact is, these individuals are ascribing to the properties. It is assumed that likeability or humorousness is an intrinsic property; likewise, in the assumption that blue is a feature of surfaces, not a power, which the surfaces possess to cause experiences within us.
Obviously, there is more information needed to defend this version of sentimentalism presented in the paper. The paper may have fall short of details to full account and defend its position. However, for the purposes of explanation the paper has offered what can be used in linking moral judgment and emotions. The paper has systematically tried to demonstrate that to that to harbor a moral belief is to have a sentiment of disapprobation or approbation. The hypothesis makes the most sense of the data adduced in the previous section. Emotions co-occur with moral judgments, influence moral judgments, are sufficient for moral judgments, and are necessary for moral judgments, because moral judgments are constituted by emotional dispositions (either standing dispositions or manifest dispositions). At least our ordinary moral concepts seem to have this character. However, this topic could have been more relevant if it was accompanied with a primary research to proof and show how it has been able to arrive to its conclusions. Overall, it provides basis for future researches.
Conclusion
The paper has presented evidence to demonstrate the relationship between moral concepts and emotions. In summary, the arguments of the paper were built on sentimentalist theory of moral concepts, where the consequence of the theory hold that moral judgments are generally motivating due to the emotional forces they have. The paper acknowledges that fact that moral judgment can sometimes occur without including emotions, however these are parasitic on emotional cases. Normative judgments, which are not parasitic related to emotions, may be referred as ‘moral’, however, not in the sense of the term.
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