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Moral Judgment and Emotions
... For instance, a person may find the thought of an action contemptible (Swan, 2004 In support, Gaudine and Thorne (2001) suggest negative affect such as depression may lead a decision-maker to become more self-interest, focusing on how the decision may impact on them as opposed to other people. Similarly, Abe, Bagozzi and Sadarangani (1996) asserted that individuals who reason at a conventional level will experience high anxiety as they are motivated by the possibility of social disapproval or the threat of rejection. ...
In examining the affective-cognitive process of ethical decision-making, this study gives a better understanding of how people can take the same information and end up with different decisions, in particular, how different individuals within the same environment can act in both ethical and unethical ways, despite the pressures and expectations of others.
This study integrates emotion into the ethical decision-making process, which traditionally has been conceptualised and studied as purely cognitive. Only recently has research started to move away from the view that emotion interferes with the development of a professional ethic. This study provides support to this new conceptualisation of ethical deliberation, one where emotion and anxiety, in particular, is central to the decision to perform unethical actions.
Furthermore, very few studies have looked at the specific decision considerations that decision-makers focus on when choosing a course of action. Similarly, little research has addressed the role of anxiety in ethical decision-making. Past literature has largely focused on attitudes and moral development. This research shows that a better understanding of the motivations behind one’s behaviour and the anxiety one feels when faced with an ethical dilemma can add further value to ethical decision-making frameworks. Attitudes can facilitate a positive view of an action or potential outcome but they do not guarantee a desire to act.
This chapter offers concluding remarks about emotive context of the presidential campaign and which emotional dimensions had significant influence on voters’ decisions—leading voters to interpret personal feelings as salient political information on specific policy issues. It also reviews thematic and distinctive patterns from the findings that point to evidence that lends support to the negative partisanship framework, and the 2016 presidential campaign along with some possible implications intimated by this evidence.
The concluding chapter examines and reviews the importance of studying emotions in political contexts and the important contributions made by the research on emotions across three presidential election cycles. The research suggests there are discernible contexts in which negative emotions are associated with retrospective voting appraisals and, by the same measure, specific political environments in which positive emotions are associated with prospective voting appraisals. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, this chapter looks ahead and provides a brief survey of the elements that will shape the political context and campaign narratives framing the choices for voters.
Motivational internalists hold that there is a necessary connection between an agent's moral judgments and what she is motivated to do. One way to express the central thesis of this view is as follows:
Necessarily, for any agent 5, if 5 judges that some available action is morally right (or good, or obligatory, or …) for 5 to perform (or to refrain from performing), then 5 is motivated, at least to some extent, to perform (or to refrain from performing) that action.
This is, to borrow a phrase from David Lewis, quite an unlovely mouthful. Perhaps a simpler way of articulating things would be:
Necessarily, an agent's sincere moral judgment that she ought to φ provides her with some motivation to φ.
Yet another formulation of motivation internalism is:
Necessarily, if an agent makes a moral judgment, then she has some desire that favours, inter alia, any course of action that judgment entails.
I discuss two ways in which emotions explain actions: in the first, the explanation is expressive; in the second, the action is not only explained but also rationalized by the emotion's intentional content. The belief–desire model cannot satisfactorily account for either of these cases. My main purpose is to show that the emotions constitute an irreducible category in the explanation of action, to be understood by analogy with perception. Emotions are affective perceptions. Their affect gives them motivational force, and they can rationalize actions because, like perception, they have a representational intentional content. Because of this, an emotion can non–inferentially justify a belief which in its turn justifies or rationalizes an action; so emotions may constitute a source of moral knowledge.
This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a “thick affective concept” A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick affective concept distinctive of the emotion. I argue that the most basic kind of moral judgment is in this category. It has the form “That is A” (pitiful, contemptible, rude, etc.). Such judgments combine the features of cognitivism and motivational judgment internalism, an advantage that explains why we find moral weakness problematic in spite of its ubiquity. I then outline a process I call “thinning” the judgment, which explains how moral strength, weakness, and apathy arise. I argue that this process is necessary for moral reasoning and communication, in spite of its disadvantage in disengaging the agent's motivating emotion from the judgment.
There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995) 1; Ethics 103 (1993) 337). Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This paper argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (a Normative Theory) and an affective mechanism. This account leads to the prediction that other normative prohibitions that are connected to an affective mechanism might be treated as non-conventional. An experiment is presented that indicates that "disgust" violations (e.g. spitting at the table), are distinguished from conventional violations along the same dimensions as moral violations.
The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 67. See also R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals
- Michael Smith
Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 67. See also R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 145–146.