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Normativity, Realism and Emotional Experience

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Abstract

Norms are standards against which actions, dispositions of mind and character, states of affairs and so forth can be measured. They also govern our behaviour, make claims on us, bind us and provide reasons for action and thought that motivate us. J. L. Mackie argued that the intrinsic prescriptivity, or to-be-pursuedness, of moral norms would make them utterly unlike anything else that we know of. Therefore, we should favour an error theory of morality. Mackie thought that the to-be-pursuedness would have to be built into mind-independent moral reality. One alternative, however, is that the to-be-pursuedness is built into our faculty of moral sensibility. There is a large body of empirical evidence demonstrating that the emotions play a central role in making moral judgments. I shall argue that this helps to explain how normative judgments are reliably and non-accidentally related to motivation. I shall also argue that emotional experience has the right structure and properties to provide us with a defeasible warrant for normative knowledge. The role of the emotions in our moral psychology does not obviously support anti-realism. Rather, emotional experience can be intentional, evaluative, evaluable, and quasi-perceptual. This makes emotional experience a plausible candidate for constituting a non-queer faculty of moral sensibility.

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Notes

  1. Earlier, Mackie writes that ‘just knowing them or “seeing” them will not merely tell men what to do but will ensure that they do it, overruling any contrary inclinations’ (1977). This seems to be an implausibly strong version of internalism according to which the connection between grasping a norm and being motivated to act is non-defeasible.

  2. The argument has the same structure as the standard epistemological argument against Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics (see, e.g., Benacerraf (1973)). Mackie’s ‘error theory’ finds its mathematical parallel in Field’s fictionalism (see, e.g. Field (1988)).

  3. Döring (2007) has also argued that the emotions can explain the motivational force of moral judgments (see further section 8). Whereas Döring takes internalism to be an a priori constraint on practical judgment, I favour the view that non-trivial statements of internalism are false. Arguing the point here, however, would lead me too far astray.

  4. Of course, some mind-independent facts depend on minds in the sense that they are about minds. It may also be that some mind-independent normative facts depend on minds in the sense that they concern the relations between minds and mind-independent states of affairs.

  5. For details of fMRI studies showing that the regions of the brain associated with the emotions are active during moral cognition see Moll et al. (2002), Moll et al. (2005), Joshua D. Greene et al. (2004) and Zahn et al. (2009).

  6. See, for example, Damasio (1994), (1999), Greene and Haidt (2002); Joshua D Greene (2009) Nichols (2004), Prinz (2007), Sneddon (2011) and Haidt (2012).

  7. For example, Joyce (2006).

  8. Prinz (2005, 2007) also defends a qualified Jamesian view. My discussion assumes a standard reading of James based primarily on his paper “What is an emotion?”. However, Matthew Ratcliffe (2005) argues that when this paper is understood in the context of James’ later work, an account emerges according to which the feelings that constitute emotions are part of the structure of intentionality. According to this reading, which I find persuasive, there are important similarities between James’ account of the emotions and the kind of account I defend below.

  9. The relationship between emotions and action tendencies is clearest in the case of emotions about objects that are present. By contrast, the relationship seems less direct in the cases of certain past- or future-directed emotions such as regret or hope. In these cases, it may be better to say that the emotions are associated with dispositions to be motivated in suitable circumstances.

  10. Perhaps the closest actual case is patients suffering from pure autonomic failure (PAF). In such cases, patients lose feedback from their sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. While emotional responses are impaired, they are not absent. See Critchley et al. (2001). For a survey of some other empirical challenges to James’ account see Hufendiek (2016).

  11. See, for example, his discussion of anger (1379a–1379b). The idea is also important in Hellenistic philosophy and, especially, Stoicism. See Nussbaum (1994).

  12. See further Teroni (2007).

  13. See, for example, Sartre’s discussion of the girl who breaks down in emotion because she cannot face the prospect of caring for her sick father (1962).

  14. Weberman (1996) also presses this line of objection.

  15. Griffiths (1997, 2004) argues that there is little explanatory power and no theoretical unity to the category of emotions, and that consequently, the term ‘emotion’ does not pick out a natural kind and should be eliminated from theoretical discourse. The sense that the emotions may form an artificial category is reinforced by the observation that many languages have no straightforwardly equivalent term. See further Dixon (2003). A further controversy concerns whether particular emotions, such as fear or anger, are natural kinds (see Barrett (2006a)).

  16. Moods seem to be another category of emotions that are neither intentional nor representational. Indeed, Griffiths (1997) argues against cognitive accounts of the emotions partly on the grounds that emotions such as depression, elation and anxiety do not have obvious intentional objects. Deonna and Teroni (2012a, b) agree that moods are not intentional and, for this reason, argue that moods are not emotions.

  17. For detail on the role of the amygdala on moral and social behaviour, see Adoplhs (1999). See also Greene and Haidt (2002). There is, however, continuing debate about whether distinct emotions consistently correspond to activity in distinct brain regions. See Lindquist et al. (2012).

  18. For details on the distinction and an explanation of the underlying physical mechanisms see Damasio (1994, 1999). In particular, the central cingulate region is thought to integrate basic emotions and cognition (Panksepp 2003)). Rather than ‘basic’ and ‘higher cognitive’, Damasio uses the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ respectively.

  19. Hufendiek (2016) provides a useful overview of objections against cognitivism including this one.

  20. Compare Nussbaum’s description of grief (Nussbaum 1994).

  21. Similarly, Deonna and Teroni 2012a, b defend a view of the emotions as ‘felt bodily attitudes’ directed towards evaluative properties, which captures the idea that emotional experience is an embodied form of taking-to-be-the-case. Also along similar lines, Hufendiek defends an account of emotions as ‘embodied, action-orientated representations’ (2016). For Hufendiek, the embodied nature of an emotion is a constitutive part of its intentional structure. A further important question concerns the psychological processes that produce out unified emotional phenomenology. One possibility is that the different, representational and non-representational states, are unified in emotional experience by a process of categorisation or conceptualisation (Barrett 2006b; Barrett et al. 2009).

  22. See Tappolet (2012) for more on emotional errors and illusions.

  23. Not always though. Sometimes emotions are ‘cognitively impenetrable’ in the sense that they persist despite an agent having beliefs that undermine their evidential basis. Some phobias, like the fear of flying, are like this.

  24. See Brady (2010) for other ways in which we pay ‘virtuous attention to our emotional systems’.

  25. See Laird and Lacasse (2014) for a review of the empirical evidence supporting James’ common-sense advice.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Doug Campbell and Carolyn Mason for helpful comments and discussion.

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    Michael-John Turp

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Turp, MJ. Normativity, Realism and Emotional Experience. Philosophia 51, 349–366 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9984-7

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