Can we Have Moral Standards without Moral Beliefs? (by guest blogger Justin Tiwald)

Let's say you have a student in your introductory philosophy class who claims he doesn't "have a morality" (there's always someone!). He explains his claim in various ways. Most often he says he doesn't have a morality because his every decision is based on egoistic calculations, other times it's simply because he does as he pleases. But whatever the explanation it's clear that he takes some pride in it: other people live by moral standards, but he has risen above that.

I think my response is similar to that of just about everyone else in this situation: I don't believe it. What gets me out of sorts isn't the thought that he's a moral monster (he usually isn't), it's that he really does have a morality but won't admit it. How does one convince him that he has a morality in spite of himself?

"Having a morality" can mean many things, but what the class amoralist seems to have in mind is this: you have a morality when you hold yourself to moral standards as such. At minimum, you believe that living according to a standard is morally good, and this belief enters as a non-instrumental reason to adhere to it. These moral reasons needn't be decisive, and they don't always need to motivate you to do the right thing (you can have a morality even if you fail to live up to it). But your belief in the standard's moral goodness is essential, and this is where the self-proclaimed amoralist thinks he parts ways with the moralist. While the amoralist has standards that he holds himself to, it's obvious to him that they're not moral ones. He doesn't ultimately care whether his behavior is right, considerate, charitable, fair, respectful, etc. He only cares whether it will get him richer, make him more loved, or allow him to have more fun.

Put this way, so much of the amoralist's smugness depends on his not believing his standards to be moral ones. But does this really matter? In my view it matters much more that he treat his standards as moral, not that he believe them to be moral. The characteristic ways of treating a standard as moral include taking seemingly moral pride in meeting them, and feeling seemingly moral guilt or shame for falling short of them. It also includes behaving as though the standards are imposed from the outside. Subjectively speaking, the standards aren't "up to us," nor are they fixed by our wants and needs. However we understand our own relationship to these norms, we invariably think and behave as though we're stuck with them, even when we'd prefer others.

I tend to think that most psychologically healthy human beings cannot but have standards that they treat in these ways (with all of the usual caveats for sociopaths and victims of bizarre head injuries). Generally speaking we're stuck with our consciences, and our consciences will treat various standards as moral ones whether we like it or not. Sometimes they'll hold us to moral norms that we do not consciously uphold, as when someone explicitly disavows charity but feels guilty for leaving her brother homeless. But our consciences will treat even treat many of our non-moral norms as as though they are moral norms. Many people pursue wealth with a moral zeal, and if the amoralist is serious about his amoralism he'll invariably take a kind of torturous, guilt-ridden "moral" pride in having risen above moralism (call this "Raskolnikov Syndrome"). Whatever the amoralist may believe, then, it would be far-fetched to say that he "has no morality" at all.

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I'd like to thank Eric for letting me borrow his soapbox these last few weeks. I've truly benefited from the comments and emails that I've gotten in response. Having seen this from the other side, I can say with even more certainty that he has a great thing going here!

Appearances, Beliefs, and the Moral Emotions (by guest blogger Justin Tiwald)

Part of what it means to have an emotion is to regard an object in a certain way. To fear an activity, for example, is to regard it as a threat to your interests. To be indignant about someone's behavior is to regard her as committing an injustice. But this usage of "regard" is ambiguous. If I regard something as dangerous, it might mean that I believe it to be dangerous. But it could also mean that it just seems dangerous to me. Often what seems to be the case is also what we believe to be the case, but sometimes these two things come apart. A popular example is the perceptual illusion created when the moon is low on the horizon. It seems bigger than usual, but most of us don't believe it's bigger.

These days most philosophers working on the emotions prefer the believing version of regarding. One thing going against it, though, is that we have emotional responses that don't match up with our beliefs. A good example (which I steal shamelessly from Michael Stocker) is the fear of flying: we don't really believe flying is dangerous. In fact most of us know that it's safer than driving. But we fear it all the same, and that's probably because it seems dangerous to us, despite our acceptance of the fact that it's safe.

Now let me apply this to an issue in historical moral psychology. I spend a lot of time reading the Neo-Confucian philosophers, who wholeheartedly embrace an account of the emotions as constituted by thoughts and judgments. For a long time I (like most scholars in my line of work) assumed they were cognitivists in the more familiar "believing" sense. Recently I've come to realize that they also make room for cognitivism in the "seeming" sense. In fact, the purpose of moral education as they understood it was to make us more reliant on emotional appearances (seemings) than on emotional beliefs. The beliefs just "second" the emotional appearances. Here's why.

When we think about harmless perceptual illusions like the appearance of the moon on the horizon, it's evident that beliefs tend to be more reliable than appearances. But in matters of moral significance the situation is often reversed. Moral beliefs tend to be more susceptible to rationalization and self-deception than moral appearances. Admittedly moral appearances also get things wrong--visceral disgust often plays a crucial role in the moral condemnation of entire classes of people (think of the initial disgust elicited by foreign eating habits or different sexual practices). But while both beliefs and appearances are unreliable, one of these problems is more intractable than others. It doesn't take much exposure to overcome our visceral disgust at unfamiliar things. But the tendency to rationalize self-serving ends is a permanent feature of the human condition. When given the chance, successful revolutionaries usually turn into unapologetic dictators.

On my reading the Neo-Confucians thought that emotions were constituted by both appearances and beliefs. But unlike many moral sense theorists they thought we were better off relying on the former. The latter will never go away, but they can be shut out by acting on our more spontaneous feelings (unlike most classical Greek and Chinese virtue ethicists, the Neo-Confucians were more attracted to accounts of moral selves as permanently divided between their good and bad parts). I think there is some truth to this, even if I'm not willing to give up entirely on belief-based emotional responses.

Finding the Blame in Survivor Guilt (by guest blogger Justin Tiwald)

On many standard accounts of the moral feelings, guilt is distinguished from other kinds of self-inflicted anguish by a belief in one's own culpability. I feel guilty when I believe I played a self-preventable causal role in bringing about a wrong state of affairs. Without this belief, my feeling might be better described as regret, shame, or embarrassment.

The phenomenon of survivor guilt throws something of a monkey wrench in this view. Survivors of fatal plane crashes often report feeling guilty about their survival, especially when it seems like a matter of luck that they lived and others didn't. Many survivors admit that they couldn't have done anything to prevent the crash, but they describe their feelings as guilt all the same. Are they right to do so?

One response is to say that such survivors are mistaken, or that the guilt they feel is of a different kind than the thief's or the murderer's. Another response is to attribute their guilt to a hidden or unconscious belief in their own culpability. I'm not satisfied with either of these answers. The lesson I take from survivor guilt is that we should characterize the cognitive elements of guilt in a broader and more textured way. What makes self-imposed anguish an instance of guilt isn't the belief that one is culpably wrong, but rather the entire family of reactions associated with that belief. And here's the key move: we can have these characteristic reactions to the belief without the belief itself.

When we think ourselves responsible for something we judge to be wrong, we typically respond in a number of ways. If I steal the laptop computer that I've always wanted, the laptop will quickly lose its luster for me. Even if I resolve not to atone for my wrong, I will nevertheless find myself imagining various ways of atoning. Similarly, survivors report that living feels like a shameful burden rather than a stroke of good fortune. They often think that they owe something to the dead or their families, and even report that they feel like better people once they find ways of making amends.

We don't always need the belief in our own culpable wrongness in order to motivate these stereotypical reactions. In fact we have a readily identifiable set of psychological mechanisms--conscience--that routinely replicates such reactions without that underlying belief. For example, conscience is often more responsive to the brute fact of human or animal suffering than to careful considerations of moral principles or calculations of consequences. We'd hope, of course, that our consciences would be more responsive to our considered judgments than this, but this isn't usually the case. I think the same tendency to bypass judgments of culpable wrongness is at work when someone feels guilty about being the sole survivor of a fatal accident. Faced with a traumatic event, judgments of responsibility go out the window.

So guilt is better distinguished by the thoughts and tendencies characteristic of someone who believes herself culpably wrong, and not helpfully distinguished by the belief in culpable wrongness itself. Our mistake is in thinking we can't have the latter without the former, which is a mistake that the psychology of conscience can easily correct. I wouldn't be surprised if we could tell a similar story about indignation, shame, or any of a number of other moral feelings.

Sympathy and Self-Love (by guest blogger Justin Tiwald)

The philosopher I work on, Dai Zhen, maintains that sympathy by its very nature requires a strong interest in one's own good. Here is my short synopsis of his argument, pieced together from comments and character glosses. See what you think.

To sympathize with someone, I must care about her for her sake. But this "for her sake" is a tricky concept. It doesn't really count if my concern for someone is grounded in any of her particular properties. Let's say that I care about someone named Mary who is also a great sociologist and an amazing Frisbee golfer. Although this combination of traits may be unique, in principle some other Frisbee golfing sociologist could fit the bill just as well. We wouldn't want a form of care in which one object of concern could be substituted for another. Therefore, we want a form of care that is largely independent of her particular virtues or appealing characteristics.

If concern for Mary's sake must be independent of these properties, then in some sense it has to be unconditional. Or at least it has to have a great deal of counterfactual resiliency. I should care about Mary even if she were a very different kind of person.

Achieving concern of this more unconditional variety is much more difficult than it appears, especially when the object of concern is someone with whom we are barely acquainted. To be able to sympathize with just anyone we have to be capable of appreciating her relevant feelings and desires even if we find them appalling or strange, and we have to consider her suffering regrettable even if we think it deserved or necessary. The best way to do this is to imagine ourselves in the stranger's place, wanting her good as we want our own. There is nothing that comes more naturally than caring about our own well-being as such, and if we imagine ourselves as the stranger, we'll be much more likely to recapture the depth and unconditionality of our own self-concern.

Now to an interesting historical point. In form, this argument runs along some of the same lines as a familiar Confucian argument for preferential love. Very roughly, the Confucian argument is that we show the requisite concern for strangers by building on the natural concern we already have for our parents and siblings. We then model that more natural concern in our interactions with outsiders. However, familial love by its very nature requires that we play favorites--if I cared about strangers as much as I do my brother then my care for my brother wouldn't be familial love. Thus, for the sake of having the right kind of concern for strangers, I must care even more about my family. This might seem unfair to the strangers, but it's just the price we must pay so that I can have the right kind of concern at all.

Dai Zhen takes it one step further. The real foundation for other-directed concern is not familial love but self-love. Self-love is unconditional in a way that natural familial love is not. Children will cease to love their parents if the parents are complete monsters, but we care about ourselves no matter what (even if we think ourselves unworthy). Whenever we are sympathetically concerned for others we are emulating and building on the concern we have for ourselves. Thus (in some very qualified sense) the self comes first. This might seem unfair to everyone else, but this is just the price we must pay in order to have the right kind of concern at all.

[Update: ES, May 22, 8:53 a.m.: Somehow the comments on this post were disabled. I have re-enabled them.]

How Selfless Can We Be (and Still Care about Others)? (by guest blogger Justin Tiwald)

Let's say that I am a person who cares very little about his own well-being. I am content with my humble job and my austere apartment. But let's say I also aspire to be the sort of person who sympathizes with a friend when she loses her good job and her family home. Is it possible to be both of these things at once?

I take sympathy to require, among other things, an ability to simulate the significant thoughts and feelings that the friend would have in her particular circumstances. This generally requires the possession of relevantly similar desires (even if not desires for exactly the same types of objects or states of affairs). And this poses a problem for the person who wants very little for himself, especially if good jobs and homes are among those things that he doesn't want.

This sort of worry emerges from time to time in the literature on Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Like many strong proponents of selfless character, Zhu Xi wants to have his cake and eat it too: he'd like his ideal moral agents to have very little interest in their own well-being and yet be capable of great compassion. Zhu's defenders usually respond by saying that he isn't so strong a proponent of asceticism as one might think. They point to many overlooked passages in which he explicitly countenances desires for basic human goods like food and family. Put these together, they conclude, and we could well have desires for a reasonably good life.

I've never been satisfied with this move. Defenders of Zhu Xi are right to point out that his ideal moral agent desires things like food and family, but they don't pay sufficient attention to why she desires them. It's one thing if she desires them because they make her life better, but it's another thing entirely if she desires them independently of their contribution to her life. In the first case she desires things that benefit her under that description. In the second case she desires things that happen to benefit her. Zhu Xi permits us to desire things that happen to be good for us, but, he warns, we better not want them because they are good for us.

This strikes me as omitting the largest share of the human good. When my friend loses her home and career, surely a substantial part of her anguish depends upon the thought that her life has taken a turn for the worse. In general, most people want their lives to go well. Knowing that one's life is on an upward trajectory is itself a source of great satisfaction, and knowing that it is not is itself a source of despair. If I am so selfless as to be entirely without desires that my life go well, I'm not going to be a particularly good at feeling the pain of those who do.

Many proponents of moral selflessness turn out to be ascetics of the more subtle kind that I find in Zhu Xi. While they might appear to condemn all desires for outcomes that are self-serving, on closer examination they turn out to condemn primarily those desires that are conscientiously self-serving. This characterization of the good moral agent strikes me as much more realistic, but it still falls well short of what is required for robust sympathetic concern.

What Does It Mean to Have a Desire? (by guest blogger Justin Tiwald)

We don't normally speak as though having a desire for something implies that we presently feel some inclination to acquire it. It makes sense to say that I have a desire for Thai curry even if I'm currently taking a driving test and not thinking about Thai curry at all. Therefore it's tempting to say that "having a desire" can be cashed out in terms of a fairly straight-forward counterfactual. I would have a desire for Thai curry just in case the following is true:

(1.) If I were sufficiently deprived of Thai curry and entertaining the possibility of acquiring it, I would feel in an inclination to acquire it.

I don't think (1) does justice to the nuances of desire-possession. Consider another account offered by Xunzi (Hsün Tzu, 3rd Century B.C.E.). On the one hand Xunzi holds that our natural desires are susceptible of being utterly transformed. On the other hand Xunzi also claims that certain inclinations are permanent, such as the eyes' lust for beautiful things. The eyes will always lust for such things when allowed to dwell on them, but it's also true the eyes' lust can be refashioned into a desire for sights that are consistent with virtue. How is this possible? Consider the following passage:

[The gentleman] makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, [etc.]...He comes to the point where he loves [learning the Way], and his eyes love it more than the five colors, his ears love it more than the five tones, [etc.]...For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him. ("An Exhortation to Learning," Ivanhoe and Van Norden, pp. 260-61.)

A strong claim about the possibility of radical self-transformation, to be sure. But notice that Xunzi isn't suggesting that we can entirely eliminate the disposition to lust for beautiful things when allowed to dwell on them. Rather, the eyes develop a preemptory desire to avoid dwelling on the wrong things in the first place--a power of selective perception. With sufficient reinforcement it no longer makes sense to say that we have a desire for beautiful things as such, even though our eyes would lust for them if our thoughts were allowed to linger on them. This gives us a slightly more nuanced account of having a desire for beautiful things:

(2.) If I were sufficiently deprived of beautiful things and presented with an opportunity to entertain the thought of acquiring them, I would feel an inclination to acquire them.

Of course, I can be presented with an opportunity to entertain the thought of acquiring something without actually entertaining that thought. So on this account I could have a desire for beautiful things in sense (1) without having it in sense (2).

I think (2) sits closer to our usual way of understanding desire-possession. If I allowed myself to dwell on the thought of taking someone's fancy new laptop, I would probably feel an inclination to do so. But it's highly unusual for me to contemplate such a thing. I can sit in a classroom for hours without noticing open bags and backpacks that might have laptops inside. Often students will use their laptops in class and it won't even register. In contrast, a kleptomaniac would be well aware of those open bags, and would need to remind herself that it would be wrong to steal them.

So I have the desire in sense (1), because I would be tempted to acquire the laptop if I thought about it. But I don't have the desire in sense (2), because I don't in fact think about it (unlike the kleptomaniac). For purposes of evaluating moral character, (2) strikes me as the more decisive sense of having a desire.