Emotion and Intuition as Sources of Moral Judgment
MORAL PERCEPTION IS POSSIBLE for virtually any normal person with an elementary mastery of moral concepts. It is common among people with highly discriminative moral sensibilities. It characteristically makes many moral propositions intuitive for the perceiver. It is a major route to moral intuition, and it often yields moral knowledge. But moral perception is by no means the only route to moral intuition or moral knowledge. Reflection is another route. Its subject matter may be concrete, as where a practical decision must be made regarding life support for an accident victim; it may be abstract, as where the topic is philosophical, say a question of whether promise breaking is always prima facie wrong; and in either case reflection may be what yields moral intuition about its subject matter. Moral intuitions may also arise in a quite different way: from emotion. How this is so, and what evidential value emotions may have in ethical matters, are central concerns of this chapter.
I. EMOTION AND INTUITION: INTERACTION AND INTEGRATION
Intuition and emotion are sometimes associated.1 Some emotions, such as certain misgivings, and perhaps a sense of foreboding, are at least next door to intuitions. Intuitions, especially those constituting insights into others’ consciousness, can be vivid and tied to keenly felt emotions, such as compassion. Correspondingly, intuitive people are commonly viewed as people of feeling. But intuitions need not be connected with emotion, as in the case of purely intellectual intuitions; and emotions, such as rage that arises from someone’s carelessly crashing into one’s car, need not be connected with intuition. Emotion may also differ from intuition in having no definite object, as seems possible in certain instances of free-floating anxiety. In the realms of contemplation and conduct, however, there is a close connection between emotion and intuition.
Truth and Falsity in Emotion and Intuition
Consider moral emotions, for instance indignation, some kinds of disapproval, and certain types of resentment. These are not uncommon in everyday life. Are there intuitions that are equivalent to these or other emotions? One obstacle to any such identification is that emotions are strictly speaking not truth-valued (or at best not happily considered truth-valued), whereas at least doxastic intuitions, a very common kind of intuition, are. To be sure, we might speak of false fears where a person fears that an accident will occur but is mistaken. It seems preferable, however, to call such a fear ill-grounded or to call the person (or the cognition in question) mistaken.
Suppose, by contrast, that one person fears another’s arrival and is correct in expecting that the other will arrive but wrong in taking that to be something to fear. Is the fear true because of the true expectation it embodies, or false because of the misappraisal that underlies it? Neither answer seems quite right. Note too that ‘fear’ has a non-emotional use: we might speak, for instance, of fearing that there will be no fresh fruit on the menu, when no emotion is involved. Fear is not the only emotion that can have a propositional object. Just as we can fear that a low-flying plane will hit us, we can be angry that the pilot violated the law. But there is no temptation to speak of true or false anger, except perhaps where these terms mean (respectively) something like ‘genuine’ and ‘merely ostensible’.
Granted, there are intuitions, as there are emotions, with non-propositional objects. These are of course not truth-valued. Take intuitions of dishonesty in an examinee or a salesperson. These might have an emotional aspect, such as distrust, but are not themselves emotions. Attributive intuitions are typically apprehensional, not emotional (though they may lead to emotion); and propositional emotions, among other emotions—say, indignation that someone did not keep a promise—are not themselves properly considered true or false, as opposed to well-founded or ill-conceived. Even if propositional emotions might in special cases be coherently said to be true or false, the many emotions lacking propositional objects, such as rage and grief, may not be coherently so described.2
Motivational and Affective Aspects of Emotion
A second obstacle to identifying emotions with intuitions is that intuitions, unlike emotions, are not intrinsically motivational. To be sure, in integrated persons—roughly those whose cognitions, motivation, emotions, and other intentional elements are mutually coherent—many kinds of intuitions do produce or are characteristically accompanied by motivation to act accordingly. But an intuition about, say, the validity of a logic-book argument with trivial content, need not be motivating.
The elements of feeling and motivation in emotion do not prevent their admitting of rationality, and emotions may be well-grounded or ill-grounded. When Shakespeare’s Othello describes himself as having “loved not wisely but too well” (act 5, scene 2), he is not just providing a poetic figure. Loving wisely is not simply a combination of love with wisdom, and Othello is admitting a defect in his emotion, of a kind connected with its apparently narrow basis and disconnection from the kind of understanding that should guide it. (Early in the play he says, of Desdemona’s fascination with his account of his harrowing exploits, “I loved her that she did pity them.”) Emotions as well as intuitions are essential for developing an adequate moral epistemology, and they interact. In ways to be described shortly, intuitions are important for understanding emotion, moral judgment, moral perception, and other phenomena of concern in this book.
Although I offer no analysis of the concept of emotion, it should be evident that I conceive emotions (including moral emotions) as multifaceted psychological elements that are normally responses to experience, whether of the outer or inner world, or to the real or merely imagined. Three kinds of constituents characterize at least most emotions; these constituents are commonly described as cognitive, motivational, and affective. Not just any combination of these elements constitutes an emotion, but arguably all are elements in any full-blooded emotion. They are understood differently by different writers on emotion3 and need brief explanation.
The cognitive element in emotion need not be propositional; but even with objectual emotions, such as fearing a growling dog, there will normally be something believed about the object, say that it will bite one. Why only normally? We should allow that a tiny child who is not yet psychologically developed enough to form even attributive beliefs could be frightened of a growling dog. This fright might not be full-blooded fear, but fear it could be.4 If being startled can be an emotion, and not (as may be more plausible) just a kind of shock akin to fear, it too has no cognitive component beyond what is required by the causative perception. In any case, cognitive content, for emotions having it, need not be carried by propositional beliefs, such as the belief that the dog may bite me. A disposition to form such beliefs might have to be present, but that is a different psychological property.
There is less controversy concerning whether emotions must have a motivational component. In experiencing an emotion, such as fear, anger, or excitement, there will be something or other one wants, say to avoid the feared thing, to strike out at the object of anger, and to experience the exciting thing. Apathy, a sort of settled indifference, may seem to be an exception. But is apathy an emotion? If it is an emotion, and not the absence of emotion where one might expect it, apathy at least has a motivational dimension. That is, we expect no motivation where we realize it would otherwise be present. The person need not be indifferent to, say, what is genuinely frightening, but is not as easily excited and does not spontaneously feel such emotions as grief or nostalgia when, for normal persons, they are natural or even difficult to resist.
The affective dimension of emotion is roughly its feeling dimension—a phenomenal element that contrasts with the dispositional character of belief and motivation. Anger has a certain experiential feel; felt affection a quite different one; fear another still. Even apathy (which I include for comparison as significantly similar to certain emotions) might have a phenomenal element—a sense of impassivity or even of the unimportance of much in life. But whatever we say about the status of apathy, we can say that a person who cannot easily feel anything of the kind that goes with fear, anger, indignation, excitement, felt affection, disappointment, distress, and anxiety is unemotional; someone who easily feels these (or a similar range of emotions) might be considered emotional.
The Intentionality and Judgmental Aspects of Emotion
Emotions are often regarded as intentional—to have intentionality as a kind of directedness toward their objects. This is chiefly because their objects are taken to be represented under some conceptualization. Consider first a propositional emotion: someone’s being angry that Benito fired his secretary. This does not imply being angry that Benito fired the man who stole the petty cash, even if these are one and the same man. The angry person might have no inkling that the second, incriminating description applies to the secretary. Still—to move to a non-propositional emotion—fearing the growling dog is fearing the attacking pit bull terrier if they are one and the same. Like simple perceptions, objectual emotions—those with an external “direct object” such as a dog—can be truly ascribed using any correct description of their object. If someone fears the growling dog, which is Jake’s pit bull, the person fears that pit bull, quite apart from having the concept of that species. The identity of that object, as opposed to the attributive content of the emotion (or perception)—say, that the dog has no leash, is not affected by the subject’s intentionality.
We might also speak of attributive emotions, on analogy with attributive perceptions, where the emotion is toward a thing as taken to have a property. These emotions constitute an intermediate case, lying between simple emotions like fearing the pit bull and propositional ones like fearing that an accident will occur. I might see an approaching bear at nightfall as I take out recycling on a farm. Fearing such an approaching figure as threatening is possible without conceptualizing the figure, and certainly without verbally labeling it even subvocally, though not without a discriminative grasp of the property of being threatening (one sees it as, say, animalic, large, and approaching). But conceptualization is required by, say, fearing that the bear will attack. Even in the former, non-propositional case, however, the property of being threatening (and for me as for many others, the concept as well) figures in the intentional content of my emotion. Attributive emotions, then, are intentional, but not in the way propositional ones are. This point is easily missed if one views emotions as judgments. In that case, moreover—on the normal assumption that judgments have propositional objects—one should also be able to predicate truth or falsity of emotions.5
I have contended that, although emotions have an essential cognitive element, they are not in general properly considered true or false. But propositional objects are not the only elements that suffice for the intentionality of a psychological phenomenon. We may take emotions to be intentional because, at least typically, they embody beliefs, even if only attributive beliefs. Attributive beliefs exhibit intentionality. Believing a distant object, such as a bear, to be dangerous, for instance, does not entail believing it to have a significant likelihood of harming someone or doing damage, even if that is necessarily equivalent to being dangerous. The predicative contents of attributive beliefs are intentional objects in roughly the same way as the propositional objects of propositional beliefs.
As our examples suggest, beliefs are paradigms of the cognitive element in emotions, even if that element might, in the convictional dimension, sometimes be weaker than belief, say a strong supposition (it might also be an intuitive seeming). With some emotions, such as fearing that the tornado will hit me, the belief or other cognitive element, such as an anticipation too weak to be belief, is propositional; but it is, in many emotions, attributive. An emotion may also embody beliefs of both kinds, such as fearing that the tornado will hit me and being terrified by the growing roar I believe to indicate its approaching.6
Desires (in the widest sense) are paradigms of the motivational element in emotion. Those elements may in any case be described as some kind of wanting. Love embodies a desire for the good of the person loved; envy typically embodies a desire for something (or a kind of thing) believed to belong to someone else (the object of envy); fear implies (typically) a desire that a felt danger be averted (or simply wanting the thing in question to change or disappear). What of free-floating anxiety? This can unsettle one, but its motivational power concerns more what one regards as relieving it than an object of worry—if it had a definite object, such as one’s vulnerable child, it would not be free-floating.
It should be stressed, moreover, that there is no sharp distinction between certain aroused emotions and certain moods, such as sadness and agitation. Some cases of anxiety may be better classified as distressing moods rather than as emotions, and there are certainly borderline cases. To be sure, moods may have both affective and motivational constituents; but they are unlike emotions in not entailing beliefs or similar cognitive elements.
We have already seen cases which suggest that the affective element in emotion is more difficult to characterize than its cognitive and motivational elements. Perhaps we can say that this element is a matter of feeling; but different emotions are associated with different kinds of feeling, and of course non-occurrent emotions, such as anger with someone who is far from one’s mind during one’s tennis game, embody only dispositions to have feelings and do not entail presently experiencing any feeling. Consider the very different feelings that go with love versus hate, with fear versus delight, or with joy versus grief.
All emotions may exist in an occurrent form, since all can be elements present in—even dominant in—consciousness. But emotions may also exist dispositionally, as where they are possessed in the way love for one’s family is when one is wholly occupied with some professional project and does not have them in mind. Might such cases as elation be exceptions? It may seem that whereas we can be angry with someone when the emotion is in no way present in consciousness, it is at least not obvious that, when our minds are wholly elsewhere, we can be elated about, say, a result of a project or revolted by someone’s treatment of farm animals. But could someone not be elated about winning a lottery, even during hours when the person is concentrating on learning Italian? To be sure, we can call someone an angry person and leave it at that, implying that the person is either dispositionally or occurrently angry; but there is no comparable category of elated or delighted persons, and to call a person elated or delighted and leave it at that, with no qualifier, implies that the person is occurrently elated or delighted at the time of attribution. This, however, shows that some but not all emotion terms may have trait-ascriptive uses, not that emotions cannot be had dispositionally as well as occurrently.
In any case, to understand emotions, we must understand dispositional psychological properties. Possession of dispositional properties is more than a capacity to exhibit—given eliciting conditions—the kinds of events that count as manifestations of those properties. But possessing dispositional properties does not entail either a strong tendency to manifest them given those conditions, or even a definite probability of doing so given the conditions.7 Consider resentment toward a coworker and an eliciting condition for that emotion, for instance someone’s asking, privately, what one thinks of the person. There will be some tendency to make a negative judgment here; but the tendency may easily be inhibited by, for instance, discretion.
The relation between emotion and behavior manifesting it is typically indirect, and assigning a definite probability to any particular manifestation, such as damning with faint praise, is unlikely to be plausible. To be sure, we can usually count on certain eliciting conditions to cause an emotion possessed dispositionally to become occurrent, as where a close friend’s question ‘What do you think of him?’ evokes felt resentment. But the emotion’s becoming occurrent is not the only constitutive manifestation of the disposition, and it may be better called a realization of it.
Intuition as a Cognitive Basis of Emotion
Distinguishing between intuitions and emotions as we have does not require denying that the cognitive component of an emotion can be constituted by an intuition. Consider indignation again. If it seems to me, intuitively, that one person interviewing another is being unfairly inquisitive, that intuition may be the central cognition in both eliciting and sustaining my indignation toward the interviewer. I would be indignant toward the interviewer and would naturally explain this by saying that (e.g.) the questioning seems intrusive. An intuitive seeming might suffice; I need not actually believe that the interviewer is being intrusive. If this just intuitively seems so, that may suffice to arouse emotion. But certainly a doxastic intuition can also serve. This is not to imply that only intuitive cognitions can serve to evoke or sustain emotion. Another case is this: the unfairness may be so plain that one readily perceives, believes, and indeed knows that it is occurring. Here one may have not a moral intuition but simply a moral perception and perceptual moral knowledge. But intuition may guide our thought and emotion where the evidence does not yield knowledge or, sometimes, before it yields knowledge, judgment, or even simply belief.
Similar points hold for anger, which is next door to indignation, as the same example shows. What of resentment, which can be moral in content or at least morally based, as where it arises because of a moral judgment? Intuition, like perceptual belief and other cognitions, can serve as the cognitive component of emotion here too. But whereas the (correct) intuition that one person wronged another may justify indignation about the wrong even retrospectively, as where one vividly recalls an injustice, retrospective justification is less likely with resentment, at least when the resented party is disposed to make amends for the wrong. Suppose a correct intuition of wrongdoing justifies resentment initially, for instance where one of two business partners commits the firm to something major without consulting the other. It may cease to justify it when, because the bypassed partner should but does not see that generous reparation has been made by the other partner, the resentment remains. Resentment can persist after the offending party has made full reparations. This resentment outlives its justification.
Suppose, however, that the reparation cannot be ascertained by the resentful person, since it might be made anonymously. Then the person may remain justifiably resentful. But no matter how well justified one is in believing reparation was not made, one cannot know that it has not been made if in fact it has. As with belief, a justified emotion may yet be objectively groundless. This difference between justification and knowledge affects our assessment of emotion and not just our appraisal of beliefs. Some but not all emotions are, in their propositional forms, knowledge-entailing; many are factive; but few if any are constitutionally justified.
Perceptually Based Intuitions and Emotional Responses
So far, the intuitions mentioned have not been viewed as the cognitive content of moral perceptions. But intuitive beliefs may arise in moral perceptions, as well as with them and from them. In all three cases, the kind of intuitive knowledge that perception can yield may produce a cognition central in an emotion in the ways we have illustrated for non-perceptual intuitions that figure in emotions. We might, for instance, hear intimidation in what one person says to another; and, through that perception and our sense of the vocabulary used, we might intuitively believe that the first is wronging the second and become angry that this is so. The sense of intimidating vocabulary, if properly grounded, can be an element in a moral perception whose basis is perception of properties that ground the wrongness of the act and whose cognitive content is an intuition. We may intuitively see that the one is wronging the other. That same intuition, under different conditions or in a different person, can be the cognitive component of a different emotion, say resentment. Seeing this wrong might then be the perceptual basis central in that moral emotion.
This is not to imply that every moral propositional perception has an intuition as its content. Consider seeing that by making a patently false allegation, someone is being unfair to a coworker. This (propositional) perception may be a clear case of moral knowledge based on conclusive evidence, and it is not a good candidate to be an intuition. That the first person is wronging the second is not unintuitive, but this kind of cognition is also not properly called an intuition. Even if the cognition is non-inferential, there is no exercise of discernment. Intuition is best understood as representing not a grasp of the obvious but rather a cognition of the kind that, often because a complex pattern is in view, can be the core of, or at least provide evidence for, judgment. With the perception of subtle intimidation, for instance, there is a need for discernment, and the intuition that the interviewer is intimidating the interviewee arises in the perception of the intimidation.
With this perception of intimidation, one may also have the intuition that the interviewer should not be allowed to continue. From the perception, as one later considers aspects of the interviewee’s response to the questions, one might (perhaps retrospectively) have the intuition that the interviewee is hurt. Similarly, seeing one person cheat another can yield the cognitive core of anger, say a judgment that the first was unjust to the second. The emotion of resentment can also arise with this perception; and from resentment of a certain acute kind one can become morally revolted by the cheater.
Intuitions and other cognitions may have causal as well as constitutive relations to emotions. A cognition that is central in an emotion and partly constitutive of it will not be at the time in question a cause of the emotion; but the cognition (say an intuition) might have earlier played a role in the formation of the emotion. An instructor’s anger that a student cheated is partly constituted by believing that cheating is wrong and a betrayal of trust, even if that same belief did not cause (as opposed to being a necessary condition for) the anger of which it later became a part. It seems clear that any of the cognitive elements just described can give rise to emotion. They can cause it, and they can certainly sustain it. There is simply a change of role when such elements as intuiting, believing, or perceiving that an interviewer is being unfair pass from causing indignation to being an element therein. A match that lights a fire can continue burning as part of the conflagration.
II. THE EVIDENTIAL ROLE OF EMOTION IN MORAL MATTERS
An emotion can arise in response to properties that evidence the belief, or some belief, that is essential in the emotion. This has been illustrated with respect to indignation when it arises from intuiting unfairness in an interview. When the unfairness is so blatant as to be seen, we have a case where a moral perception, which entails moral knowledge or the possibility of it, can provide evidence for the judgment that the person in question is unfair. The same evidence may support such moral emotions as indignation and at least some kinds of resentment and guilt.
Emotions as Rational Responses to Experience
What evidential potentiality might an emotion, especially a moral one, have in its own right? This question arises mainly when the emotion does not emerge, as it commonly does, from an evidential cognition, one that either constitutes knowledge or is well-grounded and provides evidence for the emotion. In either of those quite common cases, that cognition gives the emotion an element of justification that enables it to provide, in turn, evidence for a moral judgment, such as that one person is being unfair to another. If I know that an essay was plagiarized, my anger that it was may partly justify a negative moral judgment of the plagiarizer derivatively from this knowledge. But here anger does little if any independent justificatory work. One might well have had, even without the emotion, the same degree of justification on the basis of a moral judgment, even if lesser motivation to act against the wrong than one has when anger fuels behavior. Emotion that embodies or responds to a moral judgment may better motivate appropriate action even where (as it may or may not do) it adds nothing to one’s justification for that judgment.
To see how emotion can be evidential in its own right, apart from such a supportive cognition, consider indignation that arises during an oral examination. Suppose I am judging a colleague who is conducting such an examination. I must rely on my memory of the student’s performance as well as on sensing the nuances of the appraisal the colleague is apparently making. Emotion, like perception and intuition, is often a response to a pattern, and it may be quite rational in the light of that pattern. Perhaps in such cases emotion often responds to the whole as more than the sum of the parts. The content and style of an oral examination or an interview, for instance, may globally ill-befit the level of competence that one can expect in the kind of student or interviewee under examination. This unfittingness may be apparent during the oral examination, as one watches the individually difficult though acceptable challenges and sees the pained expressions of the candidate struggling to reply. There may also be an unfittingness of the colleague’s descriptions of what the candidate said. They may, for instance, be too harsh by exaggerating or ridiculing the candidate’s mistakes. My indignation, arising from a sense of an examiner’s demandingness as ill-befitting the low level of the student, may be part of my basis for thinking that the examiner has been unfair to the student.
It will help here to consider a quite different emotion, anxiety, which is not a moral emotion. I was once temporarily hosted by someone I had only just met. He was acting in a disturbingly strange way. We were sitting alone in a dining area where several kitchen knives lay on the table at which I was lunching. He stared at them for a time and was silent while doing so, though the conversation resumed. I found myself uncomfortable. I had no belief that he might be dangerous or even that he was seriously disturbed, and I do not think that I drew any inference from anything I believed concerning his psychological makeup. This is not to say that I could not have formed beliefs that would be a basis for having the emotion I had begun to feel. But I later saw that my anxiety—which was likely a response to many more indications than his staring at the knives—was some evidence of his being seriously disturbed. (Later incidents unmistakably confirmed that he was indeed disturbed that day.)
In this kind of case, although the emotion does not embody an intuition or a cognition that evidences a judgment, the emotion itself may play an evidential role in supporting such cognitions. It may be a perfectly rational response to a pattern that may at least temporarily evade description.8 In this and similar kinds of cases, moral emotion (among other emotions) may be quite analogous to certain kinds of aesthetic responses. It may also lead to and supplement moral judgment. Suppose an empathic friend felt anxious for me in the lunch setting in which my host is acting strangely. This could lead to judging that I should not be left alone with him.
In part because it may be a rational response to what is perceived, a moral emotion may support a moral intuition, such as that one person is being unfair to another. It may also support a non-moral response, such as a belief that a person is disturbed. Those intuitions in turn may evidentially support moral judgments. For some judgments, moral as well as non-moral, an emotion may be the primary support, at least initially. In other cases the emotion may be a response to an intuition or other cognition that is itself evidence, or intuition and emotion may be common responses to the same evidencing factors, as where a moral perception of intimidation yields both.
An Evolutionary Speculation
One may naturally speculate here that there is an evolutionary explanation for the evidential value of emotion. Emotions often motivate appropriate behavior, and their arising in situations of some danger might have survival value. Take fear. Because it is highly motivating and can rapidly produce avoidance behavior, it can play a protective role which a belief that there is danger cannot as readily play. The belief must evoke motivation before it can yield self-protective action; the fear has motivation as a constituent. If fear is sufficiently often warranted by the sense of danger or threats that evoke that sense—and we know that it not infrequently is often warranted—its role in producing rapid defensive responses might be expected to give it fitness value.
Liking—as felt attraction for another—provides a different example. If courting behavior always had to wait upon the formation of approving beliefs about the object of pursuit, human life would be quite different. This is not just because such beliefs—say, to the effect that the person has good character—typically do not motivate as well as does positive emotion; it is also because many relationships would not come into being at all if they were not initially fueled by a warm glow. Delight may come faster than approval, approval more readily than sober judgment. On the aversive side, then, the survival value of fear as part of a warning system is clear, and similar points hold for other “negative” emotions. The survival value of the “positive” emotions is connected not just with their capacity to facilitate mating, but with their capacity to support cooperative behavior.9
If emotions might have a kind of fitness value in part because of their ability to evidence such phenomena as danger—whether from natural forces or from the machinations of other people—we might wonder whether they may have a kind of evidential autonomy. In particular, are there kinds of facts which, apart from emotional evidence, one could not have evidence for or, especially, know? I cannot see that in principle there are facts that can be evidenced or known only by emotions or emotional elements. For one thing, emotions themselves are in large part responses to perceived phenomena, such as the behavior of others, or at least experienced elements such as anxiety or envisaging events. It would appear that in principle, at least, the evidential aspects of these phenomena, whether external or internal, can be captured by propositions that can be known or justifiedly believed, or by predications that can be known or justifiedly accepted, apart from emotion. Suppose this is so. Assume, for instance, that one person’s being unfair to another can be known through a cognitive grasp of the actions of the former toward the latter, their manner of performance, and their motivation. It does not follow that, given our natural constitution, we in fact can know such unfairness to occur without emotional discernment.
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The importance of emotional evidence in ethical matters is great and is best appreciated when its relation to moral perception on one side and, on another side, moral intuition is taken into account. Even if all knowable moral truths could be known apart from emotional evidence—and I do not claim this—we might well know many of them much less readily if we had to learn them through forming beliefs carrying sufficient evidential information that is independent of emotion. The reasonable conclusion to draw here is that it is not only possible that, through the evidence of emotion, often where the emotion is connected with intuition, we sometimes know things we would not otherwise know. We also know some things more readily through that evidence than we would have if our knowledge depended on non-emotional evidence. This point may often hold even where, apart from emotional discernment, we would have discovered the same things. The importance of emotion in the moral domain will become still more apparent as we consider a wider range of moral judgments.