Vivid Finale

So in the end, despite my initial enthusiasm, I didn't end up seeing much of Vivid Enofest. However, yesterday was the last day, so I thought I'd do some last minute checking of it out. I got to see Fire Water, some of the light shows, and the big finale Pure Scenius.

Fire Water was reminisent of Pyrophone Juggernaut, the big outdoors fiery musical spectacle I saw at the Sydney Festival, insofar as they were both... Big outdoors fiery musical spectacles. They were also both very arty, and both had people wearing odd costumes in a not so subtle effort to get fire-retardant outfits on the cast and crew. This one, however, had more of a plot. Thematically, it was some kind of tribute to the early convict settlers of Sydney, and to that end it started with some people yelling a list of names, and transportation sentences. Seems most people got 7 years, though being stuck in Australia at the end of those 7 years couldn't be much fun. The plot was, more specifically, a dramatic recreation of the Three Bees incident, when a convict ship caught fire in the harbour, and the guns inside it went off. I can't help but compare it to Pyrophone Juggernaut, and it doesn't really compare favourably. The music wasn't quite as good, though similar in style, and I felt that a lot was lost by the audience not really being able to feel the heat of the fire quite as vividly, due to the boat being a decent way into the water. Still, it was enjoyable, and the decorations around the event were pretty cool:

Barrel of fire! As seen in the apocalypse.

The aftermath. My attempts to actually capture the boat on fire
before it sank failed, as I am shite at photography.

After Fire Water, I checked out some of the random light sculptures around the MCA and the Quay. I didn't have much time before Scenius, so I didn't go right into The Rocks or up to Observatory Hill, but then I wasn't so amazingly impressed by what little I did see to feel that I was missing out. The only thing that really impressed me was this awesome druids sculpture.

Because druids are awesome.

And so then there was Pure Scenius. This was an improvised three-part concert of which I only bought a ticket to the third part, which I now moderately regret. When I walked into the concert hall, I recognised Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins sitting around on some couches set up at the front of the stage with their fellow musicians, just "having a yarn" as some audience member behind me put it. Once the audience was full, the light went down, Eno stood up, a violinist played a weepy solo, and Eno lamented the end of this great tour which had taken him "from one side of the Opera House stage to the other." After some more random banter, he went to his laptop and started making some music, as the other musicians got up from their couches, one by one, to join him on their respective instruments. The music was amazing, variously ambient, minimalist, and trancey. Then a bit over an hour later there was a somewhat awkward standing ovation during which Eno claimed they weren't planning on an encore. He eventually relented, on the grounds that there were so many bald heads in the audience who had come to lend him their support, he just couldn't let them down. They then proceeded to blow everyone's mind.

So it was pretty good! For quite a long time Eno has been one of my greatest musical heroes, so it was a pure joy to have had this opportunity to see him, and for the experience to be even more spectacular than I might've hoped.

Inappropriate intrusions on emotions - An appropriate response.

The problem with starting an INTERNET WAR with someone like Rishi is that he is likely to respond. This naturally means that I have to respond to his response, which may lead him to respond to me, and so on and so forth, until everything we both have to say is either: a) common ground or b) acknowledged fundamental difference of opinion, attitude, or assumption. Hopefully that will be the case after my response here.

So Rishi wants to change something from a logical question into an empirical one. I'll confess straight up, I'm not sure what the logical question was meant to be. Perhaps it is something like "is it logically (though I might rather say Conceptually) possible to evaluate emotions?" Now I would love it if I could score some cheap argumentative points by saying: "I think we both agree that the answer to this is Yes, considering that Rishi immediate goes on to positively evaluate some emotions, when he suggests that the not-murderer, who spends all day indulging in pleasurable thoughts of killing, derives positive utility from doing so, and so these emotions should be seen as good in the eyes of a Utilitarian."

Unfortunately, Rishi doesn't go so far as to positively evaluate these emotions. He rather just claims that the Utilitarian shouldn't object to these emotions. Problem is, I totally agree with him there. In this (I feel) somewhat unrealistic case, where a person frequently indulges in highly pleasurable fantasies of anti-social behavior, but then has absolutely no increased inclination or likelihood to actually engage in such behavior, and (crucially) feels absolutely no displeasure from the thwarted desires to engage in such behavior, then, sure, I agree we shouldn't judge those emotions negatively. Hell, I would indeed go further than Rishi and claim that, in this unrealistic situation, we should judge those emotions positively. These are totally awesome emotions for the person to be having, given his actions.

Problem is, the fact that I agree with what Rishi has said there is a pretty good indication that the example is flawed, it doesn't get to the heart of the problem. The example that would be relevant is this: Imagine some person spends all day thinking of terrible horrifying fantasies of murder and pain and general gruesomeness. Said person derives a large amount of pleasure from these fantasies. After time, they become increasingly inclined to actually engage in the activities depicted in their fantasies, and become upset when this inclination is thwarted, whether by fear of censure, fear of punishment, or moral convictions. Their fantasies start to come to them at awkward times, leading to some kind of retreat from society. Eventually (perhaps, though this isn't necessary to the example) they go and murder someone. They would have never murdered someone, nor felt the pain of frustrated inclination, had they never indulged in these fantasies. Additionally, there was some course of action that some person, including perhaps this very person, could've taken, which would've prevented them from ever indulging in these fantasies, without thereby causing worse results. THEN I would, indeed, negatively evaluate those emotions. And, even as it is much more detailed, I happen to believe that this is the much more likely scenario. (And this, I suspect, is what Rishi would call the empirical question).

Rishi has a few of these examples, where a person harbours bad-looking emotions, but no bad external action results from them. He claims "I don't [believe] utilitarians can relevantly object to me having these emotions, as repugnant as they may be." So yes, I totally agree. Well, not totally... Because I don't think the Utilitarian even has any grounds to call these emotions Repugnant. These racist, murderous, fire-bomberous, computer-gamerous emotions are actually awesomefunpartytimes, precisely because nothing bad is resulting from them. So anyway, this seems to be common ground.

So what isn't common ground? Well, Rishi claims that "As someone who leans consequentialist, I'd much rather have good things happen, than be overly concerned about how those good came about." I also lean consequentialist, to understate matters a bit. I also want to have good things happen. Really, that's all I want, morally speaking. Thing is though, I don't want to just sit around and have good things happen, I want to make good things happen, or at the very least I want to know how to make good things happen. This mean that I need to be concerned with how good things come about. To claim otherwise is... It's like saying "We need a bridge over the Sydney harbour. However, I'd much rather have a bridge than to be concerned with how bridges come about. So I'm just going to focus on making a bridge be there, rather than look into the causes of bridges." This is dumb. You usually can't make things happen without some kind of awareness of their causes, at least not with optimal efficiency.

This bridge example looks absurd, but I don't think it is an inaccurate representation of Rishi's argument. He explicitly says "Utilitarianism... should focus more effects/outcomes, and to a lesser extent, acts. Intentions should be given minimal, if not negligible, concern." To a certain extent, as usual, I agree with him, especially in the familiar Charity case that he mentions. If the results are equal, then the intentions are unimportant. But what Rishi misses is that just as acts cause outcomes, which is why we need to care about acts, so too do intentions, desires, emotions, and mental states generally, cause acts. So we have at some reason to care about Emotions. If we need care only about our ultimate goals, and not the potential causes of those goals, then sure, we don't need to care about Emotions. But then, nor do we need to care about acts. If we lived in some strange fatalistic world where, no matter what actions people actually performed, by some divine manipulation the exact same results always came about, then we wouldn't need to worry about acts either. Unfortunately, we don't live in such a world, neither with regard to Acts, nor to Emotions.

Rishi may grant all this, but insist that although we could care about emotions, we shouldn't do so as a matter of efficiency. "We are much better at [dealing with] outcomes and acts, then we are at dealing with intentions and emotions." I'm generally inclined to agree here, but let's interrogate this a bit more. First off, we don't really "deal with" outcomes in any relevant sense, rather outcomes are just the results we get, and the things that we are aiming at. We deal with acts insofar as they cause outcomes. And we are rather good at this. Straightforward science-type investigation can show us what the outcomes of our acts are, or potentially will be. Our investigations into civil engineering have revealed that building a bridge out of bubbles will tend to result in catastrophic failure. Economics might tell us that arbitrarily issuing a whole lot of currency will result in huge inflation. Physiology, and a tiny amount of mostly common-sense psychology, will tell us that stabbing a dude in the face will result in a whole lot of pain.

As I've suggested, just as I see acts to be a fairly immediate cause of outcomes, I see emotions to be a fairly immediate cause of acts. And insofar as we are primarily concerned with outcomes, it is no wonder that we are worse at dealing with emotions in this regard. They are further up the causal chain, further removed from our immediate concerns. Even besides this, our way of dealing with emotions will be primarily through Psychology. Whether or not you call Psychology a science, it certainly seems to be a lot more fuzzy, a lot less definite, than our more prototypical sciences. The main problem as far as Utilitarian calculation is concerned is that psychological results seem to be a lot less generalisable. We can't seem to find nice convenient laws to connect emotions with actions, like "fantasising about murder every day will lead to acts of murder." There will be exceptions, some unexplained. These problems will make evaluation of emotions less appealing to a Utilitarian. However, not to the point of negligence.

Evaluation of emotions would be of minimally, or negligible concern to Utiltarians just in case there were no decent empirical ways of predicting behavior from emotions, or if investigation into these ways did not yield enough results to justify the effort. This seems unlikely though. For example, psychologists, even if they can't give us iron-clad, infallible laws, could nonetheless tell us what emotions are primarily felt by those who then go on to kill themselves, or others, based on self-report. Again, yes, this isn't infallible, but if it gives us a statistically significant link between emotion and action, then this is some grounds for the evaluation of emotion. However, it is not, in itself, yet a reason to act upon such evaluation. Which brings me to Rishi's final point, and the one that I am tempted to think is most strongly motivating his response.

Paternalism. It's the boogie-man of modern ethics, no one since Mill wants to be Paternalist. Thankfully, I usually don't either. Thing is, I don't think anything I've suggested is paternalist. Paternalism is typically interfering in someone's autonomy for their own sake. Now, generally the evaluation I'm discussing is in terms of the interests of people other than the individual whose emotions we are evaluating. It is not in terms of their own interests, and so isn't really paternalist. But much more importantly, if, as I've said, this rough system for the evaluation of emotions is considered just as that, a system of evaluation, rather than a set of recommendations for action, then there is no interfering involved, and as such no paternalism, nor, I would think, anything particularly objectionable.

Of course, there's not much point to a system of evaluation unless we're going to do something with it, so I'll say there are a few times when I do think it would be justified to interfere with autonomy. And it's the cases that are actually generally accepted:

a) Not many people object to interference in the autonomy of children, even paternalist interference. As I suggested in my original post, I think the best use of this kind of system of evaluation will be in regards to moral education, working out the most appropriate kinds of emotional responses to encourage and promote. As I apparently didn't stress enough, I mean here the moral education of children.

b) I don't know if a person can be said to interfere with their own autonomy, when they exercise it... Okay, so they can't, but that's my second case anyway. This system of evaluation of emotions I also see as being most useful for people who think to themselves "I know what acts are right, but I find myself often acting immorally. I, for whatever reason, desire to be a more moral person. I also happen to know roughly how to alter my emotional responses to certain things. So now I need to know exactly what I should alter my emotions towards." As this is just a matter of individual acting on themselves, there should be no scent of paternalism here.

I think I'm done here. But as for Nitpicks!
Nitpick The First: Yeah, I totally agree with you there Rishi. In fact, that was my point.
Linguistic Nipick: The reasons can be good even if the link is only probabilistic. Like, the fact that seatbelts increase your probability of surviving an accident give you a reason to wear them. They don't give you a probabilistic reason to wear them. In fact, I don't even know what a probabilistic reason is.

Some Things I Tend To Thank When Playing Team Fortress 2.

In decreasing order of sensibleness.

• Medics, for healing me.
• Engineers, for teleporting me.
  
• Allies, for helping me kill to opponents.
• Spies, for sapping sentries.
• Snipers, for throwing urine on my enemies.
• Allies, for... Me helping them to kill opponents.
• Medikits, for giving me health.
• Supply Cabinets, for having Medikits in them.
• Allies, for... Thanking me for any reason.
• Enemy Soldiers, for blowing themselves up.
• iTunes, for starting to play a particularly excellent song.
  

Gonna make a mint...

Given the success of such filmic treatments of philosophical concepts as The Matrix ("What if the Brain-In-A-Vat scenario was true, but then suddenly wasn't") and Bladerunner ("What if Speciesism was justified, but then suddenly wasn't"), I have decided to write my own screenplay for a feature length film entitled:

The Stoppening! Aka: What If Occasionalism Was True, But Then Suddenly Wasn't.

The Stoppening

EXT. A CITY PARK - A SATURDAY MORNING

A typical morning scene. People are jogging through the park, walking their dogs, playing with their children, and picnicing. A YOUNG MAN is running through the park, flying a kite.

CUT TO:

EXT. HEAVEN

GOD
What a beautiful mor- *ERK!*

GOD clutches at his chest and falls over.

CUT TO:

EXT. CITY PARK

Everything is exactly as it was in the opening shot. Absolutely nothing moves. This shot is held for approximately 97 minutes.

CUT TO:

TITLE CARD READING: "The End...?"

Sidgcandle

Lately I've been reading me some Sidgwick. Henry Sidgwick. For those unfamiliar with the name (most people), he was a Victorian ethicist, sometimes thought of as the last of the early Utilitarians, or perhaps the first of the modern Utilitarians. His great treatise Methods Of Ethics is among my top 2 favourite works of philosophy, and formed the basis of much of my honours thesis. According to Wikipedia, John Rawls called it the "first truly academic work in moral theory," which probably hints at both the book's great strengths and flaws. On the one hand, it is a wonderfully clear, precise, well reasoned, and fair piece of work. On the other hand, it's widely held to be incredibly dull in style. In fact, Sidgwick probably puts it best: "... it is essentially an attempt to introduce precision of thought into a subject usually treated in a too loose and popular way, and therefore I feel cannot fail to be somewhat dry and repellent." Thankfully, I like my Victorian moralists the way I like my wit: Dry.

In actual fact: a) I find Sidgwick fairly easy to read, at least in comparison to other authors where I have to puzzle over what exactly they mean every couple of sentences (but then, I put a high value on clarity), and b) I think that Parfit later showed with Reasons & Persons that it is possible to write a very intellectually precise treatise on ethics while at the same time being engaging and imaginative, though he did have the advantage over Sidgwick of there already existing a well developed tradition of academic ethics behind him.

Anyway, despite leaning so heavily on Methods Of Ethics for my honours thesis, I actually never read anything else by Sidgwick, until I recently borrowed a collection of his shorter essays. It's pretty good. Here's a few Sidgwick quotes which I quite enjoyed:

"I hate the History of Philosophy even more than any other history; it is so hard to know what any particular man thought, and so worthless when you do know it." - This is from a letter he wrote when only 27, and he later went on to write a history of ethics, so I suppose he mellowed a bit. Still, I do appreciate any support for my own distaste for the history of philosophy

"No difficulty of any other writer can convey the least conception even of the sort of difficulty I find in Hegel. My only consolation is... that every other philosophical work I take up seems to be easy. But no amount of difficulty alone would distress my spirit if there was not added the paralysing doubt whether, after all, I am not breaking my head over highly profound nonsense." - I knew that Sidgwick was heavily into Kant, but I was surprised to learn that he also studied Hegel. Sounds to me like he nailed it, too.

"It is a horrid nuisance to have to put one's principles into practice." - I couldn't agree more. This is in reference to the major ethical dilemma of Sidgwick's life, which prompted the writing of the Methods. He was a fellow of Trinity college at Cambridge, and one of the conditions of this fellowship was that he believed in the articles of the Church of England. However, in the 1860s, he realised that he no longer could believe, and spent much time deliberating whether or not he should resign his position. He finally did so in 1869. Then parliament scrapped those requirements in 1871, apparently owing in part to Sidgwick's reputation, and so he got his job back. So... Not such a nuisance after all, I suppose.

"It is said that an undergraduate once, being asked in examination to describe the economic conditions of the inhabitants of the Hebrides, stated that they 'earn a precarious livelihood by washing one another's clothes.' It has often seemed to me that... That phrase would aptly describe a considerable part of the industry of modern metaphysicians." - Double Lols.


Some other amusing quotes, by others, about the Methods Of Ethics:

"I have never found so dull a book so absorbing" - John Maynard Keynes (Edit: Actually, turns out this quote is refering to a memoir compiled by Sidgwick's brother and widow, and not refering to the Methods. As compensation, here is another amusing Keynes quote about Sidgwick: "He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn't and hope that it was.")

"To most types of reader, Sidgwick is irredeemably dull, while writers with far feebler intellectual powers who speak in terms of prophecy, like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, are listened to with a respect they ill deserve" - Brand Blanshard. Buuuurn!

"He read The Methods Of Ethics as a young man and found it so stodgy that he had been deterred from ever reading any book on ethics since" - Said of... Alfred North Whitehead. Because formal logic isn't stodgy at all?

"Sidgwick's account of the methods of ethics misses questions beyond those which he explicitly discusses" - Alasdaire MacIntyre... What!?

Appropriate Emotion, part 2.

So, I was going to check out what might count as appropriate emotion in a Utilitarian theory. I'll do that, and then maybe postempt a response that I have already heard.

My answer should be somewhat familiar to anyone who subscribes to Douchey Moves Performed By Utilitarians Quarterly, as it is just another instance of the general tendency of Utilitarians to try and incorporate all possible human action under the domain of Utilitarian calculation: It seems to me only plausible that a Utilitarian would want to say that the appropriate emotion to feel in any given circumstance is that emotion which will tend to maximise worldwide pleasure.

So to take this ultra-simplified version of last week's example, someone kills your father, and you may respond with either anger or love. Which would be more appropriate? Well, we do a Utilitarian analysis of the two options. So, not pretending this is complete or well thought out: Love would have the advantages that it is an inherently more pleasant emotion (let us assume), and that it would motivate such positive action as striving for understanding, reconciliation, etc. With anger on the other hand... Well, it's probably a less pleasant emotion, and may motivate nasty actions of vengeance and whatnot... But on the other hand, it may also motivate actions towards achieving justice, which, if the surrounding institutions are working well, will have positive results of deterrence, public safety, and rehabilitation.

Much more important though, and I suspect tilting the balance in favour of Anger, is this: It may simply be psychologically impossible to feel love towards the murderer without precluding certain other goods. So, assume we ordinarily get some pleasures from deep, loving relationships. Furthermore, assume these pleasures are particularly strong, unique, and efficient (that is, we don't have to put much effort/resources into achieving them in order to get a lot of value out of them). So now we have extremely good reasons, both self-interested and moral, for maintaining such relationships. But now it may simply be the case (and it seems likely) that it is psychologically impossible to be in such a relationship with a person, or in anything quite as good as such a relationship, while still being disposed to love a third party who murders said person. Which is probably all just a convoluted way of saying: If you could love a stranger who just killed your loved one, then they probably weren't really your loved one after all. So, for the sake of allowing such relationships to exist, we must allow for anger being the appropriate response to the murder of one's father.

Still, all the specifics of this overly simplified case as beside the point, I just wanted to demonstrate the idea that emotional responses may be open to the same kind of Utilitarian analysis/calculation as external actions are. Also, it's probably not so radical to attempt such analysis. I vaguely remember it being done before with guilt:

So the ordinary understanding of guilt would probably be that it is appropriate to feel guilty if, and only if, you have done something immoral. But of course, if a Utilitarian believed that, then he would be in trouble, as Utilitarianism tells us that we are acting wrongly (to some degree) whenever we failed to maximise the good, which is just about all the time for absolutely anyone you would care to name, no matter how saintly they may be. So must you feel guilty pretty much all the time? That would be a fairly disastrous conclusion, especially considering that guilt is ordinarily a fairly unpleasant feeling, and so feeling guilty all the time would have fairly terrible hedonic consequences.

So when should a Utilitarian feel guilt? Well, probably roughly when:
1) She believes that she has violated some psychologically simple rule of thumb X.
2) Acting in accordance with X tends to produce good results.
3) She knew of no clear, genuine, utilitarian justification for violating X in this case.
4) Feeling guilty about this violation will likely reduce the incidence of further violations in the future (of X, or other efficacious rules), and there is no better, mutually exclusive method of reducing said violations. (This criterion becomes particularly powerful when we note that, the more guilt one feels about a range of subjects, the less effective is is liable to become.)
5) The likely benefit of reducing future rule-violations will outweigh the immediate disutility of guilt, which I take to be an inherently displeasurable experience.

Now this analysis is going to have a lot of counterintuitive results, some of which will echo standard objections to Utilitarian conceptions of punishment:
1) It may be right to feel guilty when you believe that you have done something that is immoral, even though you have not, in fact, done that thing.
2) Similarly, it may be right to feel guilty for your actions even though there was a perfectly good justification for those actions, just in case you aren't aware of that justification.
3) Your own self-interest in not feeling guilty may outweigh the interests of others in your feeling guilty.
Etc. Frankly I'd probably bite the bullet on these kinds of counter-intuitiveness objections, as is my wont, but then there might be genuine issues with my slapdash analysis up there.

Anyway, by now you surely get the picture, that the standards of appropriateness for emotion according to a Utilitarian theory should probably be the degree to which having that emotion produces positive effects. This feels to me like both a natural and plausible move to make, which may be a sign that I've been thinking within Utilitarian theory for too long.

I said I'd postempt an objection, and so, if I may, here is a caricature of Rishi's response to this, and last week's post: "Ohhhhhhh, I don't like it when people start to evaluate emotional responses! It reeks of Thought Police to me! Take your stinking theories off my emotions, you damn dirty Utilitarians! Etc!" Soooo to put it another way, this is the objection that emotions, which are purely internal, as opposed to actions which manifest externally, should be immune to moral critique. There seem to be two main arguments for this that I can see:

1) We can't actually change our emotional responses to stuff, rather they come to us unbidden, uncontrolled, and unwilled. They are Passions, in contrast to Actions; they are things that come over us rather than things that we wilfully do. Furthermore, you can't morally judge someone for something that is beyond their control, as ought implies can, and so cannot implies oughtn't.

To this I would respond... There is a point here. It should be neither neglected, nor exaggerated. We should not pretend that we have complete, absolute control over our emotions, and so morally require responses that are impossible. But nor should we insist that our emotions are completely beyond our conscious control. It's clear to me that most emotions can be stifled or cultivated. We can form and act on intentions such as "I will get less angry around idiots in the future." We can also promote certain emotional reactions in others. Without much empirical expertise, I'm inclined to agree with the Virtue Ethicists here, that moral education would probably best proceed by inculcating certain emotional responses and tendencies (if they do indeed (still?) say that).

2) Our emotions matter only to ourselves, not to others. The fact that I am randomly angry does not effect anyone else, only myself, and so I should not be morally answerable for it. I should only be judged for the externally-manifesting actions that I perform, such as the punch that I throw. I can think and feel whatever I want, so long as I don't act on it inappropriately.

I tend to think this is a fairly flawed objection. For it to provide complete immunity to the moral judgement of emotions, you would have to assume some kind of super-powerful will, some amazing Kantian faculty to produce any kind of action that rationality/morality dictates, independently of the emotions that you are feeling. This seems implausible to me. Emotion, broadly construed, is probably the strongest, if not the only motivator of action. Imagine an angry person, who may either throw a punch or give a handshake. Now it's clearly not the case that every angry person would throw a punch. He may be a particularly peaceful angry person, or he may have some other strong desires, perhaps second-order desires, overriding his inclination to throw a punch. But it still seems true that in any given situation, all else being equal and given no further information, an angry person is more likely to throw a punch than a calm one, whether or not we are talking about the same person in these two cases. That is to say something like: there is a strong probabilistic link between the emotion, anger, and the action, violence. So unless there is some other, more direct & effective way to reduce instances of punch-throwing without having to go through emotional proscription, then it seems we have perfectly good reasons to morally worry about, judge, and critique emotions.

I suppose there may be another argument 3), which takes that Thought Police comment much more seriously, and goes: I don't want the government/moral experts/paternalists/etc punishing me and blaming me for my emotions, because this is my own, special, most private sphere of behavior, etc etc.

However, I think that this argument, at least applied to Utilitarian critiques of emotion, will not work simply because Utilitarians don't think of punishment and blame in the relevant ways. That is, as with Guilt above, simply because you have done something wrong does not automatically mean that you should be punished, or blamed for it. As a matter of fact, precisely because emotions are essentially private, and only external actions are publicly accessible, it does seem likely that punishing or blaming individuals for their emotions would never be appropriate (except perhaps in special circumstances, such as those of moral education). But this does not mean that we may not theoretically critique them, and analyse their value.

There's also perhaps an objection 4): Oh please, please don't start morally judging my emotions, they are the only morality-free domain of human behavior I had left! If I have to start worrying about the morality of my emotions, there will be nothing left to not morally worry about any more!

However, this just strikes me as another instance of the Too-Demanding objection to Utilitarianism, and all the usual responses would apply, so I won't bother going over it.


I'm going to wrap this up there, but feel free to yell at me if you have any major objections with what I've said, or if I've totally failed to give your favourite objection a half-decent rendition.

Appropriate Emotion, part 1.

I've been thinking, briefly, recently, about Virtue Ethics. As I tend to do, I've been thinking about it through the perception that virtue ethics as an entire ethical theory seems sorely lacking, incomplete, and indeterminate, but may serve as a useful companion to some other ethical theory, like, oh, let's say, Utilitarianism.

Specifically I've been thinking about the idea that, according to virtue ethical theories, our emotions should always be appropriated directed. So to draw this idea out by contrast:

Some kind of simple Christian teaching might tell people to love everyone. This is the whole Turn The Other Cheek, Love The Sinner thing. Some dude punches you in the face? Love him. Some dude kills your father? Love him.

Virtue Ethical theories, on the other hand, very much don't say this. According to most virtue ethicists, as I understand it, if some dude kills you father? Hate him. Hate him quite a lot. Hate is the appropriate emotion to feel towards someone who has killed your father. Vengeance might also be appropriate. Love really isn't, and it would be the sign of a morally deficient agent that he loved someone who killed his father. That's right, to love in this case would be an evil/immoral act, to hate would be appropriate, and so good/ethical.

Maybe there's something to this thought, maybe. But the point where I bring in my "virtue ethics can't really supply us with a totally satisfying, complete theory of morality" thought is where I ask "so what exactly makes for appropriateness?" Before I say anything else, I should disclaim: Maybe some virtue ethicists have an answer to this. I'm really not all that familiar with the literature here, and so there might be some totally satisfying answer to that question that I am unaware of. But, as I say, I am unaware of it, so I will go on:

In the case I've mentioned, it does seem intuitively plausible that hatred is appropriate. Father-killing is a pretty big deal, it seems kinda normal to hate people who have wronged you or others you care about, etc, etc. There might be arguments on the other side, like that hatred only leads to more hatred, which is a bad thing in the long/short run. But these arguments are unlikely to outweigh the pure intuition. Hatred in this case will still intuitively feel quite justified, blameless. There will still seem like something kinda wrong, or emotionally deficient about a person who just says "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. This upsets me, but I am prepared to overlook it for the sake of our relationship."

But... But on the other hand, Christian theology does straightforwardly suggest an answer to the question of what makes for appropriateness in this case, an answer that is totally justified and necessarily given by the theoretical commitments of the belief system as a whole. And that answer is "It is never appropriate to hate a person. The appropriate emotion to feel towards a person is always, and under every circumstances, love." And, crucially, someone who is deeply immersed in such a Christian theory will probably not, or not so strongly, feel the above intuitions (I could be wrong about this, but it comes from my inkling that a person's intuitions will be at least partly determined by the results given by the theories that they subscribe to.)

I suppose all this is just to say: If Virtue Ethics and Other Theories of Ethics are to stand in contradiction to each other, and so Virtue Ethics is to be believed as its own, complete theory of morality, then it leaves us with no decent guide to the appropriateness of emotions other than intuition, which may differ from person to person (though may want to say of the Christian above that their intuitions are invalid insofar as they stem from belief in an incorrect moral theory).

If, on the other hand, Virtue Ethics is meant to be a mere companion to some other ethical theory, then our account of appropriateness will probably simply fall out from that other theory. This leads me to want to check out what will count as appropriate emotion in a Utilitarian theory, but I'm going to leave that for my next post.