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.