What epistemic role do emotions play with respect to ethical beliefs?

Introduction

?The Perceptual Model is one that is often used when discussing the epistemic role of emotions. D?rings view is that emotions can justify judgments and in turn actions, whereas Brady thinks that D?ring overstates this relationship and Cowan pursues somewhat of a middle ground closer to D?rings.

Brief explanation of the perceptual model

The perceptual model claims that emotions and perceptions are analogous. This model holds that emotion pays a role in the justification of evaluative judgements, which mirrors the role played by sensory perceptions in the justification of belief.

For example: If I look at a red car, I believe I see a red car. An analogous example for emotion may be that I hear a noise in my house at night and feel fear or danger.

Brief explanation of the connections between Emotions, Externalism and internalism

In this paper the crux of the matter is what place emotions have, if any, in our moral judgments. This can be picked apart numerous ways as we can see in Table 1 below. There are many different theories of how people make moral judgements and the role of emotion within that judgement. The Humean theory posits that emotions can be a part of a desire which then motivates us, but the anti humean states that desires (which may or not include emotions) are not enough to motivate us.

Humean Theory of Motivation

Desires (which may include or cause emotions) are necessary to motivate action

Anti Humean theory of motivation

Desires (which may include or cause emotions) are not necessary to motivate action

Moral Judgment internalism

Moral Judgments essentially motivate people who make them (Under certain conditions)

Sentimentalism/Expressivism

Our moral judgments express our feelings which necessarily motivate us

Rationalism

When our moral judgments are sanctioned by rational principles they give us reasons that motivate us insofar as we are rational (independently of our sentiments and desires)

Moral Judgment externalism

Moral judgments do not necessarily motivate the people that make them

Naturalist Moral Realism

Our moral judgments are beliefs about moral facts. Whether these judgments motivate us depend on if we have the relevant desire

Non Naturalist Moral Realism

Our moral judgments are beliefs about non natural moral facts. Whether these beliefs can motivate us or not

First let us examine Dorings view. Doring states that emotions are representational and represent the world in some sort of way. I.e Guilt represents something wrong or represents something as possible being wrong. Emotions evaluate some idea such as “things ought not to be this way”.

A couple of examples of this are:

1.    One attends a house party and then awakens the next morning feeling guilty.

2.    One hears a noise in the house and worries that they are in danger.

In both these examples the emotion alerts us to some sort of imbalance or potential wrongness in the state of the world around us. In these cases, one would not simply sit there and bask in the feeling one would likely want to further investigate why they feel this way and this would motivate us to act to try to determine the cause of the emotion. Perhaps we would ring a friend to check if we had said something inappropriate at the party – or in the case of the house we would go downstairs and investigate the cause of the noises.

Here we see that emotion has become a motivational force but not quite enough information to form a belief. In the fear case, if we thought we were immediately in danger we would go and get more information to decide. Brady thinks that emotions are excellent indicators without the need for further information. I.e it’s not that emotions don’t justify you it’s that we might not be able to trust our perceptions. Brady thinks that emotions are sufficient reasons for evaluative judgements which is in response to Doring who think is that emotions are tracking motivation. Doring thinks perceptions can be integrated into practical reasoning. For example, if a red car is there them then we accept perceptually hat it is a red car – we don’t look for immediate justification of that belief. A common retort to this though may be – what about visual illusions or hallucinations where we think we see a ghost or some hidden image but we do not. In this regard, the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception.

D?ring defends internalism and rejects the belief-desire model – in pseudo support of Aristotelian Theory. Internalism (as seen in Table 1 is stated as being Moral Judgments essentially motivate people who make them (Under certain conditions)). The belief desire model is classified as thus:

For an organism to desire p is for the organism to be disposed to take whatever actions it believes are likely to bring about p.

i.e If I desire a yoghurt then I will get up move to the fridge and get one.

The belief – desire model is where beliefs and desires interact with each other to produce intentions, and these intentions can lead to actions. D?ring believes the belief- desire model does not account for the conceptual connection between normative and motivating reasons. In this opposition of the belief-desire model, D?ring argues argue that rational motivation can only be established by reference to emotion. Here Doring refers to emotion as an affective perception which is required to motivate action. Doring states that emotion can somewhat explain the action also. The reason Doring gives for this is that emotions they can rationalise actions because they have an intentional content which resembles the content of sensory perception in being representational. Goldie (2003) defined intentional content as the following:

“feelings… can actually have intentional objects in the world beyond the bounds of the body (these are what he calls “feelings towards”). Some emotional feelings are simply bodily feelings and thus, whilst intentional, do not have this kind of intentionality” (Goldie 2009). This is a large claim to state the only way rational motivation can occur is through emotion and that without emotion the motivation is perhaps irrational? The Aristotelian account of practical reason and ethics is one that D?ring agrees with in which emotions can be integrated into practical reasoning. Here Aristotle uses the theory that sometimes having the right emotional motivation is essential to one’s actions being right.

An example of this might be :

You and your friend may evaluate a gorilla in a zoo as equally dangerous, and yet you are calm while your friend is gripped with fear while you think the gorilla is safely behind bars. Then you suddenly see that the door to the cage has been left open. Most probably this insight will have an impact on your evaluation. Like your friend, you will now evaluate the gorilla as dangerous in an affective way. Although both evaluations can be expressed in the same words (‘The gorilla is dangerous’), only the new, emotional evaluation is affective. The dangerousness of the gorilla now affects you, so to speak, thereby revealing your concern to escape unharmed. The concernfulness of your emotion’s content, to put it in Robert C. Roberts’ (1988 and 2003) terms, manifests itself in its affectiveness, which is not least indicated by the fact that in feeling fear towards the gorilla, typically, you are poised to act in new ways, to act out of your emotion. D?ring [1]

Pelser goes further than D?ring and states that emotions, as evaluative perceptual states, can contribute in significant ways to our achievement of valuable epistemic goods including justified beliefs, understanding, and wisdom. Pelser also believes that emotions are analogous to sense perceptions. Pelser[2] states “Emotions, like their sense perceptual analogues, can and do function as justifying reasons or evidence for beliefs”.

How does Brady counter these views?

Brady states that the model of perception gives us the idea that emotions can inform us about value. Factive being defined here as Therefore, there can be a difference between perception and emotion. Brady[3] argues that it is the nature of emotion and emotional experience that puts pressure on perceptual theory. He argues that D?ring and others overstate the epistemic value of emotional experience in normal circumstances and this then puts pressure on the claim that emotions are analogous to perceptions at the epistemic level. Brady suggests that we need further justification for emotions, for example, should I hear a noise at night I, under normal circumstances, I would want to investigate the noise or think of reasons why there would be a noise, before I accept there is danger. Therefore, we cannot take every feeling of fear to mean that we are in danger. We are even apt to invent reasons to justify our emotions such as a jealous partner fabricating reasons to justify their feeling that their partner is being unfaithful. Again, another example of how emotions can be a source of awareness but a source of self-deception. A good example is that I would not just buy a house solely based on my feelings for it as I walk in the door. Yes, it may be a factor in the purchase but certainly not a deciding one. This would suggest that we do not take the representational content of emotional experiences at face value when forming evaluative beliefs. Indeed, we even search for considerations that confirm or deny our initial emotional appraisal of our circumstances. We even do this sometimes to justify our initial emotional response when we may be wrong or have no grounds for it. This counters D?ring in that rational motivation can only be established by reference to emotion. I would agree with D?rings statement “She suggests that certain values can only be disclosed through feeling or affect.” In so far that I agree emotions have a specific function and place but as we have shown here I do not think the following statement can be endorsed “that it is feeling that does the representational work in emotional experience”.

D?ring rejects the idea that evaluative content can be identical with a non-emotional representation of the same content plus a body feeling. They suggest that certain values can only be disclosed through feeling or affect. However, Brady has just show with a small example why this may not be the case.

Cowan[4]

Cowan takes the Neo Sentimentalist view – in Table 1 we see the Sentimentalist view defined as:

Our moral judgments express our feelings which necessarily motivate us.

Cowan states that emotions are sources of immediate defeasible justification for evaluative propositions that can sometimes ground evaluative beliefs. For example, fear can constitute the justificatory ground for a belief that some object or event is dangerous (as in the gorilla example earlier) however, he states that this view is vulnerable to several objections. In this Cowan agrees with Brady over D?ring and Pelser that emotions have a function but it may not be that that emotions are literally perceptual experiences.

We can see in Brady and Cowans counter-examples that D?ring has several holes in their argument to fill. D?ring has a quite large claim in what they write and such a claim must surely be open to criticism as we see here. Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, which is the path Doring seems to tread, has widely been regarded as a useful theory regarding emotions however, it seems to me that the interpretation is key. Many views are held by Philosophers on the perceptual model and there are many variations of the model. I believe that we have an emotion and, using the logic given in Bradys examples, some sort of rational content to contextualize this in order to fully understand the situation in front of us.

[1] D?ring, S.A., 2007. Seeing what to do: Affective perception and rational motivation. dialectica, 61(3), pp.363-394.

[2] Pelser, A.C., 2011. Emotion, evaluative perception, and epistemic goods. Baylor University.

[3] Brady, M.S., 2013. Emotional insight: The epistemic role of emotional experience. OUP Oxford.

[4] Cowan, R., 2016. Epistemic perceptualism and neo-sentimentalist objections. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 46(1), pp.59-81.