Value or Affection, Reason or Emotions?

This my first formal paper for PHILOS C153B taught by Prof. DeWitt at UCLA.

Consideration of edge cases often helps us better understand the subject matter being studied and, therefore, revise theories to better represent it, and it is true for ethics as well. To account for psychopaths, an edge case that cannot be seen more in everyday life, we are both forced and helped to reflect upon many different positions of meta-ethics.

Are psychopaths not morally motivated because they cannot form genuine moral judgments, or are they not motivated morally just because they feel not to be moral, even though they can have actual moral judgments? The former view largely aligns with motivational internalism, the view that (moral) judgments are necessarily motivating, whereas the latter necessarily implies motivational externalism, the view that (moral) judgments are not necessarily motivating. While motivational externalism may seem appealing because of its simplicity (to explain their moral failure, we just say that they were lacking something external to them, period!), upon deliberation it is actually rather disturbing: such a structure of our will not only makes the explanation of psychopaths simple, but also makes the moral motivation of everyone else trivial in a way that renders genuine moral value impossible. This is because under externalism, a moral success/failure would then merely be a consequence of something external to the agent, without representing any goodness of the agent. It’s almost like I suddenly start to act morally once someone flips a switch on, and start to act evil once he turns the switch off. Because of this, motivational externalism fails to capture the essence of our concept of morality.

But if we want to stick to motivational internalism, a lot of hard questions would have to be answered – If we want to account for psychopaths while at the same time maintaining that moral judgments necessarily motivate, we would have to show that the psychopaths do not form genuine moral judgments. But what do we mean by that? In Nichols’ analysis, he divides conceptions of moral judgments into rationalism and sentimentalism. Under rationalism, moral judgments are judgments based on some kind of reason, “rather than emotions or cultural idiosyncrasies”, whereas sentimentalism considers moral judgments to be judgments based on emotions like affect. If psychopaths must not be able to form moral judgments, we should be able to account for their inability by showing what defect they have and how that defect corresponds to their incapacity to perform moral judgments. In Nichols’ paper, empirical data are claimed to show that under a rationalist conception of moral judgments, we are unlikely to account for psychopaths, whereas the affective deficit shown by data can much better account for psychopaths. From that, he concludes that “the defective capacity for moral judgment in psychopathy seems not to derive from a rational deficit, but rather from a deficit to an affective system”, implying that affection lies at the center of moral judgments. But is Nichols’ conclusion right?

To show the unlikeliness of accounting for psychopaths under a rationalist conception of moral judgments, Nichols (among other things he did, e.g., towards conceptual rationalism) tries to argue that many rational deficits rationalists may use to account for psychopaths fail to explain why only psychopaths fail to have genuine moral judgments. While I agree with most of what Kennett pointed out in her response to Nichols, in this paper, I would like to talk about something else – the perspective-taking abilities Nichols mentioned.

Nichols is right in saying that “there is no reason to think that psychopaths have such a deficit [to take a perspective not their own]” – we have seen many psychopaths in movies, if not also in real life, who, by taking perspectives, know exactly how to manipulate people to achieve their goals. Imagine asking a psychopath something like “Do you know how bad they would feel after you have done [insert immoral, deeply-harming action of your choice]?”, it would not be too much of a surprise if the psychopath replies “Yes, and what?” While we could accuse the psychopath of being cold-hearted or having a defective affective capacity, what I would like to focus on is value. We see that the psychopath does not value the well-being of others and thus chooses to harm others while being able to take another perspective and see how harmed they will be because of the action. Just as I, a normal person who would not care about how bad a criminal would feel when I have to kill them in order to save people’s lives from the crime. Just as in the latter case you would not accuse me of being cold-hearted and/or having a defective affective capacity, it doesn’t seem to be very reasonable to say that the psychopath’s lack of value (of other’s welfare) must originate from their lack of empathy or other emotion, because emotion is not the only thing that affects and justifies how one values something, as shown in the latter case of self-defense. In the case of self-defense, my not valuing the criminal’s welfare is grounded by moral principles and my valuing of the welfare of innocent people – and valuing something based on complicated things like these clearly needs some participation from reason (e.g. we need reason to know who is innocent – I do not act to protect people just because the innocent-appearing people affect me in a certain way, but also because I believe they deserve to be protected). That is to say, Nichols' consideration of perspective-taking is almost there, but he missed the difference between taking perspective to see one’s welfare and valuing one’s welfare.

The perspective-taking case can also be analyzed in another way: Think about why a normal person would be morally refrained from doing something if they realize through perspective-taking that it could harm innocent people. One way to explain this is that we are really in some way equal as imperfect rational beings. Using Kant’s words, this is because we, as imperfect rational beings, are really no different from other imperfect rational beings, and for reason to harm another instance of reason would just be reason harming itself, which is irrational and avoided by reason. If this is the case, we could say that our reason is end-setting, and in doing so, we genuinely value the well-being of each other. Then, it would seem possible to say that the psychopaths do not value others’ welfare exactly because their reason lacks at least the end-setting capability.

Further on, for Nichols’ idea that it’s really all about the affective response, we could question “so what?” – As a person with a well-functioning (at least I believe so) moral capacity, affective response seems to be far less powerful than necessitating an action. Rather, it seems perfectly conceivable that I can ask “why should I value the affective response and/or what it represents?” For example, what if I see a criminal being forced to compensate those who suffered from his actions at the cost of his welfare, even though I may possibly have an affective response, I would not say that the criminal shouldn’t be required to do so.

But valuing is not just about rationality. It is closely related to emotions, too. Consider the self-defense case again. Even though the motivating valuing of innocent people’s lives requires reason, it seems that the inner process and the resulting valuing have emotions everywhere: to believe that someone deserves to be protected seems to require emotions – I do not just run a formula and then become motivated to do something. It also seems to us that to value something is not merely about the reason underlying, but also about the surfacing valuing – which I believe is itself a kind of emotion. That is to say, moral judgment is not merely about affection/emotions, and not merely about reason/rationality either.

Perhaps the cognitive theory of emotion that feelings really just are cognitive judgments can help us better understand this: The actually motivating thing is valuing, which is an emotion, and is&represents underlying reasoning/cognitive judgment. Moral judgments are thus not about rationality or emotions, but rationality and emotions.