Are morals just feelings one approves of?

My thesis that feelings are, like thinking, like ideas, like checking facts and doing experiments, disclose reality, or cover it up, depending. Love and grief – when authentic (not sentimental or counterfeit) disclose the being of the beloved person; remorse discloses the evilness of the action and the human dignity of the person wronged; awe and reverence disclose our relation to the universe (as can fear); desecrating life as in the horrid practices of industrial meat reveals the being of animals precisely through its violation; the silence during the Eucharist is appropriate to the occasion and partly discloses its sublimity; the jubilation at the end of WWII in allied countries disclosed the significance of the victory.

    Emotions can conceal reality when not a lucid response to it.  The tourist who beholds the Grand Canyon and says, “yeah, and? A big hole” cannot see the Grand Canyon; their reaction is that of a blind person. The person who can only use the “grief” over the loss of a pet or relative to garner attention to themselves as an object of sympathy is cut off from the reality of the pet or relative. The bastards who acquired logging rights to the redwood forest, reducing it to “natural resources” waiting to become profits, are spiritually retarded. Feelings, emotions not only reveal and conceal reality, but reveal very clearly the reality of the person responding.

   And said feelings, emotions – I could add moods – give rise to our basic attitudes toward life and the world as a whole, which then color our perceptions and beliefs all the way down (and not worried about precise distinctions between these words at this point). The bastards who profited by destroying large parts of the redwood forests were perhaps stunted by an unloving family or hated nature because of some fear or past trauma. We humans are not free to love and hate, see and not-see, as are the angels, as we are creatures of flesh and blood, living in a history conditioned significantly by violence, injustice, and disharmony. If we see and feel as a response to reality rather than our seeing and feeling being blocked by past damage to our souls, then we are more lucky than deserving praise. [I think this is the background for Christ’s “let he who is without sin cast the first stone…” and “for he maketh. his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” But I digress.] We develop attitudes (Einstellung) to life and the world always under the pressure of our lives growing up – attitudes in Wittgenstein’s sense: a comprehensive stance or perspective that goes beyond a simple cognitive opinion. It involves the person's entire orientation – including emotional responses, personal values, and the overall way in which they engage with whatever. The original meaning of both the German and English suggests a sense of positioning or orientation, suggesting a way in which an individual positions themselves mentally or emotionally in relation to a particular concept or experience (the attitude of a compass, in an older usage; or in a Jane Austin novel, how a character sits in a certain attitude.). And these attitudes condition one’s feelings – upon seeing the Grand Canyon or the Redwood forest, etc. Again, I digress.]

                                                            

  

    Now I put forth a thesis, which I will now refine: this whole complex of “subjective” feelings, emotions, moods, and, importantly, the attitudes that condition them, attitudes formed under the pressures of an individual life . . . this whole complex of emotions, for short, gives rise to myth, gives rise to metaphysics (intellectualized myth, purely cognitive content abstracted from its living source in poetry, myth, imagination, emotional response to life), gives rise to religion (though power is often what shapes and perpetuates religion – officially sanctioned myth). Rational thought, when it goes beyond the kinds of things we can understand through the disciplined use of our senses and intellect, through theories, conceptual analysis, empirical testing, etc. – in short, through “natural reason” – … rational thought is conditioned by this matrix of “subjectivity,” itself conditioned by history, culture, economy, and so on.

 

. . .

      And so I am reminded of a deceptively similar approach to thinking about morals, religion, art, and metaphysics that came out of the logical positivist style of philosophy: emotivism. I first learned in a book titled After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) by Alasdair MacIntyre – a book that I have thought a lot about over the years. This is the way MacIntyre characterizes emotivism:

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. Particular judgments may of course unite moral and factual elements. ‘Arson, being destructive of property, is wrong’ unites the factual judgment that arson destroys property with the moral judgment that arson is wrong. But the moral element in such a judgment is always to be sharply distinguished from the factual. Factual judgments are true or false; and in the realm of fact there are rational criteria by means of which we may secure agreement as to what is true and what is false. But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none. It is to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others (14).

 

So am I an “emotivist”? (I dislike jargon in philosophy.) No, at least I hope not. Like emotivism I do assert that feelings/emotions – certain feelings/emotions, experienced in a particular quality conditioned by deeper attitudes – are the source of myth, religion, art, and morals. But for me this part of our inner lives (the whole complex I just mentioned) reaches out to and responds to something real and can, if ‘pure’ reveal essential aspects of the reality they are responses to. In this they are like thoughts – and I don’t consider thoughts something logically clearly distinct from these kinds of feelings. The thought ‘Both the slaughter of the people at the music festival as well as the people in Gaza through the retaliatory bombing involve unspeakable cruelty’ is a thought and the thought is intelligible unless cruelty provokes some emotional response; it is a thought-feeling. More importantly, it is not reduced to psychology. It reveals something about the person’s inner life, no doubt. But also something about its object.

  [Again, the will to reduce emotions to psychology – the subjective – stems from the logical positivists' faith in the metaphysical myth that science was not just science but also metaphysics: that scientific methods reveal the entire essence – or lack thereof – of the universe. While it is true that science must make assumptions about nature – that it is uniform, for example – it is not a possible scientific hypothesis that Being can be reduced to what science can understand of it. If anyone believes that nature is reducible to what a finished science could understand of it, then they live by a faith as unsupported by science as an evangelical. Indeed, there was something fundamentalist about the scientism of the logical positivists: they never tried to give an argument for their metaphysics because they thought all metaphysical argument was meaningless – it was on their narrow understanding of meaning and truth – and thus left no room for any awareness that their entire project of eliminating metaphysics and religion always presupposed their metaphysical scientism: an example of a world version exploding from an internal contradiction.]

    But I do think at the level of myth and metaphysics, since they make sense of our most profound responses to life, some incommensurability does exist, intellectually. I don’t think there are proofs or knock-down arguments against many possible incommensurable belief constellations. Emotions are cognitive, connected with thought. But reality is big, and we all experience it through our own lives. Perhaps some emotivists would feel that is the core of emotivism. Our finitude, our fallibility (that stems not only from our finitude but the ways we all get damaged during the course of a life) mean that natural reason can only take us so far, and that subjective certitude (or lack thereof) has to pick up from there. So Nietzsche was right when he wrote to his sister:

 

One last question: If from our youth we had believed that the salvation of the soul emanates from someone other than Jesus, say, from Muhammad, wouldn't we have partaken in the same blessings? Indeed, faith alone blesses, not the objective reality that stands behind faith. I write this to you, dear Lisbeth, to counter the most common proof that people of faith rely on, those who appeal to their inner experiences and derive from them the infallibility of their faith. Every true faith is thus infallible; it accomplishes what the believing person hopes to find within it, but it offers no basis whatsoever for establishing an objective truth.

 

But Nietzsche was referring to the level of belief systems here – Christianity, Islam – or by implication metaphysical systems like Hegel’s. I am talking about immediate responses to life. My child is born; joy fills me. Therefore, I cannot accept a belief system like Schopenhauer’s that makes the individual an illusion and life a mistake. The infallibility and certain do not come from the tenets of Christianity or Islam; the infallibility is at the level of the joy over the new life. You don’t believe that you have joy, as a proposition that may be true or false; the unquestioned joy forces certain beliefs on you, if you at another time come to inquire. The incommensurably comes because not everybody can respond to the birth of a child with joy. The question is: how do we see that? As a tragedy? I must see it that way because I cannot doubt and have lived with this certainty through thick and thin that life – despite all the bad stuff – is in its core a gift, and that it is terrible (sin) that this is covered up by the things people do and the power structures they some people erect and perpetuate.