Do Our Feelings Tell Us What Is Right?

There are two main views on morality.

The traditional one is that there are objective moral norms that tell us what is right to do. It came from religion and assumed that God provides us with the rules and virtues a community needs to live together.

Later, philosophers replaced theologians as moral authorities but they continued to look for rules and virtues that could objectively determine the appropriate actions in a given situation. Is it right to steal money to buy medication to my sick mother when there is no other means to heal her? Under which circumstances is it right to kill another person, if at all? When do I have the permission to lie to a friend?

The modern view that became popular among psychologists emerged when it became clear that different moral views clash and it is difficult to determine which one holds true. The solution to this conundrum is as simple as it is false.

According to this view, called “emotivism”, there are no objective moral laws. Each man and woman has to decide themselves what is right. What tells them what is right is their conscience, that is, the feelings that accompany an action. If we are lying to a friend and feel badly, then it is morally not permissible to do so. By contrast, if I am lying and feel well, there is according to this view nothing wrong with my lying. However, recent research revealed that people may feel a “cheater’s high”, that is, they enjoy the success of cheating others.

Although popular with psychologists, philosophers identified a major problem with emotivism, namely, that anything goes – there is no way, from this point of view – to determine whether an action or a person’s life is morally good. If a terrorist like the Norwegian Anders Breivik thinks that killing minors is good, then his act is good, an outcome most people – including psychologists – not only find counterintuitive but also abominable.

This is why some scholars advocate new forms of moral realism, that is, the assumption that moral values are “out there”. Beyond religion and virtue ethics, our communities and cultures set moral norms that serve as mindsets. Moral norms do not arise from within, from our minds. We all have grown up in communities where moral values were given. We learned and internalized them. In this regard, moral realism describes better how people arrive at moral values than emotivism that they somehow come from within.

Do feelings play no role whatsoever in assessing the morality of our behavior?

Source: El Greco: Penitent Petrus (Wikimedia, Open Source)

According to classical rule-based morality, feelings would not play a crucial role. Even in virtue ethics, it remains unclear whether emotions tell us anything informative about the morality of our behavior. However, we know from psychological research that feelings provide information, and that such information might tell us whether our action was right or wrong.

Note the difference to emotivism. In emotivism, our behavior is wrong because we feel bad while the idea from moral realism is that we feel bad because our behavior was wrong, and thus our feeling may signal but not justify that our behavior is wrong.

That means that even if one advocates moral realism and claims that moral values are not constructions of an individual’s mind, some indications signal that people are acting against their own values and the values of their community.

First, and almost trivially, most people feel scruples when they do something wrong. If a Sally is not too scrupulous, a bad conscience is a good indicator that she is not acting virtuously even when she uses her feelings to achieve a personally desired outcome – say, to sell a bad car for a good price by not telling the buyer about its deficiencies.

Second, the car selling example is not only about having scruples but also about concealing information. Having the impression that we have to conceal facts that would be relevant in the dealings with another person, we should ask ourselves whether we are acting virtuously. There are some situations where hiding information is appropriate, such as concealing what present I shall bestow my wife on Christmas; but often, hiding information or even providing deceiving information is a sign that we use critical thinking or critical feeling not in the service of values, but as a technique to give us a cutting edge.

Third, feelings may come from the wrong source and therefore lead to the false action. A father who is angry because he lost money in gambling should not let the steam off at his children. Another kind of wrong source may stem from education. When children were made to feel guilty during their upbringing, they may feel guilty in situations where the community at large would consider this feeling as unfounded. Critical feeling attempts at least to detect such erroneous sources in order to align behavior to the values one endorses.

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These first three indicators all pertain to contradictions between thoughts or actions, and feelings; the contradictions lie within our own mind.

There is a fourth indicator that measures the contradiction between our actions and norms of the family, community, or society. Actions and feelings may be in perfect agreement, but the action may be wrong nevertheless. Transgressing norms and values of our group or society may be a sign that we are on the wrong side. Norms have grown from tradition, and we may assume that they have some function.

To summarize, we are brought up with moral norms within our family, community, and culture. These moral norms stem from tradition. Children internalize those moral norms without questioning them and without even knowing that there could be alternatives. Although such norms may be outdated, we should not dismiss them lightly because tradition tells us that they stood the test of time.