DOES REASONING HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH ETHICS? David Brooks has an article entitled “The End of Philosophy” which describes current scholarship that argues that moral judgments are not made through a process of reason and deliberation. He quotes a scholar, Michael Gazzaniga as saying that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people.” (One could ask how Gazzaniga determines what constitutes “proactive moral behavior” without moral reasoning). Brooks compares moral decisions to what happens when you taste a new food. You don’t have to think about whether it is disgusting. “You just know.” He quotes Jonathan Haidt: “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.†Brooks makes several favorable comments about the new thinking. Mary Jane looked over my shoulder and asked me how I feel about this. I spent a lot of my life dealing with the moral reasoning which has been developed over centuries in the law. I think that moral reasoning has a lot to do with ethics.
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At the Jesuit college I attended, there was a philosophy class called Rational Psychology. I had to take it. I remember a few things from it. One thing in particular which may be of interest here is the category: The Influence of the Will on Judgment. In that sense, if our will is determined by our emotions, then the will’s ability to persuade a person that something is right, because one wants it to be right, is a way that emotions affect ethical thought. But is this really ethical thought? Or is this self-serving manipulation of a situation to an easy or pleasant solution, rather than an uncomfortable but moral one? Perhaps geometry is a model for ethical thought, in this sense: if you start out with a certain number of sound principles, and if your logical is sound, the solution should be sound, i.e., ethical. But if you already know how you “feel” about something, you might start with an incorrect principle or distort or misuse logic in order to get where you want. (Politics, anyone?)
Sequel: When I used to use logic arguing about something with my mother, who was smart but unschooled and unscrupulous, she would grant an initial principle, follow my logic along each step with a grudging affirmative grunt, but, then, when I got to the end, and the end result was not what she wanted, she would calmly insist I had “tricked” her because my conclusion was not the “right” one.
My father, who had a lot of religious faith, would simply say, “Do you think you’re smarter than the pope?”
Speaking of the pope, I wonder what moral process went into the automatic excommunication of the 10 year old in Brazil who was pregnant with twins, the product of incest/rape. Her doctors who aborted her on the ground that she could not survive the pregnancy were also excommunicated. Here, a moral standard based on supposed principle leads to an absurd outcome where, perhaps, an empathetic emotional response would have made more sense.
My hunch is that ones short term emotional response to a situation is more likely to result in “moral behavior” if one has developed a reasoned world view, like Camus’ argument for the inherent worth of life in The Rebel. Hopefully such an approach is tempered by the specific situations one encounters and notions like compassion moderate any single “principle.”
The Brazilian archbishop would have profitted by not confusing principle with dogma.