Emotions are Not Arguments

Moving Through, With and Beyond (?) Feelings

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Recently, Matthew Loftus wrote a powerful op-ed in the New York Times about the time when, as a pro-life doctor, he found himself in the position of having to perform an 18-week abortion while serving as a medical missionary in Sudan. It’s a really excellent piece, and one which will stay with you. I don’t want to get into the ethics of the piece, but into the ethics revealed by one particular response to the essay: uneasiness.

There was a mode of ethics prominent in the mid-20th century called emotivism, which proposed that all moral statements were really moral sentiments: when I say such and such is wrong, what I really mean is that I don’t like such and such, or that such and such produces a particular kind of feeling in me, a feeling which I identity as rightness or wrongness. There are philosophically sophisticated versions of it, but in its most reduced form, emotivism is a kind of intuitionism: morality can’t be argued about, but is known as a kind of non-transferrable knowledge, a kind of “you just know”.

Now: moral philosophy has historically had a lot to say about the emotional life, both positively and negatively. For the Stoics, the emotions were perturbances which the truly virtuous could withstand and understand as those changeable aspects of human life which we are summoned to overcome. If I experience a thing as negative emotionally, it indicates too much attachment to the thing or to certain outcomes. Famously, the Stoics held that one could endure much loss because no external was really connected to my moral state anyway. Platonists and other ancients had varying opinions about what the emotions were, but very broadly speaking, they were kinds of passions which were best tamed by the powers of reason.

This, I don’t take it, is entirely accurate of how humans make moral judgments: to say that we make moral judgments purely on adhering to reason (by which they mean not “what logically makes sense” but rather “what is most true about the world”). Our emotions are an integral aspect of being a human, such that to be sad about something worth being sad about is virtuous: to mourn the loss of a good friend or a parent is to mourn rightly, to be just in one’s estimation of what has been lost, even if you hold that they will be raised from the dead in the last. To grieve or to rejoice, to feel jealousy or love: these are all indexes to what we care about, and to what we have been summoned to tend to.

BUT. The emotions are not the same as arguments: this cannot be stressed enough. Our emotions can be indicators that we are ruffled about something, or that we care about something within the moral question, but they are not the answer to goodness or evil alone. There are a great many things about which we have to be brave which make us fearful, and about which we recoil but we have to approach anyway. To make too much of emotions is to place the precognitive at the heart of our judgments about the world, It makes us all brute animals whose intellectual justifications ultimately are just that: making up reasons to defend what we feel strongly about.

All this brings us back to the responses to Loftus’ piece about abortion.