The Psychic Basis of Morality

Mainly to blame (so to speak) for the woes of moralism is blaming. Blame is a two-faced monster. It can be directed toward someone else, or toward oneself. Furthermore, it can be directed toward oneself by someone else or by oneself. When directed toward oneself by oneself it constitutes the feeling of moral guilt (or blameworthiness). When directed toward oneself by someone else it may occasion the feeling of guilt or instead cause one to resent the attribution and indeed to direct blame back at the attributor. This can be faulting them for having made the false attribution to you, or else for their being hypocritical for blaming you for something when they themselves are guilty of the very same thing (double standard) or something else just as bad or worse; or even just your feeling guilty (or otherwise morally inadequate) will cause you to look for a scapegoat to whom to shift the burden of guilt. 

Prior to the moral act of blaming or the moral feeling of guilt is a baptismal psychic “move” from some purely empirical observation to a moral attribution. Thus, you observe someone kicking a dog for fun and this fills you with outrage. Or you take someone’s pen and subsequently feel remorse. Sometimes this will involve a cognitive error, such as mistaking the kicker’s self-defense from a vicious dog for a gratuitous act. (Interestingly this would not exonerate your own case, for if you subsequently realized that the pen was in fact your own, your original intention to swipe the pen without regard to the other person’s ownership or needs could still morally incriminate you.) Meanwhile the nonmoral feeling that someone else is blaming you may itself be mistaken: It could be your own paranoia. 

But what exactly is the feeling of guilt? It is a painful feeling. Is it sui generis, or does it amount to something else? Other kinds of pain may be “just themselves”; for example, a toothache feels one way and a stubbed toe another, but aside from attributing a source (a cavity, injured tissue) is there anything more that needs to (or can?) be said than that they hurt? Think of colors as an analogy: Is it perhaps enough to note that red can be distinguished from green? 

But I do sense, in myself and others, that the person who feels guilty is suffering from something deeper, namely, a  sense of personal inadequacy or “unworthiness” in some fundamental way. And this matters to the person. Why? Why is this painful? Perhaps this is finally the bottom line: It is simply inherently so, although remaining inchoate exactly what it even means to be unworthy in this sense. (It might even be incoherent if analyzed. Human beings are abundantly capable of experiencing incoherent things, such as wanting to kill for Christ.) 

Or perhaps we can delve deeper still and discover the real source of distress in fear; for to be unworthy in the moral sense seems to imply that one is deserving of punishment, of suffering, of failure, of loss; and this in turn might even portend that one is likely to be punished, to suffer, etc. (since there is justice in the universe: karma or God). 

So it is not clear whether the guilt feeling is something over and above this presentiment, or is simply the fear that one has brought upon oneself an aversive outcome.[1] Thus, suppose by some miracle there were a human being who did not carry around this guilt (feeling). Then we could imagine a case where someone actually was blaming them for something, and even then they would not feel guilty, so secure were they in the sense of their own “innocence.” Then, even more wonderful to behold, neither would they feel any need to blame the other person in turn, since no burden needs to be relieved and hence no guilt needs to be transferred to a scapegoat. Of course a person could have some nonmoral reason to want to refute an attribution of moral guilt, for example, if it meant the denial of some favors … just as one normally wishes to defend one’s innocence of a criminal offense in a court of law lest one lose one’s freedom, reputation, etc. And note too: This desire obtains whether or not one is guilty of the crime, or believes oneself to be. 

            I want to suggest as a general thesis that the moral feeling of guilt or blameworthiness is deeply felt, deeply aversive, and deeply ingrained. I see this as the root cause of the variety of moral phenomena. Thus, we are liable to feeling guilty about all sorts of things because this disposition already resides within us in general form: our very existence is (felt to be) somehow blameworthy. It is our Adam and Eve legacy: the Original Sin that accounts for our felt need of Salvation, as well as our defensiveness and paranoia. (And if my analysis of moral guilt into a judgment on and perhaps even a punishment of the self is correct, then the Buddhist emphasis on Nirvana via dispelling of the illusion of the self also becomes motivationally intelligible.) Since we already feel we are guilty, and we very much don’t want to feel guilty, we are likely to reject the (real or imagined) attribution of guilt, whether coming from ourself or someone else; and hence we are prone to take offense even when nobody is blaming us for anything, or to exaggerate the magnitude or significance of the blaming when somebody is. Thus also we pump up our own innocence, which becomes almost axiomatic, and thence direct any (real or imagined) blaming by another back at them in any of the various ways mentioned above, or simply blame them when anything goes not to our liking (which they will in turn reject or resent, and so on in the cycle of recriminations). This also makes us liable to being baited: Someone who knows how to push someone’s outrage buttons can whip them into a frenzy and thereby make them look like a fool (or worse: imagine an interrogator) … or someone who strikes you as outrageous can cause you to become terribly upset (imagine a telemarketer who won’t take no for an answer) … needlessly. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 

            Why in the first place we feel guilty, and care, and so strongly, about being guilty presumably has some evolutionary explanation as contributing to our survival as a species. Stories are easy enough to concoct to account for this. For example, having the liability to a strong internal self-condemnation is a motivator to do things that are conducive to (or not do things that would inhibit) survival if the failure to do them (or doing them) would trigger it. However, what I am suggesting is that at some point in human history the balance tipped from this liability’s being net beneficial to being net detrimental to human welfare and prospects. (It would not do for me to recommend discarding it just because I don’t like the feeling or even its consequences for individuals and society if in fact it was a necessary evil for overall human survival not to mention well-being.) Thus it has come to pass that our liability to and felt aversiveness to guilt feelings motivate the intransigence of our self-righteousness and the uncompromisingness of our condemnation of others that in turn produce the stultifying resistance to change and exacerbation of conflicts that constitute the banefulness of morality.


[1] Note, however, that this would in effect de-moralize morality into a mere egoism: the misidentification of fear of punishment as desert (of punishment) for being selfish. But even a truly moral focus on desert can have the egotistic effect of diverting attention from securing the welfare of others or society (or even oneself) to preserving the innocence of oneself.

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