Moralism as an Emotion

My first publication in a professional journey, 40 years ago, was an article proposing a theory of emotion. The article is cited to this day, although often as a foil. I myself have seen room for improvement. But the essence still seems to me valid, which is that both belief and desire play a role in emotions. A stick-figure example of this is that being afraid may involve believing one is about to be bitten by a snake and wanting not to be.

One implication of this theory is that one can have a mistaken emotion. For example, suppose there is no snake but only a piece of rope coiled in a dark corner. What motivates the emotion is only the belief that there is a snake coiled there. So the emotion is misplaced.

However, the emotion itself is certainly real. And there is also a sense in which it is quite proper. This can be seen by considering a case where the belief is correct, and yet the emotion is mistaken in a “deeper” sense. Imagine that someone is afraid of a teddy bear. This seems inappropriate in a way that is more fundamental than merely mistaking the object of one’s fear. Why? Because we expect fear to be of fearsome things, which is to say (so as not to beg the question), dangerous things. Teddy bears are not dangerous.

However, here again we could still make a kind of sense of the emotion. Suppose, say, the person had had a traumatic experience involving a teddy bear, perhaps at some violent scene in long-forgotten childhood. By psychological association a linkage could have been formed, such that in adulthood teddy bears evoke fear.

There is, however, one kind of mistaken emotion that is so basic, it might even be impossible. Can we even imagine a person being afraid of a teddy bear while believing it is a teddy bear and having no sense whatever that the teddy bear is dangerous? This seems to violate the very logic of fear. So just as there cannot be a four-sided triangle, one could not be afraid of an object one did not consider (however subconsciously) dangerous. If we did come across a person (even ourself) who exhibited fear in this kind of circumstance, therefore, we would be thrown back to the previous sort of mistake and hunt for some psychoanalytic explanation … or else conclude that the person was not afraid after all but only exhibiting some symptoms of fear.

But now let us to return to the garden-variety sort of mistake, where a false belief is the culprit. It occurs to me that my brief against moralism could be that morality is implicated in a mistake of just this sort. For morality as a real phenomenon (and as I conceive it) is the belief in objective value – typically, in objective right and wrong and good and bad.[1] And this belief is false,[2] I have maintained -- indeed, systematically false. There simply are no objective values in reality.

Moralism is then to be understood as an emotional state involving a false belief. A moralist is someone who is motivated, or we might say emotivated, by beliefs about, and a belief in, objective value. Thus, a moralist might become outraged because they believe that someone else has done something objectively wrong or bad, or be filled with loathing or contempt because they believe someone else is objectively evil, or yearn for justice or retribution because they believe someone else has done something objectively unfair, or be stricken with guilt because they believe they themself have done something objectively wrong or bad, and so forth.

The practical, and indeed therapeutic, upshot is that, just as disabusing someone of the belief that there is a snake in the corner by casting a light on the coil of rope will vanquish their fear, so, I would hypothesize, disabusing someone of the belief in objective values would rid them of moralism. (And that, I further hypothesize, and believe, would enable us to negotiate life and the world in a way that better conduces to our reasoned desires overall.)

[1] And ultimately all others, including objective beauty and ugliness, objective funniness and unfunniness, even objective truth and falsity.

[2] I will here bracket the question of the status of this falseness, given the presumed nonreality of objective falsehood, which I have dealt with elsewhere.

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