And Then There Was One: The Phenomenology of Demoralizing

Ronnie de Sousa has come up with a nice metaphor for the superfluity of moral attributions, namely, double counting. When we judge a behavior to be morally wrong, there is (this is the first “count”) an identification of the behavior in nonmoral terms, for example, kicking the dog, but there is also (for most of us?) the assignment of wrongness to the act. That latter is the second count: the mental attribution of a moral property, whether it be wrongness, rightness, or permissibility. De Sousa and I agree that this attribution is superfluous in the sense of being illusory or unjustified, perhaps even absurd. It is analogous to seeing a woman as a literal witch: There are no witches. There is no wrongness (etc.).

            What we both recommend, therefore, is the elimination of the attribution. Let us see the kicking of the dog only for what it is: a certain sort of motivated behavior which causes pain to a sentient being. Does this mean that we can then only be helpless observers of cruel acts? Not at all. We may still be strongly averse to any being’s experiencing pain or suffering, and also highly motivated to prevent or ameliorate or stop it if we can, other things equal (for example, it is not a case of a rabid dog biting a child).

            The benefit here is not only being more attuned to reality, but also reducing the likelihood of an escalating cycle of painful feelings and violence: contempt, outrage, punishment, guilt, retribution, and on and on. In place of being possessed by all these moral demons, the amoralist perceives a practical problem calling for a practical solution. “Here is a situation I really don’t like; so how can I counter it (without creating even worse problems)?”

            What I want to focus on in this essay is the commonplaceness of double counting. For I see it as something not exclusive to moralism but rather ubiquitous in our perception of the world. (Note: Moral double counting may itself be ubiquitous in our perception of the world, in which case I am suggesting the ubiquity of triple counting. See “The Spread.”) It seems to me that any emotional evaluation (and I consider moral attributions to fall under this heading) -- of an object or event or state of affairs or person or whatever -- involves double counting.

            For example, to find something (nonmorally) disgusting is to identify something in nonevaluative terms, for example, drool from a person’s mouth, and then attribute the property of disgustingness to it. Clearly what is going on in this case of double counting is that a substance having no such property in itself is being burdened with an illusory quality that is, in fact, only the projection of another person’s (or sometimes even the drooler’s) emotional response onto the substance.

            Oh, yes, we might define disgustingness into objective existence by giving it the meaning of “the property of eliciting the emotional response of disgust in most observers.” We do something like this with the redness of ripe apples; but in that case we are not projecting an emotional response but rather experiencing a perceptual response. It is a similar kind of mistake insofar as we take our experience of the apple’s redness to be the apple’s redness. But there is no mistake if we understand the redness of the apple to be just the apple’s skin’s property of structuring light in a specified way under specified circumstances of illumination (standard daylight…) to a specified observer (not color blind …) under specified conditions of the observer (awake, eyes open …). That this redness is a property of the apple is shown by the apple’s retention of it even under, say, neon light when it “looks green.”

            But should a worm appear in the apple, something new may be elicited from the observer: not only the identification of the worm (and even its color), but also a projection of the observer’s disgust into the worm. And that is a mistake. For there is no specifiable property common under specifiable conditions etc. to worms … and drool … and countless other things that people react to with disgust. So there is nothing real about disgustingness. It is an illusion. We know this too because one person’s disgust is another person’s deliciousness. (I won’t gross out you, and myself, with, say, an inventory of the world’s foods.)

            Just so, de Sousa and I would say, are moral properties. One person’s outrageousness is another person’s duty or at least acceptability. (Note that permissibility is itself a moral quality. It is distinct from something’s having no moral significance. See “Dostoevsky and Me.”) And what I wish to highlight in this essay is that, therefore, the elimination of moralism from our psyche is similar to, say, a nurse’s or orderly’s or parent’s adaptation to drool. The phenomenology may undergo the same transformation from (moral or “physical”) disgust to simply seeing what is there (“counted” only once) and then figuring out what, if anything, needs to be done about it.

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