Great Throughts Treasury

"They are on the role of emotive forces in shaping our moral judgment. I use the term "emotive," because they are about motivation and how motivation affects the reasoning process when it comes to moral judgment."

"There are a variety of ways that emotional processes affect reason in a nuanced way, and I just want to briefly mention one way in which this is the case: We have some evidence for, in work I've done with some people here, and in work that John and his colleagues have done, showing that disgust sensitivity, just the simple tendency to experience an emotion, can actually on one account (an account that we believe although we don't have good causal evidence for), that a simple tendency to experience certain kinds of emotions can shape beliefs over time. We've shown that disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more likely to be disgusted, over time end up developing certain kinds of moral views. In particular, we've shown that not only are people more political conservative if they're more disgust sensitive, but they specifically are more politically conservative in the following ways: they tend to adhere to a certain kind of moral view that the conservative party in recent years in the United States has endorsed, that's characterized by being against homosexuality and against abortion. What we've shown is that people who are higher in disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more easily disgusted, actually seem to have these views. One way of thinking of this is that early differences in emotional styles can actually shape the kinds of things that you find persuasive. It's not a simple case of an emotion influencing me, therefore my reason is shut off and I'm influenced by this gut reaction (which certainly happens). But it's a more complex view of the interaction."

"What happens is there's a deep motivation we have to believe certain things about the world. And some of these things are moral things. We have a variety of moral views, specific moral claims that we all hold to be true, that we believe, first and foremost, independent of any principled justification. What happens is that we recruit evidence in the form of a principle, because the principle is so rhetorically powerful. Because it's convincing to somebody else, you can say well, this is wrong because it causes harm to a large group of people."

"Across a whole body of studies, I think what we've shown is that it's not that reasoning doesn't occur, and in fact, reasoning can actually be persuasive. Say we're in a social situation and I want to convince you of something, and I say it's wrong to do X. And you say, well, why is it wrong? I appeal to a broader principle. And this in fact, might work. This might convince you, oh yes, that's a good point, that is a principle that we should adhere to. It's just that we're sneaky about it, right? And it's not that motivation [to uphold our moral beliefs] is wiping out our ability to reason, it's just making it very directional. If anything, it's opening up this skill and ability we have to find confirmation for any belief that we might have. This is probably true in most domains of social judgment, but I think it's especially interesting in the domain of moral judgment because of the implications that this has. "