Hedonism vs. Qualia Preferentism

It's worth distinguishing 'happiness' (positively valenced experience) from preferred experience. For example, an ascetic monk may wish to avoid strongly valenced experiences, or a self-loathing individual might even want to feel miserable (i.e. have negatively valenced experiences). More interestingly, we might feel attached to our current tastes (hedonic likings), and so be averse to the idea of inducing satisfactions of other tastes.

Imagine, for example, an aesthete who loves opera and fine wine, and utterly detests Britney Spears and cheap bubbly. Suppose a mad scientist offered to rewire their tastes and have them enjoy listening to Britney for hours on end. It's entirely conceivable that the aesthete would find this prospect abhorrent. While acknowledging that he would - in the proposed scenario - be deluded into experiencing great happiness, from his actual perspective the aesthete strongly prefers not to undergo this experience. He prefers not to enjoy the experience of listening to crap.

Is this preference unreasonable? I think that Derek Parfit may be committed to saying so. Parfit holds that hedonic likings and dislikings (unlike desires) are not responsive to reasons. They are simply brute psychological facts. We can have reason to want to like fine wine, if it has a greater potential for intense liking/enjoyment than does cheap bubbly. But there is no reason to like fine wine (any more than there are reasons to bleed), if 'liking' is a brute, reasons-insensitive state: something that happens to us, rather than something we do.

Anyway, if Parfit is right that there are no reasons for liking aesthetically superior objects more, then it's hard to see why we should care about the objects, as opposed to the intensities, of our likings. That is, it looks like the only reason to want to like fine wine more is insofar as it would yield a more intense liking. This might seem to devalue aesthetic evaluation. Beethoven's symphonies no longer merit appreciation. They're just cheesecake. Really, really enjoyable cheesecake. And if you could find Britney just as enjoyable, then that would be just as good.

I wonder about applying this to the moral case. It seems intrinsically bad to derive pleasure from others' suffering (even if you reflectively prefer that others not suffer, and would never act to cause suffering, or anything like that). If a mad scientist offered to rewire your tastes to make you enjoy child porn, say, that would seem very undesirable indeed (and again, I think, not just on instrumental grounds -- though that would surely be part of it). Are these intuitions mistaken?

Blame and Schadenfreude

I want to say that envy and schadenfreude are essentially irrational, in that these emotions involve implicit normative misjudgments. Envy involves responding to something good (for another person) as though it were bad, and schadenfreude involves responding to something bad as thought it were good. In general, I hold, emotions involve implicit judgments, and can be rationally assessed according to whether those judgments are themselves rationally warranted. But might this approach be used, by moral responsibility skeptics, to argue that blame is never warranted?

Someone might suggest that the reactive emotions associated with blame (resentment, guilt/shame, etc.) involve an implicit claim to the effect that the target deserves to be punished, or that it would be a good thing if this were to occur. But many people are skeptical of such retributivist claims. We may instead think that for a person to suffer is never good in itself (even if the person in question is bad). Does this then commit us to the view that people are never blameworthy?

Well, only if we accept their initial suggestion about what implicit judgment is contained in the emotion of blame. And I don't see any reason to accept that. Of course, many folk are retributivists, and so would be happy to see the people they consider blameworthy suffer. But this seems a merely contingent connection. As I see things, moral emotions like resentment or moral indignation merely involve, in the first instance, a kind of negative judgment or moral disapproval. Roughly, as per Nomy Arpaly's account, to hold someone blameworthy for an action is to hold that they manifested a "deficiency of good will" in so acting. It is this normative judgment that is implicit in the negative moral emotions, or so it seems to me, not any stronger claim to the effect that it would be a good thing for this bad person to suffer. How we should respond to the identified deficiency is a strictly further question.

It's important to distinguish here between blame and outward expressions of blame (e.g. vocally berating the person). To express blame is an action -- a form of punishment -- that may be advisable or not as the practical reasons dictate. All else equal, we may think there is a pro tanto reason not to so act, namely that it's unpleasant for the recipient. We shouldn't want people to suffer unpleasantness (unless it's instrumental to some greater good, e.g. deterring future wrongdoing, that can outweigh this consideration). This is the standard anti-retributivist point. But even if expressing blame is inadvisable, it doesn't follow that blame itself is unwarranted. (Just as one may be warranted in feeling fear, though it may be inadvisable to scream or otherwise express this emotion if that may trigger panic in others.)

This is the crucial point. While expressing one's moral disapproval may be an act of 'punishment', and (pro tanto) inadvisable for that reason, the same simply isn't true of feeling moral disapproval in the first place. Emotions aren't actions, and so a fortiori aren't acts of punishment. They may be practically fortunate or unfortunate, but those aren't the kinds of considerations that determine whether a given emotion is rationally warranted (just as practical considerations aren't relevant to rational belief). Rather, what matters is whether the implicit judgment in the emotion is warranted. So it all comes down to the question whether the moral emotions involve implicitly judging punishment to be desirable. Do they? (How, exactly, could we go about settling this question one way or another?)

P.S. For a somewhat different take on what blame consists in (which I'm also sympathetic to), see my old discussion of Scanlon's view.

Authentic Affect

Ben Casnocha writes:

It's astonishing how effective pharmaceuticals are today with only very minor side effects. But there's one side effect yet solved and I suspect it's the most potent for some drugs: the identity confusion of whether the you on drugs is really "you."

For drugs that deal with personality issues or depression, I imagine even a successful patient must grapple with whether their newly improved state is artificial. (Artificial in a more serious way than the effect of myriad everyday things like coffee.) Am I really happy or is it just the drug that's tricking me into thinking so?

Such questions have the ring of conceptual confusion, so perhaps analytic philosophy can have some therapeutic benefit after all. What, exactly, is the question in italics asking? What is the difference between being 'really happy' as opposed to being 'tricked' into such feelings? The only real question I can see in this vicinity is whether one's situation warrants the emotions one is feeling. If your affect matches your evaluative judgments, and these in turn are not unreasonable, then there is nothing left to worry about. (If you're feeling chirpy at a funeral, then you should be worried. But if you are, say, enjoying the company of good friends -- sharing in their cheer and good humour -- then that seems entirely appropriate, and as authentic as anything. How could it not be?)

The 'artificiality' of the cause is neither here nor there. In fact, we might expect genuine 'identity confusion' (or incoherence between one's evaluative judgments and emotional affect) to be more common without medication. I've never been on antidepressants myself, but at times when I have felt slightly depressed what's struck me is how out of sync such feelings seemed to be with my evaluative judgments. And I guess similar things can happen even now if I'm simply feeling a bit socially anxious or uncomfortable: those are feelings I take to not be warranted by my situation, and so it is they which strike me as alien and artificial. To be free of such impediments is to be more truly ourselves, or so I would think. What say you?

(Ir)rational Emotions

In his (independently interesting) post on 'Emotions and Moral Skepticism', Andrew Cullison writes:

It seems that if emotions are going to be rational, then the best explanation of this will have to be that they are rational in virtue of the rationality of the beliefs included in the emotion. Why is it irrational to get angry that there is an odd number of pebbles in the fishbowl? Because it’s irrational to believe that this is a bad states of affairs. Why is it rational to get angry at someone who steals money from you? Because you’re rational in believing that this is a bad state of affairs.

One quick point: the cognitive components of emotions are not properly 'beliefs' -- they might even conflict with our beliefs. But I agree with the broader point that cognitive misjudgment is one common source of irrationality in emotion. Might there also be others, though? Justin Oakley argues that emotions are complexes of cognition, affect, and desire; it seems to me that there may be rational failings in respect of all three.

Consider someone who is disproportionately angry about some minor wrongdoing. Their judgment of wrongdoing seems accurate enough;* the problem is instead an excess of affect. The excessively angry agent obsesses over this one problem, to the detriment of more pressing issues. For another example:

Good things generally warrant positive reactions. But envy consists precisely in feeling bad or resentful about the good things that happen to other people. Doesn't that just seem fundamentally misguided? Similarly for schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in others' suffering. It's simply perverse; not an apt response to the normative features of the situation.

Moreover, jealousy may involve a desire for the target to lose the benefit you so resent them for. But it is generally irrational to desire a Pareto loss -- for someone to be harmed and nobody to benefit. So jealousy and the like are irrational for this reason too.

* Now, it may be claimed that the desirous and affective components of emotions should also be incorporated into their cognitive component, in the form of normative claims. Maybe envy doesn't just consist in judging another to have benefited and feeling negative affect about this; perhaps we could say it also involves an implicit judgment that it is bad that the target benefited so. To the jealous desire we might add a judgment that it would be right to deprive them of this benefit. And so on. But if we build everything into the cognitive component to begin with, then it's trivial that it will suffice for all aspects of rational evaluation. So I think the substantive point to note here is that affect and desire are open to rational assessment too, even if they are ultimately incorporated into the cognitive component of emotion.

Incidentally, this proposed melding of cognitive and non-cognitive components of emotion relates to my earlier comments about 'rich' or interpreted phenomenology. Perhaps the broader lesson is that these enriched "components" are not really distinct and independent components at all, but instead draw our attention to a single (conceptually inextricable) state that may be variously described as a kind of judgment, a kind of desire, or a kind of phenomenal affect or 'feel'. Really what it is is just one thing, an affectively motivating intentional state, i.e., an emotion.

Inverting Emotional Qualia

Conceivably, some aspects of our phenomenology (e.g. colour) could flip around whilst everything else in our minds remains the same. Could this happen with emotions? Might I have an emotionally inverted counterpart, just like me except that fear to him feels like anger to me, and vice versa?

I suspect not. For one thing, I'm inclined to identify emotions by their phenomenal feel, so the above scenario should really be described as his feelings of anger playing the functional role of fear, etc. More importantly, though, this scenario requires that our emotions be wholly independent of the rest of our mental economy (thoughts, judgments), which is arguably incoherent. Emotions are cognitive: part of the what you experience in your anger is a judgment (e.g.) that you have been wronged.

One might respond by trying to break down these components of the emotion, the judgment and some leftover phenomenal feel. But I don't think they are so extricable (compare: what is left over in scarlet once you take away the redness?). An essential part of the overall feel comes from the judgment, so you can't subtract that without significantly altering the phenomenology.

Relatedly, I've been puzzling over a passage from Justin Oakley's Morality and the Emotions (p.19, lightly edited):

Benevolence and gratitude may both [exhaustively?] involve feelings of affection and warmth... But if one emotion can feel like another, different emotion, then the distinctions between emotions cannot be drawn in terms of feelings.

Oakley must be using 'feel' in a very narrow sense, because it seems clear to me that the different emotions have a very distinct phenomenology. But if we restrict our attention to pre-cognitive or uninterpreted phenomenal aspects, perhaps he is right. This is the sense in which duck/rabbit looks the same to you whether you see it as a duck or as a rabbit. But in a broader (and more natural) sense, they obviously look quite different, for they are readily distinguishable experiences. The lesson from duck/rabbit is that interpretation makes a difference to phenomenology (in the broadest sense). And I think the same sort of thing is going on in case of emotions and their cognitive components.

Emotion and Reflective Equilibrium

Another passage from Frazer's 'Two Enlightenments' paper raises the interesting question whether emotion is properly subservient to reason or a partner on equal footing in our mental economy:

Although Rawls sometimes seems to see the quest for reflective equilibrium as basically a cognitive process involving the weighing of pre-philosophical beliefs against philosophical theories, the sentimentalist conception of reflection involves a holistic attempt to reach an equilibrium on which the faculties of reason, feeling and imagination can all settle in harmony.

This may reinforce the thought that there's something fundamentally flawed about a conception of rational warrant that we wouldn't want to live by (because it contradicts preferences that stem from love, for example).

To relate this to the vexing problem of 'Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations', I guess the sentimentalist will be more rooted by the emotions he starts with (though they may be revised to some extent), whereas the rationalist is willing to countenance a far more radical critique of her prior affective responses, in light of what can be justified by universal reason.

How would you assess the two competing views? (There's some sense in which I find the rationalist more admirable -- certainly more noble -- though sentimentalism might be advisable insofar as it's probably a stance that's more conducive to happiness, and perhaps even to 'living a good life' more generally.)

The Claims of Emotion

When you are angry, for example, the anger you feel contains the thought that (e.g.) some other person has done you an injury... and ought to be made to suffer in return. If your reason thinks differently... you are internally not just pulled in different directions; you are thinking ultimately contradictory thoughts, one through your anger [and] the other through your reason.

So writes John Cooper in 'Some Remarks on Aristotle's Moral Psychology' (Reason and Emotion, p.245, bold added). He continues:

For reason to persuade anger (in this particular case, or in general) is for it to get its own view of what is good to prevail, in the sense that this conception comes to be adopted by the nonrational part itself, as well. To cause this to happen, even intermittently, may require practice and training, of course, but in that process reason is not just exercising brute force, as one might in training an animal. it is, among other things, addressing one's anger, trying to direct its attention to features of the situation that will show one's anger... that it would be, or was, wrong to feel in that way. [If this process is successful...] The way you then feel about what has happened and about what should be done about it, is exactly also the way you think, for reasons, about it.

Further, on pp.246-7:

Now because Aristotle thinks that the truth about such matters -- matters of value in general -- is properly settled by reasoning, he thinks that this is the direction that the resolution of such contradictions should take. Your anger was caused not by what you rationally thought, nor by what you would rationally think if you gave reason a chance, but by (possibly obscure) causes lying in your recent or distant past experience. ... There is no good reason to think that your anger reflects the truth about the matters about which it is making claims...

However, it is important to bear in mind that the resolution can go in the other direction, both in individual cases an in general orientation. Faced with a conflict between how you feel about things in some respect and how you think about them, especially if this persists for a long time despite efforts on your part to adjust the way you feel, you will, faute de mieux, tend to adjust it in the other direction, by adopting in your rational thoughts a view about good and bad and right and wrong that conforms to the way you habitually feel: it is as if, under pressure from your stubborn desires, you decide on reflection that the correct way to determine what is good is simply to accept as authoritative how you feel. (Perhaps you then figure out some reasons to suit.) What forces us to take one of these two alternatives is the central fact that being rational creatures we cannot very readily or contentedly let the contradiction stand. We are moved, because we are rational, to resolve it in one direction or another.

But are there limits to the claims reason may make against our emotions? Cf. Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations

Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations

Morality is made for man, not man for morality
   -- William K. Frankena.

I'm not sure what to make of Frankena's maxim. It's uncontroversial that human welfare is important. So let's interpret the maxim more strongly, as expressing a form of moral conservatism -- a rebuke of the radical and alienating demands of impartial consequentialism (to name just one example). An ethics for living, we may think, must be more firmly rooted in our actual condition, our personal concerns and interests.

There are many complex issues in this vicinity, but one way in is to ask whether there might be irreconcilable but reasonable conflict. I think not: I tend to conceive of the moral point of view as one that everyone can share, and thereby resolve any conflicts equitably, at least in principle. But if normativity must always be rooted in our particular perspectives, there's no reason to expect such compromises to always be possible. I may despise the frat boy as a boor, and he may despise me as an egghead, in a fundamental clash of values that is not susceptible to any common resolution. (The alternative is to think that one or both of us is making a mistake, and really ought to be more sympathetic to the other and their way of life.)

Rooted ethics implies a kind of relativism, since different people lay their roots in different places. But perhaps that's to be expected, and at the end of the day the most we can hope for is that our own values prevail in the culture wars. The metaethical conservative will not think that those who lay their roots elsewhere from his are in any sense mistaken or irrational. There is no shared ideal viewpoint for all to aspire to,* so those who disagree are not confused or misguided, but stalwart enemies.

* = Note that this abandonment of truth is what saves the metaethical conservative from incoherence

Another approach is to ask whether our prior dispositions (or perceived "common sense") place significant constraints on normative guidance. Could it possibly be the case that I ought to give up my most cherished projects and personal values? If my "idealized self" is radically different from me, so different that I can no longer recognize my self in him, what normative authority do his prescriptions really have over me?

If (the best account of) realism about value leads us to such conclusions as that newborns may be killed harmlessly, and that it would have been better if disabled persons (or children of teen mothers) had not been conceived, then some may wonder whether we'd do better to be anti-realists.

Indeed, this seems to be Velleman's position, in response to the apparent conflict between a parent's love for their particular severely disabled child, and their recognition that the creation of a severely disabled child is lamentable. He writes (in the conclusion to 'Love and Non-Existence'):

The parents experience their emotions as assessing the value of the child's existence in itself, apart from how it is conceived [i.e. under what guise or description], and the emotions cannot be simultaneously correct if so interpreted. But their emotions make perfect sense despite there being no consistent distribution of values that they would reflect, because emotions can only project value, and only when appearing to do so enhances their intelligibility.

The parents should therefore forget about evaluating their child's existence and feel the emotions that clearly make sense for them to feel. What's intelligible in their responses may cast an inconsistent set of shadows on the world, but they are, after all, only shadows.

On Velleman's view, what fundamentally matters is making sense to oneself. Making evaluations is one way of going about this, but one's personal narrative is primary, in line with Frankena's maxim.

But is it right? Or should we be realists about value, and think that what fundamentally matters is making the world a better place?

Aspiring to Objectivity

[Another post I'm working on reminded me of this note from last September that I never got around to posting...]

Is philosophy itself alienating? Excessive concern to achieve the 'view from nowhere' seems like an occupational hazard. Especially if one embraces an 'ideal agent'-type metaethic, this may lead to constantly second-guessing oneself: "would others ideally endorse this?" (Would I?) Perfection is too high a standard to try to live up to. But it's kind of hard to ignore if you spend all day thinking about it!

One worry is that many of our actual sentiments might not be expected to survive the idealization process. Yet ignoring or suppressing them may not be such a good idea. Someone in class today mentioned the 'bad squash loser' case: ideally, the loser should walk over to graciously congratulate the other player. But suppose that, due to his anger, were he to try he would more likely lash out violently. So he really should just walk away and cool off. That at least shows why we can't just ignore our contingent flaws. Is there a similarly clear argument against suppressing unwelcome emotions (e.g. if the squash loser were capable of distancing himself from his anger)? It seems a non-obvious empirical question what the consequences of this are likely to be. [I made a similar point in my recent post on the question whether to attempt to reshape a non-conforming child's gender preferences.]

A second worry arises from the concern for universal convergence. Many of our tastes may be thought idiosyncratic or merely 'subjective', but it would be unfortunate to devalue them for that reason alone. Perhaps we can resolve this by taking tastes as 'given', exempt from rational criticism, and recognize as universalizable the general desire to derive enjoyment from one's tastes (whatever they may be). Or, if such subjectivism is too extreme, at least allow for a plurality of standards of good taste.

Do feelings reflect preferences?

It makes sense to be especially concerned (excited, etc.) about the near future. I previously suggested that once we distinguish feelings from preferences, this premise gives us no reason to doubt that we should be temporally neutral when it comes to the latter. However, Brad Skow argues [draft PDF, p.10] that "biased attitudes [feelings] will be rational just in case biased preferences are." Why? Because, he suggests, the former are typically generated from the latter: we are pleased, for example, when we think that our preferences have been satisfied. The fact that we are more affectively attuned to our future than past welfare is thus taken to indicate a temporally biased preference structure: we must want to be well-off in the future more than the past.

I'm not so sure about this. After all, our affective responses are designed to help us respond successfully to threats and opportunities in our environment, and this changes over time. I should feel fearful and alert when faced with a dangerous predator, and all my time-slices can endorse this. It does not follow that all my time-slices should themselves maintain such a state of arousal –- once the danger has passed, there would be no point. So I agree with Parfit that attention and affect should change over time, in sync with our changing circumstances. But preferences are another matter. I may feel greater excitement about an imminent lesser benefit, as I attend to it in the present, even though I judge the distant greater benefit to be preferable, and so would sooner give up the imminent benefit if forced to choose. Again, note that I do not later regret feeling mounting excitement in anticipation of some immanent event, whereas I would regret choosing a lesser nearby good over a greater distant one. This is a revealing difference. Changing feelings may be endorsed from a timeless perspective, and so are consistent with temporal neutrality, unlike changing preferences.

Still, it would be too quick for me to conclude that a feeling or affective attitude is rationally warranted just because it is advantageous (cf. practical vs. adaptive reasons). So I need to say more about what the adaptive reasons for our attitudes are, exactly, that justifies their temporal partiality without appealing to biased preferences. What facts do our emotions answer to? One possible (rough) answer is that they are to track the normatively salient features of our local environment. This will normally be useful, much as having warranted or true beliefs (tracking the descriptive facts) is normally useful, but warrant and utility may come apart in particular cases.

Anyway, on this view the reason why I shouldn't get too excited about the satisfaction of my past or distant-future preferences is because they're not really relevant to my immediate situation, and it's this that I should be affectively attuned to. This story seems oversimplified though: surely we may reasonably enjoy the thought of future benefits, or savour pleasant memories, etc. Perhaps a better answer is that our emotions respond to normative features of any situation under consideration, and it's just that our attention happens to be focussed more often on the present (and reasonably so).

What do you think is the best way to flesh this out?

Assessing Envy

In 'Reasons: Practical and Adaptive', Raz writes (p.13):

[A]ffect-justifying reasons are not value-related. This would explain why there can be adaptive reasons for having emotions which it is always wrong to have. For example, some people believe that there is never a good reason to be envious. They must refer to practical reasons, for surely there are adaptive reasons for envy. If you envy someone his victory then you have no reason to envy him if he did not in fact win, if you are mistaken about his victory. If you continue to envy him after your mistake has been corrected, you are irrational. If he was victorious then you may have an emotion which it is bad or wrong to have, but you are not irrational.

[Note that "Reasons are adaptive if they mark the appropriateness of an attitude in the agent independently of the value of having that attitude, its appropriateness to the way things are." (p.11)]

Doesn't the sentence I put in bold seem to get things exactly backwards? Surely there's no question at all that there can be practical value to envy (or anything else for that matter). Suppose an evil demon will destroy the universe unless we are envious. Whatever. It would be crazy for the opponents of envy to "refer to practical reasons", for that would render their position transparently absurd. Rather, the claim is that envy is never rational (even if it may be practical), never an inherently appropriate response to "the way things are." The claim, in other words, is precisely that there are no adaptive reasons for envy. It is not an emotion that is ever warranted by the situation.

Now, Raz effectively shows that we may also assess an emotional state according to its internal correctness conditions. Envy is internally misguided if its purported basis (the other's victory) does not actually obtain. It would certainly be irrational to retain the emotion even upon recognizing it to be misguided in this way. But it doesn't follow that the emotion is rational if it lacks this flaw. Even if not irrational on internal grounds, it may still be irrational for other reasons.

We may think, for example, that good things generally warrant positive reactions. But envy consists precisely in feeling bad or resentful about the good things that happen to other people. Doesn't that just seem fundamentally misguided? Similarly for schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in others' suffering. It's simply perverse; not an apt response to the normative features of the situation.

If that's right, we need to recognize adaptive reasons as providing a third kind of evaluation, distinct from both practical value and internal correctness conditions. It's one thing to ask how advantageous an emotional state would be, and another to ask whether it is internally misdirected (wrong by its own lights) -- but it's a further question still whether the emotion is apt or objectively warranted.

Feeling the Mood

In addition to such fleeting feelings as joy or distress, our mental lives exhibit a longer-term emotional character, which we might call 'mood'. Over a period of several months, one might characteristically exhibit (any one of) depression, irrepressible cheerfulness, or anything in between. One's mood, so understood, may be a kind of disposition to react in certain ways, or to rally variously successful coping skills. It may manifest in one's general attitude towards life, as an optimist or pessimist, for instance.

Mood looms large in our self-narrated life-stories. At least, I find that I tend to classify periods of my life according to the remembered progression of such moods. (For instance, there's a certain period in high school defined more or less by depression. And, at the other extreme, the first couple of months here in Canberra stand out in my memory - as a distinctive "period" - for being so consistently wonderful.) It's an interesting question just how accurate such remembered impressions are, since of course they gloss over a lot of details. We may blot out shorter periods that are inconsistent with the general mood: forgetting the good that occurs during the bad times, and vice versa. Should this lead us to be skeptical of assigning much moral import to these narratives (say as determinant of the welfare value of one's life)? Or is it legitimate -- is the dominating memorial influence of mood a genuine reflection of its dominating importance?

(I guess I should also check whether my introspective claims resonate with others. Perhaps I have an unusual psychology, or otherwise misreport what's really going on.)

Questions of 'overriding weight' aside, it seems clear enough that mood is at least an important feature of our welfare. When people speak of the desirability of happiness, I think they're generally getting at the importance of positive moods (contentment, life satisfaction, etc.) rather than mere fleeting sensations of pleasure. So, in light of this importance, it becomes an important question how our moods are influenced, and especially whether there are positive influences that are within our power to implement.

Any answers?

Categories:

• wellbeing
• mind

On rejection, taste, and value

Recall that the self-deprecating romantic might (negatively) revise his opinion of any goddess woman who would settle for so lowly a creature as he. I now want to explore the opposite idea: that someone with high self-esteem might think less of anyone with the poor taste to reject him!

It's a familiar enough idea. A young child, pained by another's insults, might be comforted by his mother with the suggestion, "You wouldn't want to be friends with such a nasty person anyway." Similarly, a person whose immense beauty was "all on the inside" (so to speak) might be comforted in face of romantic rejection with the friendly suggestion that "Such a shallow person doesn't deserve you anyway." In both cases, the sheer fact that someone would devalue you in such a way is presented as a reason for not taking their evaluations seriously. It's a comforting thought, to be sure. But is it a reasonable one?

We surely cannot be granted universal immunity here. Another's low opinion of us can sometimes be justified, after all. If we want an accurate self-conception, we must be willing to consider others' criticisms seriously, painful though this may be. On the other hand, this may only apply on a fairly specific level. A person may be sub-par in various particular respects. But I have trouble imagining a person being thoroughly worthless in themselves (or "in general", where this is not the same thing as averaging their particular qualities; rather it is the idea of 'bare personhood', or what lies beneath the particulars. Cf. Velleman on Love). It's all too easy for us to not truly see each other, to not appreciate all that is there. Whenever I've caught glimpses of that "all" in another, I can't help but feel a kind of awed respect for it, i.e. for them. So if someone were to devalue you generally, I'm inclined to think this must be an error on their part. They simply aren't seeing the light that would dazzle them if they could.

Still, such glimses are so rare that it would be unreasonable to blame someone for failing to see this light. Iris Murdoch once wrote that "love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real". There's something to that - it's very hard to fully comprehend the reality and value of others. Especially if we don't much try. Such blindness might be blameworthy in some specific circumstances, say if one failed to love a family member. ("You've known each other your whole lives! How could you still not see them?") But in most cases, that's simply the way of things. Every person deserves to be loved. But not every person can love them.

So rejection needn't entail wholesale despair. To be unloved - though undeniably painful - is not to be unlovable, for no person is ever the latter (in either its modal or normative sense). But we may accept this without thereby blaming the rejector. Their oversight is understandable. At most, the rejected might reasonably feel disappointed that the other wasn't more willing to "look" for them. But of course disappointment is not condemnation.

The above arguments are very general in scope, however. Perhaps we need instead to address the more specific circumstances described at the start. So let us move beyond consideration of self-love (the recognition - and hence valuing - of one's own personhood) to that of self-esteem (the valuing of one's own particular qualities). The person with high self-esteem takes themselves to be skilled or talented, or otherwise worthy of note, in various particular respects. These are taken to not be outweighed by particular vices, such as being a dirty, smelly, asshole. As the qualities in question are readily recognizable, one would expect others to hold you in similarly high esteem. They should thus want to be closer to you, want to get to know you better, and so forth. We might say that to have high self-esteem is simply to take oneself to warrant this kind of response in others. But then, insofar as the rejector fails to respond in the appropriate way to your obvious qualities, they might be held to demonstrate poor taste. ("Their loss," you might say.)

I've yet to bring into consideration the distinctive feature of romantic relationships, i.e. sexual attraction. It might well be that the other recognizes and is appropriately (albeit platonically) drawn to your obvious qualities. But they just think you're batshit ugly (nothing personal, I'm sure).

Is it "shallow" to avoid intimacy with someone solely on the basis of their physical features? I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I'm inclined to go pop-sentimentalist and say, "You can't help who you're attracted to. It's just the way things are." But on the other hand, I'm not convinced that's true. If one's spouse has a disfiguring accident, one wouldn't cease to love them, even romantically. I've read a bit from conservative Christians - like Macht - who have a rather "unromantic" view of romantic love as a choice rather than an uncontrollable feeling, and a lot of what they say here (as opposed to every other topic under the sun) sort of makes sense.

A key question here is whether romantic rejection entails a kind of devaluation. The pop-sentimentalist view provides a convenient way to deny this. You can say, "Oh, no, I think you're wonderful in every way, I just don't feel that way about you." - and that lack of feeling is taken to be a brute fact about the speaker, and not any kind of rational response to, or evaluation of, the rejected. But is this really plausible? I don't think our emotions are so disconnected from our reasoned appreciation of value. Indeed, the claim in quotes sounds deeply incoherent to my ear. Surely if you considered someone wonderful in every way, then you would feel "that way" about them? So the fact that you don't entails a kind of negative evaluation of them. For whatever reason - and there must be some reason, even if it's not transparent - you think they're not good enough for you.

That's why it's so painful to be rejected. There's no reason to feel bad about someone lacking some brute inexplicable feeling. But if they're judging you to be "sub-par", then that's clearly something different.

What if they were to make the more qualified claim: "I think you're wonderful in every non-physical way, and would love to be friends. I just think you're batshit ugly, and so don't feel 'that way' about you."

The discussion above suggests that it might still have been possible for you to have a great relationship. But that alone doesn't suffice to establish that the rejector is "shallow" for not wanting to try it. That would be to disallow the consideration of aesthetic values, and it isn't clear that there's any reasonable basis for such disqualification. Sure, aesthetic values shouldn't trump all; it would be shallow to consider them and nothing else. But it is surely reasonable to consider them alongside everything else ('depth' doesn't require blindness), which opens the possibility of their outweighing other values, depending on what precisely one is looking for in a romantic partner.

This complicates the rejection-as-criticism account, because aesthetic criticism seems less objective than other sorts. So perhaps we can cede some ground to the subjectivity of pop-sentimentalism after all. One could be judged to be batshit ugly, without this judgment necessarily reflecting poorly on either you or the evaluator (depending on who is "right"). Reasonable people may have differing tastes. Though it's always a pity when someone you like doesn't have a taste for you, I suppose.

Anyway, I'm all reflected out. I'll leave it to any commentators to figure out the appropriate response to rejection in light of the above. As far as unreflective intuition goes, "forget about it and move on" sounds pretty sensible to my ear. And they do say that our gut reactions are surprisingly reliable. Perhaps not quite so fun, though ;-).

Categories:

• life
• sex
• aesthetics

Rehabilitating Lust

It's typically assumed that lust is a "shallow" emotion, in contrast to the platonic desires for companionship, affirmation, and so forth. Consider the old stereotype about guys "using" women for sex. Such situations are certainly possible, but isn't it just as possible to "use" a romantic partner for companionship or to boost one's ego? In either case, the "user" has only self-regarding desires, to which their partner is merely instrumental. Why the double standard?

Indeed, it seems that genuine lust is, properly speaking, other-directed. It is a form of aesthetic appreciation, a recognition of -- and hence attraction towards -- another's physical beauty. It is genuinely about them and their qualities. It thus seems as "deep" and appropriately flattering as any other form of romantic appreciation.

Perhaps what critics of lust really have in mind is the self-directed state of feeling horny. There the feeling is all about oneself. One wants sexual release, and doesn't much care where it's found. One's partner is then treated as a mere masturbatory tool, a "sex object" in the most derogatory sense. The other is merely incidental to satisfaction of horniness. But for lust, they are centre stage. This is a crucial difference, and one that makes lust rather more admirable, to my mind.

Even granting that lust is about the other, one might still worry that it is for oneself, and hence in some sense "selfish". This strikes me as doubly mistaken. First, I think there is an important sense of lust which drives one to seek not just one's own sexual pleasure, but also the other's. We might call this "unified lust", as the value it seeks inheres in the whole sexual union, not just the part of one lover alone. Secondly, we should not confuse selfishness with self-concern. Selfishness consists in an inappropriate disregard for others. But one can seek things for oneself whilst also caring about others and seeking their good too, so there is nothing necessarily selfish about this.

But the possibility is there, and perhaps this is the real complaint. It is certainly possible to lust after someone without genuinely caring for the person themselves. So lust may indeed lead one to "use" another for sex without having any intrinsic concern for them. This too is to treat the other as a "sex object", albeit in a slightly less derogatory sense than that previously described. (At least with lust they really are the focal object of one's desire. In the earlier case, they weren't even that. Perhaps "sex instrument" would've been a more accurate term!)

However, this possibility is also present with regard to the platonic attitudes. It is possible to "use" one's friends, after all. In the same way, a selfish agent might enjoy his partner for the way she brightens his life, without thereby caring for her or wanting to advance her interests or happiness. We might say that this is to treat her as a "platonic object".

(We can make a similar distinction to that noted above, between platonic "objects" and "instruments", depending on whether the agent's self-interested desire is directed at the other or merely themselves. Note that instruments are entirely replacable, whereas objects are not. For example, one could use one's partner as merely an instrument to boosting one's own ego. Here your partner is merely incidental to the desire's satisfaction. Anyone else might satisfy the desire just as well. Alternatively, you might have a self-interested "objectual" desire for the companionship of that particular person, in which case no replacement could satisfy that particular desire, and that person is centre-stage rather than oneself.)

I think it is plainly more degrading to be treated as an instrument than an object (though neither is very appealing!), but I see no basis for the double standard between platonic and sexual objectification. Am I missing something here?

Categories:

• sex
• life
• aesthetics
• ethics

On Jealousy

Envy consists in wanting what someone else has. Though potentially unpleasant, it’s understandable enough, as it follows naturally from a positive appreciation of the object’s value. Jealousy, by contrast, is the purely negative emotion which involves wishing that the other lacked the object of value. (I mean for these definitions to be stipulative.) Such an attitude seems quite thoroughly unreasonable, at least if the object in question is shareable. For rivalrous objects, one might want the other to lose the object solely as a means to one’s own gaining of it. Such “instrumental jealousy” lies in the service of envy, and so may inherit the latter’s reasons. But to begrudge another’s benefit, for its own sake and not for costs to oneself, seems blackly indefensible.

What, then, are we to make of romantic jealousy, i.e. the possessive desire for our partner’s exclusive attention? Is it simply unreasonable? Is the value of one’s relationship necessarily diminished in virtue of its non-exclusive character? Surely not: the value of a relationship is grounded in its deep or intrinsic character, not merely incidental or comparative aspects. (One occasionally hears homophobic rhetoric implying that one’s marriage would somehow be “devalued” if gay people were allowed to marry too. But this is absurd. Truly valuable relationships do not rest their value on such fragile foundations. Other discussion critical of zero-sum “comparative” values can be found here and here.) What matters is your relationship, not any other one – even if the other involves your partner.

(Granted, it may just be intrinsically unpleasant to imagine your partner having sex with someone else. But while we can give an evolutionary explanation of why such ‘pure jealousy’ might evolve, that doesn’t suffice to justify it. One can also give scientific explanations of violent anger, but we should resist such pernicious emotions all the same.)

So any reasonable grounds for objection here will need to be grounded in concern that your partner’s activities will negatively impact upon your relationship. There are two obvious ways this could happen: sharing might mean less of them (their time, attention, or affection) left for you; or worse, they might leave you completely.

It isn’t clear whether fear of breaking up should rationally make one more or less jealous. Presumably the worry is that non-exclusivity would give your partner more opportunities to meet and get attached to someone new. But on the other hand, it also reduces the incentive to break up if they do find someone else. In particular: if your partner still likes you, albeit less than they like the other, then non-exclusivity might in fact save your relationship, whereas jealous ultimatums would force them to break up with you. (The situation is complicated if the other becomes jealous of your partner’s continued attachment to you. The next section will address whether their jealousy could be reasonable.)

What of the concerns about ‘sharing’? They sound to me unreasonably possessive. Your partner’s time and attention may be taken up by any other hobbies or interests that they have, but those are not legitimate grounds for complaint (unless you are being thoroughly neglected). It isn’t clear why an interest in another person should be treated any differently, at least on those grounds.

I take it the real worry here concerns affection. Some may implicitly believe that individuals have a fixed emotional capacity, so that the more they care for someone else, the less they care for you. But when made explicit like this, such a view does not sound very plausible. Consider parental love. Surely nobody would claim that children from large families are loved less by their parents than is an ‘only child’. But why should romantic love (or its precursors) be any different?

Perhaps we want to be “special”; but it isn’t clear why exclusivity should create added value here. As previously noted, any non-deluded evaluation of one's partner needs to be consistent with the recognition that they’re not uniquely special, i.e. special in a way that everyone else fails to be. Our ‘specialness’ needs to be consistent with other people being special too. So, as noted above, we should look to intrinsic rather than comparative values. We have value for who we are, considered in ourselves, rather than considered in comparison to other people.

That’s all well and good from an objective point of view, but we still want to have a special significance for our significant others, even if it is recognized as a merely “subjective” or agent-relative importance. But we can grant this without requiring total uniqueness. Again, the parental analogy is illustrative: a child wouldn’t want her parents to treat her no differently from all the other kids in the world. She should have a special place in her parents’ world. But she needn’t be the only person in this place; she can share it with her few siblings, without diminishing its value in any way at all. So again: why is the romantic case any different? If someone has two significant others, must they be the less significant for this?

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious, since my armchair certainly doesn’t offer the most comprehensive view of the world. But at least in light of the issues discussed so far, it seems to me that jealousy largely is irrational, so that more reasonable creatures would not get so possessive or hung up on issues of romantic exclusivity. Whether we’re capable of being more reasonable creatures is, of course, another question entirely.

Categories:

• sex
• life
• rationality

Fiction & Emotion

Why do we respond emotionally to fictions? Is it irrational of us to feel joy or sadness about characters and events that we know aren't real?

In a recent seminar given us, Justine Kingsbury of Waikato University suggested that evolutionary psychology - and particularly the positing of informationally encapsulated 'mental modules' - could shed some light on our seemingly odd behaviour here. The core of her explanation is that although we know the fiction isn't real, this information might not be accessible to the emotion 'modules' of the brain. This view suggests that emotions are rather like automatic reflexes (and so a-rational, rather than irrational). If you see a monster on the movie screen, this stimulus may activate your 'fear module', which does not have access to the information that the threat is not real. (A similar explanation may be given of irrational phobias, which must be overcome through training - mere cognition is insufficient.)

I'm not entirely convinced, however. Our emotional response to fiction seems deeper than that. We need to be engrossed in the fiction; mere perception of the superficial stimuli is insufficient to elicit most emotional responses (there are some exceptions, e.g. disgust). I won't feel sad at a character's loss unless I reflect on their situation, and empathise. This suggests that our responses are more cognitive and less automatic than the modularity account would seem to grant. (Unless I'm missing something here?)

I think a better explanation would focus on the role of fiction as a sort of simulation. In reading a novel, we create an internal simulation of the events it portrays. This provides us with surrogate experiences, as of engaging unfamiliar environments or situations, but without any real-life risk. I think it makes sense for us to react emotionally to the simulation, for it would otherwise be incomplete. How we feel about a situation is a crucial aspect of it; to leave this out of the simulation would be to omit something of great importance to us.

So I think it appropriate for us to react emotionally to fictions. Whether it is, strictly speaking, rational cannot be meaningfully answered until we clarify what is meant by that word in this context. Some suggestions from a TLS article:

An emotion is “cognitively rational” if it is based on a well-supported belief (I clearly saw that it was you and not Susan who knocked over my glass of red wine), and “strategically rational” if it leads to actions that will achieve a desirable goal (the urgency of my anxiety encourages me to rush across the room and immediately throw salt on the stain).

I guess what I described above suggests an indirect form of strategic rationality: emotions about fictions are useful in that they help us attain our goal (loosely understood) of learning more about life. Arguing that they are cognitively rational is more difficult, given that these emotions are based on imagined (or simulated) beliefs, rather than real ones.

A neat solution would be to say that the emotions too are merely simulated rather than real. Jonathan Ichikawa has previously argued for something along these lines (at least for some cases). There is some independent evidence to support this claim: Compared to real life, we seem to have an unusual degree of control over our emotional responses to fiction. Also, the resulting emotions are often more transitory, and less likely to influence our behaviour than other emotions. Counter-evidence would include the phenomenological similarities (it seems that we really do feel happy/sad, not that we're merely simulating it), and physiological ones too.

Any suggestions?

Moral Emotions: the 'yuk factor'

Paul Bloom observes that people often confuse the disgusting with the immoral:

What, precisely, is so bad about sex between adult siblings, bestiality, and the eating of corpses? Most people insist such acts are morally wrong, but when psychologists ask why, the answers make little sense. For instance, people often say incestuous sex is immoral because it runs the risk of begetting a deformed child, but if this was their real reason, they should be happy if the siblings were to use birth control -- and most people are not. One finds what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt called "moral dumbfounding," a gut feeling that something is wrong combined with an inability to explain why.

Haidt suggests we are dumbfounded because, despite what we might say to others and perhaps believe ourselves, our moral responses are not based on reason. They are instead rooted in revulsion: incest, bestiality and cannibalism disgust us, and our disgust gives rise to moral outrage.

You can test your own moral intuitions with the Taboo game at Butterflies & Wheels. (Yeah, I know I've been linking to them a lot recently, but what can I say - it's just a damn good site!)

The game is followed by an excellent essay by Ophelia Benson:

But this business of repugnance we can't quite articulate should give us pause - should make us come to a screeching halt, in fact. Why can't we articulate it? Could it be because there is nothing to articulate? [...]

Especially since people have always 'just somehow known' in their guts or their hearts or their gluteus maximus, without being able to say why, all sorts of things that the world would be better off if they hadn't just known. That Africans should be slaves, that Jews were polluting Germany, that women should be kept under house arrest at all times, that witches should be burnt, that the races must never mix. We're all too adept at thinking what we're not used to is inherently disgusting.

I suspect that this is a major cause of conservative opposition to gay marriage (and homosexuality generally). I find it rather ironic how they accuse liberals of 'relativism', when much of conservative "morality" is little more than knee-jerk emotivism, followed by feeble rationalisations ("Uh, it's unnatural! Spreads disease! Is bad for families!", etc.). Of course, the loony left is no better, especially when it comes to biotechnology. But I digress.

Moral facts are determined by reasons, not emotions. Still, it is undeniable that emotion plays a huge role in our moral lives. Sometimes this can lead to unreflective prejudice, as mentioned above. But it can also help motivate us in a way that pure reason cannot. Although disgust can cause us to dismiss others from moral consideration, sympathy and empathy can play the opposite role, encouraging us to reach out to those we might otherwise have ignored.

I think that morality is fundamentally about character. It's not just about what you do, but rather, who you are. Thus, I think that emotion is important not as an 'input' to the moral calculus, but as an 'output'. That is, our emotional responses do not determine morality. Rather, morality informs us what our emotional responses ought to be.

An ideal moral agent, by this view, would always have an appropriate emotional response to any given situation. He would thus be able to rely upon his emotions as a sort of 'moral barometer' - he would feel appalled by immoral acts, but unconcerned by permissible ones. But it is important to note the direction of fit: he is good because his emotions correlate well with the moral facts of the situation. It is not the case that the situation is good/bad merely because of his (or our) emotional response to it.

We are hopefully good enough that our consciences reliably correlate with the moral facts, as a general rule. So our emotions are a useful shortcut which can serve us well in our daily lives, when we haven't the time to reason carefully. But in controversial cases, we should remember that these heuristics are far from infallible. Ultimately, if something is wrong, then it's wrong for a reason. And "yuk" is not a reason.

Related links:

The Chronicle - Danger to Human Dignity

Reason - Discussing Disgust

And, for an opposing view, The New Criterion - Does shame have a future?

Artificial Empatelligence

Jonathan Ichikawa recently noticed an interesting contrast between how different businesses want to portray the mechanical/computational aspects of their service:

[A]n amusing message from Amazon.com: "Dear Customer, We've noticed that many customers who've purchased albums by Various are also interested in music by John Williams."...

Consider the extremely similar phenomenon of Google's gmail's ad-targetting... Gmail wisely does not follow Amazon in anthropomorphizing its pattern-analyzing self... They're having enough privacy trouble as it is. Apparently there's an important difference between Amazon and Gmail: Amazon seems to thrive on selling itself as a smart person who watches us very carefully and anticipates our desires, while Gmail has to work very hard to avoid that impression.

Now what I found interesting about this, is its implications when considering the growing importance of emotional labour in the modern economy (thanks to Just Left for the link):

Two ways of measuring the demands of a job have defined industrial relations since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - time and effort - but a third has emerged in the past few decades: emotional labour. It's not just your physical stamina and analytical capabilities that are required to do a good job, but your personality and emotional skills as well. From a customer services representative in a call centre to a teacher or manager, the emotional demands of the job have immeasurably increased.

...Empathy has become big business, according to consultancy Harding & Yorke, which claims to be able to measure every aspect of the emotional interaction between customer and company. If a company wants its employees to sound warmer or more natural, it turns to the likes of Bob Hughes at Harding & Yorke. Delight your customers and they'll be back, is his watchword: empathy makes money.

...This kind of cognitive restructuring of employees' responses is required to pamper the customer's every whim. Such self-control can be very hard work, as management theorist Irena Grugulis points out: "Expressing warmth towards and establishing rapport with customers may provide a genuine source of pleasure for workers. Yet in practice, emotions are incorporated into organisations within strict limits. Emotion work does not necessarily legitimise the expression of human feelings in a way that supports the development of healthy individuals, instead it offers these feelings for sale."

I feel that there's an important link to be made here, but I'm having trouble putting my finger on it. I guess it's to do with the future presentation of computational processes - will they tend to get 'personalised', or "dressed up", to more and more try to simulate a real person? Or will they instead remain cold and impersonal, merely mechanical, to assure us that there's no threat to our own humanity?

One interesting issue regards the possibility of utilising mechanical processes (e.g. complex computer programs) capable of easing the emotional workloads. As Jonathan mentioned, some people find it disconcerting when computer programs mimick a personal touch. But I find the "friendliness" of tele-marketers (for example) to be no less artificial and off-putting. In effect, we're currently asking real people to pretend to be machines pretending to be real people. The Guardian article suggests that this puts an enormous strain on the workers involved, who are instructed to "Think of yourself as a trash can. Take everyone's little bits of anger all day, put it inside you, and at the end of the day, just pour it into the dumpster on your way out of the door". So why not skip the outer layer of deception, and just use machines pretending to be real people?

Of course, given current levels of technology, this simply isn't practical. Machines aren't versatile enough to respond - let alone respond appropriately - to all the different possible concerns a customer might have. But I see no reason why advances in artificial intelligence couldn't make improved simulations viable, perhaps within the next few decades.

So I guess the questions I'm raising here are:
1) How will computed processes be presented in future - as personal or impersonal? (Or perhaps both, with a growing divide between the Amazon type vs the Gmail type?)
2) Would it be possible (in future) to use advanced computer programs for emotional labour?
3) If so, would this be desirable?