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Setting ourselves up for ethical emotions

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

Updated: Jul 31, 2020

This follows on from the post about reflection.


So, we've reflected and there are ways in which we seek to change. I agree with Robert Solomon that emotions are not entirely under our control, but that they are more under our control than we like to admit.


Now, a detour here because this relates to the concept of free will versus determinism.


I recently listened to Robert Plomin, writer of Blueprint, interviewed by Sam Harris. That conversation did lead me to question how much we can 'change' who we are. However, as Scott Barry Kaufman has queried some of the claims, and allows that environment has an impact, I'll continue my thought process.


The free will determinism thing is separate from the genes environment thing, as the determinism is a matter of pure physics rather than biology. And according to this interesting piece by Harry Frankfurt - he of Bullshit, whom I think I referred to before but may never track down in this poorly organised and appallingly labelled blog - the determinism doesn't take away the freedom that matters. This is a style of compatibilism - a concept I hadn't got to grips with before reading this article. So, what Frankfurt says is that where we want what we want to want and act on that 'second order' volition, we are free. So, if I want to diet, I may or may not diet. But if I want to want to diet to the extent that I have the force to make my want effective, then I am free. It sounds crazy in the short form, but we can think of people who want want they don't want or who don't really care what they want or don't want and just act on those wants - these he describes as 'wantons' and they are, in his view, not 'real' persons.


Maybe it's easier with an example. A person wants to spend the day lying on the sofa. If she's a wanton, that's what she'll do because she has no interest in whether she wants that or not. Or, she could want not to want to lie down, but to want to exercise as she believes it's important to keep fit - but though she wants not to want to lie down, she still wants to lie down because she is not free. Or she wants to lie down and her second order is to want to exercise and so she does not want to want to lie down and thus does not want to lie down and so she exercises - but she has a third order volition not to want to want to exercise as, though she thinks exercise is important, she thinks it's just as important to be able to take a break occasionally, rather than rigidly stick to rules. Indeed, there's no limit to the number of levels. The point is that freedom comes with wanting to want what you want to want.


Now, in the case of emotions, it seems like we on the whole act like wantons.


But consider a Stoic. A Stoic might want to express anger when someone cuts her up on the road. She might want to swear loudly and call the other driver a bloody thoughtless damn IDIOT. But her second order want is that she NOT get angry and as that want is strong, she has meditated on Seneca long enough to have made it a habit that she does not get angry. Indeed, to such an extent that she no longer even wants to get angry at all. Her first order want has come in line with her second order want - but by virtue of her reading of Seneca.


Thus, she is free - but free because she has instituted this habit and has come, in line with Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, to become the kind of person who does not get angry. Her emotions are now contiguous with or consistent with her values. She does not just what she wants to do, but what she wants to want to do.


In the ethical sphere, it's not enough to just behave as you want to even if what you want is virtuous. If you do it could be that you are a wanton; you could just be 'lucky' - as it just 'happens' that you want what you want to want; or you are in a permanent state of inner civil war ( you do what you really don't want because you want to not want to do it). I suppose you could be a uniquely consistent type by nature, a saint, and always want what you want to want and it's always the ethically sound thing.


Aristotle though makes it plain that it is not enough to act virtuously: you must understand that your actions are virtuous. I think what he's getting at is that you have to know what virtue is (and be proud when you act according to it) because otherwise you would not feel shame when you acted badly. A person who is 'shameless' cannot be virtuous. Clearly, if one experienced shame all the time, that would suggest that one is not virtuous as though one understands virtue one is not acting in accordance with it - like the person who is 'not free' in Frankfurt's analysis, because he acts on the want that he does not want to want.


But anyway, Solomon's route out of this morass is what he calls emotional intelligence. And he describes this as part of what leads to happiness as he defines it: living the life that you want to live, that you ought to live in accordance with the best standards that you can find. Emotional intelligence is the emotional sensitivity to care about the right things, to devote yourself to the right things, get involved in the right things.


He has several strategies for working on your emotions, to bring them into correspondence with your values. First you have to have reflected. Indeed, he claims that thinking you're happy plays a great part in being happy. What our lives are, says Solomon, are not just what we are engaged in but how we think about (evaluate) what we are engaged in. He uses the example of love: he says it is a reflective emotion. We are in love in large part through thinking we are in love and making choices, performing actions, in line with that belief. Having a happy life isn't the transient feelings of pleasure, joy, amusement: it's the deep value one places in the devotions, the actions that one is engaged in. This is emotional integrity. That doesn't mean that you don't feel a background distress about inequality in the world, for example - there will be emotional conflicts - but in means that one's life is 'tied up in the values one believes in'.


On a practical level, to get back to some nuts and bolts, you could avoid situations where you experience emotions that you don't want to feel. So, you don't read social media if you don't want to get angry, resentful, frustrated, contemptuous and the like. You can maintain a consciousness of your emotional state and control the expression of the emotions. So, when you're angry, you don't shout or thump the table. You count to ten and keep your cool. You can reflect on emotions to consider to what extent they are valid and warranted - if you are able to be objective, this can help to ease them. But the risk is that you can end up justifying them instead and thus intensify them.


The next and, in my view, more effective and more ethical view is, as with the Stoic, to try to create habits that enhance the chances of reactions that line up with your values. Practicing through acts of kindness and generosity can lead to those emotions flowering more freely. Practicing meditation can help to relieve some negative emotions. Careful analysis of your values could lead you to understand where your anger, for example, is warranted, where it is not, and that can offer guidance when feeling an emotion, which might help to ease it in certain situations.


On this journey, though, perhaps the most critical and effective route is practicing perspective taking. Reading literature, experiencing art and culture, listening to others and, indeed, attending to the world in a way that opens up opportunities for epiphanies. Because getting outside the self, looking outward, as Murdoch and Midgley advise, creates a focus that is not all about petty or subjective concerns, that does not always require self-justificatory narratives.


Solomon cites his interpretation of spirituality in this context, which I outlined in Epiphanies. He talks about experiencing the world in a certain kind of way, which can come in moments of the sublime: that my personal self is not all there is to the universe.


It is the ego that suffers, so maybe the less attention we grant it, the better.




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