Do Emotions and Morality Mix?

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I think wherever the moral intuition came about that crossing certain lines made us not worth preserving as a species - it's a good one and we should do a lot more to on-board that in our culture. Otherwise one could slit a person's throat, crap on their head, stop a few times, and walk away as indifferent as had they fixed a leaky faucet. There's no law of physics to prevent that sort of thing and in some niche cases it could be imminently practical, just that it's the last thing we'd want more than the smallest accident of the population to be like.

The other part that maybe needed explanation - that million dollar painting that's worth more than anything to me, it's my own interiority. My best and brightest memories, the things that infuse my life with beauty. They're things I can't even properly put a price tag on.

Also as I get older I think I'm increasingly coming to what I'd think of as a satisfactory definition of evil. It might be abit of a narrow definition but I'd say that evil is the inferior eating/devouring the superior. If I made a saint within myself and then completely desecrate him to make a dollar, for the sake of survival - because the alternative is homelessness or suicide - It falls within that category of horrific trade-offs. It's like being told 'BTW, if you want to be able to sustain yourself - chop off a finger every year and we'll reimburse you'. I feel like I'm chopping off pieces of my soul half the time and I can't imagine that it's a rare feeling for a person to have.

The way I see it is that emotions and reason are intertwined in a way that can't be separated. Desires are to be fulfilled and fears to be avoided and the patterns provided by our immediate experiences are reflected against the emotional effects they provide to us and our behaviors grow out of that. The behaviors come to control for fulfillment. But the particular environment that is experienced informs the creation of those behaviors and various moral codes grow out of the specific differences between the world of experiences that each individual is subjected to. Emotion and experience beget reason, which in turn provides new patterns of experience which is evaluated by emotion, which then engenders more reason. In a circular bootstrapping that's ultimately dependent on both the past bootstrapping and the environment that's resulted from the mixture of the behaviors engaged in by everyone undergoing the same process. It's a giant interdependent dynamical process.

Even the people espousing certain moral codes are doing so because the behavior has been bootstrapped into and abetted by some fulfillment attained from the behavior.

If a person somehow gets fulfillment for playing the piano, they become some kind of pianist.

Morals are a set of abstract higher-order behaviors that afford fulfillment in contexts involving interpersonal interactions. Utter selfishness often leads to a lack of fulfillment unless the conditions of the environment are such that it does.

Eh, just a thought.

I understood your image of beauty being destroyed...
But beauty is aesthetic value. (And maybe your "good" v. "Evil" is also aesthetic, then? Also, your evil sounds a lot like... "Bad". Or rather, evil is when "bad" is valued higher than "good")
Anyway. ... As I find myself becoming ever more aggressively sceptical of capitalism, my ryetorical question would be: what's the exchange value of your aestheic value ? - because that's what things have become, haven't they?

Beauty AND value. The part of us that's willing to live up to our highest ideals is the part of us that we need to protect no matter what. It's the part of us that's worth saving, worth fighting for, worth putting up the effort of going on to serve and protect.

But what informs a person's particular notion of beauty and value? Everyone has different ideas about those things, so if there's some true ideal then how do those differences form? Either nature's machinations produce evil, or the perception of things as such arises from some limitation of perspective. It seems to me that the people most convinced of their version of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, are also those who take for granted their own views of things. Of course, all I can do here is espouse my own views formed within my limited perspective. Try as I might to move beyond it, any attempt to project my values onto the objective is illusory and hubristic. And I'm attached to those views in a way that's inescapably rooted in emotion.

I'm not making a claim that everyone would see the same thing inside or account for beauty or value in the same way. I'm getting at something maybe more pragmatic - ie. that whatever you find beautiful or valuable within yourself, ie. worth preserving and protecting, is what keeps you alive and motivated to get through difficult times.


i think we all have slightly different definitions of what the most salient evils are to us personally based on what kinds of adversity we've each had the most run-ins with but I think Sam Harris covers this one well - ie. that we can agree that a bunch of beings receiving maximum anguish for no reason whatsoever is something we can universally agree is 'bad', ie. that if there's an applicable use for the word 'bad' at all, as Sam puts it, that would be it.

As far as the example I gave earlier, ie. the inferior consuming/destroying the superior, that's been captured by movies like Human Centipede, it's been captured anytime through some act of cruelty or sadism one person permanently ruins another person and rather than it being even an overuse of revenge for some wrong-doing it's caused by disgust with the greater quality of that person's character. It's the 'kulaks' getting rounded up the Russian revolution. It's languages and cultures getting destroyed and lost to history. It's states of relatively advanced human knowledge declining into dark ages. I'd boil it down even more generally to suffering not even just without gain but with deep degradation to accompany it.

I'm sure there's a lot in what I just said above that people can pick at, and an immediate example I can think of - if I were to think 'advanced to dark ages' in terms of the Roman Empire and just how brutal they were (thinking of the Roman centurions a bit like Japan's Samurai and the Roman Emperor a bit like Japan's God Emperor where a note stating your services are no longer required is a command to commit suicide). So I'm in agreement that everyone's greatest considerations for what's vile, evil, etc. will have different nuance, different syntax, different things that matter most to them.

The core issue though, and maybe we'd need to unpack this one more, is where a person gets their compass to act or orient themselves in the world if they don't carefully curate these things. Similarly it's that same question Eric and Bret Weinstein often bring up - ie. what separates the majority who'll conform to anything you tell them to conform to so long as their left alone otherwise and the person whose stuck with enough principal that they won't do it? Bret suggested that the person who won't solute the false flag usually has a mountain of interesting things to say, well-built observations, reasoning from first-principles behind them, and it's that structure which doesn't allow them to simply go with the flow or bend to whatever pressure is in the area. We need people like that as they're critical to preventing the worst kinds of societal slippage, including a lot of the worst of what we saw in the 20th century.


Saying 'its complicated' and suggesting it doesn't exist would be two very different things though. I think there's a lot of justification to suggest that it's complicated and that people should be extremely wary of pushing any personal definitions out (although being open to talking about them). Suggesting they don't exist based on their diversity though goes in more of a 'even if it's true it's too dangerous' sort of direction and yet I don't think we'll be in any less danger if the world's filled with people who generally roll over or just have cynicism as their guide, the dangers just change and in that environment it's far less likely that people who have much to add to society rise to power or get to shape culture.

From a pragmatic perspective I can agree with you. In order to act in life we do need to come to some conclusion of things, at least momentarily, or we're lost in thought forever. And what better guide than what's beautiful or valuable to you at the moment.



I can agree.





I'm not sure a person has the ability to "curate" these things. I've thought about it as a procession of circumstance, -> gleaning -> action -> circumstance. And the gleaning is always built on what's already there and what's available from circumstance for extension, a pyramid on all past gleanings and circumstances.



I think what I'm trying to say is that beauty and values are complicated insofar as they exist solely the realm of institutional facts, but they doesn't exist in that they're not brute facts. It's in this institutional versus brute reality that I think comes both the variation among people and the danger of pushing them out into an objective realm.

Brute facts, institutional facts and individual facts, I'd say.
And I'd like to add: to have individual values, the instutions must be geared to peaceful coexistence of individuals.
But that means, institutions can only allow certain individual values (those that don't result in the harm of others).
Institutional values are however not only constrained in this way - otherwise, we'd have some sort of anarcho-syndicalism.
Our institutions are in the shape of national governments and international markets, and they are there to preserve itself.
This in turn cuts reduces individual options further - and individual values may no longer fall within the range of institutional values.
Meaning: if the institution is capitalism, individual values may be at odds with the idea of using markets to determine value.

We should remember that institutional values are contingent and ephemeral and aren't real like "brute facts"... I'd actually prefer raw data rather than brute facts... I don't know if facts can exist without institutions to enshrine them and individuals to accept them.

I'm sorry for the confusion. "Institution" in my use of it in the context of this kind of factual dichotomy doesn't refer specifically to what we colloquially call "institutions," the monolithic and storied organizations, but rather something like "to institute," to impose something. Whether individually or collectively engaged in, an institution is some notion of human creation imposed on reality meant to organize and explain it. It gets into a bit of nuance between the individual and the commonly agreed upon, but I consider all notions of things to be institutional whether or not they are agreed upon by a multitude. Any new institution resides first in the individual before becoming accepted by some mass(es) for some reason(s) and through some process(es).

And a brute fact is a fact of reality that precedes explanation. Saying a thing is a "rock" is to use an institutional fact to organize, categorize, explain, and embed in a larger theory of things, but the rock itself as experienced is a brute fact, just an unavoidably existing "thing."

There are other examples that may be better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_fact#Searle

That brings up its own conversation as well, ie. how much of what generally falls under majority human instinct and what doesn't vs. what's shaped by culture and memory.

I'd agree in that I'm not a believer in free will, but its evident as well that people who can optimize tend to optimize. I also think so much of what institutional values may be (I get that this term is being used in a way somewhat synonymous to 'philosophic' but in the broader civic sense) are plugs that people have found highly useful. Technically software is ephemeral rather than a brute thing, as are books (unless it's a REALLY heavy book), and yet we find information has profound effects on what schemas of operation our culture considers possible. There's a lot we don't have much control over, most evidently our nastiness and deep-down competition to genetically ace the next person out, but typically if a good idea hits the public sphere at a time where people are hungry for a good idea they will pick it up.

HEY!
YOU TWO!
Get a room...