Do Emotions and Morality Mix?

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Pepe
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25 Mar 2019, 3:45 am

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Should subjective feelings matter when deciding right and wrong? Philosophers have debated this question for thousands of years. Some say absolutely: Emotions, like our love for our friends and family, are a crucial part of what give life meaning, and ought to play a guiding role in morality. Some say absolutely not: Cold, impartial, rational thinking is the only proper way to make a decision. Emotion versus reason—it’s one of the oldest and most epic standoffs we know. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ng/460014/

Pepe
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25 Mar 2019, 4:09 am

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Davis: You describe moral decision-making as a process that combines two types of thinking: “manual” thinking that is slow, consciously controlled, and rule-based, and “automatic” mental processes that are fast, emotional, and effortless. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ng/460014/

magz
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25 Mar 2019, 4:21 am

Nice article, thanks for sharing!

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Pepe
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25 Mar 2019, 4:37 am

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Moral Emotions
Emotions – that is to say feelings and intuitions – play a major role in most of the ethical decisions people make. Most people do not realize how much their emotions direct their moral choices. But experts think it is impossible to make any important moral judgments without emotions. https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glos ... l-emotions

Pepe
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25 Mar 2019, 4:37 am

magz wrote:

Nice article, thanks for sharing!

Cheers...

magz
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25 Mar 2019, 5:05 am

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What makes moral thinking moral thinking is the function that is plays in society, not the mechanical processes that are taking place in the brain when people are doing it. I, among others, think that function is cooperation, allowing otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of living and working together.

This is exactly my view on morals... that humans evolved as societes not individuals and morality gives mechanisms to act against your particular interest and feel good with it - to the benefit of a larger group.
Morals are meant to be calibrated by culture, it's part of wonderful flexibility of human species, making us able to adapt to wide spectrum of environments and still cooperate.

And as the world changes, morals should never be dumped but they need to adapt - like my generation is less morally bound to hard work but more to environment protection - because with modern technology things are cheap and require less work but the natural resources are more at risk with human abundance. It's how economy shapes morals, almost Marx :lol:

(IMO Marx underestimated social effects of technological progress)

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Prometheus18
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25 Mar 2019, 5:49 am

It is emotions - or something other than pure reason/sense data - that must provide the atomic statements, or axioms, upon which a moral code is based. Beyond this, I think it's undesirable, and even harmful, for emotions to play a part in ethical judgements.

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25 Mar 2019, 5:50 am

Daniel Kahneman did a live show with Sam Harris recently and they talked a lot about his systems 1 and 2 (automatic versus deliberated). I'd agree with Greene that they're good launch points to see how different kinds of cognitive processes relate to one another albeit low-resolution, and I also like his camera analogy (ie. nimbly using manual vs automatic modes and alternating between the two by knowing the strengths and pitfalls of each).

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Pepe
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25 Mar 2019, 5:16 pm

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Morality (from Latin: moralis, lit. 'manner, character, proper behavior') is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper.[1] Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal.[2] Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality

Pepe
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25 Mar 2019, 5:27 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Does he mention in what contexts system 1 and system 2 would be most appropriate, iho?

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25 Mar 2019, 8:27 pm

Emotions provide the foundation for morality. But once we set the "first principles", morality should be developed from rational application of those.

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techstepgenr8tion
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25 Mar 2019, 9:48 pm

Pepe wrote:

Does he mention in what contexts system 1 and system 2 would be most appropriate, iho?

Not that I remember in that interview. He seemed to be in a sort of resigned place, the way George Lakoff gets sometimes, with respect to pessimism over human improvability. It sounded like the question of what we should do with the information didn't interest him nearly as much as researching it, though I could be wrong - it's just one interview.

techstepgenr8tion
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25 Mar 2019, 9:52 pm

Antrax wrote:

Emotions provide the foundation for morality. But once we set the "first principles", morality should be developed from rational application of those.

The way I'm increasingly coming to think of the interaction of emotion and logic - yes, you want to set your moral goals and what you aspire to be on first principles and loosely nit enough to handle wide variances of context, and at the same time you have to check in with your emotions to see if they'll let you live up to those principles and abstain from interactions when you feel like your emotions are likely to get the best of you and be a cause of social or ethical embarrassment.

Seems like the safest places to point emotion are art, music, and mysticism. Anything social tends to be a bit explosive.

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25 Mar 2019, 10:08 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

It sounded like the question of what we should do with the information didn't interest him nearly as much as researching it, though I could be wrong - it's just one interview.

That is pretty much my position, btw...
I prefer to stay aloof from societal involvement...
Additional responsibilities are the last thing I want or need...

techstepgenr8tion
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25 Mar 2019, 10:25 pm

Pepe wrote:

That is pretty much my position, btw...
I prefer to stay aloof from societal involvement...
Additional responsibilities are the last thing I want or need...

I probably started from some relatively selfish reasons - ie. I tend to catch the business end of the societal ugly stick too often. When it's like that it's tough not to care how people are treating each other when I know they'll turn the same sadistic lens on me and then when I'm left crying in private somewhere, more often than not, it's not their attacks that bring the tears but rather sane reflection on the kinds of awful things I have to do to myself emotionally or psychologically to harden, toughen up, or be cynical enough to deaden my reaction or have naturally camouflaged reactions. It's difficult to properly put the tragedy of needing to do that in words, the closest analogy I can think of is willfully smearing feces on million-dollar paintings.

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30 Mar 2019, 8:13 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Pepe wrote:

That is pretty much my position, btw...
I prefer to stay aloof from societal involvement...
Additional responsibilities are the last thing I want or need...

Would it help to imagine the painting as a mid-century participatory avant-garde painting that was already painted with faeces and meant to be smeared with more faeces by anyone - and that's exactly what makes it worth millions of dollars?
Because that's how I experience work-for-money. I really don't want to smear s**t everywhere and I don't want to accept that that's what we as a species decided should be worth millions of dollars. Or trillions.

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