Reasons or emotions: the ultimate motivation to make moral judgments

Moral judgments own two dimensions of motives, the first to express and the second to persuade while the first remains superficial and the second represents the ultimate motive. Moral judgments, thereby, have both the emotive and imperative meanings: they convey people’s moral approval or disapproval as well as their commands to guide others toward their judgments. Emotions give rise to the emotive meaning of moral judgments, but cannot evoke the imperative meaning because emotions cannot convince people of making the same moral judgments. Instead, reasons are able to lead to commands because others can estimate the reasons through their rational thinking. For reasons – rather than emotions – entail the whole meanings of them, moral judgments derive from reasons rather than emotions.

            Reasons serve as normative facts to motivate people to determine the grounds of their moral judgments. Moral judgments are expressions of beliefs and therefore can be true or false. Whether they are true or false depends on the facts they fit, so we select related natural and normative facts by reasoning to judge moral statements. Emotions cannot yield appropriate facts to prove the judgments true. Imagine a scenario that a 6-year-old boy with autism is sent to a doctor for his tuberculosis. Before any steps of cure, the boy’s parents ask the doctor to give negative euthanasia to their child. They say “our child has suffered a lot from his autism because he was always excluded by his peers, so it seems to be an appropriate chance for him to relieve from it when he is still young.” By emotions, the parents feel sorry and sympathetic about their child and pick the belief that the child’s defect would make him self-abased and self-sealing even if the doctor cures the child’s tuberculosis. Contrarily, the doctor refuses to give the euthanasia to the child motivated by his utilitarian calculation through reasoning: it is a fact that the child may suffer from autism, but it is also a relevant fact that the child may also get confident and make his life as happy as possible and that the child may have undiscovered potentials to enlarge the happiness. The calculation indicates the net happiness to be negative if the euthanasia is given, therefore explicitly compelling the doctor to make a moral judgment that it is immoral to give negative euthanasia to the child.[i] People who appeal to reasons to make decisions are able to select more relevant and comprehensive facts to make right decisions than those who appeal to emotions. David Hume, though, may argue that the doctor refuses not due to his rational analysis, but his passions. Hume believes that all voluntary behavior is motivated by passion and that “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”[ii] However, moral decisions are much more complicated. The doctor may have various kinds of passions – sympathy, sorrow, angriness, weirdness, and etc. – simultaneously when the parents render their appeal. The mixed passions do not offer a clear answer unless the doctor evaluates by reasons which passion overrides the other. In this case, the doctor still appeals to reasons to make the moral judgments. In comparison, rational analysis yields a more decisive result.

            Emotions are in fact consequence of the reasons people have to promote their moral judgments. Many moral judgments do not involve emotions, but moral judgments that do involve only include emotions as part of the reasons. The logic in this case is as follows. First, I notice certain facts. Then, I have desires toward these facts – either supportive or antagonistic. Because my desires conform or contradict with the facts, I feel happy or painful. Therefore, I have reasons – the relationships between my desires and facts – for my appeal to emotions. My emotions next serve as the impulse for me to make further subjective judgments based on the facts. However, the subjective judgments are inadequate to be moral judgments because the subjective judgments derive from my personal feelings and only appeal to me. Thus, I have to universalize my personal feelings about the facts to other people. The judgments thereby become critical because they are about feelings of many people, bringing not merely emotions but reasons for others to believe. Even in this case, emotions could be motivations because they are induced by reasons and appeal to moral judgments by reasons. Take it figuratively, emotions are one link in a great chain of reasons. The same logic of deducing from oneself to others also exists in Kantian ethics: Immanuel Kant suggests you should “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[iii] He adopts the notion that moral judgments, or universal law in Kant’s perspective, can be universalized from individual to everyone through reasoning for his prerequisite that all humans are rational beings. Suppose I hate people smoking on streets; therefore, I make the judgment that it is immoral to smoke in public areas. I see people smoking on streets when I am cycling, then I want to escape from the scent of cigarettes, but I fail, so the scent goes into my body and makes me feel stuck at my lung. Thus, I am agitated by these people and condemn their behavior to be inappropriate. I glance around and find many other people cover their nose with their hands, displacing their aversion to the scent – my condemnation applies to other people; therefore, I will my condemnation to be a universal law and come to state that it is immoral to smoke in public areas because smoking generates the annoying scent and lots of people cannot stand the scent.

            Although reasons seem to be the motivation of moral judgments, moral judgments are advocation of values and values do not exist independently of emotions. As mentioned above, moral judgments are to express our moral approval or disapproval and to convince others of the judgments. Values are related to evaluation. Terms like “good” and “right” are to construe the values; they describe people’s feelings toward certain actions. Therefore, moral judgments are about values, and values are about emotions, which means that moral judgments are about emotions. Take the example of chocolate. I describe chocolate A as a “good” chocolate. Therefore, A must have some features that interest me, which in this case is to be tasty for me. The term “good” represents the value of being tasty and describes my happiness of tasting chocolate A. When I describe other chocolate with the term “good,” I mean the other chocolate are tasty as well. I can thus make the judgment that the chocolate I have tasted are all good because they are all tasty and make me happy. However, the emotion of feeling happy is not necessarily the motivation for me to make such judgment. It might be an epiphenomenal appeal evoked by the reason that the chocolate share certain properties and perfectly meet my personal preferences, and then I feel happy. The term “good” is a description instead of a definition; “delicious” can also describe the chocolate. Thus, moral judgments do not necessarily refer to values, but the inner properties of the judged, in this case the chocolate. Moreover, if values are related to judgments, people can also agree on the value without appeals to emotions. Take the example of abortion. The natural fact is that there is controversy of abortion. The normative fact is that the fetus will become a human being is a reason. Taken that the natural fact must be true, if two people judge through their reasonings and agree on the normative fact, they may agree on the same value that the potential of the fetus is important; afterwards, they may state that it is immoral to have abortion. In this case, they do not appeal to their emotions to come to the value.

            Reasons are the motivation for moral judgments. They are the normative facts to prompt decision making. Emotions, on the contrary, cannot motivate us to make moral judgments; even to the most extreme cases, emotions can only motivate as the consequence of reasons. Reasons, as the exclusive property of human being, and emotions, as the shared feature of animals, represent human intelligence and animal instincts respectively. The idea of moral progress that there is greater agreement about moral judgments than before further reinforces the development of human intelligence – the reasons – that we are becoming more rational in our moral thinking. People are developing their rational reasoning, better able to find relevant normative facts to become more coherent to their moral judgments, and easier to understand others’ judgments. Therefore, reasons motivate people to make moral judgments and will become more universalizable to attain greater agreement on moral judgments.

[i] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

[ii] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

[iii] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals