Uncertain guilt

Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday. (Perhaps I have suffered from some memory loss.) What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right. For guilt to be appropriate, I should believe that I’ve done a wrong thing, and 75% is not high enough for belief.

Guilt does come in degrees, but those degrees correlate with the degrees of culpability and wrongness, not with the epistemic confidence that I actually did the deed.

If I am not sure that I’ve done something, then a conditional apology makes sense: “Due to memory loss, I don’t know if I did A. But if I did, I am really sorry.” Maybe there is some conditional guilt feeling that goes along with conditional apology. But I am not sure there is such a feeling.

However, even if there is such a thing as a conditional guilt feeling, it presumably makes just as much sense when the probability of wrongdoing is low as when it is high. But it seems that whatever feeling one has due to a probability p of having done the wrong thing should co-vary proportionately to p.

Here’s an interesting possibility. There is no feeling that corresponds to a case like this. Feelings represent certain states of the world. The feeling of guilt represents the state of one’s having done a wrong. But just as we have no perceptual state that represents ultraviolet light, we have no perceptual state that represents probably having done a wrong. Other emotions do exist that have probabilistic purport. For instance, fear represents a chance of harm, and the degree (and maybe type: compare ordinary fear with dread!) of fear varies with the probability of harm.

While we can have highly complex cognitive attitudes, our feelings have more in the way of limitations. Just as there are some birds that have perceptual states that represent ultraviolet light, there could be beings that represent a probability that one did wrong, a kind of uncertain-guilt. But perhaps we don’t have such a feeling.

We get around limitations in our perceptual skills by technological means and scientific inference. We cannot see ultraviolet, but we can infer its presence in other ways. Similarly, we may well have limitations in our emotional attitudes, and get around them in other ways, say cognitively.

It would be interesting to think what other kinds of feelings could make sense for beings like us but which we simply don’t have.

Feeling bad about harms to our friends

Suppose something bad happens to my friend, and while I am properly motivated in the right degree to alleviate the bad, I just don’t feel bad about it (nor do I feel good about). Common sense says I am morally defective. But suppose, instead, something bad happens just to me, and I stoically (I am not making any claims about the Stoic movement by using this word, despite the etymology) bear up under it, without feeling bad, though being properly motivated to alleviate the harm. Common sense praises this rather than castigating it. Yet, aren’t friends supposed to be other selves?

So, we have a paradox generated by:

1. The attitudes we should have towards our friends are very much like those we should have towards ourselves.

2. It is wrong not to feel bad about harms to our friends even when we are properly motivated to fight those harms.

3. It is not wrong to feel bad about harms to ourselves when we are properly motivated to fight those harms.

As some terminological background, feeling bad about our friends’ losses is not exactly empathy. In empathy, we feel the other’s feelings as we see things from their point of view. So, feeling bad about harms to our friends will only be empathy if our friends are themselves feeling bad about these harms. There are at least two kinds of cases where we feel bad about harms to our friends when our friends themselves do not: (a) our friends are being stoical and (b) our friends are unaware of the harms (e.g., their reputation is being harmed by gossip we witness, or our friends are being harmed by acting viciously while thinking it’s virtuous). Moreover, even when our friends are feeling bad about the harms, our feeling bad about the harms will only be a case of empathy if we feel bad because they are feeling bad. If we feel bad because of the badness of the harms, that’s different.

In fact, we don’t actually have a good word in English for feeling bad on account of a friend’s being harmed. Sympathy is perhaps a bit closer than empathy, but it has connotations that aren’t quite right. Perhaps “compassion” in the OED’s obsolete sense 1 and sense 2a is close. The reason we don’t have a good word is that normally our friends themselves do feel bad about having been harmed, and our terminology fails to distinguish whether our feeling bad is an instance of sharing in their feeling or of emotionally sharing in the harm to them. (Think of how the “passion” in “compassion” could be either the other’s negative feeling or it could be the underlying harm.) And I think we also don’t have a word for feeling bad on account of our own being harmed, our “self compassion” (we do have “self pity”, but that’s generally seen as bad), though we do have thicker words for particular species of the phenomenon, such as shame or grief. So I’ll just stick to the clunky “feeling bad on account of harm”.

When we really are dealing with empathy, i.e., when we feel bad for our friend because our friend feels bad for it, the paradox is easier to resolve. We can add a disjunct to (1) and say:

4. The attitudes we should have towards our friends are very much like either those that we should have towards ourselves or those that our friends non-defectively have towards themselves.

This is a bit messy. I’m not happy with it. But it captures a lot of cases.

But what about the pure case of feeling bad for harms to a friend, not because the friend feels bad about it?—either because the friend doesn’t know about the harm, or the friend is being stoical, or our bad feeling is a direct reflection of the harms rather than indirectly via the other’s feeling of the harms. (Of course there will also be the special case where the feeling is the harm, as perhaps in the case of pains.) I am not sure.

I actually feel a pull to saying that especially when our friend doesn’t feel bad about the harm, we should, on their behalf. If our friend nobly does not feel the insult, we should feel it for them. And if our friend is being unjustly maligned, we should not only work to rescue their reputation, but we should feel bad.

But I am still given pause by the plausibility of (1) (even as modified to (4)) and (3). One solution would be to say that we should feel bad about harms to ourselves, that we should not be stoical about them. But I don’t want to say that the stoical attitude is always wrong. If our friends are being stoical about something, we don’t always want to criticize them for it, even mentally. Still there are cases where our friends are rightly criticizable for a stoical attitude. One case is where they should be grieving for the loss of someone they love. A more extreme case is where they should be feeling guilt for vicious action—in that case, we wouldn’t even use the fairly positive word “stoical”, but we would call their attitude “unfeeling” or something like that. In those cases, at least, it does seem like they should feel bad for the harm, and we should likewise feel bad on their behalf whether or not they do. (And, yes, this feeling may be in the neighborhood of a patronizing feeling in the case where they are not feeling the guilt they should—but the neighborhood of patronization has some places that sometimes need to be occupied.)

Still, I doubt that it is ever wrong not feel something. That would be like saying that it is wrong not to smell something. Emotions are perceptions of putative normative facts, I think. It can be defective not to smell an odor, either because one has lost one’s sense of smell or because one has failed to sniff when one should have. But the failure to smell an odor is not wrong, though it may be the consequence of doing something wrong, as when the repair person has neglected to sniff for a gas leak.

Instead, I think the thing to say is that there is a good in feeling bad about harms to a friend—or to ourselves. The good is the good of correct perception of the normative state of affairs. A good always generates reasons, and the good is to be pursued absent countervailing reasons. But there can be countervailing reasons. When I injure my shoulder, my pain is a correct perception of my body’s injured state. Nonetheless, because that pain is unpleasant (or fill in whatever the right story about why we rightly avoid pain), I take an ibuprofen. I have reason to feel the pain, namely because the pain is a correct way of seeing the world, but I also have reason not to feel the pain, namely because it hurts.

Similarly, if someone has insulted me, I have reason to feel bad, because feeling bad is a correct reflection of the normative state of affairs. But I also have reason not to feel bad, because feeling bad is unpleasant. So it can be reasonable not to feel bad. Loving my friend as myself does not require me to make greater sacrifices for my friend than I would make for myself, though it is sometimes supererogatory to do so (and sometimes foolish, as when the sacrifice is excessive given the goods gained). So if I don’t have an obligation to sacrifice my equanimity to in order to feel bad for the insult to me, it seems that I don’t have an obligation to sacrifice it in order to feel bad for the insult to my friend. But that sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

So where does the asymmetry come from? Here is a suggestion. In typical cases where our friend feels bad for the harm, our feeling does not actually match the intensity of our friend’s, and this is not a defect in friendship. So the unpleasantness of feeling bad for oneself is worse than in the case of feeling bad for one’s friend. Thus, more equanimity is sacrificed for the sake of our feelings correctly reflecting reality when it is our own case, and hence the argument that if I don’t have an obligation to make the sacrifice for myself, I don’t have an obligation to make the sacrifice for my friend is fallacious, as the sacrifices are not the same. Furthermore, to be honest, there is a pleasure in feeling bad for a friend. The OED entry for “compassion” cites this psychological insight from a sermon by Mozley (1876): “Compassion … gives the person who feels it pleasure even in the very act of ministering to and succouring pain.” I haven’t read the rest of the sermon, but I think this is not any perverse wallowing or the like. The “compassion” is an exercise of the virtue of friendship, and there is an Aristotelian pleasure in exercising a virtue. And this is much more present when it is one’s friend one is serving. Thus, once again, the sacrifice tends to be less when one feels bad for one’s friend than when one feels bad for oneself, and hence the reason that one has to feel bad for one’s friend is less often outbalanced by the reason not to than in one’s own case.

Nonetheless, the reason to feel bad for one’s friend can be outbalanced by reasons to the contrary. Correct perceptual reflection of reality is not the only good to be pursued—not even the only good in the friendship.

Optical and emotional illusions

It's a pleasant and innocent pastime to look at optical illusions, planning to be initially pulled to error but then to overcome. On the other hand, it's not innocent to invite certain kinds of emotional illusions, to pursue a line of thought that one plans to excite in oneself an unjust scorn for someone or a feeling of class superiority, even if one plans and reasonably expects to overcome these mistaken emotions afterwards. Similarly, it can be a valuable exercise to take what one knows to be a piece of pseudoscientific reasoning and put oneself in the shoes of the reasoner, try to feel the force of that reasoning from the inside, as long as one is confident that one won't be finally taken in. But to do this with faulty moral reasoning seems deeply problematic: it is a bad thing to read Mein Kampf or watch Birth of a Nation while putting oneself in the author's or director's shoes, trying to feel the force of the moral convictions from the inside, even if one is confident that in the end one won't be taken in.

Likewise, there need be nothing wrong with reading science fiction or fantasy that presents a world with laws of nature different from ours and to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. It may even be fine when the world has a different mathematics from ours--to read, for instance, a story about a message encoded in π, a message that, we suppose, isn't there (at least not where the story says it is). But to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief when reading fiction that presents a morally different world--say a world where enslaving the weak is actually right (and not just seen as right)--is much more problematic.

Ever since I met it in Plato's Protagoras, I've been attracted to the idea that emotions are a kind of perception, akin to visual perception. But the above disanalogies need to be taken into account. I see two ways of doing this. The first is to say that emotion differs frmiom the senses qua perception. Perhaps, for instance, the senses present things as prima facie, something that needs to be weighed further by reason, while emotions present things as ultima facie. I doubt that that works, but maybe some approach along those lines works. The other is to say that the difference has to do with content. We might say, inspired by Robert Roberts, that emotions have as their subject matter evaluative matters of concern to one qua evaluate matters of concern to one. Maybe this makes the pursuit of emotional illusion problematic.

But is pursuit of all emotional illusion problematic? While it would be wrong to pursue a feeling of class superiority, would it be wrong to pursue a feeling of class inferiority, for instance to better feel compassion for people who have been socialized into such a feeling? I am inclined to think that even pursuit of a feeling of class inferiority is morally problematic. That's a feeling no one should have, and it is contrary to self-respect to feel it.

Intensity of desire

Here are three things I would like:

1. Not to be kidnapped by aliens today for medical experiments.
2. To own the Hope Diamond.
3. To own a minivan.

My preferences go in this order. I'd choose not being kidnapped by aliens over the Hope Diamond and over a minivan, and I'd choose the Hope Diamond over the minivan, since I would sell the Hope Diamond and buy a minivan and many other nice things. But the intensity of my feelings goes in the other direction. I have a moderately intense feeling of desire to own a minivan. I have very little feeling of desire to own the Hope Diamond, and I find myself with even less in the way of feelings about being kidnapped by aliens, though imaginative exercises can shift these around.

So when we talk of the strength of a desire we are being ambiguous between talking of the intensity of the feeling and degree of preference. One might think of the degree of preference as something like a part of the content of the desire—the desire representing the degree to which one is to pursue something—while the intensity of the feeling is external to the content.

Those of us who think of emotions in a cognitive way, and who think there are many normative facts about what emotions one should have given one's situation, may be tempted to think that the intensity of the feeling should match the degree of preference. But that is mistaken. There are perfectly good reasons why my desire for the Hope Diamond and for not being kidnapped by aliens today should be less intensely felt than my desire for a minivan. The minivan is an appropriate object for my active pursuit, for instance, while I have little hope of getting the Hope Diamond and little fear of being kidnapped by aliens.

Maybe, then, the intensity of the desire should be proportional to the role that the desire should play in one's pursuits? That's an interesting hypothesis, but not clearly true. Let's say that you are told that you will be executed if and only if 2^9288389−1 is prime. At this point it seems quite right and proper to have an intense that this number not be a prime. But there is nothing you can do about it; barring Cartesian ideas about God and mathematics, there is no pursuit that you can engage in that can make it more or less likely that the number is a prime.

A better story would be that the intensity of the desire should be proportional to some kind of a salience. One way of the desire being salient is that it should play a heavy role in one's present pursuits. But there may be other ways for it to be salient.

There is, anyway, a spot of spiritual comfort in all this. Sometimes people worry that they do not desire God as much as they desire earthly things. But a distinction must be made. Preferring earthly things to God is clearly bad. But having a more intense desire for an earthly thing than for God may not always be a bad thing. For sometimes one must focus on an earthly task for God's sake, and a means can be more salient than the end.

Representationalism in philosophy of mind and cognitivism in aesthetics and ethics

The contemporary naturalist's best bet for an account of conscious states seems to be representationalism: reducing conscious states to representational states. For independent reasons, I am very friendly to this reduction. Let us assume representationalism.

Representational states represent reality (including the epistemic agent) as being a certain way. But now consider different kinds of aesthetic awareness, say aesthetic awe or aesthetic repugnance or beauty-appreciation. If representationalism is true, each of these states represents reality as being a certain way. But aesthetic statements like "This is sublime", "This is hideous" and "This is beautiful" are connected to kinds of aesthetic awareness. For instance it seems that aesthetic awe gives rise to statements (or exclamations) of "This is sublime", aesthetic repugnance gives rise to "This is hideous" and beauty-appreciation gives rise to "This is beautiful." But once it is granted that a state of aesthetic awareness have representational content, surely the aesthetic statement that it is naturally connected with expresses that representational content. When I am visually aware of a red cube, I say "That's a red cube" and what I say expresses at least a part of the representational content of my awareness.

Thus, once we accept representationalism in the philosophy of mind, we should accept cognitivism in aesthetics. The representational content of aesthetic awe is surely something like the sublime, the representational content of aesthetic repugnance is surely something like the hideous and the representational content of beauty-appreciation is the beautiful.

Granted, the above argument is compatible with the sublime, the hideous and the beautiful being indexical or mind-dependent. That's a matter for further investigation. But the argument does make it difficult to be a non-cognitivist if one is a representationalism.

And the same argument applies in the moral sphere. If representationalism is true, moral admiration and moral repugnance have representational content, and sure if they have representational content, that content is something's being morally admirable or repugnant, respectively.

Objection: Although the aesthetic or ethical feelings have representational content, that content is an inner state of the individual, and not the sort of thing that could be the content of aesthetic or ethical claims. Imagine the content of aesthetic awe is the fluttering of the heart (no doubt it's something more subtle). Then representationalism is satisfied. But plainly the fluttering of the heart is not the object of statements of (say) sublimity. We have two constraints on what could be the object of a statement of sublimity: (1) it has to be appropriately connected to the right sorts of aesthetic consciousness, and (2) it has to fit with enough other things we say. Fluttering of the heart fits with (1)--it is on this toy theory the representational content of aesthetic awe--but not with (2).

Reply: It's certainly true that the fluttering of the heart is not at all a plausible content for aesthetic statements. But likewise it is not a plausible content for aesthetic awareness. Suppose I am having a state of aesthetic awe at a performance of King Lear. The representational content of that state is not the fluttering of the heart. For then there would be no difference in representational content between aesthetic awe at one performance of King Lear and aesthetic awe at another performance of the same play. But there is, since it is a part of the awe, qua conscious state, that it is awe at this performance, and so when the performance is different, the representational state is different. In other words, the fluttering of the heart does not capture the directedness of the awe.

I think there are two routes for the non-cognitivist now. The first is to say that the object is something like the performance's causing fluttering of one's heart. But once we do this, it is hard to resist saying that the sublime just is whatever causes one's heart to flutter. I don't say that the latter is a plausible theory--but is just as plausible as saying that the representational content of aesthetic awe at the performance is the performance's causing of the fluttering of one's heart. (Interestingly, on this view, we seem to have perception of causal features of the world, pace Hume.)

The other route is to entrench and say that the conscious component of aesthetic awe just is an experience of the fluttering of the heart (say), but that we mistakenly describe this by saying it is awe at the performance. Rather, it is awe caused by the performance. I think this is not true to the phenomenology, however.