Stop That Crow!

In my recent post concerning the refinement of emotions, we saw that emotions as engagements with the world consist in forms of judgments regarding a number of principles such as status, proximity/distance, active/passive, responsibility, etc. These, however, are simply the judgments which are in an emotion, for as Goleman, among others, has famously shown there is a significant amount of intelligence which we have about emotions as well. Such an extraordinarily complex interaction among judgments on both levels certainly entails that any kind of hedonistic calculus will never be very successful in practice.

What I would like to claim, however, is that this complex interaction among judgments at so many levels precludes a hedonistic calculus even in principle. In this I do not mean to argue against consequentialism per se, but rather solely against any ethical theory which is grounded in the simple summation of all pleasure and pain which does or may result from a given action.

Central to my argument is the claim that pain and pleasure are not emotions. Pleasure and pain, inasmuch as they are summable, are feelings and emotions are not merely feelings. Emotions involve both mind-to-world as well as world-to-mind intentionality, whereas pain and pleasure are simply the experience of physiological mechanisms at work. While it is indeed possible to assign simple valence to the feelings of pleasure and pain, to focus on this very limited aspect of our emotional experience to the exclusion of all other judgments which come into play is far too simplistic and even naïve.

This is what I see as being at the heart of John Stuart Mill’s criticisms of Bentham’s Utilitarian theory. Bentham claimed, famously, that “pushpin is as good as poetry,” a claim which only seems plausible when all intentionality involved in the two activities is reduced to mere feelings. It is to focus upon the judgments which we have regarding the feelings involved in emotions to the exclusion of all other judgments which can be found both in as well as about these emotional experiences.

Emotions, unlike feelings, are about the world and for this reason cannot be said to exist solely in the mind. The emotions themselves consist in judgments about the world. The judgments which we also make about these emotions also necessarily reflect the context in which we find ourselves in the world. Consider the case of those people who take pleasure in pain being inflicted upon them, usually by a lover (this need not be limited to extreme cases by any means). To attempt a calculus of the feelings in this experience is to miss the point entirely, for it is intimacy of the context which casts these feelings in a positive light, feelings which would be judged bad in most other contexts. It is the context which gives emotions most of their content, not the feelings, and there seems to be no way of adequately evaluating a context purely in terms of pain/pleasure valence.

Emotions can be seen as the compulsion to response to the perceived world in what can be described as an intelligent, if short-sighted, manner. The judgments which we have of emotions can be seen as the way in which we endow our emotions with even greater intelligence. For instance, the emotion of vengeance is loaded with judgments regarding activity, distance, responsibility, and disapproval. Each of these judgments can be said to have valence which we can assign to them and it is the context in which we perceive ourselves to be that will determine what each value will be. To reduce the moral judgments which we make in the world to a calculus of the mindless feelings which we experience is to make these judgments for too simple, crude and unintelligent.

It is for this reason that we view many forms of experiencing of pain as being good overall and some forms of experiencing pleasure as bad. Consider love as an emotion which, by itself, seems to produce very little pleasure, physiologically speaking and indeed produces a large amount of pain by way of anger, frustration and jealousy. And yet it would seem preposterous to our Western minds to view love as being any less than good in itself. Anger is an example of a negative emotion which can be used in a positive way to produce even greater anger in the case of moral indignation or even revolution. Fear is an emotion which is primarily aimed at preventing pain, but in itself produces little which could be unequivocally described as pleasure or pain. It is for this reason that some people hate heights while others find the “rush” of sky diving insatiable.

Perhaps the way in which a simple calculus of feelings departs from our intuitions is how it can recommend the suicide as a prevention of “hedon-loss.” It is not unexpected for a person to desire to continue to live, and even fight to fulfill this desire, even when confronted with the assurance that such a continued life will be characterized by pain rather than pleasure. It is my conclusion that an ethics of hedonistic calculus is simply unequipped to deal with the strong moral intuitions which we have in these matters.

Nevertheless, while I submit that any kind of ethics based in valence calculus will always be incomplete, I do not wish to extend this criticism to all forms of consequentialism. Indeed, the primary way in which we attribute intelligence to emotions is the manner in which they compel us toward actions which tend toward positive consequences as if they were intelligent. Almost paradoxically, the problem with Utilitarianism is that it focuses too much on the judgments which we make about the feelings associated with our emotions rather than the consequences of those emotions in the world.

The problem with Utilitarianism is that it judges the consequences of emotions in terms of feelings rather than judging the feelings of emotions in terms of their consequences. Actually, this isn’t entirely accurate either. The problem which is at the center of the form of Utilitarianism which I am criticizing is that it equates emotions with feelings, or at least a complex system of feelings. Thus, consequences are evaluated in terms of emotions/feelings whereas it should be that emotions, which are not merely feelings, are evaluated in terms of its interactions with the world within a particular context; very roughly, it’s consequences.

With an understanding of the relationship between feelings, actions, contexts and emotions in place, we can the shortcomings of the more traditional approaches to ethics. Utilitarianism focuses too much on feelings at the expense of the actions and contexts involved. Kant’s Categorical Imperative focuses too much on the supposedly universalizable actions without any regard for feelings or, more importantly, particular context. It is the sometimes dramatic variability in context across cultures which gives actions both their universalizability within a culture as well as its non-universalizability across different cultures. Perhaps the only, if not the best option can be found in some form of virtue ethics as advocated by Aristotle.

What is interesting in this context is the difference which Aristotle draws between the fundamental natures of pain and pleasure. According to Aristotle, while pain is certainly a feeling, pleasure is not a feeling or an experience by itself. Rather, pleasure is something which we take in another activity when we do it well. While I disagree with Aristotle’s claim that all pleasure must be derivative from another experience, I do think this move to endow pleasure, or more accurately enjoyment with intentionality is a step in the correct direction.