For Unemotional Ethics

For Unemotional Ethics

It is often said that ethics (morality) is concerned with the passions not the intellect. It is about feelings not knowledge, desires not beliefs. Hence, ethical non-cognitivism. On the other hand, subjects like physics, mathematics, and philosophy are cognitive pursuits, quite removed from emotion. Ethics is motivating, so it needs passionate motive force, but mathematics (say) is not motivating and is coolly contemplated. According to one tradition, ethics is motivated by love, while mathematics has nothing to do with love; it can be done without a loving bone in one’s body. The ethical individual is brimming with emotion; the mathematician is scrubbed clean of emotion, for good or ill.

I think this is the opposite of the truth: mathematics (and physics and philosophy) is imbued with emotion, while ethics is inherently unemotional. People do mathematics because they love it, but you can do ethics and feel no emotion at all. The central point is that mathematics is not about anything emotional, so it needs emotion to motivate our interest; but ethics already has motivation built into it, so that it needs no emotion to get a grip on us. People (some of them) love mathematics because it gives them pleasure, passes the time enjoyably, provides them with fun; but this is not why people become ethically engaged—they do it because they feel they ought to. Better: they know (and also believe) they ought to. They are not motivated by a desire for a good time, but by a sense of duty. Morality is not all fun and games, parties and laughter; it is serious and demanding and may interfere with one’s love-life (in a broad sense). It may even go against one’s desires and good feelings (as Kant reminded us—not that we needed reminding). People typically go into philosophy because they find it enjoyable, but no one seeks out ethical questions for hedonistic reasons—in fact, it is mainly a downer (have you met Debby Downer?). People don’t come on all ethical because of the laughs and delicious tidbits; they do so because they have to—because morality is its own motivation. You could be moved to act by morality and have no emotions at all, but what could move you to spend time doing mathematics without some of sort of emotional pro-attitude towards it? The devoted mathematician smiles when doing mathematics, but the committed moralist has no smile on his face when contemplating genocide or animal cruelty or the death penalty. He thinks about these because he has to not because he gets a kick out of it. The hedonist is no moralist, but he can be a dedicated mathematician. Pleasure comes in many forms, but ethics is not one of them. Ethics is not a game, a fun hobby, a leisure pursuit, a barrel of belly laughs and jolly times. People don’t say to their friends, “Let’s get together Saturday night and do some serious ethics!” When you are faced with a serious ethical problem in your life, you don’t lighten the load by earnestly discussing it with people; it’s more of a burden than a source of amusement. People don’t go on ethical vacations or buy tickets to an ethics concert by their favorite band. Ethics is duty not pleasure. We don’t do ethics because we think it will cheer us up; we do it because we have no choice. This is why we resent ethics much of the time; it interferes with our ability to enjoy ourselves. Children don’t take to ethics the way they do to a sport or to music or to chess or even to mathematics; they do it because they feel they have to. Fortunately, ethics has norms built into it, so there is no need to seek some delightful outside motivating force or factor. The question “Why should I study mathematics?” has much more bite than the question “Why should I learn about ethics?”. The latter question is a sign of psychopathology; the former deserves a clear answer (“It is so much fun!” or “Because you will never get a job if you don’t know any”). Ethics is essentially and intrinsically emotion-independent, yet motivating; but other activities need to be motivated by something external to them—passion, desire, emotion, pleasure. We don’t think about ethics because it will make us happy, but everything else is subject to that law. I work on philosophy because I enjoy it, but I get no pleasure from thinking about the evil of the world (if anything it makes me angry and grief-stricken). When emotions interfere with clear thinking about ethics, I do my best to banish them from my mind; but I am happy to wallow in philosophical emotions. All you need is love—outside of ethics but not inside it. You just need a conscience. Elsewhere you need passion to get you interested.[1]

[1] Obviously, I am adopting a Kantian view of ethics here, but not because of reverence for that philosopher; rather, from personal experience. It is really just plain common sense. Of course, ethics can interact with emotion, but it is not constituted by emotion; its motivation is not essentially emotional. But everything else is—either in the short term of the long term. In prudence we act so as to ensure positive emotions in the future, but in ethics we drop this reliance on emotion and simply do what we think is right. We aim to make others happy, not to make ourselves happy.