Abstract
Emotions strongly influence people's judgments about moral issues. The question is whether such emotional influence impedes an adequate formation of moral judgment or whether a particular emotional involvement is indispensable in reaching a reliable view on a moral issue. The debate about the influence of emotions on the formation of moral judgment and about the reliability of such influence not only profits from philosophical research on emotional concepts and the phenomena they grasp. Philosophers nowadays use a wide variety of results from neurobiological, psychological, cognitive and psychiatric studies to defend the position they take. Some see neurobiological studies about the importance of emotional 'marking' of options in rational decision-making as supporting the view that emotion and reason are both needed for adequate moral judgement. Some more radically use psychological evidence to argue that moral beliefs are nothing but rationalizations of our strong feelings. Others point out studies which show that moral emotions are often expressive of old prejudices and a biased outlook (sexism, homophobia). Is it possible to rationally correct the influence of such emotions? The problem with the current discussion is that it is not accompanied by a thorough methodological reflection on the way empirical results may play a role in philosophical research. It is for instance a conceptual platitude that moral judgements should be answerable to the facts, e.g. facts about a person's character. If we think that emotions provide for a particular form of rationality ("The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing") we have to make clear, first, what we mean with 'rationality' and which 'forms of rationality' are possible. This project combines a descriptive study of the most actual insights in the empirical sciences (1) about the (im)penetrability of emotions' influence, (2) about the role of basic affects, and (3) about the function of emotions in unconscious thinking with a normative study which addresses three correlated issues: (1) Normativity: people want to make a distinction between how they would feel about some issue and how they should feel about it, given reasons for and against particular stances. But can we (psychologically speaking) really make such a distinction? Is there a way to take empirical findings serious and still do justice to the phenomenon of normativity that is at the heart of the way we understand ourselves. Naturalists and constructivists accounts of normativity will be compared. (2) Categorisation: If aversive emotions like indignation or reproach are closely connected to affects like disgust (possibly causing nausea), should we say that such emotions are too primitive to be categorised as 'moral'? But can we make a viable distinction between such aversive emotions and positive moral emotions like love and sympathy in terms of complexity, aetiology, and phenomenology? Is normativity conditional on a concern for morality? Volitionalist and rationalist account will be compared. (3) Reliability: There is evidence that emotions might reveal meaningful patterns among a messy wealth of clues. Can the unconscious-thinking paradigm idea be applied to cases of moral evaluation and how can we be sure that the result of unconscious evaluation is trustworthy (given some idea of how correct and incorrect judgements can be distinguished)? Reliabilist arguments will be tested against the picture of normativity under (1)