Complexity & Artificial Life Research, Manchester U.K.
Traditionally Philosophical Ethics has been concerned, like most philosophical and scientific topics, with rational investigations and intellectual debate. There have been occasional forays into emotions but generally these have been regarded as mere sensations, getting in the way of thought, or at best being the results of either thought or physiological changes.
Here I wish to argue that ethics, as practised, are emotions and not thoughts and are in fact prior to ethical thought processes. I will contend that they grow from genetic beginnings, being shaped culturally as we mature and remain susceptible to intellectual manipulation.
Philosophers have many advantages over experimental scientists, we are able to reason from unverified premises just to see where it takes us. By these thought experiments we can explore new situations and new modes of thought, viewing reality from different angles. If we arrive at interesting conclusions, then these and our premises may prove worthy of experimental test beyond our field, in the same way as are the deliberations of theoretical scientists.
The philosophical approach starts with premises (axioms, taken to be true) and deduces consequences from these.
So let me start by outlining my premises. First a thought experiment.
You are passing a road and see a toddler walking out into the path of an
oncoming car. React !
Did you move first or think first ? Did you freeze
perhaps, unable to do either ?
Perhaps this isn't to do with ethics ? Think again, do we save a life at the risk of our own - a very ethical decision to make.
My initial premise is that in any ethical situation we act first and think later. You may argue that sometimes you certainly do think before you act and I must agree. My second supplementary premise then is that we only think about what to do if we are encountering a new situation, and have no emotional strategy prepared, even an approximate and vague one. Thinking in this case resolves emotional indecision. But what about the 'frozen' case ? In this I believe we revert to primitive reflex, like the rabbit in the headlight - fear triggers paralysing hormones overloading both our reason and emotion, and taking us outside ethics (or decision) as such, until such physiological flooding subsides. I take emotion here to be ‘higher level’ passion, on an evolutionary par with reasoning.
Let us examine these premises more closely. Can we, in any form of ethics, make a decision on how to act by intellectual effort alone ? I would suggest not. To take two examples, one secular, one religious. Utilitarianism suggests that we act for the greatest good. Leaving aside any definition of good here, is such action plausible ? How can we evaluate the consequences of our actions - we would need to follow the chain of causality to the ends of the universe to be 'sure' of the best action. Even if we accept some lesser, local or short term, view as a limiting factor, then the intellectual analysis needed would not be possible in the short (seconds) timescales often facing our ethical actions. The second example, the Christian Commandments, suffers similar difficulties. Take 'Thou shalt not kill', surely a simple and unambiguous rule based ethic ? I think not, would a Christian police officer avoid killing a terrorist if he was about to murder twenty children ? No - if yes, then how can wars start between Christian countries (and history is full of these), killing would be impossible ? Turning the other cheek, whilst encouraged, isn't the action that Christians often can reasonably take. Our ethics, in detail, vary with our cultural perspective - they are contextual. If we can make decisions neither by analysis nor by rule, then what are our actions, as contrasted with our thoughts, based upon ?
I hold that our decisions are intimately coupled with our Emotions, our instinctive values. These form rapid reaction models, built up from infancy as a result of our experiences. How ? Initially we have instinctive reactions, fight or flee for example, to environmental stimuli. Gradually we learn to control these and react in more complex ways, showing empathy to others (at as little as 9 months), and as our understanding grows adopting more complex ethical behaviours - an evolutionary process, socially adaptive, yet still subject to occasional primitive drives and their physiological consequences...
Scientific data has shown that emotions cut in much faster than thoughts, causing physiological changes before the associated thoughts register in the brain. We feel before we think. Without emotional values, why should one course of action be preferable to any other, can a set of outcomes have any benefit unless valued ? Without ethical values we may as well behave as animals. But to avoid this we must control our instinctual responses - and these are based on emotions. Emotions are our decision makers.
Surely though you may say, that would preclude learning and make any ethical discussion useless ? Not so, suppose we act wrongly, and regret it. We may (often) hide the fact from others, even repress it from ourselves, but if open we will evaluate the situation, perhaps discussing with other philosophers what action was desirable in those circumstances. By doing this we lay down new mental patterns, new models of desired behaviour. So far so good, but these are separate from our emotions aren't they ? No, 'emotions' seem to be located in the limbic system of the brain, but this is strongly coupled to the prefrontal lobes in the cerebrum, the 'thinking' area of the brain. It seems that our thoughts can control our emotions and vice-versa. So my third premise is that rational 'ethical' thought lays down emotional controls that affect our actions in the future. There are I think three linked controls on emotions - primitive (traumas), cultural (conditioning) and rational (predictive), the latter gradually building up more sophisticated and effective overrides with time, if encouraged.
So, taking these three premises as givens for now, what can we deduce from them ?
First that we have a control loop, emotions to thoughts then back to emotions. A feedback process.
Second that emotions are the present, whereas thoughts take the past and model the future.
Third that changing our ethics means changing our emotions, our reactions.
Fourth that our initial ethics appear before we can rationally think.
Fifth there is a delay between our actions and their intellectual justification.
Sixth our justification has no logical dependence on our action, they are disjoint.
Seventh what is true for ethics must be true for other human values.
What do these deductions tell us ? Well if we can control our emotions then antisocial behaviours should be amenable to being changed by reason. It may take time of course, I suspect that the changes to emotions we make are weak and it may take many reinforcements to change a firmly fixed antisocial reaction. In severe cases this may not be possible, we can perhaps just mask the problem and prevent its re-triggering unless the original trauma is re-encountered (some evidence suggests this). The conditioning process involved however is reasonably well understood in other areas of behaviourism and psychotherapy.
If we act in the 'now', and reason outside this timeframe, then we would expect reason to have little effect on ‘others’ emotionally charged actions, and this is what we find when people are 'too mad to listen to reason'. I take action here to exclude 'planned' or 'future' actions, which I would call rather 'intentions' - if these come to pass, then they become actions only on their implementation, associated with our emotions at that time. Now the future can be almost immediate, so this does not preclude us 'reasoning' ourselves into emotional states (e.g. if we believe that we have just been cheated) - a short term example of emotions resulting from thought. The remembered traces of such reactions help form the emotional controls (positive or negative) mentioned earlier. Our ethical reaction to the same situation tomorrow may now be very different and is based on our new emotional ‘understanding’ !
Changing our ethics means changing our responses to situations. The reverse is also true, if we change our responses (the ethically relevant ones that is) then we must have changed our ethics - even if we did not 'think' about the situation consciously. This follows from our reactions as babies and toddlers, where we certainly have primitive ethics - Hedonism perhaps initially, then various moral behaviours of increasing sophistication as we grow through childhood and learn.
If asked 'why' we acted as we did, do we have an instant answer ? Often I believe not, we have to think about it. If it was an action we now regret don't we sometimes 'invent' spurious justifications to save face ? So our ethical thought and ethical behaviour are often disjoint. Thought is the 'wish fulfilment' of our actions perhaps !
If what I have proposed is true, then I see no essential difference between ethics and other human values such as aesthetics, politics, metaphysics, religion etc. All should be found to follow the same act, evaluate, reprogram loop. Intellect and Values are coupled, perhaps in a one to one relationship, perhaps a more complex one, an interplay of Rational and Emotional brain sub-systems.
We have had space here only to introduce such a subject, but for anyone interested the following references explore the theme that I have raised in various associated ways.