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How are Moral Judgments Connected with Displays of Emotion?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1965

David Braybrooke
David Braybrooke
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

Most philosophers, I think, would hold that there is a great deal more to be noticed about moral judgments than any special connections which they may be supposed to have with displays of emotion. I strongly hold this myself. Many philosophers, however—and I am one of them—are inclined to believe that special connections of this kind do exist. Agitation counts in ethics. But just what does it count for? What is to be made of the central fact that the same forms of words to which both ethical and “emotive” meaning is ascribed may sometimes be used when emotions are being manifested and sometimes when they are not? Stevenson acknowledges, “There are emotively active and emotively inactive uses of literally all the ethical terms”. But how, in view of this fact, can it be illuminating to say that some forms of words—taken to be the characteristic forms of words for expressing moral judgments—have anything like a distinctive function of expressing (or “venting”) emotions?

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , September 1965 , pp. 206 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1965

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References

2 Stevenson, Charles L., Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 84.Google Scholar

3 loc. cit.

4 See A Strategy of Decision (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 209Google Scholar ff. Cf. “The Ethical Control of Politics,” Ethics, Vol. LXX, No. 4 (July 1960), p. 319Google Scholar.

5 See “The Ethical Control of Politics.”

6 Stevenson touches upon this incongruity when he writes of an actress accompanying the word “hurrah” with “the same tragic gestures and intonation” appropriate to the word “alas”. Ethics and Language, p. 40. But he does not develop the subject.

7 Cf. Taylor, Paul W., Normative Discourse (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 51Google Scholar.

8 I have provided for the possibility that, for every fact-stating locution, circumstances might be described in which some emotion specifically incongruous for certain M-locutions would operate—in those circumstances, though not in others—to cancel the statement of fact. A teacher or savant who believed that there was no planet beyond Neptune might repeat the sentence expressing the belief that there is one, accompanying his repetition with a show of disgust directed at the “ignorance” of the person who had just expressed the belief.

9 The possibility of ordering by “increasing heat” (Max Black's phrase) was once mentioned by Black as evidence of the “syntactical complexity” of emotive signs. Commenting on the point, Stevenson claims to have “recognized and named” the phenomenon at issue; but the passage in Ethics and Language to which he refers one—p. 82—does not fully bear out his claim. See , Stevenson, Facts and Values (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 160Google Scholar and (for Black's remarks) p. 173. Cf. Paul Ziff on “good” having “a relatively dispassionate feeling,” Semantic Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 220Google Scholar ff.

10 Kenny, Anthony, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 66Google Scholar.

11 Kenny recognizes “the existence of characteristic expressions of emotion”. Op. cit., p. 59.

12 See Klineberg, O., “Emotional expression in Chinese literature,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. XXIII (1938), pp. 517–520CrossRefGoogle Scholar [cited by Paul Thomas Young in Candland, Douglas K., ed., Emotion: Bodily Change (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962), p. 84.Google Scholar]

13 See Hebb, D. O., “Emotion in Man and Animal: An Analysis of the Intuitive Processes of Recognition,” Psychological Review, Vol. LIII (1946), pp. 88–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Op. cit., p. 48.

15 There is experimental evidence that, going on facial expressions alone, people are liable to confuse any emotion with certain others — e. g., contempt with happiness, or disgust. On the other hand, even with nothing more than facial expressions to go on, people are not liable to confuse any emotion with any other. The facial expressions interpreted as displays of happiness are quite clearly discriminated from the facial expressions interpreted as displays of anger or fear. See Harold Schlosberg, “The Description of Facial Expressions in Terms of Two Dimensions,” in Candland, op. cit., pp. 220–234.