In discussing my last entry with a friend I realized I hadn’t explained very well what particularly disgusted me about the position Kucinich and friends had taken. Particularly my sense was that they were indulging their emotions which said ‘this is wrong and I shouldn’t compromise.’ This would be fine if they felt this way pursuant to some principled moral theory or at least would hold to that same position if the consequentialist harms of doing so were more emotionally salient. However, my strong sense is that if it came to a vote for funding the war and they knew Bush had taken a commitment pill to keep our troops in harms way whether they were supplied or not (if you prefer had an absolute unshakable religious conviction) and the effect of their voting not to fund the war was to leave the troops in Iraq without ammo they would vote for funding. In short their ‘principled’ refusal to vote to fund an ‘unjust’ war is an emotional luxury they can afford because the harms of taking this position are neither immediate nor very emotionally salient.

Besides the sort of simplistic rhetoric offered in defense of their supposedly principled refusal to vote for the war (can’t invade a sovereign country etc..) doesn’t hold up under even the most casual analysis. In short this sort of stance is motivated by emotional gut feelings not a principled moral stance. It is this substitution of emotional feeling for moral principle that caused my disgust and motivated me to post about this issue rather than the hundreds of other issues that our representatives take silly stances on.

My conception of moral virtue is that what makes someone virtuous or not is their ability to subordinate emotional reactions to rational (moral) analysis. One does not (directly) control (even in a subjective way) what emotions you feel. One does not so much choose to feel rage, gratitude, sexual attraction as find these feelings impinging on one’s consciousness. Thus it makes no more sense to praise or blame someone for the emotions they feel than for the situations that are beyond their control they find themselves in. In other words the man with the strong fetish for young boys (pedophile) who resists that temptation is a far better person than the otherwise similar individual who doesn’t feel it at all.

I think we all feel share this intuition and agree that we should judge the character of a man by how they deal with their temptations not by the number of temptations they feel. We ought to treat moral emotions in exactly the same way. The man whose immediate emotional reaction when someone insults his wife is that ‘this man must be punished’ is no worse than the man whose immediate moral reaction is ‘I must forgive this man.’ Admittedly what emotional reactions someone has may given evidence as to their moral virtue because practice and habit sculpt these emotions so having the ‘right’ emotional reactions may be indicative of a practice of placing moral reason first. However, the conventionally moral person who ‘just knows’ that certain things are right and others are wrong because of training in childhood is no different than the person who ‘just knows’ that one slaps a woman when she gives you lip. Being lucky and being trained to have the right sort of values doesn’t make one a better person. The persons reacting to ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ moral emotions are in exactly the same epistemic state so are equally virtuous.

Hence it really disgusts me when people pass off indulging their moral emotions as virtue rather than vice. The real moral virtue is the ability to analyze your reactions to something and suppress them if you conclude they counsel the wrong action. Of course all this bit about moral virtue is really just a complicated description of my emotional reaction to things. To the extent there are moral facts they are only facts about which states of affairs are better than others. Moral virtue is something that we choose to define not something the universe hands to us. It isn’t even really relevant to which states of affairs are better.

This is the reason I am so hostile to supposed deontic justifications for actions or moral positions. When taken by real moral philosophers I disagree strongly (both with their conclusions and the deference they give moral feelings) but I can respect what they are doing. However, when used by almost anyone else it is usually an excuse to just go with one’s moral feelings without analysis.