I’m constantly amazed at the moral outrage people express at executive pay. For instance take this post expressing amazement that executives who spend 1.2 million dollars to renovate their offices can sleep at night while normal people lose their job or experience economic hardship. Presumably the idea is that it’s immoral for executives to be that profligate when other people at their company are being forced to make sacrifices. While unethical dealings to increase their earnings are obviously wrong the ‘wasteful’ behavior of these executives is no different from that of any other American.

I mean how many of us pay thousands of dollars to get a new car or purchase houses for 100s or thousands? These aren’t truly necessities. Sure, I live four miles from work and it’s almost always below freezing but I could leave two hours early every morning and walk. Sure, it might be shameful and unpleasant but most of us don’t have to buy a house or even rent an apartment of our own. We could live in our parents basements or share an apartment with others. Even if we walked miles in the snow every day and choose to live in our parents basement we would still be many times better off than the billions of people who live on less than a dollar a day. Our purchase of a new car or choice of a nice apartment is as wasteful relative to the way most of humanity lives as an executives expenditure of 1.2 million to redecorate his office.

Ultimately we evaluate our standard of living relative to our friends and associates. Owning a car or living in our own residence seems reasonable because that’s what our colleagues do and our social circle expects that we will do as well. The fact that we, just like these executives, could pass up those conveniences and gift that money to the poor doesn’t make us monsters in our eyes because we aren’t being any more selfish than our friends. Similarly in the circles these executives travel in these expenditures aren’t out of line. Sure, they look obscene to us but no more so than our use of resources looks to the worlds poor.

There are important questions about the appropriate role of government in encouraging healthy behavior. As a free society we should have deep reservations about forcibly taking people’s money and using it to tell them how they should live, even when we are sure that would make for a better society. History is replete with examples of tyrannical majorities wasting resources and even fueling crime combating`harmful’ behavior. Thus we already have plenty of reason to tread carefully when legislation to discourage tobacco use, encourage exercise or promote a healthy diet is proposed. However, I have a much more fundamental question. Is it even preferable to have a society where people live longer?

At first glance this seems to be a truly stupid question. After all it’s bad when people die early. Isn’t it? Well, I certainly don’t want to die and neither do most people but that misses the point. We all die eventually and even if we personally want to put off death as long as possible can we truly say that a society where the average life span is 90 years rather than 70 is a better place? Would a society where the average life span was 200 years be even better? What sort of life span would be optimal?

It’s tempting to answer ‘infinite’ and certainly it would be wonderful if we could all retain our youth for forever and never have to grieve over lost friends and family. However, for the immediate future this simply isn’t possible. No healthy diet or prudent lifestyle can reduce the (average) number of friends we must mourn¹ and no amount of yoga or wheatgrass smoothies can prevent old age from taking it’s toll. Moreover, suppose we really could increase our lifespan indefinitely. At least for the next century or so we would have to virtually stop reproducing to avoid outgrowing our resources.

Ultimately we can’t simply say ‘life is good so we want more of it.’ Almost certainly such a policy would actually demand we divert money from healthcare into programs encouraging reproduction. As a society we’ve already reached the conclusion that it’s better to maintain a relatively small population that can live well than to expand into a great multitude that can barely make do. But rationally applying this insight to this question suggests that investing in longer life spans might not make sense.

Certainly we feel greater pain when someone is snatched from life too early and so we certainly shouldn’t stop pursuing more effective treatments to save people who might otherwise be struck down in the prime of life. Nor would we want to create distress or anger by denying people treatment. However, researching ways to further prolong our life span would likely introduce greater variability (some people die of heart attacks at 65 others make it to 130) and thus prolong the time people would have to endure the loss of loved ones as well as the sense of tragedy and anger at their deaths. Other things being equal a society is better if people spend a smaller proportion of their lives old and frail and since extending old age is unlikely to make people substantially happier (on average²) investing in technologies to lengthen our lifespan seems counterproductive. Of course we should look for technologies that let people be healthy and fit for a greater fraction of their lives and if we are able to make 80 feel like 55 that might justify more investment in keeping people alive till 80.

The observation that merely putting off death is not necessarily a desirable end in and of itself also has substantial consequences to what kind of charity and aid is best to give to the third world. However, that will have to wait for another post.

If I hadn’t seen this on the AP website with my own eyes I would have assumed it came from the onion but apparently Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) really is protesting drunk driving in Grand Theft Auto IV. Yes, that’s right they feel that this game deserves to have it’s rating bumped up from mature to adults only because in addition to the ability to murder, rob banks, perform hits, pimp girls out and engage in wanton violence you can also drive drunk. This is so fucking stupid I’m actually at a loss for words. MADD seems to actually believe that we need to portray our murderously violent felons as believing in designated drivers “out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.”

This is just one more example of the idiotic tunnel vision of groups like MADD and our general irrationality in calculating costs and benefits. Ultimately drunk driving does differ in kind from any other kind of careless driving. If you drive after having just a little bit to drink and double the chance you will kill someone it’s no more harmful than driving while slightly sleepy, upset about your breakup or anything else that also doubles your chance of committing vehicular homicide. One might try to argue that drunk driving is in general far more dangerous than say driving while drowsy but this isn’t so clear.

According to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) there are about 1,550 deaths annually where drowsiness is cited by the police as a factor. Admittedly this is a much lower number than the 15,829 alcohol related deaths reported in 2006. However, as the NHTSA says it is quite likely that drowsiness is radically under reported. After all the crash is quite likely to wake you up (or put you to sleep) and who is going to volunteer to the officer that they were too tired to be driving? Moreover, we should expect these figures to underrate the danger of drowsiness compared to drunk driving since drowsiness is not testable post-mortem while BAC is.

Of course it’s reasonable to think that strong moral condemnation of drunk driving is more likely to reduce deaths than similar moral condemnation of drowsy driving. I’m not sure¹. However, even if this justifies more severe treatment of drunk drivers and a greater degree of cultural condemnation it doesn’t justify importing your prejudices and unexamined emotional reactions into the debate. We should step back and take a look at which measures/responses are most likely to save lives and balance this against the costs. What I have a problem with is people judging drunk driving more harshly because drinking is considered `sinful’ while working late at the office is considered virtuous. The whole tone of moral outrage against drunk driving is a classic example of demonizing people who aren’t like you. Sure most of us may drink but even most drunk drivers likely don’t think of themselves as such (I’m a big man and only had…) while it’s much easier for everyone to identify with someone who had to drive while sleepy. Maybe we should try and change that but anytime we single out one activity like this I worry that we won’t make the correct trade offs.

The interesting article about the science of moral judgements in the New York Times also had a really excellent remark about the way our society is responding to the issue of global warming I wanted to share.

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

I think this is spot on. As I’ve been saying for a long time the tendency to view global warming into a personal moral issue is a monumental mistake. For starters by moralizing the environment we immediately alienate a great many people who might have joined an attempt to solve an economic and engineering problem. Surely global warming is an issue that has moral consequences (like any other) but by associating it with the idea that we have a moral duty to live more simply and repudiate consumerism you not only ensure that people with other moral views aren’t inclined to join up but you also create a sort of righteous indignation that interferes with compromise and creates animosity. I mean if global warming had been presented as a pragmatic concern I doubt we would have seen the same extent to denial and resistance to what is ultimately an extremely technical scientific conclusion. However, because global warming was used as part of a sermon to lecture the public about their evil consumerist ways it inspired a strong bitter backlash.

It now appears we are almost past the hurdle of global warming skepticism but nevertheless the moral attitude toward the environment continues to create problems. For instance consider this selection of posts for blog action day. Following the usual formula for personal moral advice these posts tell people what simple sacrifices they could make to use less energy, recycle more and otherwise be more environmentally friendly. What could be wrong with this?

Well everything. For starters by making the issue into one of personal morality we’ve implicitly adopted the idea that environmental solutions must be sacrifices because we don’t give moral credit for things that we want to do anyway. In our personal lives this tends to result in nothing worse than wasted effort but by encouraging this idea we create an environment where the best solutions (those that require the least sacrifice) aren’t properly favored. Also, just as we tend to unreasonably view Mother Teresa as a better person than Bill Gates so too does moralizing environmental choices skew our praise toward useless sacrifice. There is no good reason whatsoever to try and minimize the total volume of waste you produce but because we have moralized environmentalism we end up stupidly glorifying people who carry their trash around with them. Even individual choices to conserve energy aren’t very useful as they lower the price of oil based fuels for others.

If people just wanted to waste their time like this that would be one thing but the real problem arises because the public only has a limited willingness to sacrifice for the environment. After all if I sort my recycling and turn the thermostat down at night why should I have to pay a tax on gas too. It’s bad enough that turning the environment into a personal moral issue uses up people’s willingness to sacrifice on inefficient solutions rather than the needed national fixes but it even creates antipathy for useful economic fixes. So long as it’s an engineering/economic problem the idea of trading emission credits seems perfectly reasonable but the moment you start viewing CO2 emissions as a moral harm the idea that you can purchase indulgences starts to rub people the wrong way. In fact I’ve seen more than a few environmentalists objecting to carbon credits on this basis.

Unfortunately I don’t have the slightest clue what we can do to unmoralize the environment at this state.

I woke up this morning to an NPR discussion with Gary Wills about his op-ed in the LA Times today claiming that abortion is not a religious issue and despite having the sort of calm measured voice that makes you want to believe he is being reasonable the arguments Wills made were so bad it was almost physically painful. True most of the callers to the show were even worse but this guy is being held up as if he made an important serious argument while in reality he is making the same kind of illogical, incoherent partisan emotional appeal that he thinks he is criticizing others for doing. Of course it’s hard to remember what exactly he said on the show but ‘thankfully’ his op-ed is just as incoherent.

Before we even examine what Wills says it’s easy to see that his conclusion couldn’t possibly be true. If you accept a religious account of morality as every major religion does then all moral questions are religious questions. Now I dispute the idea that god could possibly be responsibly for morality¹ but short of throwing out traditional monotheism you’re stuck with the conclusion that abortion is a religious matter. A slightly more defensible claim that Wills could have made is that abortion is not a scriptural matter but this is only better in the sense that the entirety of modern religious moral teaching lacks scriptural justification² and it wouldn’t give him the conclusion he wants (religion should stay out of the abortion debate). So keeping this in mind let’s see what he has to say.

It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

For starters no one believes that all forms of killing deserve to be punished equally. Evangelicals might reasonably think that falsely believing a fetus wasn’t a person was a mitigating factor in their crime. Arguably it wouldn’t even be murder since they would be lacking the relevant intent to take a human life. Ultimately though at best he has shown that some evangelicals have compromised between the pull of religious teaching and mainstream social belief in an inconsistent way. It is of no relevance to the question of whether abortion is a religious question.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past.

Uhh so? They didn’t used to consider the murder of infidels to be morally wrong either. Does this show murder isn’t a religious issue?

The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments — or anywhere in Jewish Scripture.

As I’ve already observed if we insisted that only things with clear cut scriptural support counted as religious we would have to throw out almost all the teachings of every modern religion. The dirty secret of modern religious practice is that we decide what teachings we want to believe in and then search for things that support that view in our holy books. This is a compelling argument that religion is an absurd internally incoherent practice but it is misleading to raise a general failure of religion as if it were of specific relevance to abortion. In any case it brings us no closer to the claim that abortion is not a religious issue since obviously not every matter of religious importance is addressed in scripture.

Much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception — that it is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion. Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.

Gahh, huh? So the question of whether a soul is implanted in a just conceived fetus isn’t a religious question? People who would say yes wouldn’t be making theological arguments? This doesn’t make any sense. As far as the pope this sounds like yet another time people take the complex technical statements that characterize catholic theology and confuse them with their natural language notions. Besides, the idea that there is some bright line division between natural law and religious fact is just flat out wrong. Whether christ rose from the dead is clearly a matter of religion and theology but whether or not any human body ever ceased pumping blood for 3 days before starting to function again is clearly a scientific one and yet one can’t be true without the other (hence the reason to believe they are both false).

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise, not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer — they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.

Huh? Wait is he really arguing because the experts disagree there isn’t actually a clear cut answer? The argument here is so bad I can’t even guess what he is trying to say. I mean I could create a religion tomorow that says right out in it’s holy book, ‘And on the third day god said abortion was immoral,’ and no failure of scientists and philosophers to agree with me could change the fact that my religion said abortion was immoral. I mean short of straight out arguing that religious belief is unscientific and should be abandoned this point has no grip whatsoever.

So evangelicals take shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot be indiscriminately pro-life. …. And if one were consistently pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia, insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells, asparagus and so on. …. Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. …. The universal mandate to preserve “human life” makes no sense. My hair is human life — it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows.

God this guy is a fucking idiot. When people talk about “human life” they don’t mean any living human cells they mean the life of a human being. Now of course scientifically this term turns out to be imprecise and kinda meaningless but the central thesis of most religions is that humans poses a unique indivisible soul the presence of which is what they mean by human life. If pro-lifers religious beliefs are true they have a perfectly consistent position.

Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

According to most pro-life religious beliefs, yes. So what. God kills lots of people. True the belief that it is wrong for us to intervene and cause someone to die but not for god to kill them is absurd but it is another general problem with religious doctrine nothing specific to abortion.

The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.

Why is that the question? Why should I give a fuck what Aquinas said? The question is whether it is immoral to abort fetuses not whether they can think, do arithmetic or play snood. Animals can think and there are plenty of animals seemingly as intellectually capable as a newborn human. The idea that there is a simple rule that killing is always wrong and that we just need to decide when an abortion is killing is the essential fallacy of the abortion debate. Killing isn’t essentially wrong it’s the harmful effects it causes like grieving relatives and the fear that someone might kill you that make it wrong. Thus birth is a nearly perfect psychologically salient boundary at which to draw the line at which we will no longer accept killing but this is way off the topic supposedly at issue.

It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her, not just a fetus. ….. Given these uncertainties, who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious leaders? They have no special authority in the matter, which is not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority is given by the people it represents, and the people are divided on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest to the decision.

Gahh, there is no natural kind ‘child’ distinct from ‘fetus’ they are just names we choose to apply to stages of development based on our moral classification of them. But ignoring this is he really arguing that because the woman is the most emotional about the issue the most caught up in the events of her life she is the best one to make this decision?

Let’s try this argument elsewhere. Why not say that the decision on whether or not to kill your husband for his money is best made by the woman in question because she is the one closest to it? That’s absurd. In general we recognize that social and moral principles are best formulated by experts given time to deliberate and think. The reason that it should be legal to have an abortion is because on reflection the best arguments show that it is a net societal benefit not because it would be unacceptable for others to step in and stop them if they were doing something that inflicted massive societal harm.

Anyway if you want to argue that abortion should be legal and morally acceptable that’s fine but it really bugs me when someone like this uses laughably absurd arguments to try to pretend they aren’t taking a position on the issue just pointing out that others don’t have standing to really comment. Can there be better evidence that most people aren’t interested in logic but in feel good group affiliation than the fact that a total piece of crap like this piece was published as if it was a reasonable commentary on the morals of abortion?

This is a quesiton that has been bothering me for awhile so you’ll have to excuse me if I’ve already said this but why can’t we keep peace in Iraq like Saddam did?. Now obviously the answer seems to be that we choose not to do so, probably if we tortured innocent people, rewarded corrupt officials who repressed their people for us and otherwise behaved like dictators do all over the world we could oppress the Iraqi people just like Saddam managed to do. The question I really want to ask is whether it’s reasonable for us to refuse to behave like Saddam.

In particular many liberal’s beliefs about Iraq consist of the following two views:

• Invading Iraq was a horrible mistake that made the average Iraqi much worse off than they were under Saddam, often with the clear implication that a civil war or some other sort of massive bloodshed is inevitable.
• If we could do something for the Iraqis we should but we can’t so we should just leave now.

I realize this doesn’t summarize all liberal’s beliefs about the war (certainly not mine). Some people believe (unreasonably IMO) that things will get much better once we leave and there might be some who even believe the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam but I get the sense that the two views I summarized represent at least a significant percentage of mainstream liberals.

Don’t they entail that we should stay in Iraq but just clamp down just like Saddam did? For those of you who doubt we could do this all we would need to do is pick some local strongman and use our troops as muscle to help him establish himself as Saddam 2. Heck, maybe we could even keep our hands clean by just giving him implicit support and training his forces.

So why shouldn’t we kill a few innocent people now to save many more from a potential civil war? Or was the initial invasion actually a good thing?

So I just heard an interesting interview on NPR (fresh air) with Walt (of Mearsheimer and Walt) about their new book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”. This interview was followed by one with Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.” Now Walt’s arguments seemed silly, factually dubious and subtly fallacious, in other words exactly what I expect for any public policy discussion, particularly those involving Israel, but he certainly didn’t appear even slightly antisemitic. Now to be fair Foxman didn’t technically call either Mearsheimer or Walt an antisemite in the interview I heard¹ but he did call Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument a, “sinister antisemitic canard,” accuse them of “defamation of the Jewish community” and do his best to imply they were no different than Pat Buchanan or David Duke not to mention running afoul of Godwin’s Law. Ironically while Foxman blasts M&W for aiding and abetting antisemitism his outraged denunciations do an order of magnitude more harm than Mearsheimer and Walt would have done on their own.

In short I think that Mearsheimer and Walt certainly ought to be blamed for foolishly adopting some silly beliefs and presenting them poorly I think just as much blame lies with their opponents for encouraging people to take this crap seriously. The fact that we tend to blame only one side not the other regardless of the causal impact of their choices is yet another deep seated human irrationality that always seems to bite us in the ass. I argue for this views at far too much length below.

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Does anyone understand what’s going on when they get attacked/bitten/poisoned by some sort of animal and after the fact they say something like, “I don’t blame the animal we were in their habitat so it’s our responsibility to look out,” or even more bafflingly after something like a shark attack say it wasn’t the animal’s fault because it thought I was a seal?

I mean presumably most people believe that animals aren’t ever morally responsible for their actions (certainly the Christian view) but these explanations suggest that the animal could have been at fault if things had been different. What even makes something the animal’s habitat as opposed to our habitat? Would the shark somehow have been blameworthy if it knew it was attacking a human but was hungry anyway?

What seems particularly ironic about all this is that almost all the excuses (except total lack of moral responsibility) given for animals seem to apply equally well to people who destroy the animals habitats or hunt the animal down in revenge.

In an entertaining turn of events four Brandeis alums have pitched in and created a searchable interface to Madam Palfrey’s phone records. If you want to try a number for yourself head on over to dcphonelist.com and once you are bored of that the story in the Hill about the the project is worth a read. Apparently one lobbyist has already been outed through the site but given the difficulty. In case you aren’t familiar with the DC madam case so far I give a brief summary after the break.

Now some people seem to think that reporting on or distributing this information is immoral as the sex lives of politicians should remain private and others find this an unpalatable invasion of privacy. Presumably this is the reason that ABC refused to identify any of Palfrey’s non-politician clients. But this is mind bogglingly hypocritical. I mean jesus christ the men on this list are faced with potentially losing their job or being divorced. Ms. Palfrey is facing prison time. It’s insane to think that prostitution is bad enough to throw Palfrey in jail for it but not bad enough to cause some guys to be embarrassed. Unless the guys calling are on the record as supporting the legalization of prostitution I have no sympathy for their plight.

Every day the government takes away people’s freedom for no other reason than prudish moral disapproval¹. It is the people who don’t really believe prostitution (or drug use) is that bad (such as the johns) but stay silent out of ambition or fear of censure who are really guilty here not Madam Palfrey. None of us would defend the person who let an innocent man go to jail rather than reveal he was having an affair and tacitly supporting the criminalization of prostitution is even worse. You don’t even need to admit you have been to a prostitute to argue for it’s legalization. Just like homosexuals working for gay bashing senators these clients deserve to be punished for their hypocrisy if anyone does and more importantly we ought to discourage this sort of hypocritical behavior.

If we really knew the names of everyone who used drugs or visited prostitutes they would become legal within the week. I’m hopeful the loss of obscurity (aka privacy) that everyone complains about will bring us to a point where this sort of hypocritical moralizing is no longer possible.

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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.