Daniel Little — Moral Emotions

Why do people act morally? Why do people act altruistically, keep their promises, or act fairly? It is sometimes held that a part of the answer is that people have "moral emotions", and these emotions play a key role in the creation of moral actions.

What is a moral emotion? I'm sure that there are specialists who would offer different definitions of this concept; but I suggest that a moral emotion is a feeling or affect that is responsive to the situation of other living beings. Sympathy, compassion, humor, affection, and respect are all examples of moral emotions; but so are antipathy, rivalry, envy, and racial animosity. This inventory shows that what I'm calling "moral emotions" are not necessarily "moral" -- taking pleasure in the suffering of others is morally unattractive, but falls in the category of a feeling that is responsive to the situation of the other.

There is a related category of emotion that philosophers sometimes refer to as "cognitive emotions." These are feelings that are dependent on possessing certain kinds of beliefs. Feeling grateful is a cognitive emotion; it doesn't make sense to attribute this mental state to someone without also attributing to the person some set of factual beliefs about what has occurred in light of which being grateful makes sense. (Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins provide some theoretical discussion of this topic in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions.)

These two categories do not fully overlap. There are moral emotions that have a cognitive basis. But there are also moral emotions that do not have a cognitive foundation -- for example, the emotional response most people have to a smiling infant. And there are cognitive emotions that do not have a social component -- for example, fear of illness.

It is clear that normal human beings experience these kinds of emotions and feelings. How should we factor them into our theory of action? How do emotions affect behavior? Some emotions seem to have an immediate causal power to create dispositions to specific kinds of action (dispositions that can nonetheless be overridden by higher functions of self-control). An angry person is disposed to lashing out at others. A person experiencing sympathy is disposed to providing aid to people in immediate need. A frightened person is disposed to retreat from the frightening situation. A person experiencing sadness may be inhibited from any kind of action. So emotions have a fairly direct relationship to action....

Understanding Society
Moral Emotions
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

What Daniel Little calls moral emotions play a central role action theory and decision making, hence in political economy, and they are central to politics and policy making. But, curiously, they are excluded from the consideration of rationality in neoclassical economics. Keynes considered them in terms of "animal spirits," for example, but not substantially otherwise.

This is strange in the Adam Smith, the founder of economics, or better, political economy, was a moral theorist, having published The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) well before The Wealth of Nations (1776). Karl Marx, too, was more a philosopher than an economist in the contemporary sense, and his work centers on emotion as much as on reason. Marx's concept of alienation, derived from Hegel's master-slave and "unhappy consciousness" analysis, later became a syndrome in contemporary psychology but was forgotten in economics. Hegel had maintained that behavior is contextually determined rather than natural in the sense of law-based, so that it is possible to transcend from one stage of consciousness to another. Marx held that it was possible to transcend the state of alienation and, moreover, that this was the direction of history at present, driven by increasing species-consciousness, that is, awareness of the universality of human nature.

Some economists have called for a more balanced methodological approach. Adolph Lowe called for a melding of economics and sociology in the 1930's in order to give economics on a strong footing in reality instead of being absorbed in stylized modeling. Kenneth Boulding introduced the concept of "psychic capital" and went on to develop the field of evolutionary economics, which attempted to approach social science holistically  Recent advances in cognitive science (Antonio Damasio) are beginning to have an impact, too, and behavioral economics is gaining ground. In fact, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel in economics enen though he is not an economist. So some progress is being made toward a more comprehensive approach. On the return of emotion to the study of economics, see Mabel Berfezin, "Emotions and the Economy."