Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decisionmaking?: A Hedgefoxian Perspective

10. Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgment: Different Prototypes Lead to Different Theories

• 10 • Reason and Emotion in Moral Judgment: Different Prototypes Lead to Different Theories BENOÎT MONIN, DAVID A. PIZARRO, AND JENNIFER S. BEER ONE CAN not study the relationship between emotions and decisions without including an analysis of moral judgement, both because many significant decisions that individuals make every day involve morality, and because an increasingly influential school of thought stresses the importance of emotions in moral judgement. In fact, one of the major debates in the current study of morality in psychology pits emotion against reason—one side argues that moral judgment follows from emotional reactions, and the other side asserts the role of conscious reasoning in arriving at moral conclusions. The goal of this chapter is not to take sides in this debate. Instead, we hope to present the major issues involved, and attempt to reconcile competing accounts of moral judgment by proposing that they are potentially compatible. While it may sometimes seem that moral psychologists from opposing sides of the debate describe different species of “homo moralis,” they are actually talking about the same being, albeit in varying prototypical situations. Those focusing on complex hypothetical dilemmas are likely to see moral judgment as the result of deliberative abstract reasoning, while those focusing on reacting to the transgressions of others are likely to see moral judgment as the result of 219 quick emotions such as contempt, anger, or disgust. Both views might be correct, and both models represent judgment well as long as you restrain each to its indigenous situation. Favoring one view is ignoring the diversity of moral situations that people encounter in their everyday life. As evidence of this diversity, some authors have in mind yet other prototypical situations when investigating morality. Considering one of these as the modal moral situation yields yet another model of morality, and it is one that does not necessarily fit the reason-emotion dichotomy. For example , if the typical moral situation that researchers had in mind did not involve solving dilemmas or judging others but instead involved resisting temptation (which is admittedly an important part of our moral lives), then models of moral behavior would be less focused on reasoning or emotion and instead emphasize willpower and self-control. Thus, disagreements about what empirical research tells us about moral judgment may unwittingly be the result of divergent assumptions about what constitutes the ideal-type situation of moral judgment in the first place. In a brief review of the history of the debate between the “emotionalist ” and “rationalist” approaches to moral judgment, four examples of prototypical moral situations stand out: moral reactions, moral dilemmas , moral weakness, and moral fortitude. Each leads to a different perception of moral judgment. This framework can be used to inform the question of what it means to be a virtuous individual by considering four archetypes—the sheriff, the philosopher, the monk and the wrestler— which correspond to each of the prototypical situations. A Short History of Emotion and Reason in Moral Judgment One question that has troubled moral philosophers and psychologists for some time is whether moral judgments are primarily the fruits of reason or of emotion. One tradition holds that moral judgments are largely the output of our emotional system. A competing tradition holds that while emotions are often heavily involved in the process of moral judgment , our moral beliefs exist at heart because of the distinctly human ability to reason and to distinguish right from wrong. The tension between these two positions has a long history, in part because the truth of the matter was seen to have serious implications for the status of morality. This tension is best exemplified in the debate between the philosophers Immanuel Kant (1785/1957) and David Hume (1777/ 1969). If the moral notions that guide people’s everyday moral pronouncements actually were the unreflective output of emotion, then the task of assessing the validity of such moral beliefs seemed problematic: 220 Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? If a behavior shocks me but not my neighbor, who is to say if it is morally right or wrong? On the other hand, moral beliefs grounded in reason were, by virtue of the reliability of the reasoning process, more likely to be agreed upon by all as truth. The question of whether moral beliefs could be understood as objectively “true” (on par with, for instance, the law of gravity) is what kept the debate alive (Ayer 1952...