Morality

David Brooks’s Op-Ed on Morality has been the most popular article on the NY Times website for two days now.

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

I’d agree with Brooks on most of this.  Moral judgments usually take emotions into account first, and the logic usually serves as a justification after the fact.  We don’t like theft because it feels bad when it happens, and we rationalize our hatred of theft by talking about how it is wrong for one party to steal from another party without having earned whatever is stolen.  Based on our emotions, we may often take the opposite side by sometimes seeking to justify theft, as in the case of a person who steals medicine for a dying child.

This reminded me of the feminist/pornography debate.  Most feminists probably would say that pornography is degrading to women, but pro-pornography feminists, such as Nina Hartley, say that it is empowering.  Most feminists say that it objectifies women, while pro-pornography feminists say that it’s liberating.  When they debate, it’s like watching two speeches going on concurrently with neither side hearing the other.  Ultimately it is, as David Brooks says, an aesthetic response.  Some feminists value the freedom from objectification, while others value the freedom to do what society has traditionally condemned.  It depends on the person.

I’ve learned that when arguing a moral point, one often just has to list the reasons for what one is feeling.  One can expand upon an idea and explore other avenues of logic, and sometimes one will succeed in convincing another person of the rightness of one’s views.  In the end, however, it ultimately becomes a question of what one feels is right.

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