Do Emotions and Morality

Mix?

How feelings influence right and wrong?

 Philosophy of Feelings
• Max Scheler: our most original, immediate and intimate
contact with reality is through feelings.
– The emotional constitutes the most important sphere of
human existence;
– Emotional aspects of consciousness are founded on a priori
immediate relations among objects called values;
– If our reason can err in judging, why be biased against
feelings?
 Philosophy of Feelings
• Scheler’s order of different levels of feelings:
1. Sensible feelings or feelings of sensation
2. Feelings of the lived body (as states) and feelings of life as functions
3. Psychic feelings
4. Spiritual feelings (feelings of the personality)
• Only spiritual feelings are in essence intentional, meaning
directed to an object, a value. Others may or may not be
directed to a value.
 Philosophy of Feelings
• In striving or willing, the following emotional
components are to be found:
1. A feeling directed towards some value
2. A feeling state from which striving and willing issues forth, and
3. A feeling which accompanies execution of striving and willing.
• To illustrate: young man who has just been rejected by a
girl who fall for another guy.
 Philosophy of Values
• Values for Scheler are particular class of ideal objects of our
feelings
– Little Prince: “what is essential is invisible to the eye, it is
only with the heart that one can see rightly”
– Educators: “values are caught, not taught”
• We know a value is a value through the heart, because we feel
it. Of course we can thing of values, but strictly speaking what
we are thinking is the concept of value.
 Philosophy of Values
• Values are qualities, different from goods or carriers of value
– In their essence, values are objective, eternal and immutable;
– They are independent of the subject – although “related” to it – and of the
social, historical, contingent factors of situation;
– Values do not change even if carriers change;
– Carriers or goods are units of value-qualities; through them values are objectified
and become elements of the real world
• Values are independent of subjective emotional states
– The feelings of loneliness for example remains while the emotional state changes
 Philosophy of Values
• Values form the basis of our ends and only thereby form the basis
of our purposes
– Example: I can strive to be healthy.
– The value of health becomes the basis of my striving, but I may not have as
yet a purpose or image in mind such as drinking milk everyday and jogging
in the morning
• Values are felt even without striving towards them and making
them purposes of our volition
– In fact, we often realize the value of something, for instance of health,
when we do not aspire for it; in the case of health, when we get sick
 Philosophy of Values
• Values are given to us immediately in the acts of preferring, the most
fundamental of which are love and hatred
– To prefer a value is not the same as choosing, for object of choosing is a
good, a carrier of value
– Choosing already implies a value comprehension, that a value is higher
than another
– Love (and hatred) is an immediate attitude towards objects of value which
encompasses always a whole complex grades of value
– Love is not a state of feeling; our love for someone does not change even if
the beloved causes us feelings of pain
– Love (and hatred) is an immediate mode of response to objects of value—
within it, the presence of an order of values is immediately felt
 Hierarchy of Values
• In the very act of preferring then, a certain hierarchal order of
values is revealed
− The structure of values is a priori preferred;
− their order is in their very essence invariable, attributed chiefly by Scheler
to ressentiment, a damaged and deceived ordo amoris
− this ranked order of values is not mediated by the intellect but is “known”
to us intuitively by the logique du Coeur
• Values fall into two groups, the positive and the negative values
− A cannot be both at the same time positive and negative at the same time
 Hierarchy of Values
• The following is the a priori hierarchy of values:
1. Sensory values: pleasant-unpleasant; delight-pain
o Pleasant-unpleasant are values that are objects of sensory feelings
o Delight-pain are the corresponding subjective states
o A being always prefers the pleasant or agreeable
 although he may have a different object or carrier considered as
pleasant by him but looked at as unpleasant by others
 Or perhaps, this being prefers the unpleasant only as a sacrifice for
another higher value-modality
o Under this realm also are technical values, values of civilization and luxury
values
 Hierarchy of Values
2. Vital values: noble-vulgar
o Under this realm are values connected with the general well-being
 The corresponding states of feeling of vital values are: feelings of health-sickness,
aging, exhaustion, energy, vigorousness, etc.
 The feeling-toned responses of this realm are being pleased or distressed, courage,
anxiety, urge to revenge, anger, etc.
o Vital values are completely independent; they are irreducible to sensory
values
 Scheler: this is a mistake of Kant, for Kant assumes values to be reducible to hedonistic
values of good and evil, of pleasant and the unpleasant
 Kant failed to recognize life as a genuine mode of being, not an empirical category
characteristic of all earthly beings
 Hierarchy of Values
3. Spiritual values
o They are peculiar and distinct in the way they are given as they are independent of the
body and the environment
o They are again irreducible to the vital and sensory values, in fact, vital values ought to be
sacrificed for them
o Spiritual values correspond to spiritual feelings, more appropriately to the spiritual act of
love (and hatred)
o The main kinds of spiritual values are the following:
 The values of the beautiful and the ugly (whole realms of aesthetic values)
 The values of justice and injustice
 The values of pure cognition of truth
 Scientific knowledge and all values of culture are derivative values of this value
 Hierarchy of Values
o The corresponding feeling-states of spiritual values are spiritual joy and
sorrow (in contrast to vital feeling-states of being glad-not being glad)
 These states change independently of any vital-states but vary
independently on values of the respective objects themselves
o Some responses of spiritual values are:
 delight and dislike,
 approval and disapproval,
 reverence and contempt,
 striving for retaliation,
 and spiritual sympathy
 Hierarchy of Values
4. Holy and unholy
o Theses are values that appears only on objects given intentionally as “absolute objects” –
Scheler does not mean a definable class of objects but every object in the “absolute
sphere”
o The values of the holy and unholy are totally independent of things and powers, persons
held to be holy at different times
 Derivative values of this realm are those things of value in cults, sacraments, and other
forms of worship
o The subjective states of these values are bliss and despair, and their responses are belief
and unbelief, awe, worship, etc.
o The values of the holy are higher than the spiritual values, and the vital values are higher
than the sensory ones
o Both the values of the holy and the spiritual are values of the person, while the vital and
sensory are values pertaining to the ego.
 Hierarchy of Values
• How is one value higher than the other? Following are the essential
characteristics by which a value is higher than another:
1. A value is higher if it contains in its essence (not in the carrier or goods) the ability
to exist through time – to endure
2. Higher values are less divisible
3. A value is higher if it generates other values
4. The higher the value the deeper it produces inner satisfaction of fulfillment in the
possession of its good
5. A value is higher if it is independent of the organism experiencing it
• They are criteria for higher and lower ranks of values, however, not evidence for
the hierarchy of values
• The ranks of values in their order are given in immediate feeling, not in any
ethical judgment or reflection.
 Moral Values
• The values of good and evil are not included by Scheler in his four value-
modalities for the reason that they refer to the bringing of the other values in
existence
− For Scheler, good and evil “ride on the back of the deed”
− A good deed is good because of the good end, and evil because of its evil end and evil
because of its evil end, besides, the end does not justify the means
• Good is the realization of a higher value in place of a lower value, of a positive
value instead of a negative one
• Evil is the realization of lower value in place of a higher value or of a negative
value instead of a positive value
• Note: the realization of a lower value does not necessarily mean evil, nor does
the realization of a higher value mean good, they are good or evil only when
there is an “in place of”
 Moral Values
• The moral values of good and evil are personal not only in the superficial
sense of coming from the person who acts but also in a deeper sense of
contributing to the formation of the person
− Since the higher values of the holy and the spiritual pertain to the person and the
lower values of the vital and the sensory pertain to the ego, the moral values of
good and evil form our personhood
− Doing good makes us more of a person while doing evil makes us less of a person
and more like a beast, Scheler’s ethics is thus called an ethical personhood
• An ethics can also be objective and yet be material, that is to say, based
on the content or material of the act is none other than value
 Moral Values
• The hierarchy of values is objective
− What changes is not the hierarchy of values but our perceptibility of values and our
norms, our feeling for, knowledge of and judging of values
− No individual or group can have a total perspective of the realm of value-essences,
and therefore each perspective is unique and irreplaceable
− In consequence, it is a task of mankind to cooperate with each other in blending
value-perspective and in fostering the growth of prioristic knowledge
 Critique
• Nicolai Hartmann: Scheler’s non-formal value ethics is not adequate enough as guide
in value-preference
− Value-height (Scheler): Hartmann observes that the higher the value, the lighter it is, and the lower
the value, the heavier it is
− Value-weight (Hartmann): the lower values are heavier because they are more basic, and therefore it
is necessary to first realize the lower values before realizing the higher ones. Similar to Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs, before one can aim for higher needs of fulfillment, one must first aim for the
basic needs
• Response to Hartmann and Maslow: need to point out that values are different from
needs; needs are grounded on values
• One should not remain within the lower ranks of values. Human life would be
meaningless if it is exhausted in the realization of only the lower values.
• The moral life demands of the human person that he responds to the call of higher
values
 Critique
• Value-height and value-weight are not the only perspectives in preferring or choosing
values. Hans Reiner adds nine other principles in choosing values:
1. Temporal need
2. Great number of values to be realized
3. Greater chance of success
4. Greater or more urgent need
5. The negative demand that an existing but endangered value will remain instead of answering to a
new value
6. The lack of persons to realize a value
7. Special talent, skill, possession to realize a value
8. If a person is more capable of realizing a value than another, then he should choose his value rather
than the other
9. Principle of dominion. This is a call of conscience that may call a person to do a unique or
extraordinary deed
Daghang Salamat!