Ethics- BatStateU Introduction MODULE 11

FEELINGS AND REASON

This module discusses the role of feelings

and emotions in decision-making. Reason and
emotions are jointly at work and tightly
intertwined. This means that feelings are used as
instinctive response to moral dilemmas. Feelings
may sometimes prohibit us to make right decisions
but it can also be used in making the right one.
This concept will be explained by two theories of
ethics which discuss the role of feeling on
morality. Lastly, student shall be mindful of their
own feelings, thoughts, and values as an indication
of moral development.

Le
arning Objectives
At the end of the topic, students are expected to:
p) Appraise and analyze their feelings in personal
experiences
q) Compare reasonable and emotional responses.
r) Compare and contrast Ethical Subjectivism and
Emotivism
s) Apply the principles of Ethical Subjectivism and
Emotivism

L
earning Content

Feeling and Moral Decision-

Making

According to Ells (2014), emotion is a

response to stimuli based on past experiences
which is made instinctively while reason is a form
of personal justification which changes from
person to person based on their own ethical and
moral code, as well as prior experience. Some
ethicists believe that ethics is also a matter of
emotion. They hold the moral judgment as thet are
even deemed by some as instinctive and trained
response to moral dilemmas (De Guzman et al.
2017). Emotions is the result of logical analysis
through which we first analyze someone’s
behavior, make an appropriate judgment, and then
feel whichever is called for, respect or contempt
(Pillemer & Wheeler, 2010).

Researchers (and some philosophers) now

see emotion and reason as tightly intertwined.
Emotion and reason are jointly at work when we
judge the conduct of others or make choices
ourselves. A cognitive deficit of either type can
impair our decision making capacity about all
manner of things, including moral judgments.
People who suffer certain kinds of brain injuries or

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lesions, for example, retain the intellectual ability

to understand alternative courses of action,
nevertheless are unable to make up their own
minds, both literally and figuratively. Reading a
menu apparently is one thing, but choosing among
items involves weighing likes, dislikes, objectives,
and values. These necessarily involve subjective
judgments (Pillemer & Wheeler, 2010).

Some hold that reason and emotion are not

really opposite. Both abstract inference and
emotional intuitions or instincts are seen as having
relative roles in ethical thinking. For one thing,
feelings or emotions are said to be judgments about
the accomplishment of one’s goals. Emotions, it is
thus concluded, can be rational in being based at
least sometimes on good judgments about how
well a circumstance or agent accomplishes
appropriate objectives. Feelings are also visceral
or instinctual by providing motivations to act
morally (De Guzman et al. 2017).

Reason when removed from emotion,

allows a person to make conscious decisions based
on fact, with no references to personal
involvement. The use of reason as a way of
knowing, allows for the knower to see the
consequences of their actions through-out the
decision-making process. Also, there are
limitations to decisions made based on reason
alone, perception of situations is not questioned as
it may be with an emotional decision (Ells, 2014).

Feeling-based Theories in Ethics

There are at least two theories in ethics that
gives focus on the role of feelings on morality.
They are (1) Ethical Subjectivism and (2)
Emotivism (De Guzman et al. 2017).

1. Ethical Subjectivism. This theory basically

utter runs contrary to the principle that there is
objectivity in morality. Fundamentally a meta-
ethically theory, it is not about what things are
good and what are things are bad. It does not tell
how we should live or what moral norms we
should practice. Instead, it is a theory about the
nature or moral judgments (De Guzman et al.
2017).

In the article “Basics of Philosophy,”

Ethical Subjectivism holds that there are no
objective moral properties and that ethical
statements are in fact arbitrary because they do not
express immutable truths. Instead, moral
statements are made true or false by the attitudes
and/or conventions of the observers, and any
ethical sentence just implies an attitude, opinion,
personal preference or feeling held by someone.
Thus, for a statement to be considered morally
right merely means that it is met with approval by
the person of interest. Another way of looking at
this is that judgments about human conduct are
shaped by, and in many ways limited to,
perception.

As cited in the article “Basics of Philosophy,”

there are several different variants which can be
considered under the heading of Ethical
Subjectivism:

• Simple Subjectivism: the view (largely as

described above) that ethical statements
reflect sentiments, personal preferences and
feelings rather than objective facts.
• Individualist Subjectivism: the view
(originally put forward by Protagoras) that
there are as many distinct scales of good
and evil as there are individuals in the
world. It is effectively
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a form of Egoism, which maintains that

every human being ought to pursue what is
in his or her self-interest exclusively.
• Moral Relativism (or Ethical Relativism):
the view that for a thing to be morally right
is for it to be approved of by society,
leading to the conclusion that different
things are right for people in different
societies and different periods in history.
• Ideal Observer Theory: the view that what is
right is determined by the attitudes that a
hypothetical ideal observer (a being who is
perfectly rational, imaginative and
informed) would have.

2. Emotivism. As cited in the “Emotive Theory of

Ethics” The term emotivism refers to a theory
about moral judgments, sentences, words, and
speech acts; it is sometimes also extended to cover
aesthetic and other nonmoral forms of evaluation.
Although sometimes used to refer to the entire
genus, strictly speaking emotivism is the name of
only the earliest version of ethical noncognitivism
(also known as expressivism and
nondescriptivism).

Emotivism is actually the most popular

form of non-cognitivism, the meta-ethical theory
that claims that ethical sentences do not convey
authentic propositions. Moral judgments,
according to Emotivism, are not statements of fact
but are mere expressions of the emotions of the
speaker especially since they are usually feelings—
based (De Guzman et al. 2017).

To understand how the theory views moral

judgments, it would help to note that language is
used in a variety of ways. Principally, language is
used to state facts or what we believe to be facts.
But there are other purpose for which language
may be used like utterance or command. The
purposes of utterances are (1) they are used as
means of influencing other’s behavior and (2)
moral sentences are used to expresses (not report)
the speaker’s attitude (De Guzman et al. 2017).

As cited in the article “Emotivism,”

Emotivists believe that moral language expresses
emotions and tries to influence others; it has no
cognitive content. If I say homosexuality is evil,
I’m just expressing my feeling that homosexuality
is disgusting! I am expressing my emotions and, at
the same time, trying to influence you to dislike
homosexuality. The same analysis applies to any
moral judgment. If I say that capital punishment is
wrong, I’m just expressing my dislike for it and
trying to get you to agree with me. I might as well
have said capital punishment while shaking my
head and rolling my eyes. And if I say that Stalin
or Cheney were bad men—which they were—I’m
merely trying to get you to agree with what I’m
really saying.

Criticisms on Ethical Subjectivism and Emotivism

Stated in the article “Subjectivism,”
subjectivism implies the moral statements are less
significant than most people think they are – this
may of course be true without rendering moral
statement insignificant. More so, Ethical
Subjectivism has implications that are contrary to
what we believe about the nature of moral
judgments.it also implies that each of us is
infallible so as long as we are honestly expressing
our respective feelings about moral issues.
Furthermore, it cannot account for the fact of
disagreement in Ethics. Finally, the theory could
also have dangerous implications in moral
education (De Guzman et al. 2017).

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As cited in the article “Emotivism,”

emotivism presupposes that moral
disagreements are incapable of being resolved
by rational discourse. There is no way to resolve
our attitudinal disagreements unless we are
persuasive enough (or violent enough). But we
have already seen that there’s another way to
persuade—using reason to support our position.
We can provide good reasons why x is right or x
is wrong. If we appeal to reason, we have
discovered a way to resolve our disputes that
other than by shouting or beating others into
submission. And if reason plays a role in ethics,
then there is truth or falsity about ethical
judgments.
Feelings Can Help in Making the Right Decision
According to Pillemer & Wheeler (2010),
moral development may rest in our ability to be
mindful of our own feelings, thoughts, and values
—and the context in which we are functioning. As
we ponder decisions, and more fundamentally, our
principles, Pillemer & Wheeler (2010),
enumerated some precepts to bear mind. Among
them are:

1. Don’t accept the problem as given.

How choices are framed can sway your
choices in ways that may contradict
your core beliefs. (Think of the classic
experiment about health care policy.)
Generate multiple options and assess
them against one another instead of
considering them in isolation.
2. Listen to both your heart and head.
Issues of right and wrong matter deeply
to us, as they should. Twinges of
disgust or shame may be internal signals
that we are nearing the outer bounds of
acceptable behavior. But we should also
reflect on the sources of our feelings, be
they negative or positive, as they may be
triggered by associations that have
nothing to do with the matter at hand.
3. Watch your language. How we name
things exposes (or masks) the nature of
our actions and their consequences.
Firings become layoffs, layoffs become
downsizing, and downsizing becomes
right-sizing. The action may be
unavoidable, but we should not
sugarcoat the fact that people who once
worked with or for us are now jobless.
4. Take special care in dimly lit places.
Your actions—and ultimately even your
values—are influenced by the company
you keep.
5. Be modest about your virtue. Most of
us believe that we are more ethical than
are others. Countless experiments and
real life examples, however, should
remind us that people who are most
self-righteous may be most likely to slip.
6. Understand why others transgress.
Some lapses may be due to moral
failure, but others can be caused by
external factors that have little to do
with their fundamental nature. Luck
 plays a role in regard to how people are
tested and what resources they can draw
upon. Refrain from judging a person’s
core character, positively or negatively,
on the basis of a single event.
7. Don’t give up on yourself (or on
others). An ancient proverb says,
“Every saint has a past. Every sinner
has a future.” Honest reflection about
the past, coupled with a measure of
humility, can serve as foundation for
leading a responsible life going
forward.

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In the end, morality is not merely—or even

principally—determining the right thing to do in
specific instances, rather it entails who we want to
be and what kind of life we want to lead (Pillemer
& Wheeler, 2010).

Lear
ning Activity
Directions: The following are the suggested activities
1. Case analysis. Analyze the following cases
with your group members and justify your
answer based on what you have learned
from the topic.
A. You are a high-ranking public health
official who must decide how to
respond in the face of an epidemic
that will cost 600 lives if nothing is
done. You only have two
alternatives: Option A which will
result in 200 lives being saved or
Option B with a 1/3 chance that
everyone would be saved. Which
would you choose?
B. Dan, a student council president,
often picks topics for discussion
that appeal to both professors and
students in order to stimulate
discussion. Would you say that his
conduct is highly immoral, not
 immoral at all, or someplace in
between?
C. What if instead of throwing the
switch, the only way for you to stop
the train and save the five is
pushing a 300-pound man on to the
tracks?

2. Recall a news report that you have seen

recently. Illustrate your feelings as
instinctive response to the news.

Lea
rning Assessment
Directions: The class will be divided into six
group. Each group will play a wheel of fortune
game prepared earlier by their teacher. Each part
of the wheel has topic to be used in the class
debate. Each group have only chance to roll the
wheel. The topic where the pointer ends would be
the group’s topic.

The following are the options written in the wheel of fortune

15. Affirmative Team – End of life involving a dying
parent
16. Negative Team – End of life involving a dying parent
17. Affirmative Team – Payment of facilitation
fee to a customs officer by a finance employee
18. Negative Team – Payment of facilitation
fee to a customs officer by a finance employee
19. Affirmative Team - The use of an official
car to bring a four-year old daughter to school
everyday
20. Negative Team - The use of an official car
to bring a four-year old daughter to school
everyday

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