Moral Apprehension and Cognition as a Social Skill

ABSTRACT

Haslanger's ‘Cognition as a Social Skill’ shows how ideology as embedded in perceptions, habits, and practical skills cannot be changed merely by changing people's conscious beliefs. In this commentary, I explore the roles of emotions in ideology. Oppressive ideologies propagate stigmatizing images and ideas about subordinate groups in order to evoke fear, disgust, contempt, and other emotions toward the oppressed. Such emotions preempt sympathy and respect for the oppressed. Oppressive ideologies also hijack moral motives by propagating false or misleading factual beliefs about the oppressed. Yet understanding how these ideological strategies work exposes their vulnerabilities. Oppressive ideologies must spread distorted factual beliefs and images because they cannot contest basic moral claims rooted in the moral sentiments. But moral sentiments have natural objects, and are capable of detecting them despite misleading propaganda. I focus on the sentiments of sympathy and moral apprehension–an inchoate emotional grasp of the fact that one is behaving unjustly toward another. These sentiments can be cultivated and activated through practices of accountability and group integration. Through such methods, moral emotions can function as resources to overcome oppression, rather than as resources hijacked by oppressive systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Keywords: emotion
• propaganda
• ideology
• sympathy
• oppression
• justice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Lynne Tirrell [2012] similarly argues that the pervasive practice of referring to Tutsi as cockroaches and snakes, drawing on the link between vermin and extermination, prepared Hutus to undertake the Rwandan genocide.

2 Ideologies don’t seek consistency. They opportunistically incorporate incompatible ideas that reinforce hierarchy. James Whitman [2017: 105–9] notes that Nazi jurists admired the ‘primitive’ definitions of race in American Jim Crow laws, which were loose enough to give free rein to ‘Gefühlsantisemitismus’ or racist gut feelings of Nazi judges. They rejected the arguments of conservative jurists, that race laws needed to be based on scientifically sound and formally rigorous definitions of race.

3 Haslanger, like Jason Stanley [2015], stresses that ideology need not promulgate false beliefs. Due to mindshaping, ideologies can make people with different identities disposed to behave in conformity with group stereotypes. Yet ideologies mislead about the modal properties (potentials) of individuals. And propaganda systematically misleads about the distribution of dispositions within and between social groups (for example, relentlessly highlighting bad deeds committed by members of stigmatized groups, while stressing good deeds committed by members of dominant groups).

4 James Oakes [1982: ch. 4] supplies further evidence of slaveholders’ moral apprehension. During the Second Great Awakening, evangelical preachers throughout the South held revivals in which they sermonized against the mortal sin of greed, and welcomed slave and free alike to be saved, as equals in the eyes of God and at the altar. He documents how slaveholders, in their letters and diaries, frequently worried that they were damned, while expressing confidence that their slaves were saved. Although their interests led them to rationalize slavery through proslavery orthodoxy, orthodoxy was unable to assuage their troubled moral consciences.

5 Racist practices of forgiveness offer further evidence for this point. Myisha Cherry [2017] documents how whites obsessively ask blacks to instantly forgive racist murderers of their family members. Whites’ insistent pleas for forgiveness of racist acts committed by other whites express an implicit apprehension of collective guilt for whites’ oppression of blacks. Similarly, James Baldwin [2016] highlighted whites’ neurotic need for blacks to forgive them, notwithstanding their refusal to apologize or offer reparations, in American films dealing with race relations. The refusal follows racist orthodoxy and doxa; the plea for forgiveness, moral apprehension.