Feeling better about moral dilemmas

Abstract

There has been a trend in contemporary ethics to believe that a morally admirable agent would feel negative self‐assessing emotions following even the best possible choice in a moral dilemma. A commonly held reason for holding this position is that agents who are well‐brought up are trained to feel negative self‐assessing emotions when they do something morally forbidden under ordinary circumstances, and that agents acting for the best in a dilemma will nonetheless recognize their deed as morally forbidden. I challenge this view and reach the conclusion that without the further notion that the agent morally failed, negative self‐assessing emotions ought to be discouraged in favour of emotions such as grief and sadness, which are negative and self‐conscious, but not self‐assessing. I then offer some cognitive strategies moral educators could impart to help persons feel emotions that better reflect the nuances of moral dilemmas.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jiyuan Yu, Pablo De Greiff, Michael Donovan and the JME referees for incisive commentary throughout various stages of this essay's preparation.

Notes

Against the notion that emotions are things that happen to us (i.e., things that we suffer), Robert Solomon's brand of cognitivism (judgmentalism) is that emotions contain normative judgements, for which we are responsible. They are our choices insofar as we can seek out any normative judgement embedded in them and go on to extinguish it. See also Solomon (1976).