Jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral: The incompatibility of emotions

ABSTRACT

Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued that to evaluate the funniness of a joke based on the consideration of whether it is morally appropriate to feel amused commits the “moralistic fallacy.” We offer a new and empirically informed reply. We argue that there is a way to take morality into consideration without committing this fallacy, that is, it is legitimate to say that for some people, witty but immoral jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral. In our account, one has an intramural moral reason not to feel amused if one focuses on the moral feature itself of a joke rather than the moral consequence implied in one’s reaction to the joke. When one judges a joke as not funny because of the intramural moral reason, one is in a negative emotional state with high arousal, for example, moral disgust or anger. This state is psychologically incompatible with amusement. That one has an intramural reason not to feel amused thus implies that one does not have a reason to feel amused. Moral consideration thus plays an indirect and appropriate role in the evaluation of the funniness of a joke.

KEYWORDS:

• Amusement
• moral reason
• emotion
• moral disgust
• moral anger

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Martin Peterson, Linda Radzik, Kenny Easwaran, and José Luis Bermúdez, who provided helpful comments to earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Zhen Cai and the audience of a workshop in ethics at East China Normal University in Shanghai, 2017. Finally, thanks to the two anonymous referees provided by Philosophical Psychology, as well as to the editor of the journal, Mitchell Herschbach.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There is a distinction between “a legitimate reason from the perspective of morality” and “a legitimate reason from the perspective of humor.” It is this latter sense of legitimacy that is in use in our arguments. In this sense, we are concerned with the funniness of a joke rather than the morality of it. It is a happy coincidence that this legitimate reason happens to be a kind of moral reason (and this is why, in later arguments, we can make morality relevant in determining the funniness). To see the distinction, imagine a possible world where creatures have the same notion of humor as we do, but instead of morality, they only have “worality.” Whatever that means, they can have a “woral” reason to judge and act. Suppose that an offensive joke can somehow elicit their “woral” reaction in the way that prohibits them from having a reason to feel amused, then this “woral” reason is a legitimate reason from the perspective of humor that has nothing to do with morality. Thanks to Kenny Easwaran for urging us to make this distinction.

2. For the sake of convenience, in the following paper, we will speak as if such a group of people indeed exists. The argument can be easily applied to the case where they do not exist. In that case, the claim becomes that even if nobody actually takes moral factors into consideration when judging the funniness of a joke, they are allowed to if they want to.

3. We think our position can be compatible with comic immoralism. Here is a brief explanation. Our main argument above is that people may have a special kind of moral reason against the funniness of a joke, a reason that contributes to the fact that they lack any reason to feel amused because of the incompatibility of amusement and moral disgust or anger. It is possible that some people would not feel negatively about the immoral component of a joke, but positively. These people may then have a reason to find the immoral joke funny. However, even though our position may be compatible with comic immoralism, it is different from it. As we will explain in the section on the incompatibility of certain emotions, for some people, if they feel angry, they do not feel amused. This argument does not support the comic immoralist claim, in which the emotion of anger is absent.

4. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we consider the differences between our position and those of others.

5. We don’t claim that this is the only plausible view on amusement. Our point is that if this is the right view to adopt, then our proposal can still reply to the moralistic fallacy challenge without rejecting this view.

6. The term of ‘silencing’ has also been used in works that Jordan and Patridge did not mention. For example, Percival (2005) discusses it. In that paper, Percival traces the idea to McDowell (1998). In history, the idea about silencing is mostly discussed in virtue ethics, for example, in McDowell and McFetridge (1978, pp. 26–27). Also, Doris points out that “considerations favoring behavior contrary to virtue are ‘silenced’ in the virtuous person; although she may experience inducements to vice, she will not count them as reasons for action” (Doris, 2002, p. 17); “Compare Smart and Williams (1973, pp. 92–93) claim that a person’s moral outlook can render some actions ‘unthinkable’, and Hollis’s (, p. 172) gloss of Williams as holding that character sets ‘boundary conditions’ on the realm of behavioral options. ‘Silencing’ might be taken to imply that the good person simply does not experience temptations to inappropriate behavior” (Doris, 2002, pp. 176, n. 14).

7. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising these points.

8. A helpful parallel to the distinction between the extramural and intramural moral reasons is the ‘rebutting defeaters’ versus ‘undercutting defeaters’ distinction in epistemology. According to Pollock, in evaluating an inference, rebutting defeaters give one a reason to believe that the conclusion is false; and undercutting defeaters give one a reason to believe that the relationship between the premises and the conclusion is problematic (Pollock, 1967). Parallel to this, we can understand that extramural reasons rebut other reasons for judging a joke to be funny, while intramural reasons undercut other reasons. Thanks to Kenny Easwaran for directing us to this distinction.

9. The debate on whether emotions are discrete or dimensional is still going on in psychology (for example, see Barrett et al., 2018; Cowen & Keltner, 2017); however, this is a debate on how to best characterize features such as valence and arousal (and maybe others) in emotions. Thus, it will not affect our point, which just applies the idea that valence and arousal can characterize an emotion.

10. Valence is not defined in term of people’s reactions. Some people may have a positive attitude toward a negatively valenced emotion. For example, one might enjoy the feeling of sadness. We do not get into this issue but will stick to the “objective” scale of valence. A helpful analogy to use is temperature. Temperature can be above or below zero, but people may freely enjoy only the temperature above zero, only the temperature below, both, or neither.

11. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for raising these points.

12. We say “prima facie” because we are aware that feeling moral disgust does not necessarily imply moral wrongness. For example, feeling disgusted by homosexual people does not imply that homosexuality is morally wrong.

13. In a series of studies, researchers asked people how they felt after watching the movie Life Is Beautiful and found that 44% of the participants reported mixed emotions of happiness and sadness (Larsen & McGraw, 2014). Similarly, subjects who listened to songs with conflicting cues reported similar mixed emotions (Hunter et al., 2008). Music with conflicting cues can have, for example, fast tempos (which typically elicit happiness) but minor modes (which typically elicit sadness). Not only artworks such as film and music elicit mixed emotions, real life events can too. For example, meaningful endings such as graduation can elicit both happiness and sadness. (Larsen et al., 2001).

14. Note that the pathogenic disgust that has been studied in these works is different from the moral disgust discussed here. To briefly explain the difference, scholars have proposed that pathogenic disgust is a reaction toward objects that would potentially cause disease, such as feces, dead body, rotten flesh, mold, and so on. Differently, as we have explained, moral disgust is a reaction toward objects or events that threaten social order or the moral norm. See (Rozin et al., 2008; Tybur et al., 2013).

15. See especially Berrios et al. (2015) and Larsen and McGraw (2014).

16. We address a different question from McGraw and Warren. They test the empirical question of what kind of moral violation can produce humor. Our paper answers the normative question of whether it is legitimate for people to find an immoral joke not funny because of moral reasons. Our distinction between intramural and extramural moral reasons is partly inspired by their study. However, it is not the case that intramural moral reason corresponds to malign violation and extramural moral reason to benign violation. We argue that one can have both kinds of moral reasons while experiencing a malicious joke, but only the intramural ones are relevant for assessing whether the joke is funny. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern.

17. Our argument about the incompatibility of amusement and anger or moral disgust can also address the alternative explanation that one has a pro-tanto reason to be amused but an all-things-considered-reason to not be amused. As we have shown above, people who have an intramural moral reason not to be amused are feeling moral disgust or anger, which psychologically precludes them from feeling the emotion of amusement. Adding the internalist point that one does not have a reason if it is not in one’s subjective motivational set, we can see that these people do not have any reason, whether pro-tanto or otherwise, to feel amused.