Feelings

Broadly stated, ethics is “concerned with making sense of intuitions”10 about what is right and good. We do this by reasoning about our feelings.

Biologists verify that: “Emotion is never truly divorced from decision making, even when it is channeled aside by an effort of will.”11 Physicists now confirm that seeing the world with complete objectivity is not possible, as our observations affect what we perceive.12

Moral philosopher Mary Midgley writes: “Sensitivity requires rationality to complete it, and vice versa. There is no siding onto which emotions can be shunted so as not to impinge on thought.”13

We rely on our reason to guard against feelings that may reflect a bias, or a sense of inadequacy, or a desire simply to win an argument, and also to refine and explain a felt conviction that passes the test of critical reflection and discussion. We rely on feelings to move us to act morally and to ensure that our reasoning is not only logical but also humane.14

Scientific evidence supports this approach to ethics. As children, we manifest empathy before developing our rational abilities, and there is evidence for the same order of development in the evolution of the human brain.15

“Empathy is a unique form of intentionality in which we are directed toward the other’s experience.”16 This involves feeling, at least to some extent, what another person is feeling. “[I]n empathy we experience another human being directly as a person—that is, as an intentional being whose bodily gestures and actions are expressive of his or her experiences or states of mind.”17

Empathy enables us to identify with others and may generate a “perception of the other as a being who deserves concern and respect.”18

This does not guarantee ethical conduct, but encourages it. “Aid to others in need would never be internalized as a duty without the fellow-feeling that drives people to take an interest in one another. Moral sentiments came first; moral principles second.”19

Conscience reflects our integration of moral sentiments and principles. We should test our conscience, however, by explaining to others the reasons for our moral presumptions, and we should listen carefully to concerns they may have. 

Peter Singer probably speaks for all moral philosophers when he says that an ethical argument should only appeal to “emotions where they can be supported by reason.”20

Both our feelings and our reason reflect our participation in a moral community, or more likely several moral communities. As children, our moral community is our family, which soon broadens to include our friends and then is defined largely by the rules of our school.

As adults, our moral community extends from our family to our friends (at work, in our neighborhood or a support group, and perhaps in our religious community), to our city, our country, the people of the world whose moral and legal rights are defined by international law, and even to a moral community that includes nonhuman organisms and ecosystems.

analogy to rule of law 
constructing presumptions
critical reasoning
faith and reason
environmental ethics 
ethical traditions
ethical relativism
right and good 
testing presumptions

10.  Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, “Introduction: Ethics and Environmental Ethics,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 3.

11.  Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better (New York: Random House, 2007), 191. Research has “emphatically confirmed the network model of the brain as well as a long history of thought and metaphor. Reason and passion, thought and emotion, were indeed linked in a loop rather than stacked in a hierarchy. Neither stood as the other’s slave. They engaged in a conversation that, to be healthy, had to be rich and balanced.” David Dobbs, “Turning Off Depression,” Floyd E. Bloom, ed., Best of the Brain from Scientific American (New York: Dana Press, 2007), 175.

12.  The scientific method “changes and transforms its object.” Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Jeffrey M. Schwartz. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Regan Books, 2002), 255.

13.  Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1983), 43.

14.  “[D]isgust at bloodshed often does have a meaning. It has played a great part in the development of more humane behavior, because it can alert people’s imagination to what they are doing and wake their sympathies for the victims. The same thing happens with unthinking revulsions to unfairness, meanness, ingratitude, envy and the like. The revulsion itself is not significant, but it can become so in the context of fuller thought.” Ibid.

15.  Benedict Carey, “Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment,” The New York Times (Mar. 21, 2007) online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/health/21cnd-brain.html. For the development of empathy and rational thinking, see Michael Schulman and Eva Mekler, Bringing Up a Moral Child: A New Approach for Teaching Your Child to Be Kind, Just, and Responsible (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1985), 8.

16.  Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 386.

17.  Ibid.

18.  Ibid., 401.

19.  Frans de Waal, quoted in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 401.

20.  Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: A New York Review Book, 1975), x.

  Our Moral Community...

We rely on both reason and feelings to make sense of our moral community. We have no doubt that those we love share our community of concern. And those we love may include animals as well as members of our family and our friends.

Sometimes the animals we love are wild, especially mammals that are cute and remind us of cuddly toys, like a monkey, or like bears of all kinds, such as this panda bear and her cub. Do you have feelings as you look at these photographs? Do you feel some sense of responsibility not only for the persons you love, but also for wild animals?

If so, your reason may caution you against these feelings. After all, we can't care for wild animals in the way we care for our family, or even for our pets. So, does it make any sense to include wild animals in our moral community? Not unless we rely both on empathy and reason to help us understand and appreciate what it means to live as part of nature.

We rely on the natural environment and its immense diversity of animal and plant life to sustain the earth's biosphere. As the only moral species on the planet, we have a responsibility for the biosphere. If we act rationally, we will conserve the plants that provide oxygen and food for all the animals that enjoy life on earth.

Of course, our moral community also includes all other people, for they, too, are members of the earth's biosphere. Each person has the same right to life. We live because of the biosphere, so we each have a moral responsibility to care for the earth.