Morality as an "Environmental Effect"

From an interview of Simone Schnall of the University of Plymouth in the UK, on the Edge blog site, moral decisions are affected by your surroundings and the emotional state they put you into:

... if I ask you, "How wrong is it to falsify information on your CV in order to get a better job?" you might think that you just go through a rational process, and think of the reasons why this is wrong, or perhaps why it's not so bad. But we found that when you put people in certain emotional states, for example, if you have them sit at a table that happens to be very sticky, dirty, and disgusting, then people make different decisions. If you sit at a disgusting table, or let's say you're smelling a disgusting smell in the room, then you're more likely to say that falsifying your CV in order to get a better job is really wrong compared to somebody who sits at a clean table, or somebody who doesn't have a nasty smell around them.

Similarly we find that when you give people a chance to feel very clean and pure, they decide that something like falsifying their CV is not so bad, it's proper behavior, or it's okay, it's clean. It seems like however people happen to be feeling at the moment colors their judgments about some even very fundamental decisions of whether it is right or wrong to do something. It's quite surprising that even though we like to think there are good reasons for our decisions, often times there are all these random things that just happen in our lives, and that's how we decide, for example, what is moral, and what is immoral.

It is interesting to think that our "deep felt morality" is subject to the whim of our current environment and emotions!



You would think that when we summarize our "state of being" we are giving a reasoned, deeply analyzed result. But not so...

Quite a bit is known about how feelings influence thoughts, and how to counteract this influence. One really influential approach by Jerry Clore and Norbert Schwarz is called the "Affect-as-Information" approach, which is the idea that whenever we have a feeling, whenever we sense a mood, or an emotion, we interpret it, and give it some meaning in terms of what it is relevant for. The classic study, for example, looked at how people decide whether they're satisfied with their lives, and it makes quite a bit of difference whether you ask somebody who happens to be feeling relatively happy at the moment versus somebody who is not feeling so happy — and that is actually reliably influenced by the weather.

On sunny days people feel relatively happy, and they say life is great. On rainy days they say, "Well, you know, life is kind of miserable." But if you actually remind a person of the weather and say, "Oh, isn't it a lovely day?", or "Oh, isn't it a lousy, rainy day?", then people correct for that, and on a rainy day, for example, say that, "Well, you know, life is not so bad", because they realize that their feelings play a role as far as their judgments are concerned. So often times in life we feel something, and we interpret it as being meaningful.

If I feel happy and good, I take that to mean that my life is good, even though, of course, how I feel at the moment is not really that relevant for life as a whole. This idea has been taken and found to be relevant in lots of domains, and most recently the domain that we've looked at is the moral domain, as I mentioned earlier.

...

Morality has really turned into a hot topic within the last few years in psychology. Somehow it really caught on. Why is it that this idea of an intuition-based morality has become so popular? I think there are a couple of reasons. One reason is that this approach links up well with the approach of embodied cognition, which has become influential at the same time. Another reason is because there is a growing understanding that so many things happen outside of consciousness. We are not aware of many of the things we're doing, and why we are doing them. So there is a lot of agreement that, often times, we do things for no good reason whatsoever. That means that for better or worse, rational thought may not really happen that often, and it's not such a central component of human life, or of why we do things.

I added the bold emphasis in the above.

We may not be 100% rational nor even aware of our motives, but our ethical and judicial systems are based on individual responsibility and our intentions. They may not match up well with what science knows about us, but we have to stick to our ethical and judicial systems despite that because they are the glue of our society. Until science can give us a pill that will change us into fully rataional, fully self-conscious, fully free-willed individuals, we are stuck with what we have.