The Moral Emotions

Abstract Morality dignifies and elevates. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God said “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). In many of the world’s religious traditions, the good go up, to heaven or a higher rebirth, and the bad go down, to hell or a lower rebirth. Even among secular people, moral motives are spoken of as the “highest” and “noblest” motives, whereas greed and lust are regarded as “baser” or “lower” instincts. Morality is therefore like the temple on the hill of human nature: It is our most sacred attribute, a trait that is often said to separate us from other animals and bring us closer to God. For 2,400 years, the temple has been occupied by the high priests of reason. Plato (4th century B.C./1949) presented a model of a divided self in which reason, firmly ensconced in the head, rules over the passions, which rumble around in the chest and stomach (Timaeus, 69). Aristotle had a similar conception of reason as the wise master and emotion as the foolish slave: “anger seems to listen to reason, but to hear wrong, like hasty servants, who run off before they have heard everything their master tells them, and fail to do what they were ordered, or like dogs, which bark as soon as there is a knock without waiting to see if the visitor is a friend” (Ethics, 1962, 1149a). Throughout the long history of moral philosophy, the focus has generally been on moral reasoning, whereas the moral emotions have been regarded with some suspicion (Solomon, 1993). Even when moral psychology finally separated itself from moral philosophy and began to make its own empirical contributions, it invested almost all of its capital in the study of moral reasoning. Piaget (1932/1965) studied the child’s developing understanding of fairness and rules. Kohlberg (1969; Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983) built on Piaget to provide both a measurement tool and a conceptual framework for the study of moral reasoning, and the field grew rapidly. Kohlberg’s work was an important part of the cognitive revolution, demonstrating that morality, like language, could be studied as a system of transformations of underlying cognitive constructs. Yet as the cognitive revolution matured, researchers recognized the growing need for a parallel “affect revolution” (Tomkins, 1981). Table 45.1 shows that this revolution has indeed taken place, for the moral emotions have been growth stocks in the 1980s and 1990s. Although the number of journal articles on morality and moral reasoning rose in the 1980s and then began to decline in the 1990s, the number of articles on emotion in general, and on the moral emotions in particular, has increased greatly. Table 45.1 shows that the “old academy” stocks of empathy and guilt, which were the most widely studied moral emotions in the 1970s, have not grown in the 1990s, whereas the “new academy” stocks of anger, shame, and disgust have racked up impressive gains in scholarship.