Bad Faith: A Philosophical Memoir by Joel Marks

Author:Joel Marks [Marks, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Emotion

If there is one thing that should be obvious from the most casual reading of my moral life story in this book, it is that it is full of feelings. Even when I wax technical and intellectual, passion underlies my assertions and arguments. Therefore it will come as no surprise that my initial reactions to the new revelations I am reporting herein were also emotional. But what was surely surprising – at least to emotional me – was that the chief revelation was none other than that morality itself is emotional in its fundamental nature.[48]

As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, my emotions took a ride upon this realization, and first came devastation. I suddenly recognized that my reactions to various moral phenomena, such as the torture of animals, were what constituted them as moral phenomena, and secondarily as wrong (or right or indifferent, as the case may be). In other words, they were in a sense not reactions to moral phenomena, but moral reactions to phenomena – phenomena that in themselves were without inherent moral import.

But this was crazy! How could intentionally torturing an innocent puppy dog – to take a stereotypical but nonetheless powerful image – not be wrong through and through? Yet – really, I was stunned – it now seemed to me, and just as clearly as the original moral intuition, not to be wrong in the only way I thought something could be (morally) wrong, namely, “in itself.” Instead I was left only with a kind of preference or desire … in other words, an emotion.

Clearly, then, my response to the puppy’s plight – my strong desire that she not be treated in that way, plus, perhaps, a strong desire to stop and then punish the torturer – was emotional. But to say that the emotional response was what made the torturing wrong – or was, at any rate, a necessary ingredient of its being wrong, since absent the response it would only be what it was, namely, torturing a puppy – seemed, to put it mildly, to be putting the cart before the puppy. It implied, among other things, that there could be a world in which there were no people like myself but were only people like the torturer, who derived nothing but pleasure from the operation, and innocent puppies capable of feeling the pain of being tortured … and nothing would be wrong.

What is wrong with this picture? Only everything. Hence my shock, for I now believed (and believe) it is the picture of reality. There is no God who is judging what a crummy world it is where there are sadistic torturers and tortured innocents, and is pondering whether He should send down a flood just to be rid of the damn thing (much the way at the end of the sci-fi flick Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston decides to destroy the whole stinking planet). But neither is there any morality standing in God’s place to certify

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