Isn't an appeal to emotions in fact necessary to validate our ethical decisions?

Question

Isn't an appeal to emotions in fact necessary to validate our ethical decisions? On the one hand, it is an informal fallacy to appeal to emotion, but on the other hand ethics seems permanently anchored to right and wrong centered around the emotional impact of the consequences of decisions.

Consider the argument it is wrong to hurt a vulnernable adult or child. Clearly, when a vulnerable adult or child is maliciously injured with malice aforethought, we respond in such a way that our logic is guided by our emotions. But, if argument appeals to emotion, then doesn't it essentially reduce all of our ethical arguments to irrational claims?

Answer 1

Contrast:

A

If it were true that someone should hurt a child, people would experience grief and moral outrage. Therefore it is false that someone should hurt a child.

Whether or not the premise in the first sentence is true, the conclusion in the second does not follow, so this is a fallacy.

B

Morally salient emotions are an accurate guide to what should and should not be done, especially if the same emotional response is shared by the overwhelming majority of people. Therefore if something can be reliably predicted to make almost anyone experience grief and moral outrage, it is false that someone should do it. If someone hurts a child, almost anyone will experience grief and moral outrage. Therefore it is false that someone should hurt a child.

One or more of the premises may be false, but the conclusion follows, so it is not a fallacy.

Just to emphasize, consider:

C

You are sad. Therefore you are sad.

Obviously an emotion is appealed to, but this is just the law of identity.

The fallacy called an appeal to emotion is one which looks like A if the argument is expressed formally, not any argument in which emotions are referred to.

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Nobody actually argues like this in real life; what you'd really see is probably something that could plausibly be interpreted as either A or B. I think for something like this charity demands that you assume B would be what the speaker meant if they thought it through.

Answer 2

No, that's silly. While one may need to appeal to emotions to justify several moral positions, the logical fallacy of "appealing to emotions" must still be avoided in an argument. Not every appeal to emotions is a logical fallacy.

The logical fallacy obviously happens where emotions are used in an invalid way. But when they are used in a valid way in an argument, it's not a fallacy.

Similarly legal court must take a person into consideration, that's not the ad hominem fallacy. Many fallacies have names that could make it sound like they are being used in other context validly, but that's just slightly confusing naming.

Many discussion forums have informal rules that the debate is over when the name of Hitler is used. Still if a debate was about WW2, then there might be obvious reasons to use the name without that appeal to emotion.

Clearly, when a vulnerable adult or child is maliciously injured with malice aforethought, we respond in such a way that our logic is guided by our emotions

While humans may naturally respond with modified reasoning, it is the duty of professionals like the police or courts to respond according to the law, and not let emotions change their behavior. For the general public, it is difficult to give general recommendations about how to handle such emotions, but a rational argument will have more validity even then when it is not twisted by the natural emotions one may feel in such situations.

Answer 3

What you're missing is that many emotions are closely related to our ethics. Emotions are shortcuts that the brain uses when making judgements and decisions ("Type 1" in Daniel Kahneman's terminology from Thinking Fast and Slow).

So when we see a child being hurt unnecessarily we feel emotions like sadness and outrage because we believe this is wrong. There's nothing wrong with this, it's usually consistent with our ethical beliefs. We're not appealing to emotions to validate our ethics, these emotions are a reflection of our ethics.

But these shortcuts are often easily fooled, resulting in what Daniel Ariely calls "predictably irrational" behavior. That's where "appeal to emotions" comes from. If you don't combine rational considerations ("Type 2") with your emotional responses, you may make incorrect decisions.

You can see this when politicians exploit fear. A politician may warn people that immigrants are "coming to steal your jobs" or they're mostly criminals and say that they'll solve these problems by curbing immigration. Voters who don't check the statistics and economics of immigration will simply let their fear and trust in the politician guide their voting decisions.

Scammers are similar. They offer you a quick, easy opportunity to make money, and greed inclines you to take the offer. But if you were to think about it harder, you'd realize that there must be a catch.

So you're putting the cart before the horse. We usually start with an emotional response to a situation. If it's an important decision, and we don't need to respond immediately, we should then appeal to rationality to validate this response. The tendency to skip this second step is what people do when they take advantage of you. We could rename "appeal to emotions" to "appeal to laziness" -- emotions are easy, thinking is hard.

Answer 4

It seems to me that in practical terms the answer to the title question is a clear yes. To get people (including ourselves) to align with a moral principle or framework, we need to have desires and/or emotions engaged. Consequentialist positions will generally assume or appeal to our distaste for or desire for/liking of certain consequences. However much we frame this in logical arguments, we'll having little motivation to align with the moral arguments if we don't care about either the purported negative and postive consequences the consequentialist is trying to decrease and increase respectively.

Also, whatever the goal is will include a value-driven assessment.

With deontology, we may, yes, dislike the rules. However, in religious deontologies there are generally threats of unpleasant consequences, appeals to our owing a deity, appeals to, of course, wanting to align with the greatest of all beings, guilt around not doing one's duty, etc. On a motivational level religious deontology depends on all sorts of appeals to emotion and deisre - carrots and sticks, with emotional effects often. I think beyond the motivational necessity of appealing to emotions in religious deontology, it is inherent in the assumptions regarding the relationship with the deity. Of course you will do what the loving Father suggests, how could you not? I don't mean to offend any religious people by what is likely a serious oversimplification, but it seems to me there are emotional appeals similar to this either explicitly stated or assumed/implied.

Secular deontologies, anything from Kant (sort of secular, but influential on secular deontologies) to rights-based deontologies all have some kind of emotional appeal on both the motivational side - listen to any disucssion of the violation of rights and you will necessarily hear emotional appeals or they will simply be implicit - we all know that's bad or good because of what it feels like contemplating not having a right to privacy, etc. And deontologists often engage in consequentialist arguments about what happens if we don't follow the rules, and these will have appeal emotion components.

This is getting long but I think virtue ethics (the name itself already points to the appeals) also has appeals to emotion - admiration, for example - built in. I'll leave that argument gestural.

Even in ethical systems that lead to people striving to have what might be rather unpleasant experiences and states, there is a value judgment that the states of the ethical person or the consequences of the actions or the relationship the framework honors is emotionally appealing. In other words, I am not in any way arguing that all ethical systems boil down to a (perhaps deeply buried) hedonism. In fact, the appeal could be, for example, the nobility and honoring the deity in asceticism or self-flagellation. And while these 'lifestyles' may have secondary gains, I see no reason to assume that people having these lifestyles have a net gain of pleasure nor to I think they are motivated by those possible secondary gains.

To sum up I'd say appeals to emotion are a part of normative claims and systems. Appeals to emotion are problematic in non-nomrative discussions. They can, of course, also be misused in normative discussions, but are nevertheless necessary, given what we are and what the topic is.

Answer 5

All of this debate stems from the confusion surrounding the very nature of emotions. I propose to treat emotions as template rational schemes (like technical lemmas in mathematics) that have become automated routines bypassing certain cognitive faculties in the brain traditionally attributed to intellect/reason. These emotions are like habits of reason just like reflexes of chessplayers playing blitz really embed rational understanding compressed into hard-wired circuits.

Ideally, one should contemplate one's emotions and take them apart employing the slow deliberate rational process. But my analogy aims to explain the paradox why emotions may seem so valid for ethical decisions. Each time a seemingly valid emotional response is an element of an ethical decision-making process we are in fact dealing with a black box containing a reference to a rational process. This rational process should always be brought out to the conscious mind in a properly conducted process.

These ideas have been developed in a conversation with Thomas Aquinas Emulator. The link contains more details explaining that strictly speaking appeals to emotions are indeed fallacies, but it also explains the source of the paradox that they often seem to work as valid arguments.

Answer 6

Argument from Fallacy (AKA: the Fallacy Fallacy)

The Argument from Fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Just because something follows the pattern of a fallacy does not automatically falsify it or mean that there is not an actual logical relationship in argument, it simply means that the argument MIGHT be logically malformed. For example, if you are citing Albert Einstein when describing General Relativity, you are logically Appealing to Authority because the Theory is literally what he says it is which is different than citing Albert Einstein when saying that the universe must follow General Relativity because Albert Einstein says so. Likewise, many arguments about emotions are logically sound, it is only when we use a person's emotions to distract from unsound or a lack of reasoning that it becomes an Emotional Fallacy.

Let's break down the example statement:

It is wrong to hurt a vulnerable adult or child. Clearly, when a vulnerable adult or child is maliciously injured with malice aforethought, we respond in such a way that our logic is guided by our emotions.

I would call this an appeal to emotions fallacy because it fails to actually make any logical assertions about how the emotions interconnect. The appeal to emotion here is designed to get a person to react to how they feel and ignore the fact that you've not actually made any logical claims.

That said, emotions are valid data points when treated as such. They can be a measure of harm and they often lead to complex behaviors to improve the survivability of a society, even when the individual behaviors seem illogical and unconnected. The goal of a logical argument is to discuss the emotions and their ramifications, not to appeal to them.

So if you were to use emotions as data points, a logical statement might look like:

It is especially wrong to hurt a vulnerable adult or child. People typically experience greater emotional suffering when they witness harm to a vulnerable person. This is further escalated if such harm is done with malice. Because the circumstances of these actions cause additional harm, it is more wrong than it is to hurt someone who can stand up for themself or to do so without malicious intent.

Or if you were to use emotions as a path to complex behaviors:

Experiments done on the Prisoner's Dilemma show that Equivalent Retaliation (tit-for-tat) is the most efficient method for managing trust when neither party is vulnerable and both parties are acting with intention. However, a vulnerable person can not do equivalent retaliation on their own; so, they rely on the reactions of others to step in and do it on their behalf. This is a reciprocal human behavior which aids in our successfulness as a species because we are all vulnerable to certain abusers, and how we collectively respond to abusers that we can control affects how we can expect others to respond to the abusers we can not control. So, it is especially wrong to hurt a vulnerable adult or child because this fuels our natural, emotion driven reaction to retaliate against those who harm others. This improves our society as a whole, even if we may not see any immediate or direct advantage in each individual case.

It is also important to show leniency for harm done without malicious intent because those same Prisoner's Dilemma experiments show that equivalent retaliation can lead to very costly patterns of behavior when the abuser's actions are not always done with intention.

Answer 7

Is it ethical for a judge to follow the law?

If so, it may be ethical for a judge to rule for a large corporation and against a poor family if that is what the law requires. Even if this means the large corporation gets slightly richer and the poor family becomes homeless.

The judge’s emotional sympathy may be with the family, but if the law is clear, and they have sworn an oath to uphold the law, would it be ethical for them to ignore the law?

If it is, then it is not necessarily ethical for anyone to follow the law. Each should decide whether murder, child abuse, drug taking, or parking in disabled zones without a permit is ethical according to their own emotions on the day. If you have angered me, then my emotional response is to hurt you. Therefore, hurting you is ethical?

Answer 8

What happens when someone is pleased that someone hurt a vulnerable adult or child?

Consider the case where Jane Doe and Rachel Roe were taking their children, Jack and Ruth, along a road when James Poe, driving drunk, kills them all, and skates on the charges.

Somewhat later, Janet Poe and their daughter Jill are killed by a drunk driver. Both John Doe and Richard Roe fell pleased. Richard Roe is just plain pleased that James got back what he did. John Doe is ashamed of it, he knows Janet and Jill are innocent and did nothing to harm him, and that, anyway, the chief victims of James are Jane, Rachel, Jack, and Ruth, not himself, so James suffering what he himself suffered is not equal situations -- but he does feel pleased.

We can not use emotions as a standard because they are not stable enough.