If immoral things shouldn't be done, how come people feel good committing them?

Question

"The forbidden fruit is the sweetest". When we teach someone that something is immoral, the immoral thing becomes appealing to them. People want the things they can't have, so what's the point of teaching someone that something is immoral? The outcome would be the opposite and they'd wish to commit the immoral thing more afterwards, right? Sounds like reverse psychology. Tell someone not to do something and they'd do it. Tell someone to do something and they wouldn't do it. What can be done about that? Have philosophers covered the issue on morality? Why do immoral things feel good if they shouldn't be done? Shouldn't they feel bad?

Answer 1

Consider Kant's categorical imperative:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." -Kant, in 'Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'

A person may wish to do an 'immoral' thing. But what if instead it's done to them. Do they feel a grievance? That feeling, if so, is what we call a sense of justice. It has a deep and widespread impact on human behaviour.

"Justice is the constant and perpetual will to allot to every man his due." -Ulpian of Tyre, Roman jurist.

It is possible to look at human morality as only the result of game-theory, multiple agents interacting repeatedly seeking self-interest. We find around the world a fairly constant percentage of psychopaths, those with unusually low levels of guilt for 'immoral' behaviour, and lack of concern for others. Businesses run by psychopaths perform worse than average. Yet psychopaths are about twice as likely to be a CEO as the prevalence in the population - and we should note societies with more than a few percent psychopaths presumably get enough negative impacts to mutual trust to select against this becoming a dominant trait.

So how do we go from game theory, to the abstraction of justice? Through intersubjectivity, which is the basis of the distinctive advances we see in human cognition, in language, learning, and abstraction, despite us otherwise being quite ordinary animals individually. Discussed here: Is the Categorical Imperative Simply Bad Math? :)

The Golden Rule, The Categorical Imperative, Rawl's Theory Of Justice: these all seem artificial, imposed, until we realise the same mechanism sees us able to pick up the thoughts of ancestors where they stopped, and leave behind insights and tasks for our descendents, in ways that make other humans implicit in the scope of who we can be. Discussed in more detail here: According to the major theories of concepts, where do meanings come from?

Answer 2

When someone tells us not to do something otherwise attractive, without allowing us a proper understanding (which can often take years), our following of that advice is essentially done on reciprocity or blind trust. In the former case, when that person is elsewhere, we may feel an intuitive sense of unnecessity since, after all, how can they benefit from our choice if it has no identifiable effect on them? In the latter case, we fear there is a risk, but simultaneously wish to explore and occasionally test reality's boundaries. All it takes is a taste without failure to begin questioning the advice. The immoral decision is basically a shallow mistake resulting from ignorance of the longer tail of causation.

Naturally to partake in an inherently gratifying activity feels satisfying when we have little cognitive dissonance from any apparently significant downsides. Higher knowledge and wisdom, as from education or experience, allows us the capacity to recognise problems and to experience their prospective dissonance while contemplating options. Without this mental feedback, all we have is our basic instinct and imagination to "guide" us, perhaps leaving us in the dark.