The Moral Emotions: Can we overcome anger and blame?
The history of moral philosophy reveals concepts of anger, blame and morality to be inextricably intertwined. All notions of justice can be revealed as blameful in a certain way. Recent approaches have found a way to take the sting out of anger and blame, resulting in a less violent understanding of moral action.
Within modernist discourses, a distinction is made between rational and irrational forms of anger and blame.
Martha Nussbaum argues that anger involves a desire for revenge, payback or retribution. Nussbaum believes anger is a destructive, immoral or irrational emotion that we can and should transcend.
Blame skeptics like Derk Pereboom distinguish between ‘desert’ and deterministic blame. Desert blame is based on belief in free will , and involves indignation, moral resentment and guilt.
Pereboom believe when we reject free will in favor of determinism we can avoid such emotions.
“…when someone is mistreated in a relationship, there are other emotions available besides resentment and indignation—these emotions include “feeling disappointed, hurt or shocked about what the offender has done, moral concern for him, and moral sadness and sorrow generated by this concern when the harm done is serious”. Communicating such disappointment, sadness, or concern can be quite effective in motivating avoidance of future misbehavior. In addition, communication of such al ternatives to resentment and indignation “is not typically aggressive in the way that expression of anger can be, and will usually not have
its intimidating effect” “ “moral sadness and sorrow—accompanied by a resolve for fairness and justice, or to improve personal relationships—will serve societal and personal relationships as well as resentment and indignation does.”
(Derk Pereboom
Others , including various feminist writers, reject the idea that revenge is the central aim of anger, arguing instead that anger aims at acknowledgment or recognition of an injustice and that it can thus be an adaptive and useful affect. Jesse Prinz has called anger a moral emotion that alerts us to injustice and violation of ethical norms.
Postmodern approaches jettison the rational/ irrational binary in favor of a pragmatic-genealogical model emphasizing the social dimension of blame.
Buddhist perspectives talk of substituting compassion for anger. Others say we move beyond anger by forgiving those who wrong us. What all these approaches, whether pro or anti-anger, have in common is that they leave intact the impetus of anger, which is the ascription of a certain intent on the part of the other , namely that of being blameful, culpable, willfully malevolent ,
guilty. Those who claim that we can and should avoid what they consider to be the essential cognitive and behavioral-expressive manifestations anger nevertheless make blame an irreducible feature of experience.
No philosophical approach, however, makes the claim to have entirely eliminated the need for anger and blame.
On the contrary, a certain conception of blame is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations.
I take expression of blame to include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous or moral indignation, ‘adaptive’ anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, disresectful, cruel, culpable, prideful, perverse, corrupt, tyrannical, inconsiderate,
deliberately oppressive, repressive or unfair, a miscreant, insulting, rude, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, seeing the other as a willful perpetuator of social injustice or injustice in general, as committing a moral wrong, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, narcissistic.
I suggest that it is possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by getting past the idea that human motives are fundamentally arbitrary and capricious, and subject to conditioning and shaping by irrational social and bodily sources. What do you think?
Within modernist discourses, a distinction is made between rational and irrational forms of anger and blame.
Martha Nussbaum argues that anger involves a desire for revenge, payback or retribution. Nussbaum believes anger is a destructive, immoral or irrational emotion that we can and should transcend.
Blame skeptics like Derk Pereboom distinguish between ‘desert’ and deterministic blame. Desert blame is based on belief in free will , and involves indignation, moral resentment and guilt.
Pereboom believe when we reject free will in favor of determinism we can avoid such emotions.
“…when someone is mistreated in a relationship, there are other emotions available besides resentment and indignation—these emotions include “feeling disappointed, hurt or shocked about what the offender has done, moral concern for him, and moral sadness and sorrow generated by this concern when the harm done is serious”. Communicating such disappointment, sadness, or concern can be quite effective in motivating avoidance of future misbehavior. In addition, communication of such al ternatives to resentment and indignation “is not typically aggressive in the way that expression of anger can be, and will usually not have
its intimidating effect” “ “moral sadness and sorrow—accompanied by a resolve for fairness and justice, or to improve personal relationships—will serve societal and personal relationships as well as resentment and indignation does.”
(Derk Pereboom
Others , including various feminist writers, reject the idea that revenge is the central aim of anger, arguing instead that anger aims at acknowledgment or recognition of an injustice and that it can thus be an adaptive and useful affect. Jesse Prinz has called anger a moral emotion that alerts us to injustice and violation of ethical norms.
Postmodern approaches jettison the rational/ irrational binary in favor of a pragmatic-genealogical model emphasizing the social dimension of blame.
Buddhist perspectives talk of substituting compassion for anger. Others say we move beyond anger by forgiving those who wrong us. What all these approaches, whether pro or anti-anger, have in common is that they leave intact the impetus of anger, which is the ascription of a certain intent on the part of the other , namely that of being blameful, culpable, willfully malevolent ,
guilty. Those who claim that we can and should avoid what they consider to be the essential cognitive and behavioral-expressive manifestations anger nevertheless make blame an irreducible feature of experience.
No philosophical approach, however, makes the claim to have entirely eliminated the need for anger and blame.
On the contrary, a certain conception of blame is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations.
I take expression of blame to include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous or moral indignation, ‘adaptive’ anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, disresectful, cruel, culpable, prideful, perverse, corrupt, tyrannical, inconsiderate,
deliberately oppressive, repressive or unfair, a miscreant, insulting, rude, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, seeing the other as a willful perpetuator of social injustice or injustice in general, as committing a moral wrong, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, narcissistic.
I suggest that it is possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by getting past the idea that human motives are fundamentally arbitrary and capricious, and subject to conditioning and shaping by irrational social and bodily sources. What do you think?
Comments (76)
Let us say that I have been hurt and disappointed by someone I care deeply about, and as a result I become angry with them. They now approach me and say “ I know I let you down. I was wrong and I'm sorry“ (regardless of whether I prompted them or not). One could say that the other's sense of their guilt and culpability is the mirror image of my anger. The essence of the anger-culpability binary here is the two parties coping , as victim and perpetrator, with their
perception of an arbitrary lapse in values, a socially catalyzed drift in commitment to the relationship on the part of the one , and the recognition of this caprice by the other.
Let us then suppose that the hurt party believes that the always present possibility of the other's straying, succumbing to, being overcome by alienating valuative motives, is an expression of human motivation in general as dependent on arbitrary bodily and intersocial determinants. This being the case , it would not be unreasonable for the hurt individual to formulate the hopeful notion that the blameful, that is, capricious, behavior of the other can be coaxed back to
something close to its original alignment, so that the relationship's intimacy can be restored. The hopeful quality of the anger, then , is driven by a belief in the random malleability of human motives. I am going to call this hopeful intervention ‘adaptive anger'.
It begins with an experience of invalidation (hurt and disappointment) and ends with the consequent hopeful intervention (adaptive anger).
The conflictual relationship scenario I sketched
above was intended to capture what I believe to be a fundamental tenet of any philosophical or
psychological approach that is founded on the belief in the irreducibility of blame.
Good OP, it was interesting to read something with such importance as how to overcome angry and blame because, I think, these are one of the most humane emotions. Despite we see a lot of branches to overcome both I guess it depends on someone's personality and behaviour.
To be honest, if someone ever hurts me that bad, I do not know if I would be able to overcome it. I am a very apprehensive. Probably all of those branches you have shared with us could help me to just accept it. But I don't see myself overcoming the issue.
Another example: There are couples that, when someone cheat on the other, this one for some reason forgive him/her. It is amazing they are available to do so.
We can go beyond through anger thanks to time and accepting it. This is position. There is a phrase which stands: Time cures everything
I wonder which category of blame this fits into?
It sounds a lot more like Pereboom’s desert blame than his rational deterministic blame.
Pereboom rejects blame as moral responsibility because he claims that “what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.”
“In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.”
On the contrary, I think it's possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by giving up the aims that anger and blame serve, ie. wealth and power.
Do you mean only the wealthy and powerful have anger and blame, or that the anger and blame the rest of us experience is somehow manipulated by the wealthy and powerful? What do you think motivates power?Is there a drive for power? Does greed motivate wealth?
I'm trying to clarify the completeness of the argument here, because in any moral assessment of a situation, there are always two sides -- the person causing harm and the person who suffered the harm. I've heard of people who forgave their attackers -- that is, they've come to terms with their anger and found closure by talking to their attackers directly and forgiving them (in court or prison of course).
But there's another component of this moral event -- what to do with the attacker. The society has something in place: appropriate punishment. It is this component here that seems to be missing. @Joshs, are you saying that aside from skipping anger, should we also skip punishment or desert to the person who caused harm?
Yes, punishment presupposes blame and anger.
In punishment, the angered wants to teach the guilty party a lesson, remind them, shame them, make them feel
the guilt they inexplicably failed to feel as a result of their regressive actions. Why do we say the criminal should suffer what the victim suffered, get a `taste of their own medicine’? If they really know the ethical rigor of what was lost to us in our disappointed suffering, we think, then they may see the error of their ways and return to what we believe they knew all along. Our hostility
wants to provoke the other’s pain only in order to gain the opportunity to ask "How do YOU like it?" and hear them empathetically link their pain with ours by linking their thinking more intimately with ours.
But since we don’t know why they violated our expectation of them, why and how they failed to
do what our blameful anger tells us they `should have’ according to our prior estimation of their relation to us, this guilt-inducing process is tentative, unsure.
Even if we succeed in getting the blameful other to atone and re-establish their previous intimacy with us, we understand them no better than we did prior to their hostility-generating action, and thus our hostility provides an inadequate solution to our puzzlement and anxiety. All we have learned from the episode is that they other is potentially untrustworthy, unpredictable. The
ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the fact that even if contempt succeeds in getting the perpetrator to mend their ways, an adequate understanding of his or her puzzling motives has not been achieved. The very success of the contempt delays the pursuit of a
permeable construction within which the other’s apparently arbitrary disappointing deviation
from what one expected of them can be seen as a necessary, adaptive elaboration of their way of
construing their role in the relationship.
When confronted with behavior of another that is comprehensively different from our own, a mystery to us, and especially when it disturbs us, we need to bridge the gap between ourselves and the other not by attributing the problem to the other’s being at the mercy of capriciously wayward motives which we may hope to re-shape, but by striving to subsume the other’s outlook within a revised version of our own system.
Quoting L'éléphant
Here’s my view of forgiveness:
Transcending anger by revising one’s construction of the event means arriving at an explanation that does not require the other’s contrition, which only serves to appease the blameful person rather than enlighten him. Forgiveness and turning the other cheek only make sense in the context of blame, which implies a belief in the potential arbitrariness and capriciousness of human motives. Seeking the other’s atonement does not reflect an effective understanding of the original insult.
If, rather than getting angry or condemning another who wrongs me, I respond with loving forgiveness, my absolution of the other presupposes my anger and blame toward them. I can only forgive the other’s trespass to the extent that I recognize a sign of contrition or confession on their part. Ideals of so-called unconditional forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, loving one's oppressor, could also be understood as conditional in various ways. In the absence of the other's willingness to atone, I may forgive evil when I believe that there are special or extenuating circumstances which will allow me to view the perpetrator as less culpable (the sinner knows not what he does). I can say the other was blinded or deluded, led astray. My offer of grace is then subtly hostile, both an embrace and a slap. I hold forth the carrot of my love as a lure, hoping thereby to uncloud the other's conscience so as to enable them to discover their
culpability. In opening my arms, I hope the prodigal son will return chastised, suddenly aware of a need to be forgiven. Even when there is held little chance that the sinner will openly acknowledge his sin, I may hope that my outrage connects with a seed of regret and contrition
buried deep within the other, as if my `unconditional' forgiveness is an acknowledgment of God's or the subliminal conscience of the other's apologizing in the name of the sinner.
So does your view apply to every moral harm? Rapists? Murderers who murdered an entire family? Torturers of children?
And sins, I didn't know that you were going in that direction -- what if one is an atheist? How does an atheist forgive?
You know that forgiveness does not deter transgressions against people by evil people. The law does. People who commit heinous crimes and crimes of opportunity don't have conscience, and there are plenty of them around. If you remove the punishment by law here, then heaven help us all.
So evil and lack of conscience can be understood as a kind of arbitrariness , irrationality or capriciousness at the heart of intention and motivation, right? People are tempted, they stray from the ‘right’ path, but we don’t know why, or we assume there is no reason.
That’s my claim, that this arbitrariness is an assumption we make about ‘evil-doers’. But what if this simply reflects a failure of insight on our part? What if ‘evil-doers’ believe they are just, and their failure isn’t one of moral intent but of insight?
Sorry. But I take a harder stance on moral claims -- those that involve suffering of the psychic and physical harm. I won't compromise on this. (Heck, that's why I made a thread here Enforcement of Morality)
The "what-if" failure of insight on our part, as you proposed, has been studied for ages and ages -- backed by scholarly and medical studies. We aren't wrong in limiting the freedom of those who cause us harms. There's no more excuse that we might be short-sighted and not seeing the forest because of the trees.
I’m more interested in the philosophy and psychology of motivation. I understand your stance. What I would like to know is how you articulate the nature of wrong-doing and evil in terms of the capriciousness of straying from the path of righteousness. Tell me more about what makes such straying possible. Is it a kind of randomness? Is it an irrationality?
The straying, as you also name it, has various causes. There are certainly people born with mental illness whose propensity to harm people is well documented. So, this one is not capricious or random -- it has a root cause.
One cause is the development of a vice. There's a joke that mocks the petty crimes, double life, and white lies as something that could not progress to heinous crimes. Well they do. We know this is true. Self-centered and self-absorbed people can discern right from wrong. That's a fact. But when they make a decision, this decision involves rationalization (in another sense of the word) to make this decision palatable and justifiable. So there's a deliberate attempt at plotting the perfect crime.
You know police investigations would show that rapists make a decision to go out and hunt, depending on the weather. If the weather is not conducive to prowling, they postpone it. So, the weather factors in to their decision to commit a crime. They don't aimlessly wander around separated from their minds and decision-making.
But mental illness understood as a pathology is another name for randomness. The cause is arbitrary.
Quoting L'éléphant
But you haven’t articulated this decision-making in terms
of how it differs from a morally ‘correct’ decision-making. What cause some to do what is incorrect? Why are some self-centered and self-absorbed but not others? Is it a certain randomness or arbitrariness that lurks within each of us?
I just said, they're found to be able to discern right from wrong. In short, they're not mentally ill. So yes, they are aware of what's morally correct.
Quoting Joshs
I think we need to sit down and sort this thing you call randomness. To me, when an individual is born with mental illness, that's not random. That's their being. And for that, our society provides a treatment.
Quoting Joshs
This you might call arbitrariness (God I don't know what country you're in, but no offense, I find these terms not the kind I would use when discussing morality, but well okay.) Because it is a vice they want. And to support this vice, they would rationalize their behavior (while knowing right from wrong) -- this rationalization is their support, in a manner of speaking, to go ahead and act on their vice.
Have you taken information systems, btw? Have you heard of "internal controls" -- it would be a perfect framework for your topic because it involves human behavior but in technology setting. The computers against wayward humans.
Quoting Joshs
For Strawson, the recognition of freedom is the cause and basis of resentment (roughly blame in the sense of the OP). For Joshs the recognition of freedom is the basis of 'thinking beyond' blame. Same observation - opposite conclusions. Something interesting going on here.
Strawson’s analysis here is too abstract and general to take into account what we already know about the changing blame behaviors and notions of fairness and justice that have taken place over the course of recent cultural history.
To the extent that recent approaches have taken the sting out of blame it is because they have rethought the traditional religious and Enlightenment ideas of freedom of will’. Derk Pereboom’s and Galen Strawson’s rejection of free will desert-based blame in favor of determinism is one example, postmodernism’s social construction of blame is another., and Derrida and Heidegger’s deconstruction of presence is yet another.
Good call on Strawson's quote.
But as you can see above, Joshs's view is this: why don't we stop looking at is as free-will so that we could also stop the blame-desert corollary.
And I reject this view. First of all, I don't use free-will philosophically to argue about why guilt, blame, and punishment is a just view. Humans are psychologically predisposed to recognize these 3 elements. So, I use the psychological framework to make a statement about moral agency.
My view on blame is a further development of the approaches of Heidegger and Derrida. Neither of them are determinists, nor are they free-will advocates.
I would simply suggest that the history of blame is directly correlated with a progressive philosophical and psychological understanding. The more fundamentalist the view of human nature, the harsher the blame that is considered justified. Enlightenment free will philosophy, while rejecting religious fundamentalism, shares with religious thinking of its era the assumption of an atomized autonomous subject that controls what it wills. This view doesnt understand the reciprocal interconnection between individual will and the social system in which it is embedded, leading to a profoundly arbitrary view of freedom.
Tom, please do not inject another element into the argument. Josh and I and, I believe, Cuthbert, too, know what's at stake here.
So, let's assume that Josh's view has assurance that the removal of blame is not because it is bound to be abused by "convenient flare up" and "righteousness". Josh, you know this. We are precluding righteousness here.
The blame definition is pure.
Do you think that anger and blame are also the only way we can think of to improve certain situations where the other acts in ways that appear capricious and ‘wayward’ to us, such that our anger tells us we can ‘ knock some sense’ back into them?
The question , then, is whether there is a way of looking at human motives such that what is good for
each of us when we make a choice is never meant to be in deliberate conflict with the desires of
others( unless of course we feel they need to be punished). I suggest the only way to understand motive
this way is as a form of anticipatory sense making that intrinsically takes others into consideration , given that they are a crucial element of our sense making. We blame when we attribute the ‘waywardness’ to the other’s actions, rather than in our inadequate construction of them.
The idea here is that motive can never be wayward, and therefore blame is always a failure of our own understanding.
I think anger satisfies an emotional need and I believe many of us seethe in hatreds and bigotries already and we are always on the look out for events or cues to activate these emotions. I come to this from work I have undertaken with violent offenders over the years. If this is not relevant please let me know.
The thing is , people play around with the word anger, because it has a negative connotation of violence , lack of control , irrationality and self-aggrandizement.Nobody want to admit that they get angry a lot.
They tell us we can eliminate anger, control it , suppress it, substitute in its place compassion and forgiveness. But none of these arguments gets to the heart of the matter , which isnt the expression of anger per se but blame.
None of the authors who suggest a substitute for anger
believe we can get rid of blame. In fact, I would argue that their philosophies are absolutely dependent on a notion of blame at their very core.
For instance, Gendlin, a phenomenological psychologist allied with Merleau-Ponty, considers anger to be potentially adaptive. He says that one must attempt to reassess, reinterpret, elaborate the angering experience via felt awareness not in order to eliminate the feeling of anger but so that one's anger becomes “fresh, expansive, active, constructive, and varies with changes in the situation”. “Anger may help handle the situation because it may make the other change or back away. Anger can also help the situation because it may break it entirely and thus give you new circumstances.” “ Anger is healthy, while resentment and hate are detrimental to the organism.”
The social constructionist Ken Gergen writes that anger has a valid role to play in social co- ordination “There are certain times and places in which anger is the most effective move in the dance.”
Merleau-Ponty scholar John Russon(2020) offers:
“Anger can be unjustified, to be sure, and in that case it enacts a fundamentally distorted portrayal of the other. But anger can also be justified, and in that case it can be the only frame of mind in which the vicious and hateful reality of the other is truly recognized.” (The Place of Love).
Robert Solomon (1977), champion of the view that emotions are central to meaning and significance in human life, says that anger can be ‘right'.
“ Anger, for example, is not just a burst of venom, and it is not as such sinful, nor is it necessarily a “negative” emotion. It can be “righteous,” and it can sometimes be right.”
What I am suggesting is that we can get rid of the concept of blame, but only when. we stop thinking of motive and intent as potentially arbitrary , capricious , vulnerable to bodily-emotive and social conditioning and shaping.
I dont know any philosopher or psychologist who follows me here , except perhaps George Kelly , and I may be misreading him. The closest to my position are Derrida, Heidegger and Gendlin.
Anger and blame achieve the establishment of boundaries and rules, in different settings, in social situations. The cause is secondary, it is separate. Even if you got rid of blame, we'd only see a change in tone while the same punishment is being delivered. Sometimes maybe there should be a change of tone, I agree, people shouldn't be blamed for what they are, or for failing to save us from themselves. I think most crime shows impairment in decision making, maybe it's a temporary impairment but from the perspective of a healthy, clear-minded person, crime's reward usually doesn't justify the risk.
I only think anger and blame should at some time expire, that cooler heads can prevail ultimately. If then we determine that a person should be absolved of blame, so be it.
I'll mull over this. I've never really taken the idea of blame very seriously. Do animals get angry and does blame play a role?
Let me ask you this: do you think you personally can get rid of the ALL of the following feelings in response to the actions of others?
I take expression of blame to include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous or moral indignation, ‘adaptive’ anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, disresectful, cruel, culpable, prideful, perverse, corrupt, tyrannical, inconsiderate, deliberately oppressive, repressive or unfair, a miscreant, insulting, rude, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, seeing the other as a willful perpetuator of social injustice or injustice in general, as committing a moral wrong, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, narcissistic.
Quoting Judaka
Would we still call it punishment if we believed that the other’s motives were not only in their own interests but in the interest of those they allegedly ‘wronged’? And furthermore, that we agree that given the level
of their understanding at the time they took action, their actions were indeed the best they could
possibly do? In other words, dont we only want to punish when we believe the ‘guilty’ party knew or should have known better?
For instance, this:
Quoting Michael Sol
Notice that here we have a combination of irrational emotion and willful evil that form the recipe of righteous anger.
Would you punish a child who locked a nose-bleeding friend in the closet because she was told by another child that a bloody nose is a deadly contagion that can wipe out a whole community?
Or would you teach them what they would like to know anyway?
Do we punish individuals who ostracize deviants because the medicinal folk ways they grew up with i. their very traditional cultures tell them the deviants are
evil? And if we do, isn’t it. asked o. the assumption. they should have known better?
I would argue the cause of blameful rules isnt secondary, it is the primary instigator for the rules and what motivates us recognize that they have been violated. Anger begins with surprise and disappointment. It is a puzzlement. Without this puzzlement and disappointment there is no anger and no blame.
Quoting Judaka
That’s a form of blame, the attribution of irrationality to another. If we believe that one’s motives can be swayed in irrational directions, then our anger tells us we may be able to away them back into the fold. Derk Pereboom’s blame skepticism makes a similar argument, leading to a pared down notion of blame.
I would say yes, the higher mammals can ‘scold’ another they are friendly with for violating an expectation.
That's a useful series of questions. I'm seeing your broader point.
Going back to Gendlin, what is the difference between anger as an emotion or felt meaning and does he provide an account of blame? I am assuming he would see anger as sometimes having a useful role.
Quoting Joshs
I'd also be interested in a few points on this.
Gendlin says emotions are patterns of behavior in situations ( he recognizes a few which are inherited) that don’t take account of the larger context. They are like feeling with blinders on. That can be adaptive in fighting off predators , but not in dealing with your boss. Felt meaning, on the other hand , takes into account the whole situation , giving one many more options of responding to it appropriately and in a nuanced and intricate way.
Quoting Tom Storm
I can give you a taste of how postmodern social
constructionist Ken Gergen looks at blame.
“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement -incorporation or antagonism.”“ if moral deliberation is inherently cultural, then in what sense are we justified in holding individuals responsible for the humane society? Isn't individual blame thus a mystification of our condition of interdependence?”“Blame and responsibility are thus distributed within the community, and indeed the culture.”(Gergen)
If there's a drawback to rage, it is that judgment is hampered and when that happens, as we all know, things begin to spiral out of control.
Is it better to nip it in the bud, or learn to express in a way that's gentlemanly, if you catch my drift. In a way, it's like a nuclear reaction - yes we have atomic weapons that can level entire cities, but we also have relatively safe nuclear power plants.
But what about blame, the thinking that underlies anger?
Even if one never loses one’s temper or shows anger, the central issue here is whether we can transcend blame. Anger takes many forms, like thinking of others as greedy, selfish, thoughtless, immoral. This is still anger, even with no expression of it.
The blame here is the culpability of the person who caused the harm. Josh's argument is, if we get rid of the notion of blame, then we get rid of the root cause of anger.
But moving past this, is it really philosophically correct to not assign blame for the wrong done?
Yes, and the idea of ridding ourselves of blame seems to me to be almost impossible to accomplish, even if it's the right thing to do. We struggle to rid ourselves of pride, jealousy and greed - could blame become the 8th deadly sin?
Quoting L'éléphant
Can you find a way to defend blame in a way that 'redeems' the notion for Joshs?
Getting rid of blame is not logically sound. Why? How do we even start to define harm? Someone caused it, but he couldn't be blamed for it because there's no free will? How do we hold people accountable then? A no-blame morality is untenable and unsustainable because it is a one-sided premise whose burden is on the person harmed.
The desert proponents once argued that punishment is a way for us to acknowledge the humanity of a person. Denying him a punishment is denying his accountability for his actions. And denying his accountability is denying his moral agency. So personhood has this component of culpability. You take away this culpability, then we treat him like we treat innocent animals.
Quoting Joshs
Speaking from my own personal experiences, I'd say blame only enters the picture in the presence of a free agency (someone who's free to act as s/he chooses and thus is responsible/culpable).
Let me relate two kinds of incidents in our lives:
1. You've parked your car under a tree. You go do whatever it is that you had to. After a coupla hours, you return only to find that a branch has broken and has smashed your hood & windscreen. You fly off the handle, but there's no one to point a finger at i.e. there's literally no one to blame. If you do, like most of us, still feel the need to blame someone, anyone, you blame yourself for having lacked the sense to foresee the falling branch (it is after all a possibility, no matter how improbable, that you should have thought about). Then there's always your luck you could hold responsible for your troubles. The bottom line is, in such circumstances, it's either you (your idiocy) OR (bad) luck.
2. Someone drives carelessly and rams his/her vehicle into your car. This person is what I would call a free agency (s/he had a choice and still...). In such cases, you blame the person/persons that injured you or damaged your property.
Thus, on the whole, there are 3 blameworthy individuals.
1. Yourself [your stupidity to be precise]
2. Displeased Fortuna [your (bad) luck]
3. Other people [a free agency]
No reason why all 3 shouldn't work in concert to spoil your day, week, month, year, so on.
What's to note, nevertheless, is that if you'd been (more) careful, if you'd thought things through, if you'd been just that much more wiser, you could've easily eliminated the uncontrollable variables in the anger-blame equation (Fortuna & other people) and that empowers you (you're in charge of your life, emotions, etc.), but at the same time, that makes you responsible for any calamity that befalls you (you yourself are to blame for your mishaps, small & big).
I wouldn’t say wholly responsible for any calamity that befalls me, but responsible at least for my part in it. To eliminate blame is to also refrain from self-blame. Mishaps happen, and they make demands on our attention and effort that we didn’t expect and weren’t prepared for. If we could be honest in attributing blame, then we may be just as angry at ourselves as we would be towards others. But even when we blame ourselves, how often do those we love bear the brunt of our self-deprecating anger? And how many cop the anger they supposedly deserve as well as what we should have inflicted on ourselves? Acknowledging our own part in the mishap - our lack of awareness, consideration or care - should eliminate the majority of blame and therefore the anger directed towards others, but it often compounds the anger instead.
Blame is a way of directing our attention and effort towards a determined cause of pain, humility or loss after the event, which is unlikely to reduce future instances. It’s wasted, if you ask me. Better to direct it towards increasing our capacity for awareness, consideration or care in future situations.
Quoting Joshs
No, should I want to?
Quoting Joshs
Well, I completely disagree and I can't imagine why you think this.
Do we have rules that protect the rights of employees and employers, rental providers and renters, customers and businesses, rules that protect from harassment, the rules of civility or even the rules of a game, on the basis of blame? If I scream at a co-worker or at a cashier, it's only a problem because I can be blamed? We need to ask whether or not I had a bad day? Did my parents raise me right? Was I being influenced by some biological factor? Or is the problem that as a society we want to protect people from being screamed at regardless of the reason?
Anger and blame can be valuable, I don't condemn them without context. I think that people will disagree, we know this, and we know people are different, thus I think our approach should tolerate difference and handle differences with the utmost grace and respect. When something is unfair or harmful, that's when for things to continue running smoothly, some kind of arbitration is needed.
Quoting Joshs
What's the problem?
I find your characterisations alien, I do not believe people care about the violator as they do the rules. Correction of another's behaviour is one way to ensure the rules are followed but it is not the only way, but our motivation or interest is not about the violator, and if imprisoning them or sending them away is the way to ensure the rules are protected then that's what is done. The employee will be fired, the employer sued, the customer banned and etc.
I took it a little too far. Thanks.
Quoting Possibility
You mean shit happens! You can say that again.
Quoting Possibility
Too often. :sad:
Quoting Possibility
Not necessarily, but :ok:
Quoting Possibility
Nature's bloodlust!
Quoting Possibility
Sound advice!
Anger and blame could be valuable only in self-awareness, not in directing towards others. If we believe ourselves righteous in anger towards someone, it’s a sure sign that we don’t understand where they’re coming from. That should give us pause.
Do we really think that attributing blame and directing anger towards someone will repair any damage or prevent future occurrences? Can we predict their response to us that accurately, or are we imposing our assumptions on how they should respond? When something is unfair or harmful, by all means we should take steps to redirect those energies, but I don’t think that can be achieved through blame or anger.
Arbitration is about judgement required to settle a dispute - it’s not about attributing blame, but rather redirecting attention and effort towards seeing that damages are repaired and/or recurrences of unfairness or harm are prevented.
I worry that we may have in our minds differing images of context for anger and blame, at the very least, I can agree that anger and blame are not always high-quality, reliable tools for arbitration. They can be inappropriate and unhelpful. If your argument is that anger and blame are never useful then we disagree. Blame and anger communicate a stern warning, that some behaviour or decision was inappropriate and sometimes there can be some opportunity to rectify things, apologise and correct. Anger can be handled in a measured way and it can be communicated respectfully.
I don't like to talk too much about this kind of subject without context, it is very context dependant. Anger is not always a bad emotion, sometimes people get angry because they care, or it can be used to emphasise a point. Sometimes, anger is a performance, it fulfils some other objective, like showing how you feel. And how it's communicated matters a lot.
It seems that you’re reluctant to put aside anger as a useful ‘tool’ for interaction. I do get that, and I’m certainly not saying that anger is a ‘bad’ emotion, because I don’t think those kinds of judgements are useful at all. But I do think it’s inefficient, and often ineffective, as a ‘tool’ for any interaction.
I don’t accept that people get angry simply because they care - there’s more to it than that. I think we get angry because our connection makes us afraid (of pain, loss or humility) and we’re not willing to accept that fear. I also think that if we need to use anger to emphasise a point, then there’s a communication issue somewhere. Likewise, if anger is our go-to method for expressing how we feel, then I think there’s a need to improve awareness, connection or collaboration in how we interact. This is what I mean by anger being useful in self-awareness.
Anger is a warning sign that the interaction is flawed. Feeling it is not the issue - using it as a ‘tool’ on someone else is. Communicating a perceived inappropriateness of behaviour doesn’t require an expression of anger on my part, unless I’m actively refusing to accept any part in the interaction. When I communicate respectfully, it isn’t the anger that I need to communicate, but my awareness and ongoing connection regarding the flawed interaction - along with my willingness to collaborate in repairing it. Blame and anger just make this more difficult, because they keep my attention and effort directed towards what I cannot change, ie. the past, other people’s behaviour or decisions, etc.
The subject of interaction between people is too complex to talk about so generally and without context, don't you agree? But I can agree that anger is generally inefficient or ineffective as a tool for interaction.
Though was this thread talking about anger as a tool for interaction or for a tool for analysis? For instance, seeing an issue like the Israeli-Palestine conflict or the Russian-Ukrainian conflict through the lens of anger and blame? What is the better way?
Quoting Possibility
Blame skeptics like Derk Pereboom make a distinction between forward looking and backward looking blame. Backward looking blame tends to be retributive, whereas forward looking blame aims to minimize future incidents.
I should note that focusing on increasing our care and consideration implies that we believe we were acting carelessly and inconsiderately, which I consider to be forms of anger-blame.
My claim is that all forms of blame I mentioned indicate a failure of insight on our part. I’m not saying they have no positive benefit. Our blame can cause another to apologize and tow the line. But it never achieves effective insight into why the other chose to act the way they did.
Feeling of blame are always an impetus toward conformity to what we thought should have been.
Quoting Judaka
‘Rights’, like ‘justice’, is a concept that would not exist without anger and blame. Concluding that someone acted unjustly or violated another’s rights is a blameful judgement. Harassment is also a form of blame and anger , as is the concept of incivility. All
of these terms imply that the other knew better, or should have known better, than to do what they did. Do you violate my rights not to be harassed if you trip and fall on me? No, deliberate intent must be involved.
Quoting Judaka
Shift away for a moment from societal rules and laws, and focus instead on the much more relevant and frequent examples of anger and blame on our daily lives. Many of these occur in our relations with people we know well , and it is these that determine our day to day happiness to a much greater extent than the legal situations you refer to.
The legal situations are derivations of the intimate interpersonal interactions we experience. Here we can see how blame and anger are remarkably sensitive manifestations of rifts in the subtle and vulnerable bonds of expectation and trust we develop with our families, friends and acquaintances. Why did my spouse cheat on me , why did my friend insult me, why hasn’t my child called me lately? These are deeply intimate , surprising disappointments in our sense of how others think about us. We thought they cared for us, and now they seem to callously reject us. The hinge of anger and blame is the proximity we feel the other has to our needs and feelings. This is what gives anger the fuel to try to influence the other back into the fold, because we believe at some level they are close to their previous caring self and can be coaxed or forced back to that intimacy with us.
Justice, laws and rules retain this structure of hopeful coaxing or forcing. If we look at the cultural history of blame, we see that as our views of the psychology of interpersonal blame evolves, our notion of legal blame evolves in tandem with it.
How do we hold children accountable for attacking another child out of fear because they didn’t understand the other child’s intent was innocent and peaceful? The whole point is we won’t need the concept
of moral accountability if we recognize that motivation and intent is never to ‘blame’ , but a limited understanding of other’s behavior and thinking is the root of what we mistakenly call immorality. There are all
sorts of ways we can protect ourselves from the potentially harmful actions of those whose limited insights make them a potential danger to us, as is the case with autistic children who can be uncontrollably violent with other family members. It’s important to note here that I am not considering the autistic child’s behavior irrational or parhological. On the contrary, it is a reflection of the child’s appropriate interpretation of their situation, given their inefficient processing of social and perceptual cues.
Ditching the concept of accountability allows us to know how to support others while protecting ourselves from their violence , rather than treating them
like demons.
How many times do you hold lovers, friends and
family members ‘accountable’ for actions you blame them for rather than blaming your own failure to effectively construe their thinking?
We wouldn’t have anger and blame as tools
for analysis if they weren’t already being used as tools of interaction. Would it be possible to effectively understand such conflicts without assuming a basis in anger and blame? Put differently, what would be left of these conflicts without such feelings?
I think this is a great topic, but you're asking questions that aren't actually applicable to reality. To explain, the functions of the brain, are in fact, the functions of the brain. These functions also include the executive function of perception and formulating thoughts on perception. Modern neuroscience shows us that basic behavioral protocols are initiated to achieve individual homeostasis, by and large, but that those protocols can be informed by values and concepts integrated through executive function perception. So, what are we dealing with here?
Anger and the other emotions you discussed are not issues at all. In fact, they are emotions that are essential to your survival, as well as your long-term homeostasis, and maximization thereof. However, the brain is also acutely perceptive of inequalities in homeostasis contributive resources between biological entites (nobody cares about being unequal with the person with cancer). Inequalities that, if the observer feels have no justifiable explanation, or the explanation includes behaviors that threaten homeostasis, then not only does one become angry, but often aggressive as a matter of function. The kicker here is the executive function value and concept integration.
Let's say I value equality as a standard for behavior. Then percieved inequality is going to incite anger, and likely agression, in response to what I have integrated into my behavioral processing mechanisms (amgdyla, thalamus, hippocampus, mesocorticolymbic, etc.) and for the pursuit of overcoming perceived disturbance of homeostasis. However, inequality is not something anyone can remove from reality, is a fact of nature. Thus, if I value the removal of an ineradicable factof reality, my anger systems will begin to burden me, and thereby reduce homeostasis, perhaps even long-term. The same is going to be true with any other value one integrates into the "threatens homeostasis" category of protocols for which there is no remedy, or correction possible. However, let's say I don't care about inequality. Let's say, on the contrary, I have integrated the value that inequality is the proper and realistic representation of individual aptitude within a given domain of production (art, music, basketball, coal mining), then I won't be perturbed at all. In fact, I will celebrate it, pursue, and achieve homeostasis by the behavioral standards that are instantiated as a result of that value integration. So, you know what I think about it all? Well, I'll tell you:
Philosophy has produced no real way to deal with the intrinsic emotions that you enumerated, especially the ones humanity is just so burdened by, because philosophers have NEVER understood the nature of the brain, and thereby the nature of consciousness. But, neuroscience has really revealed a good deal to us now, and nobody seems to want to explore it. And the reason for that is, that modern neuroscience verifies and validates every unpopular philosophical precept that dominates both religion, as well the academician philosophers in our educational milliue. That aptitude is real, that reality is real, that the brain is a material entity, that the brain has an intrinsic nature, that the nature of the brain can be predicted and tested, that the brain not only produces consciousness but also regulates every other function of the body, and that it's primary directive as established by evolution and the nature of the systems that gave rise to it is the pursuit of its own individual achievement and maximization of homeostasis. This shit flies right in the face of accepted modern philosophy, most of which being informed by Christian sentiment, and by proxy Kant, Marx, Foucault, Descartes, Plato (although not Christian still mystical), and Hume, whom all posit ideas that are contradictory to reality, and frankly, are complete bullshit.
So, that all being said, here's you a few good ethical propositions that are consistent with human nature by which to predicate your personal approach at dealing with anger:
1. Understand it is only a neural function designed to help you
2. Understand that any conclusions you draw while angry are likely to be irrational, and thereby likely to induce more anger and homeostatic precarity and disruption
3. That in order to achieve homeostasis and be free of the harmful effects potentially implied by anger, your conclusions must be rationally drawn in accordance with the most reliable data you can find
4. That every other human's brain is bound to the same functions and thereby intrinsically required to be respected in it's nature as an equal but independent entity from you for the sake of overall homeostasis for all people involved in the circumstances impacting said homeostasis negatively
Just these alone being integrated by most people would solve half of the worlds problems, and de-mystify anger as a neural phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is some truth to the assertion of the absence of philosophical approaches to these perceived issues, but there is always Epicureanism and Stoicism which did wonders for people, especially Epicureanism.
Luckily as it happens, actual philosophers are exploring and addressing these issues, I happen to be one of them. Feel free to ask me for clarity, or expansion of anything I have posited here.
I think the Israeli-Palestine conflict is a clear example of the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of blame and anger. What would a win-win situation look like here? Everyone is so focused on the significance of history in such a limited space, they’re ignoring aspects of the present reality. They acknowledge present pain and loss, but what’s not being recognised is the present state of humility. This is why the conflict continues, because both sides focus on past or consolidated pride to avoid a sense of humility in any present or future interaction.
Humility in this sense isn’t self-blame, though - it’s being honest about how far our present reality is from where we expect or prefer it to be, and about the distribution of attention and effort over time required to close the gap. Keeping in mind that we can only intend forward in time, and anything worth doing well involves choosing awareness over ignorance, connection over isolation and collaboration over exclusion.
Quoting Possibility
Quoting Joshs
Sure, it can imply that - if you’re focusing on consolidating a judgement of past behaviour; backward-looking blame, as you say. But the distribution of attention and effort I’m referring to here is more in line with taking responsibility in future interactions, rather than being morally responsible for past behaviour.
This corresponds to the increase in arbitration and mediation for legal situations regarding harm, disappointment or feelings of rejection.
I am wary of anger used as a tool for interaction - to try to ‘coax or force’ another back into intimacy, for instance. There may be an alternative perspective to what you’ve described here. Feelings of anger are a warning sign that the interaction is flawed. Using anger as a tool in this situation seems not so much a ‘hopeful coaxing’ but expressing a selfish threat to withdraw intimacy - believing our position, our needs and feelings, to be uncompromisingly central to the relationship.
Legal tools such as arbitration or mediation focus on the relation itself or ongoing interaction as central, rather than the ‘needs and feelings’ of one or the other party. That isn’t to say that our needs and feelings have no value, but that they form only one aspect of a broader reality - one in which justice, laws, rules and blame could be considered arbitrary.
I realize that the term blame is loaded with all kinds of oppressive moralistic connotations, and that’s why blame skeptics and incompatiblists ,embodied cognitive scientists , legal scholars and postmodern social constructionists are racing to distance themselves from the word. I agree with their rejection of the idea of blame as based on belief in traditional free will. The notion of blame I think still remains is something that many may not consider blame at all. But my notion of blame has
to do with aspects within models of psychological and social functioning threat rely on the idea that values are conditioned and shaped. Jesse Prinz says babies are natural psychopaths that need to be conditioned into
moral concepts.
You mentioned attention and effort. Attention and cognitive effort are central features of many contemporary cognitive theories. These concepts as
they are used in cognitive models assume that attention and effort are processes that are themselves
conditioned. They use experimental manipulations to attempt to demonstrate this. Phenomenolgosts like Eugene Gendlin and Husserl critique this idea
of attention as a kind of spotlight. They instead argue that attention is a creative process. We create what we are attending ro rather than noticing something that was assumedto be already there.
The difference here is between a causative
model and an intentional one. Causative
models are semi-arbitrary and based on conditioning. They imply the concepts of anger and blame , because these have to do with our experience of others behavior as semi-arbitrary and subject to shaping influences. We’re. it talking about moral condemnation here , just simple irritation and annoyance. Those are enough to lead us to try to ‘forcefully’ reshape attention and effort, rather than recognize that we always act to define and extend our understanding of
the world in the most appropriate fashion available to us at the time, given our pepe-existing knowledge.
Although our needs and feelings , far from being separable from a mitral, rational understanding of the situation , form the very basic of our rationality. Strongly polarized feelings between disputants are manifestations of different paradigms of rationality, different worldviews.
I’m with you here. Cognitive theories, being narrowly focused on cognition, fail to recognise attention and effort as a pre-cognitive, creative/consolidating relation. In creating the object of our attention, we simultaneously consolidate the subject who attends - neither of which can be assumed to be ‘already there’ as such.
Quoting Joshs
Agreed. And when we recognise this, it should be clear that whatever reality may be in itself must include what appears to us irrational.
That translates to aggression.
There is no such thing as "narrowly focused" on the most complex and sophisticated computational entity in the known universe. Such a "narrow" categorization is not just a reductionist fallacy, but an avoidance of established science in favor of feelings. If your conclusions on such emotions are non predominantly predicated on the assessments provided by cognitive neursoscience, and as much data as you can accrue in the field, then you have no opinion. You're simply just positing thoughts. Furthermore, this statement is completely incoherent. There is no "pre-cognitive" anything in human experience, it's made-up bullshit and a further reduction. "Creative/consolidating relation" describes what appears to be nothing that makes any rational sense. And objects of attention are observed, not created. In other words, only that which exists can be apprehended by the brain in the form of sensory data and analyzed across its astronomically advanced system of networks. This is all complete gibberish.
Quoting Possibility
Why would one recognize something that is clearly not true? Rationality is a clealry defined, highly specific concept:
The quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic.
So is reason:
Think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.
So is logic:
Reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity.
In other words, to accept rationality as relatrive to a paradigm, a group of feelings, or some other non-rationality associated term, is itself irrationality by definition. Reality is never in a position where the irrational must be included into our model. If something appears irrational, there is a flaw in either a premise of ours, or in our inductive assessment. Not that reality and irrationality are compatible. Where do you people generate this anti-philosophy from?
A lot of it is generated from cognitive neuroscience. Check out anything by Panksepp or Antonio Damasio.
Or Lisa Barrett’s ‘How Emotions are Made: the Secret Life of the Brain’:
“ You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget.
Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger. It doesn’t matter whether you’re choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons —your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses.
Antonio Damasio, in his bestseller Descartes’ Error, observes that a mind requires passion (what we would call affect) for wisdom. He documents that people with damage to their interoceptive network, particularly in one key body-budgeting region, have impaired decision-making. Robbed of the capacity to generate interoceptive predictions, Damasio’s patients were rudderless. Our new knowledge of brain anatomy now compels us to go one step further. Affect is not just necessary for wisdom; it’s also irrevocably woven into the fabric of every decision.”
Oh, the reduction and the false dichotomy fallacies that seem to take everybody for fools.
No, man.
"Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget," is but one, singular function that the brain performs in a vast array of functions that includes memory, concept generation, analysis of perceptions, regulating all organs and homeostatic systems necessary for maintained survival, and get this, no shit, executive function; the exact same executive function that allowed this person to not only observe what she believes she has observed in the brain inductively (rationality), but concisely and tactfully right a fucking book on the subject (even more rationality). It's nonsense. You don't get to convey something to me as that is a result of exclusively using the prefrontal cortex executive functions that allow for reason, to tell me reason in an "implausible fiction." This person shoud be ashamed of herself for witing this, especially if she's a cognitive neuroscientist.
Quoting Joshs
Now, this is far more inlign with what is understood in neuroscience.
Quoting Joshs
Bingo! It is one of the brain's feedbackloops that induces more experience through action/behavior, thereby more data accrual, data to be abstracted from to form concepts, that inform future behaviors and the pursuit of homeostasis achievment and maximization. Also being just one singular group of functions that the brain helms. The key to understanding this awesome shit, as opposed to the quackery above, is that the observance of self-eveident neural protocols such as rationality, are absolutely not incompatible, or negated by self-evident neural protocols used to regulat temperature, heart beats, emotional processing, or any other demosntrable function of it. The brain is literally doing all of it. Meaning, when you see that the science demonstrates another group of processes and functions, you do not conclude them to be of primacy,at or dismiss other observations that are sound and reliably observed, but incorporate them into the body of knowledge of observed and tested neural processes and functions upon which to draw conclusions.
Here is a plethora of sources on the brain, go check out what it is doing at all times, it is literally mind-boggling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroeconomics
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6043598/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00359/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5586212/
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Field_theories_of_consciousness
https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_03/i_03_p/i_03_p_que/i_03_p_que.html
https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-functions/visual-perception
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542184/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10870199/
Plenty more where this came from.
What you need to do is find out what the neuroscience sources you endorse are saying about the sources you reject as false and bogus. It’s easy to do, and maybe you and I should do it together. For instance, you refer to Barrett’s work as ‘quackery’ and praise Damasio. But what does Damasio say about Barrett? You treat sources your reject as though no self-respecting cognitive psychologist would treat them seriously , but that reflects a misunderstanding of how such theorists are viewed within the cognitive neuroscience community.
A reading of just the sources I sent demonstrates the complexity of the brain, that's specifically my point. And I don't care about opinions, I care about arguments. I don't care if he loved her just so much, thought the world of her, best scientist of all time. The argument she posited is both invalid and unsound. But, the one of his you showed was not. That's how that works. But, yeah, happy to explore anything you want together. But, I will not do so with anybody unwilling to accept new data and contend with ideas. Nor will I stand for negation as a result of confusing results in research.
Quoting Joshs
No cognitive scientist would treat that kind of assertion with dignity, unless that person had a vested interest in deceiving you into believing that rationality was a myth. He/she would, of course, employ rationality to attempt as much, just like your source did, but no cognitive scientist without an agenda would do so. The brain is far too complex to relay that kind of position, especially to do it fallaciously. But, the quackery I was talking about was the gibberish non-science from that other guy who had commented.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, let me tell what that misunderstanding is. Theorists mean nothing in the realm of logical assessment, philosophy, and science. Their theories do, and if certain parts of those theories are predicated on reduction and false dichotomy fallacies, trained and dedicated philosophers like myself are gonna call that shit so fast it's going to startle everyone in the room. Gadflys and all. Don't take it personal, it's what we do. Besides, it is assertions like "rationality is an implausible fiction," which is literally a contradiction of its own assertion to ascribe truth values to the function that created truth values as a metric, that is eating the fucking world up and destroying lives. So, I can't let that kind of thing slide without comment.
Again: I think it's possible to think beyond anger and blame entirely, but we can only do this by giving up the aims that anger and blame serve, ie. wealth and power.
In other words, people get angry and blame (others) for the purpose of securing or obtaining wealth and power.
If people wouldn't seek wealth and power, they would have no reason to get angry and blame.
Wow. He doth protest too much, methinks.
Sure, cognition as computation is the best we can get - and that’s fine if computation is all we’re after. I’m not denying that cognition can efficiently process almost all of human experience. Almost. And I get that what it cannot process is arguably not worth your attention. That’s an opinion, and you’re welcome to it. It’s a choice you make to dismiss any aspect of experience that makes no rational sense, just as it’s a choice I make not to. That doesn’t mean I prefer feelings to cognition, or to established science - that’s a false dichotomy. But I maintain that cognition is a narrow focus when it comes to attention - my use of ‘narrow’ being relative to the reality of experience, not to other forms of computation. If cognition were really as comprehensive as you believe, then it shouldn’t need you to come to its rescue against these ‘feelings’. It would stand up to any of the thoughts I’ve posited.
There seems to be more to human attention and more to what exists than what can be apprehended, let alone analysed. None of that would capture your attention, of course - no, it needs to be consolidated into an object for you first. Only then can you observe it as such, as if it was already there. This is a limitation you intentionally impose on how you process experience. Fair enough, uncertainty is scary. But you’re in no position to impose the same limitation on me.
Creativity is ‘making sense’ of reality. It involves awareness of, connection and collaboration with all possible qualitative ideas and available energy as well as logical structure. Feelings aren’t much use to cognition without rationality, but neither are they accurately experienced if we reduce their quality or energy to only what cognition can process - ie. only what is rational. The thing is that quality or energy may exist and even be experienced without any initial sense being ‘made’ of it. This is little more than ‘noise’ that has a quality and/or energy about it. Yes, it’s arguably ‘incoherent’ or ‘gibberish’ in relation to cognition, but it does exist (although it is no-thing). The fact that it makes no rational sense is meaningful in relation to understanding the limitations of human cognition, and its underlying susceptibility to distortions of affect.
But you go ahead and aggressively dismiss it. Use all that cognitive power you have at your disposal. I’m sure that’ll work. It’s not like qualitative relations of energetic improbability ever emerged to consolidate into anything worthwhile, like the universe, life or consciousness...so go ahead and forget I even brought it up...
Is it really philosophically correct to take for granted that the party who feels wronged is automatically the arbiter of morality?
Quoting L'éléphant
As the poor and the powerless, and the innocent animals have experienced for millennia.
What this discussion is lacking is an acknowledgment of the role of the power differential in moral judgments.
The one who can punish is in the position of power.
If punishment is justified, as a matter of principle, then might makes right. Do you want to go in that direction?
And how people treat innocent animals? By keeping them in horrible conditions and then killing them or letting them die a gruesome death.
Why? People generally don't consider it very important to understand others. In fact, they generally prefer to see themselves as the arbiters of the others' reality, they prefer to see themselves as the judges over what is true for another person, esp. concerning the other person's inner life. They make this very clear in their insistence of using you-language.
Of course. Blame and anger are effective means for gaining and keeping power over others. It's why people do it.
Quoting Possibility
But such humility would require them to give up their identity. And --
Quoting Tom Storm
So if you live in a suburb, and dry your laundry by hanging it out in the air in your backyard, and your neighbor burns trash in his backyard, so that the smoke makes your laundry filthy -- you see no problem with this? You don't think he was careless and inconsiderate to do so, and that he should have at least warned you, so that you could take down the fresh laundry on time?
The solution is that you buy a dryer? But that is still care and consideration on your part, and as such, anger-blame.
Early Buddhism maintains something similar, but the matter is rather complex to explain (lots of things to remember).
You used this line of reasoning to defend Nazis.
So Putin's "failure of insight" is what exactly? That Slavic people are inferior and must let the West rule over them? That when the West makes promises to Russia and doesn't keep them, Russia must accept this and bow to the West?
And what if it's not failure at all?
Quoting Joshs
I asked you (and @Tom Storm) about this before, but you didn't reply. Namely, on the difference between I-statements and you-statements (I-language and you-language).
E.g.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/632636
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/647537
I point this out because you're using you-language in your discussions of a topic that I think could be approached more effectively when acknowledging the distinction between I-language and you-language.
Yet everyone wants ‘world peace’ - we want an end to war, violence and oppression. We just don’t want to believe we are contributing to it in any way, and we don’t want to be ‘the one to change’. We say the problem is ‘over there’, between ‘those people’, and we label them ‘evil’, when the reality is that we are likely to behave the same way in the same situation. So it’s important for us to genuinely understand ‘their’ situation, by recognising what it would take for us to intend the same behaviour, before we can understand what it would take to change the trajectory.
So we also need to watch our use of they-language. When we include ourselves in what we say about ‘people’, we recognise our own capacity to make the same errors of judgement. Using ‘they’ seeks to distance our self-awareness from the statements we make. It implies a passive self-righteousness.
You do know what I mean. Are you saying that rape is justified sometimes? lol.
No one could say, yes I raped her as a self-defense.
How about we think before we take the neutral position or the it-depends position.
Quoting baker
First of all, I don't understand your post. Power differential in moral judgments -- what's that? Say we have a court functioning with integrity. Is it really that hard to discern fault here?
How self-righteous, and actively so!
You assume entirely too much and allow too little room.
But perhaps we think that those might actually not be "errors of judgment" to begin with, but in fact virtues. If anything, the state of the world suggests that anger and blame are virtues, something to strive for. And that we (minority-we) are ninnies to think them vices.
[i]A: Tommy, why did you hit Harry?
B: Because he then hit me back![/i]
Is Tommy the victim here?
How about we discuss the complexity of the matter.
That whether something is perceived as moral or not has to do with the relative positions in the power hierarchy of those involved.
The same kind of action is perceived differently, depending on whether it was done by a person of wealth and power, or if it was done by a person of low socio-economic status.
Or if it was done by your boss or by you. Or by a teacher or his student.
If a rich person hits you with their car and runs off, they can expect to get away with it.
If you were to hit a rich person with your car and run off, you should get ready for grave consequences.
Etc.
You mean a modern court in a democratic country where having a good lawyer can get one off the hook for pretty much anything, and where a person with few financial means has to endure injustice?
This is a funny mixture of composition, hasty generalization, and division fallacies all at once: https://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/fallacies.html#:~:text=Sweeping%20generalization%20(The%20fallacy%20of,%22Christians%20generally%20dislike%20atheists.
Where'd you pick up this nonsense argument?
Quoting baker
Sounds like you hate the state, buddy. As lawyers and injustice are apparatuses of state administration of law, you don't got much else to blame here. In other words, democracy itself for having given rise to such a phenomenon.
Quoting baker
That's because people aren't thinking clearly. All violations of the human consciousness are evil, doesn't matter how much "power" they have.
This is a common misunderstanding. It is the threat of intentional violence, oppression or exclusion that is an effective means for gaining and keeping power over others. Blame and anger use this to compensate for ignorance, isolation or exclusion of affect.
Quoting baker
Not give up their identity, but recognise that this sense of who they were is not the same as who they are. The significance of identity has a temporal relativity that is subject to human ignorance, isolation and exclusion.
Quoting baker
I had a feeling you might interpret this as a judgement of you, but it’s more an understanding of us, and a call to be self-aware. You can take this how you like - just be aware of possible implications.
I do agree that our use of ‘you-language’ implies (not intends) an ‘objective’ judgement of the other based on our own moral perspective, and that using ‘I-language’ instead at least acknowledges the relativity of this perspective. I’m only proposing that we take it a step further, by acknowledging our mutual capacity for anger and blame, for instance.
Quoting baker
You’re reading more judgement in my words than is there. I’ll grant the implication is probably not intentional, but it does present an ‘out’ that we should at least be aware of, just like being aware of the relativity of an implied (not intended) judgement in ‘you-language’ .
Quoting baker
Sure, but then we wouldn’t have any qualms about including ourselves in what we say about ‘people’, would we? When we use ‘we-language’, we’re more likely to refrain from any sense of moral judgement of what we’re describing - any distinction between ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’. An ‘error in judgement’ is recognised as part of human nature. This way we can strive for accuracy instead of ‘goodness’, which is relative.