Are there really so many moral emotions? Carving morality at its functional joints

Abstract

In recent decades, a large body of work has highlighted the importance of emotional processes in moral cognition. Since then, a heterogeneous bundle of emotions as varied as anger, guilt, shame, contempt, empathy, gratitude, and disgust have been proposed to play an essential role in moral psychology. However, the inclusion of these emotions in the moral domain often lacks a clear functional rationale, generating conflations between merely social and properly moral emotions. Here, we build on (i) evolutionary theories of morality as an adaptation for attracting others’ cooperative investments, and on (ii) specifications of the distinctive form and content of moral cognitive representations. On this basis, we argue that only indignation (“moral anger”) and guilt can be rigorously characterized as moral emotions, operating on distinctively moral representations. Indignation functions to reclaim benefits to which one is morally entitled, without exceeding the limits of justice. Guilt functions to motivate individuals to compensate their violations of moral contracts. By contrast, other proposed moral emotions (e.g. empathy, shame, disgust) appear only superficially associated with moral cognitive contents and adaptive challenges. Shame doesn’t track, by design, the respect of moral obligations, but rather social valuation, the two being not necessarily aligned. Empathy functions to motivate prosocial behavior between interdependent individuals, independently of, and sometimes even in contradiction with the prescriptions of moral intuitions. While disgust is often hypothesized to have acquired a moral role beyond its pathogen-avoidance function, we argue that both evolutionary rationales and psychological evidence for this claim remain inconclusive for now.

An evolutionary contractualist theory of morality

“…We have not, however, addressed the question of how we react to immorality. Outrage over injustice, including that suffered by others, is one of the characteristic manifestation of the moral sense, and is itself governed by the logic of morality (Fitouchi et al, 2022a). That is, there is a moral way to react to immorality.…”

“…This likely is the case of many behaviors perceived as both disgusting and immoral. In fact, a growing body of experimental evidence suggests that when participants are asked to judge disgusting or apparently harmless actionsfrom spitting (Royzman et al, 2009) to sacrilegious ideas (Royzman et al, 2014; to GMOs to homosexuality it is the perception that these behaviors unfairly impact the welfare of other people, rather than feelings of disgust per se, that best predicts their moralization (see Fitouchi et al, 2022a, for a review).…”

“…Second, would their immoral behavior eventually be discovered, they would need to assess the exact extent of what they must give to others to redeem their fault (section 9). The management of these two problems is the likely function of guilt (Fitouchi et al, 2022a).…”

Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

“…In particular, the Theory of Dyadic Morality maintains that all moral judgements stem from perceptions of dyadic harm-i.e., from perceptions that an 'agent' intentionally causes suffering to a 'patient' (Gray et al, 2012(Gray et al, , 2014Schein & Gray, 2015. Other unitary theories argue that all moral judgements are outputs of fairness computations, tracking violations of mutual benefit between cooperative partners (André et al, 2022;Baumard, 2016;Fitouchi et al, 2021b) 2 . By contrast, theories based on distinct cognitive domains-such as Moral Foundations Theory-maintain that moral cognition is composed of multiple, functionally distinct, domain-specific mechanisms, some of which track stimuli unrelated to harm or fairness (Graham et al, 2013).…”

“…As researchers have noted, however, many behaviors are disgusting without being immoral (Kayyal et al, 2015;Piazza et al, 2018;Schein et al, 2016). It seems, moreover, evolutionarily unclear why disgust should have acquired such a secondary moralizing function (Fitouchi et al, 2021b), and the experimental evidence seems overall to cast doubt on this possibility (Piazza et al, 2018, for an extensive review). In particular, a meta-analysis (Landy & Goodwin, 2015), highly powered replications (Ghelfi et al, 2020;Johnson et al, 2016), and recent studies (Jylkkä et al, 2021) strongly suggest that feelings of disgust do not increase moral condemnation, nor cause moralization of otherwise morally neutral actions.…”