Moral Anxiety and Moral Agency

Abstract

Nothing in human affairs is worthy of great anxiety. -PlatoHow much should I give to charity? Is it okay for me to break this promise? As an advocate of women's rights, can I vote for the pro-life candidate? When we face difficult moral decisions like these, we feel a distinctive unease: we must make a choice but we are unsure what the correct thing to do is. Yet despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, surprisingly little work has been done to either characterize this emotion-this moral anxiety-or explain the role it plays in moral decision making. That's a mistake. Given that moral anxiety is a pervasive feature of our lives, it is important that we understand what it is. Moreover, and more importantly, given the many ways in which emotions can inform and distort our reasoning, it is also important to understand the role that moral anxiety plays in moral decision making.In what follows, I will argue that moral anxiety is central to good moral decision making and agency-it's an emotion that we ought to cultivate. This claim is striking on its own. But it also upends the familiar picture, one found among philosophers and folk alike, of anxiety as an inherently destructive emotion: the anxious person is someone consumed-paralyzed-by intense anxiety. What could be valuable in that? To make my case, I begin by developing a model of moral anxiety that builds from work on anxiety in general and social anxiety in particular ( § §1-3). The resulting account reveals moral anxiety to be an emotion that (i) we experience when we are uncertain about the correctness of a moral decision that we are contemplating or have made, and that (ii) prompts epistemic behaviors like deliberation and information gathering that are aimed at resolving our underlying uncertainty. With this model in hand, I then argue that moral anxiety is an emotion that is particularly well-suited to engage the capacities that are essential to good moral decision making and agency-deliberation, reflection, and

Emotion, deliberation, and the skill model of virtuous agency

“…I return to this in §6. It is also worth noting that this picture of anxiety as generally beneficial is widely endorsed by both social and clinical psychologists (e.g., Barlow, 2001;Leary & Kowalski, 1995;Marks & Nesse, 1994); it is gaining increasing attention among philosophers as well (e.g., Hookway, 1998;Kurth, 2015Kurth, , 2016Kurth, , 2018bNagel, 2010). 19 This picture of anxiety as a system that can recruit additional (cognitive, physiological) resources on an as-needed basis is thought to be a general feature of emotions, not something specific to anxiety.…”

“…So understood, practical anxiety can be seen as one of the (likely many) epistemic feelings that beings like us have. More specifically, practical anxiety is a metacognitive mechanism that (a) is triggered by an assessment that some threshold of uncertainty about what to do has been met, and that (b) tends to generate feelings of unease and associated epistemic behaviors (information gathering, reflection, reassessment) aimed at resolving the uncertainty at hand (Kurth, , ).…”

“…I return to this in §6. It is also worth noting that this picture of anxiety as generally beneficial is widely endorsed by both social and clinical psychologists (e.g., Barlow, ; Leary & Kowalski, ; Marks & Nesse, ); it is gaining increasing attention among philosophers as well (e.g., Hookway, ; Kurth, , , ; Nagel, ).…”

The Emotion of Self-Reflexive Anxiety

“…Or take Kurth's (2015) example of considering putting one's mother in a nursing home because she is suffering from Alzheimer's and one sees oneself no longer capable of providing her with the care she needs. Kurth presents this case as a case of moral anxiety.…”

“…As a reaction to an uncertainty about what is the correct or appropriate thing to do, moral anxiety ‘prompts epistemic behaviors (e.g., deliberation, information gathering) aimed at resolving the uncertainty at hand’ (Kurth 2015: 183) and behaviors aiming at ‘minimizing the risks that come along with having to act in the face of such uncertainty (e.g. deferring to ‘moral authorities’)’ (Kurth 2015: 179). Self-reflexive anxiety, too, may be a reaction to moral dilemmas and conflicts.…”