The appeal to emotion as a device for moral persuasion

Is it reasonable for moral advocates/theorists to try to persuade people to accept their moral agenda by simply appealing to their emotions?

Think of vegans trying to persuade meat eaters not to eat meat by showing them graphic scenes from slaughterhouses. Or more broadly think of suffering focused moral advocates trying to persuade people by showing them scenes of horrific suffering. Here is an example of this practice of appeal to emotions that I warn you is really graphic and upsetting.

If this practice is reasonable, an immediate objection follows. Imagine all the ways a moral egoist or a psychopath can use this technique by instrumentally appealing to the dark side of people’s nature. Or as a more concrete example recall Hitler’s successful attempt to persuade the public that certain groups of people are morally disgusting and should be eliminated. Furthermore, in his book “Against empathy” Paul Bloom explains how even virtuous, much-praised emotions such as emotional empathy can bias our moral judgment and sway us toward suboptimal outcomes.

A particular group of meta-ethical theorists are especially immune from arguments that try to oppose this practice of appeal to emotions. These theorists call themselves emotivists. They regard ethical and value judgments as expressions of emotion and perhaps also an attempt to also elicit similar emotions in others. (SEP, 2018) Hence they justify the practice of appeal to emotions on the same ground.

The appeal to emotion in order to morally persuade is not the primary thing that I find objectionable. What really bugs me these days is that some theorists are not just using appeal to emotions as a persuasion technique to argue for their moral agenda, but even base their whole morality on a strong emotion. In other words, they use a strong emotion as a fundamental axiom of their system.

Perhaps, for too long I have been reading normative ethicists that do not even mention their meta-ethical positions. Perhaps what makes me uncomfortable when reading these moral theorists is exactly their emotivist honesty. Speaking of me, if I am basing my moral system on my core moral intuitions I will easily end up as a moral egoist. At least I and the average Joe will, and to say nothing about people who lean toward the psychopathic end on the empathy axis.

In my view, a large part of the enterprise of moral philosophy has a single dominant purpose – by using reason to build on and improve our, biased, parochial commonsense morality. In other words, by relying on higher faculties we often override our strong emotions and moral intuitions to make the world a better place. Note that “better place” in the last sentence also depends on our value judgment and in the case of these theorists this value judgment will again depend on their strong emotion. So, below I will use a salient contemporary example of this kind of moral theorist/advocate and will try to question his axiom.

Negative utilitarianism focused on extreme suffering

A prominent contemporary advocate of this kind of moral system is Brian Tomasik. As he wrote to me in a private conversation:

The emotion of wanting to prevent extreme suffering is the fundamental axiom of my moral system.

It seems strange to me that emotivists such as Tomasik put so much negative moral weight on extreme suffering.

In this video (Beware, he appeals to the watcher’s emotions by showing some horrific graphic videos. If you have a strong stomach watch this video in order to see the appeal to emotions technique in practice) Tomasik objects to the following argument against negative utilitarianism by Ord:

“In their day to day lives, people make tradeoffs between happiness and suffering. They go to the gym, they work hard in order to buy themselves nicer food, they sprint for the bus to make it to the theatre on time, they read great books and listen to beautiful music when they could instead be focusing on removing suffering from their lives. According to all commonly held theories of wellbeing, such tradeoffs can improve people’s lives.”

He counters this argument by saying that this does not apply to the case of extreme suffering (relevant frame of video) and further illustrates why with an example of preference reversal of our organism’s value function – even if we choose few minutes of torture in order to gain 100 years of happy life our preferences will instantly change in the first few moments of the extreme torture. So, according to Tomasik, this unbearable conscious experience is the main reason to prioritize the prevention of extreme suffering over all other things.

This I think does not hold. I don’t understand the need for deliberately going back to being moral slaves of our lower faculties’ value function. Just because our value functions are hackable it does not mean that during a rational moral reflection (when using reason to decide what matters most to us) we should put infinite weight to things that can hack us (such as extreme suffering). As an immediate counter to this imagine a Middle East religious fundamentalist villager driven primarily by the emotion to keep his honor. He will justify any action that will preserve his honor even if he needs to kill his loved ones due to a minor norm violation (by our standards). Is this a reasonable thing to do?

utility(Honor) = +infinite > utility (Welfare of daughter) = +1000000^10

Back to the problem of value function reversal due to extreme experiences. How can humans avoid this form of weakness of will (value function reversal) that Tomasik presented? Consider the following example:

A person needs to choose between brazen bull torture or death of her children. She reflects upon this and chooses brazen bull torture. However, before torture, she anticipates that torture will hack her value function and pre-commits – makes her decision to be tortured irreversible:

Before making the decision:

utility(Brazen bull)= -1 000 000 000

utility(death of her children)=-1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000^1 000 000

So even though extreme suffering altered her value function during the torture this horrific experience is irreversible. By this strategic move, she saved her children from her weakness of will.

During the torture:

utility(Brazen bull)=-infinite > utility (death of children) =-1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000^1 000 000

So the thing that puzzles me is why would we put an infinite negative value to things that are infinitely abhorrent to our organism. Just because natural selection molded our organism to infinitely abhors extreme suffering it does not follow that we should by reflection decide to make this our primary goal. (see rule number 7 here).

People anticipate this bug of our program and often counteract it by taking precautionary moves against their future selves. Think of war prisoners who decide to kill themselves in order not to reveal important information due to torture. Or think of war generals before a battle who decide to burn their ships in order to prevent the future selves of each soldier to change their mind due to fear and run away.

Furthermore, some consequentialist theorists argue that from an impartial perspective a torture (extreme suffering) of a terrorist who needs to confess about a nuclear device hidden somewhere in the middle of Berlin is justified (seems intuitive). I wonder what Tomasik would do if he finds himself in this kind of realistic scenario (not in a hypothetical dilemma but the actual situation). It is the same consequentialist argument that given our limited resources, from an impartial perspective will lead us to forego an extremely costly operation in order to rescue a little girl stuck in a deep hole underground (seems counterintuitive).

On the other hand, if the threshold objection of Tomasik holds I don’t see why a classic utilitarian cannot use it to argue for his position. Since as in the case of extreme suffering, extreme bliss will also hack and reverse our value function. (recall rats clicking the pleasure button until exhaustion). This should bring Tomasik back to the classic utilitarian value function:

1 unit of suffering = 1 unit of happiness

Extreme suffering= – infinite

Extreme bliss= +infinite

Tomasik is aware of this, he writes:

But, as several readers of this piece have pointed out to me, we can imagine a symmetric situation with respect to extreme pleasure. For example, imagine that a person initially judges that some brief period of extreme pleasure isn’t worth it if it will cause a long period of future suffering. However, suppose the person happens to get a taste of the extreme pleasure, and during that moment, he changes his mind and is willing to accept any amount of future suffering in order to make the pleasure continue. (One example of this might be religious fundamentalists who have premarital sex despite the possibility they’ll be eternally tortured for doing so. That said, one can dispute whether continuing to have sex in such cases is driven more by pleasure or by aversion to the pain of stopping.)

However, he still sides with negative utilitarianism:

just because negative utilitarianism aligns with my emotion-driven intuitions about what’s morally important.

This assumption of negative utilitarians that extreme suffering has a more moral weight that extreme bliss is questionable, at least we would need to find a way to measure their intensity in order to compare them or even find some novel way to compare them.

To which Tomasik replied to me in a private conversation:

My view is that there’s no “right answer” about how to compare various things of value/disvalue.

In conclusion, I don’t see how anyone can counter this emotivist position with reason. All that you can do is express your different moral intuitions. And that seems to be happening in everyday life situations. Here are few examples that first come to mind: open-borders advocates care about immigrants and are disgusted by their opponents who don’t care about people outside the borders. The people who oppose open-borders advocates are puzzled by the lack of parochialism and this egalitarian urge to help strangers, most of the time they just ignore these policy proposals. Vegans are disgusted by meat eaters, but meat eaters do not care and make fun of them. Conservatives are disgusted by people who approve of abortion and nobody who does not have this moral intuition does not give a fuck about their position.