Experimental Social Psychology, Situationism, and Creating a Virtuous Character

In an New York Times op-ed a couple of weeks ago, David Brooks drew on the work of Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in order to suggest that the philosophical view of character and virtue is now being replaced by the “psychologist’s view” that there is no such thing as character. Instead of thinking of character as a firm and stable disposition to act and feel a certain way, Brooks explains that experiments in psychology suggest that character is actually more contextual, failing to exhibit what psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”

The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context. As Paul Bloom of Yale put it in an essay for The Atlantic last year, we are a community of competing selves. These different selves “are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control — bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.”

The philosopher’s view is shaped like a funnel. At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character. And at the top, the wide ways it expresses itself. The psychologist’s view is shaped like an upside-down funnel. At the bottom, there is a wide variety of unconscious tendencies that get aroused by different situations. At the top, there is the narrow story we tell about ourselves to give coherence to life.

Brooks goes on to explain that philosophers see the development of character as a matter of “direct assault,” using reason and strength of will to distinguish virtue from vice. Psychologists, on the other hand, see the development of character as a more subconscious, indirect process:

In the psychologist’s version, the good life is won indirectly. People have only vague intuitions about the instincts and impulses that have been implanted in them by evolution, culture and upbringing. There is no easy way to command all the wild things jostling inside.

Brooks’ conclusion suggests that the psychological view may be more accurate, that the good life is not won through “heroic self-analysis but through mundane, self-forgetting effort, and through everyday routines.”

Brooks, in his use of Appiah, is referring to a debate that has existed for some time in moral philosophy over the “situationist” account of character. Situationists see the conclusions of experimental moral psychology suggesting that behavior changes according to situations in conflict with the philosophical view that behavior can be largely predictable due to stable virtuous and vicious dispositions in one’s character.

Some moral philosophers who embrace situationist social psychology argue that the conclusions drawn in empirical research have radical implications for virtue ethics. Gilbert Harman, who has written extensively on the implications of experimental social psychology on moral philosophy, argues that if we take a virtue to be a stable disposition to act in certain ways, than empirical studies indicating that human behavior is largely determined by the situation cast doubt on whether or not there is such a thing as a firm and consistent character, or whether or not character can be developed at all.

John Doris does not go so far as Harman in questioning the existence of character, but he does argue that situationist social psychology indicates that habits of character tend to be narrow rather than broad. That is, a virtue is not a general disposition to act in a certain way, but a disposition to act in a certain way under quite specific circumstances.

Doris and Harman both draw similar conclusions about the usefulness of virtue ethics. If there is no such thing as a virtue, meaning a firm and consistent disposition to act a certain way in a wide range of situations, than virtue ethics is not a useful moral theory and we would be better suited given the reality of our human nature to adopt a more deontological and utilitarian moral theory. In essence, virtue-based moral theories are more idealistic about human nature than the evidence tends to support. Situations, rather than character, are better predictors of behavior.

However, both Doris and Harman, and interestingly enough, David Brooks himself, have an inadequate understanding of character as it is conceived in traditional virtue ethics.

The understanding of characters offered by the situationists and traditional virtue ethics are not the same. The character traits that situationist psychological experiments investigate are dispositions to behave a certain way, apart from the reasoning process. They are studying character traits, such as the tendency not to lie or the tendency to help out strangers. These specific behaviors, however, are not the same as “character” understood in a more Aristotelian sense. Virtue ethics offers a more holistic view of character that is something more than particular traits, but rather consists of a complex set of desires, beliefs, and goals that dispose the person to act in certain predictable ways. That is, a person may consistently provide aid to a stranger in need not because of a disposition to help strangers, but rather because of an overall disposition of generosity and kindness. To pass by a stranger in need, for example, due to a hurried mood, a temporary bad mood, or any of the other factors that situationists claim cause us to behave unpredictably does not indicate that this person’s character is not generous and kind. It indicates rather that this person is acting out of character.

People may act “out of character” when their appetites conflict–say when a person’s emotions overcome his or her reason. A person may also act “out of character” due to competing obligations and the lack of resolutely good choices. Say our kind and generous individual in the above example has promised to give an important talk at a university about generosity and is running late. She may pass by a stranger in need because another obligation, an obligation she considers important because of her character, but which competes with another obligation to help a stranger in need. She may still be kind and generous, but the object of her kind and generous actions today is the university audience she has obligated herself to, rather than the needy stranger that passes her way.

What experimental social psychology provides moral philosophers like myself is not a challenge to an Aristotelian understanding of character that thereby undermines virtue ethics, but rather a warning that the temptations humans face in the goal to act virtuously comes not only from our own vices, but also from situations that we face, sometimes unconsciously, that challenge the sort of behavior that we would want to consider distinctive of our character. For example, I may be more prone to snap at my husband impatiently because somebody snapped at me impatiently earlier in the day. This tendency does not mean that my character is impatient (although in my case, it most definitely is), but rather that this external situation or getting snapped at predisposes me to act out of character. Once I become aware of the role this situation plays in determining my behavior, my reason can help resist such tendencies in order to allow the expression of my character to gain more cross-situational consistency.

So Brooks is wrong to suggest that the creation of the good life comes from self-forgetting. It is rather quite the opposite. The good life comes as a result of becoming conscious through the development of character of those situations when self-forgetfulness leads to out-of-character behavior, of rationally becoming aware of the inconsistencies of one’s actions with one’s desires, beliefs, and goals. Experimental social psychology does not challenge a virtue-ethics understanding of character or the existence of vice and virtue, but rather illuminates specific ways in which acts do not correspond to a person’s habits. Experimental social psychology is an ally in understanding character and virtue ethics, not a competitor.

The Re-Emergent Interdisciplinary Nature of Scholarship

One of the complaints about scholarship these days, especially in the humanities but also in the natural sciences, is that each discipline has become so specialized, that it has become irrelevant to those on the outside. Young scholars in PhD programs are continually pushed to the marginalia in the search for new and original topics, and the dissertations they churn out are frequently so obscure and specific that nobody would read them except the author and their board.

My goal in this post is not to complain about over-specialization in scholarship but rather to suggest that over-specialization is not the way of the future. David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times this week, entitled “The Young and the Neuro,” addresses the necessarily-interdisciplinary nature of contemporary research being conducted in the humanities, and especially in cognitive neuroscience, which fuses the fields of bioetechnology, psychology, economics, as well as political science and ethics. Scholars involved in this emergent field are actually transversing disciplines, all in the hopes of trying to figure out how and why people interact in the way that they do.

The new interdisciplinary nature of such scholarship is a reaction against the reductionism we saw in the earlier part of the century, especially in the wake of new knowledge about genetics. A funny side note: in yesterday’s NYTimes crossword puzzle, one of the clues (33 across) was “essence of a person, one might say.” Not to spoil it for you, but the answer is DNA.

The research Mr. Brooks discusses challenges this notion that DNA actually is the essence of a person. People like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson wanted to use genetics to explain the essence of all human behavior. Ethics, once considered a branch of philosophy, entered into the natural sciences as scientists hypothesized and rapidly worked to confirm that one’s genetic constitution could explain why you as a person behaved the way you did. This field became known as sociobiology–the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of behavior.

If the sociobiologists would have stuck to ethics, they would not have ruffled very many feathers. But sociobiologists also had to attempt to illustrate how genetics could even explain the great metaphysical questions faced by humankind such as the nature of the soul and the existence of God. What happened in the wake of such books like The God Delusion was a widespread religious reaction against science, especially science that extolled genetics as a causal mechanism or used the dreaded word “evolution.” This religious antithesis to the new work in biology, genetics, and evolution became another form of reductionism. Instead of using science to explain everything, the “theologians” and preachers and ordinary believers wanted to use God to explain everything.

Here is what both sides missed. Different fields explain different phenomena and answer different pressing questions raised by human beings. This was something Aquinas (drawing on the Greek heritage of Aristotle) recognized in distinguishing the practical from the speculative intellect. The practical intellect deals with the natural world, the world that is contingent, subject to decay and change and evolution. The practical intellect deals with sense data derived from sensuous consciousness, that is, with this particular human being, this particular triangle, this particular action.

The speculative intellect is concerned not with the contingent, but with the necessary, the universal, the unchanging. The speculative intellect is concerned with the immaterial. It wants to know not “this particular triangle” but rather, what is the essence of “triangle?” What is the universal form that makes particular triangles come into being? The speculative intellect is not concerned with this particular action, but rather with the question of causation–what are the universal forces that causes anything at all to happen?

The practical intellect deals with what Aristotle called the practical sciences: physics, ethics, politics. The speculative intellect deals with the mother of all science: metaphysics (literally, “above or beyond the physics.”) Aquinas recognized in light of his theological preoccupations that even this neat division was not truly in accordance with reality with the recognition that theology was both speculative (metaphysical) and practical (ethical and political). That is, our study of God is primarily speculative but imminently practical. Theology is speculative because it deals principally with divine things which are immaterial, but secondarily practical because it is concerned with human acts insofar as these acts lead the person to beatitude. So even theology, the premier metaphysical pursuit becomes interdisciplinary in Aquinas’ work. The larger part of the Summa theologiae (“sum of theology”) deals with practical matters, what we would now call ethics.

But Aquinas’ ethics are a theological, and hence, interdisciplinary ethics. His ethics are most certainly theological in the sense that all human acts must be properly considered as part of the life in the spirit. Charity, the most important theological virtue, is the form and mother not just of the theological virtues, but of all the virtues, including the human or moral virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Thomas’ sum of theology shows how biology, anthropology, politics, ethics, economics, metaphysics, and theology are interwoven, each answering different particular questions in order to draw the really important conclusions concerning why we (humans) are here on this earth, what we are supposed to be doing while we are here, and where we are ultimately meant to end up.

In Aquinas’ day, he could be a theologian, an ethicist, a political scientist, an economist, and an anthropologist, but such “renaissance men” were thought to have been long-extinct in the contemporary period in light of the increasing specialization of each of the disciplines. We assumed that to really know anything in the wake of the proliferation of knowledge that followed the modern scientific, industrial, and technological revolutions, you had to be a specialist.

What Brooks’ article indicates to my Thomistic eyes is that we are beginning to re-recognize the important ways in which the practical and speculative concerns overlap, the dangers of reductionism, and the importance of interdisciplinary pursuits in drawing the right sort of conclusions about the questions we are asking. As Brooks points out, we now know the important influence that genetics has on our behavior. But we are beginning to recognize also how complementary processes of social interactions and culture influences genetics and physiology. He writes,

All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that. . .

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

The challenge faced by young scholars like myself is no longer how to get my questions and my language specific enough to generate a new idea. Rather, young scholars are faced with the new challenge of how to gain a broad enough base of knowledge to re-ask the really old questions without dabbling too much, or drawing conclusions that are too broad to actually be meaningful.

My own dissertation asks how we can integrate a moral theological discourse into the already-interdisciplinary discourse about eating disorders, that is, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Researchers have already acknowledged that eating disorders are physiological, biomedical, psychological, and sociological disorders; I argue that they are also moral disorders. So if you want to really know why people have eating disorders and what can be done about it, you need more that psychology, biomedicine, and sociology. You also need ethics, metaphysics, and yes, even theology.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and Thomistic Anthropology

My husband and I are big Joss Whedon fans, probably because his shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and most recently Dollhouse), have such interesting philosophical and theological components. Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse is perhaps his most thoroughly philosophical.

The premise of the show is that the “Dollhouse” is a powerful, cutting edge organization that recruits young, beautiful individuals to be “dolls,” to have their brains wiped and memories erased so that they can be uploaded with different personalities to serve the needs of the Dollhouse clients. The leading scientist, the nerdy Topher, has designed a technology to quickly and practically effortlessly install the dolls’ brains with complete personalities, including memories, skills like rockclimbing and breaking into bank safes, and emotional connections with other people.

The most recent episode, starring, as always, Eliza Dushku as the evolving doll Echo, includes a new twist, as Topher figures out a way to change Echo on a glandular level in order to meet the demands of a distraught Dollhouse client who recently lost his wife in childbirth and can’t bond with his son. The man needs a mother for his son, and the Dollhouse provides. The opening scene shows Echo nuzzling an adorable baby as she breastfeeds him while her “husband” sleeps in the next room.

The client, Nate, quickly comes to recognize that the doll Echo is not his wife, and that hiring the Dollhouse to provide a mother for his son was a mistake. He calls the Dollhouse, demanding they remove her “or he’ll get rid of the baby,” while Echo surreptitiously listens at the door. Echo, fully installed with maternal instincts and lactating breasts, fears that her son is in danger, and desperately tries to escape.

She is almost successful. Echo is a remarkable doll in the show’s ongoing storyline, who is always sharp, smart, and talented, no matter what her personality, and always equipped with the best survival instincts. Her handler, Paul Ballard, ends up having to drag her screaming from a police station, while the father goes to recover his child. Even the standard calming line “Would you like a treatment,” fails to soothe the maternal Echo who fully believes that her child has been stolen from her.

When Topher goes to wipe the personality, returning Echo to the irenic “doll” state in which she walks around in pajamas and talks in naïve monotone, the story gets particularly interested. Echo’s maternal instinct doesn’t get wiped. When Topher asks her how she feels, Echo, half doll and half mother, punches Topher and makes for the exit, showing up at Nate’s house with the baby and a knife in hand, still fighting to keep her child.

When asked what went wrong, Topher responds:

“Maternal instinct is too strong for a normal wipe. I outplayed myself. . . Perhaps triggering lactation was a bridge too far.”

The father is eventually able to talk Echo down, explaining to her that he hired her to be a mother because he could not be a father, but that the real mother is a part of his son. Echo is not. In a poignant realization of what she is, a doll and not a mother, Echo hands over the baby. The next scene shows her in a playground, as Paul Ballard tentatively approaches.

Echo: I had a baby, now I don’t have him anymore. I feel sad. All of these things that happen to me, I feel them.
Paul: I know, Echo. I know you remember everything.
Echo: Not remember. Feel. I was married, I felt love. And pain, fear. It’s not pretend for me. They made me love my little boy, and then they took him away. They make it so real, every time, they make it so real. Why do they do that?. . .

Paul: If you want I can tell Topher what is going on with you and he can wipe you. You won’t have to feel sad anymore.
Echo: Feeling nothing would be worse. That would be like being asleep, like before. I’m awake now. I don’t want to go back to sleep.

What is so interesting about this episode from an EverydayThomist perspective is that Joss Whedon is implicitly endorsing an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology. For Aristotle and Aquinas, form subsists in matter. This means that the form of a person, their soul if you will, is not contained or trapped in the body, but is an integral, inseparable part of the body.

In Aristotelian studies, this concept is pitted against a Platonic metaphysic and anthropology that sees the body and soul or the matter and form of a substance as two different opposing realities that are connected, but not necessarily so, in the human person. For Plato, the human person is primarily spirit. The matter, and this includes the entire sensitive appetite including the emotions, is unnecessary, transitory, and disruptive. Aristotle argued against such a dualistic anthropology that body and soul were what made a human being a person. Matter, including the emotions, is not disruptive but necessary. The human form cannot subsist without matter.

In Thomist studies, this concept is referred to as Aquinas’ hylomorphic anthropology, hyle meaning “matter” and morphe meaning “form.” The passions or emotions like love and fear which Dushku mentions in the above quote must be understood in light of this hylomorphism. The subject of the passions is not only the body, nor is it only the soul, but is rather the substance, the unification of the two. The passions are accidents which are predicated of the hylomorphic unity of the person who can only subsist as both body and soul.

Every passion, therefore, involves a psychosomatic change in the person. This means that every passion, properly understood, effects both the immaterial soul of the person and the material body. This is not a question of cause and effect, as it was for the neo-Platonist Descartes who assumed that the immaterial mind/soul of the person was affected by the passions emerging from the body. Rather, the psychosomatic movement of the passions is a unified event for Aquinas. One quippy way of putting this is that every act of love is also an act of knowledge, and every act of knowledge is also an act of love. The intellect and the passions, the soul and body, the form and matter, are always moving as a unified, hylomorphic unity.

A more Cartesian anthropology assumes that the mind is the controlling force of the person. In other words, Descarte’s cogito, ergo sum posits that the person is a subject who thinks, or a mind who happens to have a body. The body, and the emotions, are not essential to anthropology (although there is some debate about whether this is a caricature of Descartes. Another story for another blogpost).

What Joss Whedon gives us in Dollhouse is a challenge to this Cartesian metaphysics and anthropology. Topher assumes that the mind is the operating principle of the person—change the brain, change the person. Moreover, he assumes that the brain controls the body as he illustrates in this episode. With the proper changes to the brain, Echo goes from gun-fighting superwoman to lactating mama.

But the person, as “Instinct” cleverly points out, does not subsist just in the mind or the form of the person, but in the body itself. Echo does not just think as her infused personalities do, she also feels the way they do. And when Topher wipes her brain at the end of each mission, what he fails to recognize is that he cannot fully wipe each personality because each personality is somehow in Echo’s body, and specifically in her sensitive appetite which is still left with the somatic imprint of the psychosomatic emotional changes that each of her personalities experienced.

In contemporary Thomistic studies, this is becoming more of an important point, post-Grisez and Finnis who, along with the other neo-Thomists, assigned too much control to reason, and neglected the dynamism of the sensitive appetite in Aquinas’ philosophical anthropology. This mistake was based on a larger cultural assumption that the “mind over matter” mentality encapsulated what it meant to be a human being. More recently, we are rediscovering the importance of human matter in moral psychology. Joss Whedon’s “Instinct” perhaps unwittingly pointed that out. Another point for the Thomists.

Two Forms of Judgment: Judgment per modum cognitionis and per modum inclinationis

Aquinas distinguishes between two types of knowledge at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae that correspond to two modes of judging. The first is judgment by cognition (per modum cognitionis), the second is judgment by inclination (per modum inclinationis):

Since judgment appertains to wisdom, the twofold manner of judging produces a twofold wisdom. A man may judge in one way by inclination, as whoever has the habit of a virtue judges rightly of what concerns that virtue by his very inclination towards it. Hence it is the virtuous man, as we read, who is the measure and rule of human acts. In another way, by knowledge, just as a man learned in moral science might be able to judge rightly about virtuous acts, though he had not the virtue. The first manner of judging divine things belongs to that wisdom which is set down among the gifts of the Holy Ghost: “The spiritual man judges all things” (1 Corinthians 2:15). And Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ii): “Hierotheus is taught not by mere learning, but by experience of divine things.” The second manner of judging belongs to this doctrine which is acquired by study, though its principles are obtained by revelation (I, Q. 1, art. 6, ad. 3).

According to Aquinas, right judgment can be achieved either through the perfect use of reason or by way of inclination. Judgment per modum cognitionis is notional knowledge attained by rational study. In other places, he refers to this mode of judging as per studium et doctrinam, per modum rationis, and secundum perfectum usum rationis.

Judgement per modum inclinationis is not cognitive, and not a judgment which takes place through the cogitative power, but rather, judgment according to affection or desire, and thus a kind of affective knowledge. Elsewhere Aquinas writes,

Wisdom denotes a certain rectitude of judgment according to the Eternal Law. Now rectitude of judgment is twofold: first, on account of perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter about which one has to judge. Thus, about matters of chastity, a man after inquiring with his reason forms a right judgment, if he has learnt the science of morals, while he who has the habit of chastity judges of such matters by a kind of connaturality (II-II, Q. 45, art. 2).

Aquinas is distinguishing the two different forms of judging, or assigning value to something, using the example of virtue. A person may judge a thing like chastity should or should not be desired because he or she has been taught and understands how such a thing should be considered moral or immoral. On the other hand, a person may judge rightly as to whether something should or should not be desired not through a cognitive decision, but rather on the basis of whether or not he or she actually desires the thing in question. In the case of the former, the intellect is clearly providing the basis of judgment through the cogitative power. In the case of the former, the affective inclination of the person provides the basis for the judgment. In this way, the virtuous person is the rule and measure of human actions. The virtuous person is inclined towards the object of virtue (inquantum ad illa inclinator) or through a certain connaturality with the object of virtue (per quondam connaturalitatem ad ipsa).

We might think of an example in eating. Some individuals need to mentally check themselves to ensure that they do not overeat. How much food this person should desire on any given occasion is a cognitive decision. This individual may desire to eat a second helping of a dish, but decide that this second helping would make him or her too full, and therefore decline. Others, however, just naturally desire the right quantity of food on a given occasion. This individual does not have to decide whether a second helping of a dish is appropriate—the individual simply acts on his or her desires.

We must be careful not to go too far in pitting these two forms of judgment against each other as opposites, but see them rather as corollaries. Affective knowledge and judgment per modum inclinationis is not a judgment made without knowledge, but is rather the synthesis of love and knowledge—a synthesis of cognitive and affective activity. If we understand the two modes of judgment in this way, as a single activity of knowing and loving, we may resolve the apparent tension in Aquinas between the passions and reason. Recall that Aquinas holds that the human person is a hylomorphic unity of body and soul, and that the sensitive appetite stands between these two in a unified activity of putting the whole human person substantially in relation to the world. Knowing and loving are distinct activities, but with the same principle of operation, which is the substantial unity of the human soul.

Moral knowledge, therefore, is not either purely rational knowledge or purely affective knowledge, but is rather a synthesis of both knowledge per modum cognitionis and knowledge per modum inclinationis.

The hylomorphic unity of the human person also explains how one particular power can overcome the other. If the soul’s full energies are employed in the act of cognition, of knowing, such cogitation can impede the affective movement of the soul. Aquinas says that the concentration of the intellect can actually overcome the sensitive appetite so that it no longer experiences certain sensible functions: “In the powers of the soul there is an overflow from the higher to the lower powers: and accordingly, the pleasure of contemplation, which is in the higher part, overflows so as to mitigate even that pain which is in the senses” (I-II, Q. 38, art. 4, ad. 3). More commonly, however, the soul’s activities get concentrated on affection and its accompanying form of judgment. In this way, a person under the influence of anger may judge a thing good that he would not so judge if not under the influence of that passion:

Now it is evident that according to a passion of the sensitive appetite man is changed to a certain disposition. Wherefore according as man is affected by a passion, something seems to him fitting, which does not seem so when he is not so affected: thus that seems good to a man when angered, which does not seem good when he is calm (I-II, Q. 9, art. 2).

What is important to note, however, is that the sensitive appetite seems to present the intellect with an object already laden with value. This challenges the view among some Thomists that the role of the sensitive appetite is only to obey reason.

Is Anger an Appropriate Response to Suffering?

In the last post, I said that I was going to do a series of posts on some of the thoughts I have been having related to the “theodicy” issue, or the problem of evil and suffering in light of the belief that God is all-good and all-powerful. In this post, I am going to use as my starting point a quote from Harold Kushner, who I mentioned in the last post wrote a very famous book on theodicy called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In his effort to explain God’s involvement in the suffering humans experience on this earth, Kushner writes,

We can recognize our anger at life’s unfairness, our instinctive compassion at seeing people suffer, as coming from God who teaches us to be angry at injustice and to feel compassion for the afflicted. Instead of feeling that we are opposed to God, we can feel that our indignation is God’s anger at unfairness working through us, that when we cry out, we are still on God’s side and God is still on ours (45).

In this post, I am going to expound on Kushner’s provocative idea about anger from a Thomistic framework in order to determine the moral and theological significance of anger, and whether Kushner is right is saying that suffering should prompt anger.

We tend to think of anger as vicious or harmful. Somebody may say, “I didn’t mean to do X, but I was blinded by anger,” or “anger is wrong; I want to be a more peaceful person.” Aquinas is aware that anger connotes sinfulness. There is good reason for this. In Matthew 5:22, for example, Jesus claims that one who is angry with his brother is liable to judgment. In his discussion of anger, Aquinas asks whether all anger is contrary to virtue, to which he answers a resounding no. Anger, which is a passion, can be aroused according to reason, which makes anger in some situations virtuous.

So how do we determine if anger is virtuous (according to the standards of reason) or not? Aquinas looks at the object of anger, or that to which the anger is directed. He identifies two objects to anger: one is the injury that the person suffers, and the other is vindication (vindicatio) that the person seeks. The vindicatio is the justice that one seeks to exact against an perceived injustice. It is the way of making an injustice right. The vindicatio is an evil under the aspect of good. Denying a person his freedom for a number of years in punishment for theft, for example, could be a vindicatio because it is an evil (imprisonment) that seeks to rectify an injustice (the theft), thus rendering the vindicatio itself a good.

If a person seeks a vindicatio against a person who does not deserve it, for example, the anger would be sinful. If a person seeks too great a vindicatio, such as when a person repays an injustice with a much greater injustice (beating a child for spilling milk), such anger would be sinful. So anger is virtuous if a truly unjust offense occurs and the response is proportionate to the injustice.

What about Matthew 5:22 that says that anyone who is angry against their brother is liable to judgment? In light of scripture, how can Aquinas still say that anger can be virtuous? One way which Matthew 5:22 has been explained is using the person/sin distinction. That is, it is wrong to be angry against a person, but okay to be angry against a sin. Because Jesus is referring to the former in his condemnation of anger, it does not contradict the thesis that anger can be virtuous. This is the explanation Augustine used, claiming that one is properly angered at the sin of one’s brother, not one’s brother himself. Thomas disagrees with this, claiming that if a person is unjust, it is fitting and proper to be angry towards that person, granted that one’s anger is proportionate and the vindicatio sought is just.

The reason is that anger is that, according to Aquinas, has a two-fold object—the injustice, and the rectification of that injustice. An injustice is when a person is not given their due. The order of the universe which is in natural things and in the human will reveals that there is justice in God. God orders things and orders that they be in right relationship, and this is what is meant by God’s justice. Kushner is right in identifying that when we recognize that things or people are not in right relationship, we are participating in God’s justice.

Anger, then, because it is concerned with justice, is properly determined by relationships. In order to determine if anger is appropriate, one must be in some relationship of justice, that is, a relationship that is ordered according to God’s standards. This requires a little explanation. I cannot be angry against an inanimate object, for example, because the inanimate object cannot do me an injustice. I may stub my toe on my desk, but my anger cannot rightfully be oriented towards the desk. Nor can I be angry at a hurricane or a virus for the same reason. I may be hurt by these things, but they cannot be the object of my anger because they did not commit an injustice against me. Anger, for Aquinas, is really properly directed at people.

Additionally, if anger is to be justified, the right rectification must be sought. A child who commits a grievous fault–perhaps he hits one of his siblings–has committed an injustice which the parents, due to their relationship of justice with the child, have a responsibility to rectify. Perhaps they will ground the child, or require some sort of positive compensation to the assaulted sibling. However, the sibling who has been harmed is not in a relationship that allows him to seek the necessary vindicatio. It would be inappropriate for the sibling to ground his own sibling or to hit his sibling back. It would also not be appropriate for a stranger to punish the pugilistic sibling. Nor would it be appropriate if a child was the victim of an injustice committed by a parent to seek vindicatio. If a child is hit by a parent, the appropriate response is to appeal to a higher authority, like the police. In short, in order to seek a vindicatio, one has to be in the right position of seeking justice.

This is why we frown on vigilantes, or civilians who go out to seek vindicatios against injustices that are going unpunished. Because such civilians are not in the proper relationship of justice to the people whom they are punishing, they are actually committing an injustice in their actions in seeking a vindicatio that is not theirs to seek. Their anger is not virtuous, because the vindicatio sought is not virtuous.

Reasonable anger (and hence, virtuous anger) according to Aquinas is (1) prompted by an occasion of injustice, (2) directed at the perpetrator of injustice, and (3) seeks a just vindicatio to restore the injustice. If anger meets these three requirements, Aquinas would say it is virtuous.

So how does this play out regarding the theodicy question as Kushner sees it? First of all, the object of anger must be an actual injustice, not just something that makes us unhappy. Aquinas would not say it is virtuous to be angry if you, for example, get diagnosed with a terminal illness. This is not an injustice that should rightfully prompt anger. Moreover, there is no committer of an injustice towards which one can direct their anger. A more proper response would be sorrow at the fact that one is experiencing an evil, but not an injustice. But it would be proper to experience anger at a news story relating how somebody has been raped or murdered, or to be angered when you hear about the violence in the Middle East or Zimbabwe. Here, we do have an injustice, and perpetrator, which can be the object of our anger.

Second, the anger must be directed at the right person. If I read about what is going on in Zimbabwe and get angry at Robert Mugabe, my anger may be justified. If I read about Zimbabwe and get angry at black people, my anger is definitely not. Similarly, if I get angry at God when I hear about Mugabe’s egregious offenses against his people, my anger is not targeted at the right person. Such anger, according to Aquinas would not be justified.

Lastly, the vindicatio sought must in itself be just. If I decide that I am going to go assassinate Mugabe to stop his injustices, the unjust vindicatio thus renders my anger unjust. A more just vindicatio might be writing to the UN or raising awareness in this country by writing letters to the newspaper or marching in DC, or praying to God for the Zimbabweans who are suffering.

Kushner is right that we should feel compassion and sorrow for those who suffer. But I am not quite sure that an appropriate response to suffering is anger. Anger connotes that an injustice is being done that one can do something about. Sickness, death, and natural disasters are indeed evils, but they are not injustices. Such tragedies may be handled in an unjust way. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was not itself an injustice, but the subsequent way it was dealt with in many ways was.

This is not to say that Aquinas thinks we should remain Stoic in the face of suffering. He acknowledges that the passion of sorrow, which is the apprehension of some pain or evil, is a appropriate. When one is faced with a pain or evil, it may be appropriate to weep, to seek to remove or alleviate the harm, or even, as is the case with Job, demand answers from God. But for Aquinas, and I think he is right, it is not an injustice to experience pain, nor does God owe us any answers. The proper response to suffering, I would argue against Kushner, is not anger, but rather sorrow. The situations that concern Kushner, the death of a child for example, do not arouse God’s anger because no injustice is being done. God’s universe is still in order, even if we suffer.

But this is not the final word for Aquinas against Kushner, which will be the subject of another post on the issue. Aquinas, as a Christian, has not only a God that gets angry at injustice, as Kushner does, but also, a God who through the incarnation, is capable of suffering with, or feeling compassion and sorrow with his creation. And through the resurrection, Aquinas has a God who not only suffers with his creation, but has also ultimately defeated suffering in the grand eschatological scheme. Thus, for Aquinas, suffering should prompt not only anger if an injustice is done, or sorrow if no injustice is done, but should also prompt us to reflect on the God who loved us so much, that he suffers with us, and is himself ultimately the remedy to our sorrow.

How Neuroscience is Influencing the Bioethical Debate About Compulsory Treatment for Anorectics

Anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric disorder characterized by excessive preoccupation with body size and weight as well as self-deceptive attitudes toward the nature of thinness and emaciation. Treating anorexia is replete with challenges. First of all, treatment is often unsuccessful. Less than 50% of anorectics recover within ten years of the onset of the disorder. About 25% of cases develop into chronicity. Oftentimes, anorexic behavior is replaced by bulimic behavior.

Anorexia is a classic case where the tension between preservation of liberty of the patient and the imperative to treat a severe illness becomes quite acute. In most cases of anorexia nervosa, a well-structured therapeutic program, administered by a multidisciplinary staff experienced in treating eating disorders, is adequate. Even with the best of treatment options, however, avoiding treatment is part of the condition of anorexia. Anorexia is characterized with the obsessive pursuit of thinness and treatment is always aimed at thwarting this goal. The refusal may not be total: many patients accept psychotherapy or family therapy, but may refuse components of treatment likely to increase food intake, reduce physical activity and induce weight gain. In severe cases where anorectic patients categorically deny all treatment oriented toward weight gain, compulsory treatment is usually pursued.

A patient who refuses nutrition despite severe emaciation is generally thought to be behaving without autonomy and is deemed incompetent to consent to treatment. The Mental Health Act Commission allows, “that in certain situations, patients with severe anorexia nervosa whose health is seriously threatened by food refusal may be subject to detention in hospital and further that there are occasions when it is necessary to treat the self-imposed starvation with measures such as involuntary naso-gastric feeding to ensure the proper care of the patient.”

As a rule, most treatment programs resort to compulsory treatment only as a last resort. Compulsory treatment seems to be justified only by immediate mortal danger to the patient, but may also be pursued based on motives of beneficence within the health care system. Nevertheless, the ethics of compulsory treatment of anorectics is hotly contested issue.

Compulsory treatment for anorexia as well as other conditions assumes that the doctor is right about what is in the patient’s best interest. However, in medicine, prognostic ability is a far cry from an exact science, despite the fact that prognoses are usually given in percentages. Moreover, the prognostic difficulties are complicated in psychiatry, with psychiatrists very often incorrect in their identification of danger to the patient.
Moreover, the pursuit of compulsory treatment usually implies that treating the patient against her wishes will help her. A general principle of compulsory treatment is that one must be reasonably confident that the treatment is going to bring about some beneficial effect. In the case of anorexia, the ethics of compulsory treatment are complicated by the fact that the patient must at some point submit to either treatment or resuming somewhat normal eating patterns. An anorectic cannot spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric ward or on a feeding tube involuntarily. At some point, she must cooperate with therapeutic efforts if she is to recover. Compulsory treatment must both aim for, and have a reasonable likelihood of success achieving a state of voluntary cooperation with the anorectic.

New developments in neuroscience are changing our understanding of the role of the brain in mental illness, as scientists rapidly discover minimally invasive and benign techniques for exploring and altering the brain. Brain mapping technologies like positron emission tomography (PET scans) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs) serve to identify the brain areas involved in certain behaviors like self- starvation or performing a given task like consenting or refusing to consent to medical and psychiatric treatment.

Neurotechnology offers more advanced scientific data related to specific cognitive deficits relevant to consent, which has a direct impact on psychiatric diagnostic criteria, providing objective bases, derived from the structure and processes of the brain, for classifying a brain as “abnormal.” Standards for determining competence right now in the clinic are unreliable and based on what is called the “reasonable person standard.” With new neurotechnologies, it may become clearer both clinically and legally what constitutes a reasonable person.

Neuroscientific data is also leading toward a richer understanding of the nature of consent which is based on the idea of “degrees” of competence, rather than a simple threshold. Basically, neuroscience is pointing away from a model of consent that views the capacity to consent as an “all or nothing” sort of thing, and towards a model that accepts more or less capacity. That is, capacity to consent lies on a continuum. On a degree notion of competence, patients are never said to be either fully competent or totally incompetent, but rather, as displaying various and changing degrees of competence to consent at various different times.

Most contemporary models and tests for mental competence do not make adequate provisions for the positive influence of emotions in the determination of competence. Recent advances in the neuroscience of emotion provide compelling evidence that the decision-making process, including the act of giving consent, is not exclusively cognitive, nor can decisional capacity be assessed by purely cognitive means such as the Mac Arthur Competence Assessment Tool (MacCAT-T). Integrating more neuroscience studies on the complexity of the consent process is leading to a “multifactorial and qualitiative account of the components of capacity” which could lead to clinical developments that enhance the necessary components to improve decision-making. For example, fear and anxiety may impair an anorectic’s ability to consent to treatment, which may be enhanced by introducing a known and trusted confidant to the consent process who can engage the patient more successfully on an emotional level.

Although the issue of compulsory treatment, including forced-feeding, for anorectics has been greatly debated on the theoretical in bioethical circles, as Simona Giordano rightly identifies in her book Understanding Eating Disorders, the question of compulsory treatment is also, and perhaps primarily, an “empirical” problem:

People with eating disorders are typically intelligent, and are not at all the stereotypical ‘insane’ person, detached from reality. People with eating disorders are generally skilled, intelligent, and able to run their life in many important ways, like everybody else. It is hard to believe that all of them, when they refuse treatment, are incompetent. Given that we are dealing with intelligent and generally competent people, it seems that one cannot assume a priori that every time a person with eating disorders refuses treatment, she is incompetent. It seems that their incompetence should be assessed, not presumed (193).

Some Notes on Free Will

Aquinas uses the Latin liberum arbitrium,  meaning “free judgment” when he talks about free will in the Prima Pars (the first part of the Summa Theologica), henceforth referenced by the Roman numeral I).  The idea of “judgment” is important for his parsing out what he means by free will.

He says in I, Q. 83, art. I that some things act without judgments, like a stone moving downward when dropped.  Other things move with judgment but without knowledge like animals who judge a something like a steak to be good, but judge according to instinct, not reason.  Humans, however, act from judgment with knowledge, meaning that humans reason that something should be sought or avoided, not on instinct, but according to reason.

One advantage of acting according to judgment with knowledge is that human beings can be inclined to various “good” things like studying for comps or blogging, but not to any particular good.  Now, that does not mean that the will is not moved of necessity.  In Q. 82, art. 2, Aquinas says that the will must of necessity tend towards the good.  This means that the will has to will anything that it wills because it sees it as a good.  The reason that free will is still possible in light of this is that the will is not bound to any particular good.  Blogging and studying for comprehensive exams are both goods, and my will can choose either one of them because it judges one to be a particular good worthy of pursuit over the other (which is why I am blogging at midnight rather than studying or sleeping, other, perhaps better goods).

The idea of free will got a little distorted in the 14th c. in what is known as the Nominalist movement.  Figures like Duns Scotus and William Occam read that the will was bound by necessity to the good (that it must will the good) and assumed that this undermined human freedom.  Occam posited instead the freedom of indifference for the will, meaning that the will was not bound by anything.  It could choose evil if it wanted to, or it could choose good.  For Occam and others during this time, this was the only conception of freedom that made sense.

For Aquinas, freedom is not the capacity to choose between contraries.  The will is created to be inclined towards the good and so it simply cannot choose evil.  To understand this, let’s think of the stone falling to the ground.  The stone has to fall towards the ground.  This is simply the way God created the universe and the natural laws according to which the universe operate says that a stone dropped on earth will fall to the ground.  In a similar way, the will has to move towards the good.  The difference is that, whereas there is only one place for the stone to go, namely down, there are many places the will can go.  There are many different goods it can choose.  But just because God created it to tend towards the good does not mean that it isn’t free:

Free-will is the cause of its own movement because by his free-will, man moves himself to act.  But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself. . .God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary.  And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature (I, Q. 83, art. 1).

What I think is so interesting about Aquinas’ treatment of free will is the extent to which he emphasizes how the exercise of the free will depends on the help of God.  In the reply to 83.1, Obj. 2, he says that free-will is not sufficient, “unless it be moved and helped by God.”  In the reply to Obj. 4 of the same article, he says “man’s way is said no be his in the execution of his choice, wherein he may be impeded, whether he will or not.  The choice itself, however, is in us, but presupposes the help of God.”  In the next article, he says that “free will is the subject of grace, by the help of which it chooses what is good.”

The reformer Martin Luther is famous for saying that there is no such thing as free will.  What he means is that  human beings are incapable of doing good unless helped by grace.  To illustrate this point in a work called The Bondage of the Will, he borrows an image from Augustine of the will being ridden (enslaved) by Satan, unless it be justified, whereby it is then ridden or “enslaved” to God.

The tendency in moral theology has been to place Aquinas and Luther on opposite sides of the spectrum, with Aquinas emphasizing the good that human beings are capable of, and Luther emphasizing the complete and utter dependence on grace.  I am not so sure this is fair to Aquinas.  In I, Q. 83, art.2, ad. 3, Aquinas says “man is said to have lost free will by falling into sin, not as to natural liberty, which is freedom from coercion, but as regards freedom from fault and unhappiness.”

It seems to me that Luther and Aquinas are closer than they are thought to be.  Luther thinks that with grace, and only with grace, can the will do what it is supposed to do.  He uses the metaphor of enslavement to God to illustrate the point.  Aquinas agrees that only with grace can the will do what it is supposed to do (not just in its fallen state but in its natural state as well).  Rather than enslavement, however, Aquinas talks about necessity to clarify the sense in which the will is free.  In Q. 82, art. 2, he says that the will can freely choose among various goods that are not necessary for happiness, “but there are some things that have a necessary connection with happiness, by means of which things man adheres to God, in Whom alone true happiness consists.  Nevertheless, until through the certitude of the Divine Vision the necessity of such connection be shown, the will does not adhere to God of necessity, nor to those things which are of God.  But the will of the man who sees God in His essence of necessity adheres to God, just as now we desire of necessity to be happy” (emphasis mine).  What Aquinas is saying here is really very similar to Luther–the will needs grace to do what it is supposed to do as a will, and to do what a will is supposed to do is the only meaning of “freedom” that makes any sense.

Thomas Aquinas’ Views Featured in TIME Magazine

I am delighted with the feature article for the most recent Time Magazine.  I love it when an article substantiating everything Thomas Aquinas said 800 years is considered “news.”  The Time Magazine article is all about happiness, which I talked about here in my article on beatitude as providing the foundation of Aquinas’ ethics.  This article, however, is not so much about ethics but rather, positive psychology, which I also talked about here.

Positive psychologists are interested  not just in what makes us depressed, but also in what makes us happy.  Or as Martin Seligman, the new president of the American Psychological Association, describes the goal of positive psychology: “It wasn’t enough for us (psychologists) to nullify disabling conditions and get to zero. We needed to ask, What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?”  Seligman and others like Edward Diener, Ray Fowler, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have been pushing scientific studies to determine what makes us happy, but for a Thomist, the conclusions are not news.

Turns out, wealth doesn’t make us happy.  As described by this accompanying Time Magazine article, scientific research indicates that people with above-average incomes are not much happier than others and that loss of wealth is usually only accompanied by a short term loss in happiness, if overal happiness is affected at all.

But Aquinas already said that happiness did not reside in the acquiring of wealth (I-II, Q. 2, art. 1) because wealth is meant to serve something else like the satisfaction of needs.  Even wealth that buys us not just what we need but all the things in the world that we may want does not satisfy our insatiable human appetites, as Aquinas explains:

in the desire for wealth and for whatsoever temporal goods . . . when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others: which is the sense of Our Lord’s words (John 4:13): “Whosoever drinketh of this water,” by which temporal goods are signified, “shall thirst again.” The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein.

Positive psychologists are also discovering that education, fame, goods of the body, and even pleasure don’t make us happy.  All of Question 2 of the Prima Secundae, however,  is dedicated to proving this exact fact.

Positive psychologists have also discovered that friends are conducive to happiness.  Aquinas derives this notion from Aristotle, making this insight even more ancient:

If we speak of the happiness of this life, the happy man needs friends, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix, 9), not, indeed, to make use of them, since he suffices himself; nor to delight in them, since he possesses perfect delight in the operation of virtue; but for the purpose of a good operation, viz. that he may do good to them; that he may delight in seeing them do good; and again that he may be helped by them in his good work. For in order that man may do well, whether in the works of the active life, or in those of the contemplative life, he needs the fellowship of friends (I-II, Q. 4, art. 8 )

Religion also seems to make us  happier, which I talked about here.

But it also turns out that even the happiest people are sad some of the time.  According to Aquinas, this is because the happiness of this life is only imperfect happiness.  True happiness consists only in contemplating the Divine Essence, which is the only sort of happiness that cannot be lost.

Like I say, I am delighted that positive psychology is confirming all of these great Thomistic insights.  As valuable as positive psychology is, however, it can only tell us about imperfect happiness, which by its very nature will always be a little dissatisfying.  Maybe those like Martin Seligman and Edward Diener who are on the quest for happiness will, in their dissatisfaction with what positive psychology concludes, lead others to the theology of Thomas Aquinas which concludes that “final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence” (I-II,  Q. 3, art. 8).

Elation: A Christian Evaluation of Positive Psychology’s New Emotion

Positive psychologists are the psychological community’s optimists.  One of the goals of positive psychology is to reevaluate human nature and human potential in order to draw out the more positive aspects like compassion, self-sacrifice, and the capacity for self-transcendence.   The new thing in the field is an emotion called “elevation,” or “the Obama factor” as University of California-Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner calls it, described in this Slate article.  Keltner tries to study the emotion of “elation” by reproducing it in a lab.  Ordinarily, this is easy to do.  If you want to study disgust, show video of  someone vomiting and then proceed with a brain scan.  If you want to study compassion, video of a starving child in Africa with flies in his eyes normally does the trick.  But elation, it turns out, is a lot harder to coax in the lab . . . that is, until Keltner got the idea of showing video of Barack Obama’s victory speech.  Turns out, our president-to-be was just the stimulus needed to recreate “elation” in the minds of Keltner’s subjects.

You probably haven’t heard a lot about the emotion called “elation.”  The word was coined by positive psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who I have written about here.   Haidt describes elation as that strong motivational tendency towards moral improvement that comes from the feeling of being “lifted up” in an optimistic response to some elevating stimulus.  The emotion elation is elicited by witnessing acts of virtue or moral beauty, or as Haidt describes, “a manifestation of humanity’s ‘higher’ or ‘better’ nature.”

Haidt got the idea of elation from reading Thomas Jefferson’s letters, who he feels perfectly encapsulates the characteristics of elation:

[E]very thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue. When any … act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions; and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise (emphasis mine).

In Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical anthropology (also called his “moral psychology”), emotions are called “passions,” from the Latin word passio meaning “suffering,” but connoting the idea of “being acted upon.  According to Aquinas, a passion is a movement of the sensitive appetite (the appetite that perceives and responds to sensory perception) either towards or away from some perceived  (sensory) good or evil.  For example, fear is the sensitive appetite’s movement away from some perceived evil, whereas desire is the sensitive’s appetite’s movement towards some good (see I-II, Q. 59, art. 1 for a good summary of what the passions are).

In and of themselves, the passions are neither good nor evil.  In fact, many of the same passions seen in human behavior are also evident in the behavior of animals.  The difference between human passion and animal passion is reason.  Aquinas thinks that all human passion must be subordinated to reason (or the intellect).  This subordination to the rational appetite  is not in the way a slave subordinates himself to a master, what Aquinas calls a “tyrannical rule” over the passions whereby the passions do only what the intellect tells them to do.  Rather, the process is more dialectical, a process Aquinas calls “political rule.”  The sensitive appetite perceives some sensory object like a suspicious stranger or a beautiful sunset and in the process of this perception, is moved to feel something like fear or joy.  This is called the “antecedent movement of the sensitive appetite.”  If all is right within the person, the sensitive appetite then presents the perceived object to the intellect for evaluation, which then gives the passion a moral quality.  If the intellect determines that the sensitive appetite responded to the perceived stimulus correctly, the passion is deemed morally good; if the intellect determines that the sensitive appetite’s response was inadequate, the passion must be changed or else it becomes immoral.

An example may help clarify things.  If I see a tall black person walking on the street at night and I clutch my purse tighter, I am acting out of a passion called fear.  In an of itself, this passion is neither moral or immoral.  When  my sensitive appetite presents this object to the intellect, however, my intellect may determine that I don’t act out of fear when I come across tall white men at night and that I probably responded in fear due to some latent racism.  The intellect then tells the sensitive appetite not to be afraid.  If the sensitive appetite obeys, then the internal moral mechanisms in me are in order.  If I continue to feel afraid unnecessarily due to my latent racism, I am then indulging an immoral emotion.

Another example might be the joy I experience when I eat Jelly Belly jelly beans.  As I am experiencing pleasure and joy from my candy fix, my sensitive appetite is continuously presenting the object of my enjoyment to the intellect.  The intellect determines what degree of enjoyment is moderate, or temperate, and then informs my sensitive appetite when my enjoyment is getting excessive like when I start eating too many delectable beans.

The point is, emotions themselves are neither good nor bad until they are evaluated by reason.  The emotion of joy is only a good emotion if the object of enjoyment is good, like a conversation with a friend.  Joy becomes immoral when the object of enjoyment is bad, like mocking a person or gossiping.  The danger with introducing an emotion like “elation” is mistaking this emotion for a prima facie good.  Elation is fine and moral if I experience this feeling of transcendence and human excellence when I watch a video on Mother Theresa or read a newspaper article about a fireman going back into a burning building to rescue someone.  However, if I experience elation when listening to a white supremacist, the emotion becomes quite immoral.

This brings me back to Dr. Keltner.  I am not so convinced that Barack Obama should be the preferred stimulus for inducing the feeling of elation.  Barack Obama is inspirational in some ways, especially in his historic status as the first black American president.  Surely it is a great feat for the United States to move so quickly from legislated segregation only a few decades ago to having the majority of the country vote for a black man.  But Barack Obama is also a political figure who has to compromise himself in many ways to get the job done (what Michael Walzer calls getting “dirty hands”).  He also holds some questionable views that Christians at the very least should have some distaste for, like supporting the legalization of partial birth abortion and other views regarding the protection of the pre-born.

However, the bigger issue that I am concerned about is that people are moved emotionally by political figures like Barack Obama and celebrities like Oprah (one of the tests Haidt used to study elation involved exposing lactating women to an episode of Oprah’s talk show), but these stimuli are largely phantasms.  No matter how strongly you feel about Barack Obama, chances are, you don’t know the guy.  You don’t know what kind of president he will be.  You probably don’t know what kind of senator he was.  No matter how inspiring you may think Oprah is, you probably know nothing about her but the image she puts on.  She could be a wretched person to her staff and family and friends, and you wouldn’t know at all.  So you have to ask yourself–is elation the appropriate response to the stimulus of Barack Obama or Oprah?

For Christians, I think our experience of elation should often be reigned in, knowing what we know about the sinful and fallen state of the world.  Surely, there are many great moral examples to follow, and many witnesses to the human capacity to transcend our fallen natures, but more often than not, human beings are selfish and self-justifying.  The white supremacist probably experiences elation when she listens to a David Duke speech.  The secular humanist probably experiences elation when he listens to Paul Kurtz or reads Nietzsche.  They experience elation because the stimulus is self-justifying.

Christians have long had a sense of the importance of elation for the moral life, however.  The writing of the Gospels was largely because Christians felt elated and were inspired to rise to new moral heights when they heard the story of Jesus.  The “Imitation of Christ” is a highly regarded spiritual tool for much of the same reason.  The stories of the saints were used to induce “elation” and compel Christians to become more virtuous, compassionate, and loving individuals.

The difference between Christian elation and what Haidt and Keltner are studying is that Christian elation is stimulated by God’s love for humanity and his mercy towards us, rather than what human beings achieve on their own.  The witness of Christ, the great saints of the Christian tradition, and holy men and women of today is not to the capacity that human beings have to transcend, but rather, they witness to the height, depth, and width of God’s love.  It is this stimulus alone which we know is always morally good, and which should compel the greatest experience of elation from us.

I am reading a book right now called The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination by Dale C. Allison which argues that the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew is not just about internalizing the Jewish moral code or about advocating some perfectionist ethic, but is also a summary of Jesus’ deeds and a witness to his character.  Allison writes, “the First Gospel is about a figure who imaginately and convincingly incarnates his own moral imperatives.  Jesus embodies his speech; he lives as he speaks and speaks as he lives.  It is not going too far to say that Matthew 5-7 proclaims likeness to the God of Israel (5:48) through the virtues of Jesus Christ” (22).  Allison concludes this section of the book by stating, “If Aristotle regarded ‘the good man’ as the canon in ethics, in Matthew, Jesus is the canon of Christian morality.”  Christians should pay attention to what the positive psychologists tell us about elation, but they should strive to cultivate this “new” emotion in response to Christ, who alone is “praise, adored, and loved with grateful affection, even to the end of time.”