• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Jonathan Haidt

Emotions are not primarily judgements

07 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Biology, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, Fear, Human Nature, Meditation, Mindfulness, Practice, Psychology, Serenity

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

anxiety, autobiography, Chrysippus, Four Noble Truths, Headspace, Jonathan Haidt, Martha Nussbaum, nonhuman animals, S.N. Goenka, Sigmund Freud

I was struck by two things when I read Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness. On one hand, as I noted previously, I’m excited by Nussbaum’s new, and more Śāntidevan, normative approach to anger; it seems like she and I have moved toward the same position there. On the other, though, I realized that I have moved away from Nussbaum’s general descriptive theory of emotion. Nussbaum articulates this theory at length in Upheavals of Thought, and I don’t think her theory has changed much by the time we get to Anger (she offers a summary of it in the appendix). What has changed, in the roughly fifteen years since I read Upheavals cover to cover, is that I agreed with her theory then, and I no longer do – and reading the short summaries of the position in Anger helped me realize that.

Nussbaum’s theory (derived primarily from the Stoic thinker Chrysippus) is that emotions are fundamentally cognitive judgements of value, with a content directed at an object believed to affect our well-being. So fear, for example, is primarily a judgement that something could be harmful to us in the future; grief is primarily a judgement that something of value has been lost to us. I found this account plausible when I first encountered it. I no longer do.

Continue reading →

Is it morally wrong to eat your dead dog?

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Death, Disgust, Family, Food, Monasticism, Morality, Sex, Virtue

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Confucius, J. David Velleman, Jonathan Haidt, nonhuman animals, Peter Singer, virtue ethics

Jonathan Haidt opens his The Righteous Mind with two hypothetical examples, “thought experiments” as analytic philosophers would say:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

And

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Haidt asks us: Did the people in either of these cases do something morally wrong? My reaction was, and is, to say yes in the first case but not the second. Continue reading →

Is pleasure the only intrinsic good?

14 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Monasticism, Morality, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Truth

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Jonathan Haidt, Mencius, Neil Sinhababu, phenomenology, Todd Stewart

I recently had the pleasure of reading an interesting paper by Neil Sinhababu, a friend I met while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas. Neil’s paper, thoughtfully posted online, is entitled The Epistemic Argument for Univesal Hedonism. In it, Neil makes an argument for a strong and controversial position that I’ve flirted with before myself: that pleasure and displeasure are the only things intrinsically good or bad in any ethical sense.

Neil’s argument proceeds roughly as follows (and this summary, qua summary, must necessarily leave out some of the detail and precision of his argument): Ethical judgement all derive from one of two sources: emotional perception and phenomenal introspection. The source of most of our commonsense judgements about morality is emotional perception: a process by which we react emotionally to states of affairs in the world, form moral judgements in connection with these emotional reactions, and thereby perceive the states of the world as having objective moral qualities. Neil draws on Jonathan Haidt’s empirical research to support this point.

Neil goes further, however, in arguing that we are wrong to make moral judgements on the basis of emotional perception, thus rejecting Mencius’s metaethics as well as those of the moral sense theorists. Emotional perception, he claims, is inherently unreliable. Continue reading →

Inconsistency in the incest taboo

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Disgust, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Sex

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

conservatism, Dan Savage, incest, Jonathan Haidt, Leon Kass, Martha Nussbaum

I’m often surprised by people who see gay rights as an entirely one-sided, good and evil issue – and then turn around and condemn incest, even consensual adult brother-sister incest, as sick, disgusting and therefore wrong. (The “therefore” is the most intriguing part.) I’ve always enjoyed Dan Savage‘s sex columns, but after his continued attacks on those who condemn gay sex as disgusting (such as ensuring that this (NSFW) is the first Google hit for Senator Rick Santorum‘s name), I lost a lot of respect for him when he repeatedly proclaimed incest to be wrong.

Savage’s arguments are startlingly poor. Continue reading →

Ethics without morality

02 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Free Will, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Bernard Williams, Charles Goodman, Damien Keown, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jonathan Haidt, Mark Siderits, Śāntideva, Shyam Ranganathan

There’s been a debate in the past couple of years between Mark Siderits and Charles Goodman over Śāntideva’s attitude toward free will. In his chapter condemning anger, Śāntideva says a number of things that sound completely determinist:

Even though my stomach fluids and so on make great distress, I have no anger toward them. Why do I have anger toward sentient beings? Even their anger has a cause…. Certainly, all the different crimes and vices arise out of causes; we can’t find an independent one…. Therefore, when one sees an enemy or a friend doing unjust acts, one should think “it has causes,” and remain happy. (Bodhicary?vat?ra verses VI.22-33) Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Amod Lele on In praise of the present moment
  • Nathan on In praise of the present moment
  • Nathan on In praise of the present moment
  • Nathan on Self-improvement by not-self-improvement
  • Amod Lele on Self-improvement by not-self-improvement

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (13)
  • Applied Phil (296)
    • Death (38)
    • Family (46)
    • Food (18)
    • Friends (15)
    • Health (24)
    • Place (29)
    • Play (15)
    • Politics (170)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (40)
  • Asian Thought (412)
    • Buddhism (296)
      • Early and Theravāda (126)
      • Mahāyāna (122)
      • Modernized Buddhism (90)
    • East Asia (89)
      • Confucianism (56)
      • Daoism (15)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (134)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (39)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (38)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (6)
  • Method (247)
    • M.T.S.R. (139)
    • Metaphilosophy (162)
  • Practical Philosophy (371)
    • Action (12)
    • Aesthetics (46)
    • Emotion (162)
      • Anger (34)
      • Attachment and Craving (27)
      • Compassion (7)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (8)
      • Grief (6)
      • Happiness (48)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (7)
    • External Goods (51)
    • Flourishing (90)
    • Foundations of Ethics (111)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (66)
    • Virtue (157)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (23)
      • Leadership (5)
      • Mindfulness (18)
      • Patient Endurance (29)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (30)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (127)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (36)
    • Monasticism (45)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (20)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (344)
    • Consciousness (17)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (67)
    • Hermeneutics (57)
    • Human Nature (31)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (94)
    • Philosophy of Language (20)
    • Self (66)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (438)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (146)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (24)
      • Roman Catholicism (51)
    • French Tradition (48)
    • German Tradition (86)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (112)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (20)
    • Islam (38)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (34)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (153)
      • Economics (33)
      • Psychology (63)

Recent Posts

  • Sudden and gradual together
  • In praise of the present moment
  • Self-improvement by not-self-improvement
  • On f***ing Daoism
  • Of races and other castes

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.