Recently I have started to think about the relation between the judgements and the emotions, would the judgements be merely an answer or the satisfaction of one’s own emotions? You can’t say yes and also can’t say no, but your answer might be “it depends on the situation”. Ok, let’s say “it depends on the situation”. then what is the criteria that hold your statement to be correct? Might it be the amount of harm or the convulsion of your moral holdings? Your judgements tend to protect someone from harm or to do justice to someone that has been harmed or something that holds your moral values.
Then what if a situation where nobody is harmed but you need to give your judgment. Here your moral values come into the picture. For example, Dancing naked when nobody is home is a situation where nobody is harmed, and nothing is wrong but the feeling you receive by reading is disgust and dissatisfaction. Your judgment regarding the situation is condemning the action. Consider another example
“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 the dinner. Nobody saw them do this.”(citation from JONATHAN HAIDT book, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND)
If you are the person to judge the situation then you condemn the action saying it is morally wrong. But when asked to give the reason for your judgments in the above situation you starts to say some “informational assumption” answers like, it is wrong to do that to the dog or dog meat harms your body. You start to create or try to see some harm in the situations. “We people really condemning the actions because they foresaw these harms, or was it the reverse process– were people inventing these harms because they had already condemned the action” [In this view can we take our little time to think about the Sabarimala temple issue where women are not allowed into the temple]
These situations give us some valid points to say emotions drive our judgment but the disgust you feel is not a strong emotion to valid this point. So to dive deep into the matter I started to read articles by the psychologists and read a book that is similar to the point i.e., THE RIGHTEOUS MIND by JONATHAN HAIDT
In the book JONATHAN used the theory made by the Psychologist Hume, The Psychologist argued that moral reasoning was a mere servant of moral emotions. He stated from his findings that “people were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.” May be this might be one of the reasons for the divide in people based on their religions or beliefs
For this context Jonathan has a beautiful statement “The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant”. Here the rider is our conscious reasoning–the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99% of mental process that actually govern most of our behavior, The 1% amount of dissatisfaction governs our behavior to the far extent[lets take our little time to think about the turban issue in India].
It is hard to think rationally when one already has the presumptions. Finding the ground to think rationally is hard to find hence, the arguments occur between parties. In my view to solve these things there are two ways, one is to Thinking out of the box and the other is to get hold of your presumptions. Amidst of all these my most concern is about the children, they has the ability to pick up things & thoughts through their surroundings. By making them to abide by our society rules and tampering their reasoning and judgement is the harsh gift the society offers to them. Hence, the generations take time to habituate the rational thinking.
[Dear Reader what are your thoughts regarding Rational Thinking. Please do comment on the article, All the constructive criticism is encouraged]
(K.L. Ambika)
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