Moral Emotions

Abstract

The “moral emotions” are often considered to be shame, guilt, sympathy, and empathy (Tangney and Dearing 2002), and, to a lesser degree, contempt, anger, and disgust (Rozin et al. 1999), but a moment of reflection reveals that this view is far too narrow. The palate of human emotions is much larger and diverse than this short list of moral emotions; and since human capacities for emotion evolved to increase moral commitments to others, social structures and culture, many more emotions have moral effects. For example, righteousness, awe, veneration, joy, happiness, remorse, vengeance, and even sadness can mark emotional arousal over moral issues, as we hope to demonstrate. Moreover, as the literature makes clear, the arousal of emotions like shame and guilt can set into motion cognitive and psychodynamic processes such as attribution, expectation states, repression, displacement, or projection that transmute the initial arousal of an emotion like shame into anger, fear, disgust, and hatred (Lewis 1971; Scheff 1990; Turner 2002). These and other emotional states are ultimately connected to morality, even if a person and others do not fully recognize this connection. Thus, from a sociological perspective, the study of moral emotions soon brings into play a much larger array of human emotions. The goal is to understand both the sociocultural dynamics and psychodynamics by which emotional arousal is fueled by considerations of morality.