Abstract
Experts typically accuse lay people of “emotional” responses to technological risk as opposed to their own “rational” judgment. This attitude is in tune with risk perception research that qualifies lay people’s responses in terms of bias. By contrast, cognitivists argue that emotions are judgments or that they are assessable as rational or irrational. But this does not account for the “raw”, bodily and passive aspect of emotional experience. A Jamesian view of emotions as bodily changes may deliver that, but at the cost of downplaying the role of practical rationality. In this paper I develop an account that neither conflates emotions with judgment nor separates them entirely. I argue that emotions can be at the same time passive and overwhelming and rationally connected to our beliefs, concerns, and commitments within a judgmental constellation. This view takes seriously people’s so-called “gut reactions” to technological risk as being potentially rationally related to, but not identical to, judgmental elements. It recognizes the possibility of actively changing our attitude to risk if we judge that there are good reasons to do so, but appreciates that if sometimes technological risk strikes us with fear and horror, that experience teaches us much about what we judge to be important.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Note that my account does not make the Kantian distinction between moral and prudential judgment. To do so would imply that emotions can play a role in prudential judgment but should not “interfere” in moral judgment, a view which I reject. The account developed in this paper is applicable to both moral and prudential judgments and hence to all risk judgments in so far as they involve such judgments.
- 4.
A similar view can be found in Sartre’s The Emotions (Sartre 1948).
- 5.
Note that recently emotions have also received a more prominent place in the philosophy of action, which seems to support the cognitivist view. In their article “Emotion and Action” Zhu and Thagard argue against the view that emotions are irrational and that they “merely happen to people” (Zhu and Thagard 2002, p. 19). Drawing on research in cognitive neuroscience, they conclude that “emotions contribute significantly to the processes of action generation as well as action execution and control” (34).
- 6.
This sounds like Sartre, but Solomon rejects Sartre’s view that emotions have a “magical” function. He calls wanting to undo the past, stereotype responses, avoiding unusual situations etc. “pathological ways of choosing our emotions” (Solomon 2003, 13). According to Solomon, emotions do not merely change our view of the world, the also (make us) change the world. Note also that the cognitivist is similar to the Stoic view of emotions, as Martha Nussbaum (2001 and Miriam van Reijen have shown (van Reijen 1995, 2005).
- 7.
Note that our emotion and judgment can also be non-moral, but here I consider (risk) judgment as moral judgment.
- 8.
Note that I have a more pluralist definition than Roberts (see also his contribution to this volume): the value dimension enters not only via concern.
- 9.
Note that there are more criteria to evaluate the completeness and the quality of a judgment. In his paper “Emotions and Judgments about Risk” Roberts proposes a number of epistemic criteria that can be used to evaluate judgments. For example, a judgment is better if it is epistemically justified and if the subject understands the judgment. Both are unrelated to what Roberts calls the “truth” of a judgment (see Roberts in this volume).
- 10.
The situation here is similar to what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”, except that here the constellation contains emotions as well as cognitive elements. We could call it “emotional-cognitive dissonance”. And similar to the usual response to cognitive dissonance, it is likely that the person will change her beliefs.
- 11.
Note that, apart from elements within the judgmental constellation, Goldie suggests that there is a sense in which our actions themselves can reveal a “passivity”. In his analysis of jealousy he writes: “The passionateness of jealousy is revealed not only in its aetiology and in the way jealous thoughts and feelings can be out of our reasoned control. It can also be revealed in our actions. We can, so to speak, find ourselves doing things (…).” (Goldie 2000, p. 231) This suggests that we should not only look into the relation between these emotions and the other elements in our judgmental constellation, but also to the relations between elements of that constellation (for instance emotions) and our actions.
- 12.
If Goldie is right about the passivity of actions (see the previous footnote), we might also want to seek out the rational relations between judgmental constellations and actions.
Bibliography
Coeckelbergh, M. 2009. Risk and public imagination: Mediated risk perception as imaginative moral judgment. In The Ethics of Risk. L. Asveld, and S. Roeser, eds., London: Earthscan Publishers.
Covello, V., and P. M., Sandman. 2001. Risk communication: Evolution and revolution. In Solutions to an Environment in Peril. A. Wolbarst ed., 164–178, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
de Sousa, R. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Frankfurt, H. 1988. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, H. 1999. Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldie, P. 2000. The Emotions. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Greene, J. D., R. B., Sommerville, L. E., Nystrom, J. M., Darley, and J. D., Cohen. September 2001. An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science 293: 14.
Greene, J. D. 2003. From neutral “is” to moral “ought”: What are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 847–850.
Habermas, J. 1981. Theorie des Kommunikatieven Handelns (Band I + II). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Translated by T. McCarthy (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1 + 2, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
James, W. 1884. What is an emotion? Mind 9: 188–205.
James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. II. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Kant, I. 1785. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. New York: Routledge, 1991.Translated by H. J. Paton Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.
Keller, C., M., Siegrist, and H., Gutscher. 2006. The role of affect and availability heurstics in risk communication. Risk Analysis 26(3): 631–639.
Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, E., K. D., McCaul, M., Stefanek, and W., Nelson. 2006. A heuristics approach to understanding cancer risk perception: Contributions from judgment and decision-making research. Annals of Behavioural Medicine 31(1): 45–52.
Pott, H. 2005. Van James naar Damasio: Balans van dertig jaar emotietheorie. In Emoties: Van stoïcijnse apatheia tot heftige liefde. M. van Reijen, ed., Kampen: Klement.
Prinz, J. 2004a. Embodied emotions. In Thinking about Feeling. R. C. Solomon, ed., 44–59, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Prinz, J. 2004b. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Prinz, J. March 2006. The emotional basis of moral judgments. Philosophical Exploration 9(1): 29–43.
Prinz, J. (2007) Was William James right about emotions? Paper presented at the Dutch-Flemish Society for Analytic Philosophy (VAF) Conference, University of Antwerpen, 26 April 2007
Ratcliffe, M. 2003. Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. In: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Retrieved from http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1360.Review of Solomon, R.
Roeser, S. October 2006. The role of emotions in judging the moral acceptability of risks. Safety Science 44(8): 689–700.
Roeser, S. 2010. Intuitions, emotions and gut feelings in decisions about risks: Towards different interpretation of “neuroethics”. The Journal of Risk Research (forthcoming).
Sartre, J. -P. 1948. The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Translated by B. Frechtman New York: Philosophical Library.
Slovic, P. 1999. Trust, emotion, sex, politics, and science: Surveying the risk-assessment battlefield. Risk Analysis 19(4): 689–701.
Slovic, P., M. L., Finucane, E., Peters, and D. G., MacGregor. 2004. Risk as analysis and risk as feelings: Some thoughts about affect, reason, risk, and rationality. Risk Analysis 24(2): 311–322.
Smith, A. January 2005. Responsibility for attitudes: Activity and passivity in mental life. Ethics 115: 236–271.
Solomon, R. C. 1980. Emotions and choice. In Explaining Emotions. A. Rorty, ed., 251–281, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Solomon, R. C. 2003. Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solomon, R. C. 2006. True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tversky, A., and D., Kahneman. September 27, 1974. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185(4157): 1124–1131.
van Reijen, M. 1995. Filosoferen over emoties. Baarn: Nelissen.
van Reijen, M. 2005. Ik denk dus ik voel: Een stoïcijnse filosofie van emoties. In Emoties: Van stoïcijnse apatheia tot heftige liefde. M. van Reijen, ed., Kampen: Klement.
Young, L., and M., Koenigs. 2007. Investigating emotion in moral cognition: A review of evidence from functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology. British Medical Bulletin 84: 69–79.
Zhu, J., and P., Thagard. 2002. Emotion and action. Philosophical Psychology 15(1): 19–36.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Coeckelbergh, M. (2010). Risk Emotions and Risk Judgments: Passive Bodily Experience and Active Moral Reasoning in Judgmental Constellations. In: Roeser, S. (eds) Emotions and Risky Technologies. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8647-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8647-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-8646-4
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-8647-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)