BY: GROUP- 3

Feelings and Moral

Decision- Making
 We decide based on our emotions or
feelings because they are integral parts of
one’s life, such as how we get annoyed by a
coworker, and long-lasting emotions, such
as the death of a loved one.
According to Cherry (2018), our emotions are composed of the following:

1. Subjective component – how we experience emotion

2. Physiological component – how our bodies react to the emotion
3.Expressive component – how we behave in response to the emotion
 The Function of Emotions
(Oasis Recovery Center 2021)

1. Emotions can motivate us to take action

2. Emotions can help us make decisions
3. Emotions allow us to understand others
4. Emotions play a significant role in our ethical decision-
5. Emotional responses can lead to suboptimal moral decisions
6. Emotions can help people learn to make better choices even when
they cannot reason consciously about these choices.
• Depending on one’s view about morality, these studies on how emotions may help
moral action are challenging.
• Several philosophers claim that to be moral, and action must be the result of
deliberative thought. In this view, people must consider the consequences of their
actions when making an ethical decision.
• However, an alternative and nuanced understanding of moral action avoids this
dispiriting conclusion. What if moral action is the result of deliberative choices one
has made over time? On this view, people can, through deliberative reasoning,
change their interpretations of situations and their emotional responses to those
situations.
• This idea does not imply that we all share the same view of what constitutes
moral behavior, but we all can bring our emotional responses in line with our own
moral beliefs and intentions, whatever those are.
In terms of NEGATIVE EMOTIONS, adverse reactions
provide the perfect occasions for us to develop our
emotional responses to make them aligned with our moral
attitudes and goals.

The following reasons explain why this can happen:

1. Negative emotions signal the need to adjust our behavior

2. Negative emotions can help us learn from our mistakes
3. Emotional responses can be reshaped over time
 Our emotions are powerful and unavoidable.
However, we need not be at the mercy of our emotions, unable to control them or prevent
them from overwhelming our reasoning and behavior.
 According to Damon, Colby (2015), we should not refer to neuroscience to study morality
because findings from the studies are hard to interpret. These studies are typically conducted
on limited populations, such as college students, and focus on dilemmas that are unlikely to
occur in real life, such as the trolley problem (cited by Suttie 2015).

Damon and Colby (2015) provide three-character traits that influence the moral character
in which a person can cultivate:

1, Truthfulness
2. Humility
3. Faith
 The debate on whether the moral decision is a matter of
emotions or reason has spilled over into the nature of
ethical thinking.

According to Thagard (2010), resolving this debate requires an evidence-based theory of

emotions that mediates between two traditional theories. These theories are the :

1. Cognitive Appraisal View

2. Physiological Perception View
 The cognitive appraisal view believes in the rational characteristic of emotion
because the truth or falsity of judgments can be evaluated.
 Meanwhile, the physiological perception view places emotions on the
nonrational side because bodily reactions are not susceptible to reason.

Generally, ethical judgments are highly emotional, mainly when people

express their strong approval or disapproval of various acts (Thagard 2010).
 Ben-Ze-ev (1997), on the other hand, argues that free choice is involved in any moral
decision. Many philosophers will agree with this statement. However, Ben-Ze-ev added that
free choice entails intellectual deliberations.

In relation to these, Ben-Ze-ev (1997) illustrates the following:

“P is causally responsible for X if P is the cause for X. Thus, if P hands

over a glass containing poison to X and consequently X dies, then although P
is causally responsible for X’s death, P is not to be blamed for this death if he
did not know that the glass contained poison. The central sense of moral
responsibility is that of blameworthiness. It can be divided into direct and
indirect responsibility.”
 To shape our character properly is partially out of
responsibility but is neither entirely nor directly under our control.
Given that we are responsible for our character traits, we are
accountable for our emotions because managing them is easy.
Emotions and character traits, therefore, are socialized modes of
responses and not raw impulses (Ben-Ze-ev, 1997).
THANK YOU!!