Emotion

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EMOTION

The role of emotions in moral behavior has been debated by ethicists since ancient Greece. The scientific study of emotions is much more recent, yet the advances in twenty-first century understanding of the neural mechanisms that subserve emotions take on added meaning in the context of these ancient debates. New developments in emotional technologies add further nuances to these old questions. This entry provides a brief account of what emotions are, outlines the way emotions have been viewed in some major philosophical traditions, and discusses the ethical questions raised by some forms of technology.

What Are Emotions?

Emotions may be defined in a number of ways (Evans 2001). From a neurobiological perspective, emotions are defined in terms of the neural mechanisms that implement emotional processes in the brains of humans and other animals. In all mammals most emotional processes are mediated by a set of neural structures known collectively as the limbic system. The limbic system is an ill-defined term, but usually refers to a variety of subcortical structures, including the hippocampus, the cingulate gyrus, the anterior thalamus, and the amygdala (see Figure 1).

Neurobiological definitions of emotion can be regarded as parochial, because they exclude organisms that lack brains like those of humans from having emotions. A less chauvinistic alternative would be to define emotions in functional terms—that is, as dispositions to behave in certain ways. Fear, for example, disposes the organism to mobilize defensive and flight behaviors, and to focus attention on possible threats.

Functional definitions of emotion have been criticized on the grounds that they leave out feelings. Feelings—the conscious awareness of emotional states—have often been regarded as the central component of emotions, but some neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio prefer to distinguish between emotions, which they regard as objectively measurable processes, and subjective feelings.

Emotions may be distinguished from other affective phenomena such as moods and personality traits by temporal duration. Many psychologists regard emotions as relatively rapid and brief processes, lasting no more than a minute or two, and class longer-lasting affective states as moods, although this distinction is not universally accepted.

Emotions in Philosophy and Ethics

At the risk of over-simplification, it is useful to distinguish three main traditions in Western thought regarding the role of emotions in moral behavior. First many thinkers, such as Plato (c. 428–348 b.c.e. and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), have regarded emotions principally as obstacles to good conduct. Plato compared the rational mind to a charioteer whose task was to keep his horses (his emotions) under a tight rein. Kant argued that good actions were only truly moral when performed purely out of concern for the moral law, and not motivated by any emotion.

A second tradition, exemplified by thinkers such as Aristotle (384–322) b.c.e. and economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), has regarded emotions as vital ingredients in generating moral behavior. Aristotelian ethics is based on the idea of virtue, which is a golden mean halfway between opposing vices. Because many vices are defined as deficits or excesses of particular emotions, Aristotelian virtues may be regarded as optimal midpoints between emotional extremes. This ancient approach to ethics finds many echoes in the modern concept of emotional intelligence, which also stresses the need for cultivating emotional self-regulation. Smith argued that certain social emotions such as sympathy, which he called moral sentiments, lay at the heart of all ethical conduct.

Finally, a third tradition takes issue with both of the preceding positions, arguing that all moral judgments are merely an expression of the speaker's emotions. According to this view, championed by philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), when someone says that a certain action is right or wrong, what is meant is that the speaker has a feeling of approval or disapproval toward the action. This is sometimes referred to as the emotive theory of ethics.

More recently the philosophy of emotions has begun to address other questions besides the role of emotions in moral behavior. Contemporary philosophers such as Paul Griffiths, for example, have argued that emotions are such a heterogenous bunch of phenomena that they cannot constitute a single natural kind. Others have attempted to clarify the complex relationship between emotions and rationality (de Sousa 1991).

Emotions and Technology

Since its very beginning, much human technology has been driven by the desire to exert greater control over the emotional states. Many human inventions, from cooking to music, may be viewed as technologies of mood, in the sense that they are designed primarily to induce certain emotions in the user. Modern developments such as psychotherapy and antidepressants, therefore, may increase the effectiveness of the ability to manipulate emotions by artificial means, but the ethical questions they raise are not new. The objections raised by critics such as Francis Fukuyama (2002) to the possibility of cosmetic psychopharmacology, in which people manipulate their emotional states at will by means of sophisticated new drugs, have many echoes in ongoing debates about authenticity. Such objections seem to some to smack of psychopharmacological Calvinism, the niggardly belief that happiness must be earned the hard way—that is, without the help of drugs (Kramer 1994). The inflammatory rhetoric that has so far characterized such debates needs to be eliminated if people are to have a mature and reasoned discussion about the benefits and dangers of developing more powerful technologies for influencing moods and emotions.

Other modern technologies raise ethical questions that had not previously been considered. The advent of neuroimaging techniques and other means of monitoring emotional processes that were previously thought to be irreducibly private and subjective raises new issues of neural privacy. How much of one's emotional life should others be able to assess by means of these technologies, and how reliable are they? These questions will become more urgent as new technologies such as sensitive clothing (garments with embedded sensors that monitor physiological changes) and brain-machine interfaces permit further intrusion into the emotional lives of others.

Another technology that raises new ethical questions concerning emotions is affective computing, a branch of artificial intelligence that attempts to build emotional machines (Picard 1997). One line of thinking in robotics argues that robots will need emotions if they are to be truly autonomous, and some commercially available entertainment robots already come programmed with a repertoire of basic emotions. It is arguable, of course, whether such mechanisms constitute genuine emotions or merely simulated emotions, but this distinction may be irrelevant because people tend to react to such robots as if they possessed genuine emotions. The ethical problems raised by such developments have been explored in great detail in science fiction, from Isaac Asimov's (1920–1992) short story "The Bicentennial Man" (1976) to Arthur C. Clarke's famous novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). While such fictional scenarios often postulate devices that are far in advance of available technology, the questions they raise are deep and sometimes disturbing. In Asimov's short story, for example, a robot redesigns his own circuitry so that he may experience the whole range of human emotions. Because some rights are often held to be contingent on having certain emotional capacities, a robot with human-like feelings might have to be accorded a moral status equivalent to that of a human. There are parallels here with the animal rights movement, which has placed great emphasis on the capacity of certain animals for pain and suffering in its attempts to provide them with greater legal protection.

More sinister scenarios envision emotional machines turning against their human creators, raising the question of whether efforts in affective computing should be curtailed. In Clarke's novel, for example, an onboard computer called HAL turns against the crew of the spaceship Discovery I, killing all but one of the astronauts. Asimov has suggested that such dangers might be avoided by programming machines to obey certain principles such as his three laws of robotics, stated in several of his stories and novels from 1950 onwards (including "The Bicentennial Man"), of which the first is that "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Yet it is hard to see how such principles could be implemented in a computer program.

This list of issues raised by technologies of emotion is not exhaustive, but illustrates how a greater understanding of emotions impacts ethics. Science and technology have powerful emotional dimensions that are often ignored by those involved in developing them. Yet it is vital to think about these dimensions, because adverse emotional reactions to new technologies among the general public can have serious consequences. From the Luddites, eighteenth-century English artisans who destroyed machinery during the industrial revolution, to twenty-first century environmentalists who oppose the planting of genetically engineered crops, new technologies have often inspired deep feelings of mistrust. Those developing future technologies risk provoking similar reactions unless they engage the public at large in open and informed debate in which emotional dimensions are addressed as well as the scientific facts.

DYLAN EVANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asimov, Isaac. (1976). "The Bicentennial Man. In The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, 1976. In this story Asimov manages to explore many of the moral dilemmas of giving computers emotions more effectively than any non-fiction account.

Clarke, Arthur C. (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: ROC. A science-fiction classic, featuring HAL, the onboard computer.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. London: Heinemann. A prominent neuroscientist explores the distinction between emotions and feelings.

De Sousa, Ronald. (1991). The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A philosophical discussion of the role of emotions in rational behavior.

Evans, Dylan. (2001). Emotion: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A good overall introduction to the science of emotion.

Fukuyama, Francis. (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. London: Profile Books. An emotional polemic against modern technology.

Griffiths, Paul E. (1997). What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. A philosophical discussion of the concept of emotion.

Kramer, Peter D. (1994). Listening to Prozac. London: Fourth Estate. A forceful advocate for the view that drugs can improve our emotional lives.

Picard, Rosalind W. (1997). Affective Computing. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Discusses recent attempts to build emotional computers and robots.

Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics