Feeling better about moral dilemmas - Lake Superior State University

Journal of Moral Education 

Vol. 34, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 43–55 

Feeling better about moral dilemmas 

Jason K. Swedene * 

Lake Superior State University, USA 

There has been a trend in contemporary ethics to believe that a morally admirable agent would feel 

negative self-assessing emotions following even the best possible choice in a moral dilemma. A 

commonly held reason for holding this position is that agents who are well-brought up are trained 

to feel negative self-assessing emotions when they do something morally forbidden under ordinary 

circumstances, and that agents acting for the best in a dilemma will nonetheless recognize their 

deed as morally forbidden. I challenge this view and reach the conclusion that without the further 

notion that the agent morally failed, negative self-assessing emotions ought to be discouraged in 

favour of emotions such as grief and sadness, which are negative and self-conscious, but not selfassessing. 

I then offer some cognitive strategies moral educators could impart to help persons feel 

emotions that better reflect the nuances of moral dilemmas. 

We ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato 

says, so as to both delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought. (Aristotle, 

Nicomachean Ethics, 1104b, 11–13) 

Our world is such that we must make tough decisions, as we navigate the many 

demands of modern life. There are indeed a plurality of values and a plurality of 

situations in which we must choose between actions that embody competing and 

irreducible values. When we need our morality most may turn out to be precisely the 

time in which we likely will not feel pleasant about acting in accordance with it. 

Since virtue is connected with how we feel about acting morally, should a virtuous 

agent acting as morally as he can be expected to feel distress? What kind of distress? 

The impetus for this brief essay is to respond to commonly held views that a virtuous 

agent would feel painful self-assessing emotions, such as guilt or agent-regret, even 

in cases wherein the agent acts for the best. The most accepted position, referred to 

as the ‘habituation view’, celebrates dilemmatic negative self-assessing emotions as 

by-products of a sound moral upbringing. I shall argue that while the habituation 

view provides a useful explanation of why good agents often do feel badly even when 

they have acted with moral responsibility, the habituation view cannot substantiate 

itself unless it is supplemented with the claim that the dilemmatic action was 

categorically wrong, a position few ethicists would support. The challenge now 

*Lake Superior State University, Department of Arts, Letters and Social Sciences, 650 W. 

Easterday Avenue, Sault Sainte Marie, MI, 49783, USA. Email: jswedene@lssu.edu 

ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/05/010043-13 

# 2005 Journal of Moral Education Ltd 

DOI: 10.1080/03057240500049307

44 J. K. Swedene 

becomes how to integrate a revised emotional awareness into our moral instruction 

so that we might be pained only at the things we ought. 

Moral dilemmas and the virtuous agent’s emotional profile: the habituation 

view 

Emotions have a significant place in our moral lives. Our emotions inform us of 

moral salience, contribute to deliberation, connect us with other human beings, and 

alert us (sometimes painfully) that we have acted immorally. The self-assessing 

emotions in particular bear so much on our moral lives because they function to 

draw attention to the ways in which we interact with the world. Both guilt and agentregret, 

for example, alert us to moral wrongdoing. Guilt and agent-regret are 

negative self-assessing emotions. By ‘negative self-assessing emotions’ I mean those 

emotions which include a discomfort (hence, ‘negative’) directed at the self (hence, 

‘self-assessing’). All self-assessing emotions seem to indicate that one’s character is 

attuned to the world, one’s life, and one’s action. And, of course, the virtuous person 

would be so attuned. All self-assessing emotions, and a fortiori all negative selfassessing 

emotions, involve a cognition or belief about the self’s role in the greater 

world. I might feel a negative self-assessing emotion in the aftermath of betraying the 

trust of a friend. In that case, I would notice that such behaviour is wrong, harmful, 

and that it was me who performed that wrong behaviour. 

Granted that a virtuous agent would hold a proper belief about her role in the 

action (an intellectual virtue) and react properly (a moral virtue), we might wonder 

why she persists in experiencing a negative self-assessing emotion following 

dilemmatic action. Would not a proper belief at least include the content that the 

agent acted for the best, acted reasonably, or some other variant? Most of us would 

grant that even as the dilemmatic virtuous agent acts for the best with compunction, 

the agent would nonetheless believe that she acts appropriately given the 

circumstances. And moreover, it is that very belief of propriety that allows her to 

follow through with tough decisions even as competing imperatives pull her in 

opposing directions. Yet a significant number of ethicists continue to defend the 

thesis that negative self-assessing emotions in the wake of dilemmatic action are 

warranted, perhaps even to be celebrated. For the remainder of this essay, I employ 

examples of severe and tragic dilemmas frequently addressed in the literature. If an 

agent may be emancipated from negative self-assessing emotions following his killing 

an offspring, he certainly may be emancipated from such emotions following 

breaking a promise to a colleague. 

The habituation view considers negative self-assessing emotions as non-specific, 

involuntary emotional responses constitutive of moral virtue. When an admirable 

agent commits an action perceived to be incongruent with his integrity and moral 

values, feeling a negative self-assessing emotion is inevitable. In fact, Daniel Statman 

(1990) has argued that should the agent fail to feel such an emotion in response to 

dilemmatic action, the agent must not have been brought up properly. The morally 

admirable agent, so the claim runs, is sensitive to harm and authentic in 

acknowledging his causing the harm. For Statman (1990, p. 199), ‘Dispositions

Feeling better about moral dilemmas 45 

cannot be switched on and off at will’. Once habituated to feel regretful, guilty, or 

ashamed should he perform some prima facie wrong act, he cannot but experience 

those emotions even when circumstances ‘force’ him to do it. This is essentially the 

utilitarian R. M. Hare’s (1981) thinking too: emotions are instilled as an efficient 

way of motivating behaviour in normal circumstances. Dilemmatic action may elicit 

these emotional reactions inculcated by a sound moral upbringing. 

Ruth Barcan Marcus (1980) claims that the agent who does not feel dilemmatic 

guilt lacks moral awareness. The agent either has not internalized a moral principle 

that should have been internalized or does not recognize that his action conflicts with 

the moral principle. She writes: 

Where an agent acknowledges conflicting obligations, there is sufficient overlap with 

dilemma-free cases of moral failure to warrant describing the associated feelings where 

present as guilt, and where absent as appropriate to an agent with moral sensibility. 

(Marcus, 1980, p. 132) 

Since dilemmatic actions resemble non-dilemmatic actions, the well-disposed 

cannot help but to feel guilt. Moral sensibility entails that guilt be felt. 

If the habituation view held by Statman, Hare, and Marcus is correct, then 

Aristotle may very well have missed something important when he proposed that we 

should be habituated to experience pleasure in response to acting well and pain in 

response to acting poorly. How would the virtuous ship captain feel after tossing 

overboard treasured cargo to secure the lives of his crew? In Nicomachean Ethics 

Book IV. 9, Aristotle (McKeon, 1941) argues that we would not praise an adult for 

feeling a negative self-assessing emotion because that adult should not do anything 

that calls for that feeling. Just because the conditional ‘If a good man did x, then he 

would feel y’ is true does not entail that ‘A good man would feel y’ is true. A good 

man would never do x’. (And the careful thinker would never affirm the 

consequent!) Yet even Aristotle in Book III agrees that there are cases of dilemma 

in which a good man might do something incongruent with his character, such as 

doing something base under the orders of an unprincipled tyrant. 

The psychological claim ‘morally admirable agents will feel y in circumstances z’ 

entails ‘those who aim to be morally admirable should cultivate the disposition to 

feel y in circumstances z’. Thus, the psychological claim takes the imperative form of 

a moral claim. Moral education is precisely for those who aim to be morally 

admirable. I take issue with both the psychological and moral claims. 

Moral dilemmas and the virtuous agent’s emotional profile: critique of the 

habituation view 

The habituation view is attractive for various reasons. Negative self-assessing 

emotions are generated by an asymmetry between a morally admirable character and 

some perceived feature of his moral act. An admirable moral agent would have been 

brought up to recognize when his action produces harm. Following a moral 

dilemma, the agent perceives a morally salient feature of his environment, the harm,


and the morally salient feature of the cause of that harm: himself. This elicits the 

negative self-assessing emotion. 

Of course, the admirable agent would notice certain features of his world which 

bear upon morality, and react as one who noticed those features should react. The 

noticed features neatly fall into two classes, each corresponding to an intentional 

object of the self-assessing emotion. A first feature is that someone has been harmed 

and a second is an acknowledgement that the self brought about that harm. 

Regarding the first intentional object, the other person, we would have difficulty 

justifying why an admirable agent would not attune himself to the harm done. Harm, 

for our purposes, is defined as an effect that hinders or destroys another’s prospects 

for living well. Recognizing harm is a good thing: one who is aware of harm is in the 

best position to alleviate it and to prevent its further spread. 

One could, of course, argue that recognizing some harms (for example, the 

genocides and terror in Africa, abhorrent labour conditions, children being sold into 

sexual slavery) might lead to an anxiety that makes worthwhile life impossible. On 

this view, some harm must be ignored, and if it cannot be ignored, it must be 

forgotten quickly lest it consume us. But such a view could hardly be sustained. Even 

supposing a most disturbing example of harm, the carnage in Sierra Leone, I cannot 

see why recognizing harm should ever be dissuaded. For much of the last decade 

rebel forces in Sierra Leone massacred, raped, burned, and mutilated civilians, while 

paramilitary forces responded in kind. The amount of human harm in the region is 

undeniable. All morally sensitive persons would recognize the suffering and harm of 

the civilians tragically caught in the terror of a civil war, but surely not all of them 

respond to that recognition in the same way. Some may grow discouraged; others 

may become motivated to work towards ending the suffering. Very few persons 

become the radical altruist and commit the self-sacrifice of fully devoting themselves 

to the cause. The point need not be pushed further: responses to harm are not 

determined simply by our recognition of it. Whereas some recognition of harm may 

lead one to take unreasonable or even unjust measures in response, desensitizing 

ourselves to harm would make us callous, indecent, and morally blind. 

Now we must consider whether one who recognizes oneself as a moral contributor 

to dilemmatic harm is superior to one who does not. At first glance, the claim that one 

should recognize oneself as the moral contributor to harm seems unproblematic, 

perhaps even intuitively obvious. But for moral dilemmas which arise through no 

fault of the agent’s own, the circumstances that necessitate a forced choice make up 

the largest contributing source of harm. The Gestapo officer acting in the backdrop 

of institutionalized genocide is certainly a more primary moral source of harm than 

Styron’s (1976) Sophie. Sophie, recall, is compelled to choose which of her children 

will die at the hands of the Nazis. If other forces conspire to compel the horrible 

choice, then why overshadow that fact with the negative self-assessing emotion? The 

negative self-assessing emotions, and in particular guilt and agent-regret, focus 

moral censure onto the self disproportionately to the moral censure deserved by 

other agents. Moreover, why must these emotions imply even the slightest selfcensure 

when we acted appropriately given the circumstances of dilemma?


Admittedly, we may celebrate the habituation view for its description of the 

perceptive capabilities of the virtuous agent. Specifically, its description of the 

implications of habituation is laudable. A person who has been habituated properly 

has the moral sensibility to notice, act, and react in ways that lead to a good life. 

That granted, when a person is habituated, even habituated properly, there may be 

times when he has to act contrary to disposition. 

For Aristotle, habituation is the most effective means (and indeed the only means) 

for instilling moral values in the inexperienced. Classroom learning is wasted on the 

young for the reason that one must first develop a ‘second nature’, a programmed 

system of responses to efficiently and effectively implement ethical imperatives. A 

sound moral upbringing emphasizes family, truth, and human life. A sound moral 

theory teaches why they are essential. Sophie’s guilt is seen as appropriate because 

her guilt proceeds from a character which values the lives of her children. She has 

been habituated to feel guilty when she acts against her disposition. Conversely, 

Agamemnon’s lack of guilt at sacrificing Iphigenia for the sake of his crew and a 

victory in Troy is often seen as inappropriate given the duties of a father towards his 

offspring (see Lawall & Mack, 1999). An Agamemnon not saddled with guilt clearly 

lacks the disposition to value his child. 

On an explanatory level, the habituation view convincingly describes the products 

of a firm and unchanging disposition. An agent who faces two mutually exclusive 

and morally compelling act choices cannot help but have some aspect of his ultimate 

choice go against his disposition. Certainly our dispositions should be averse to 

killing family members. A world in which all of us hesitated before we put our family 

members in mortal danger is a better world than one that is not such a world. However, 

arguments supporting dilemmatic self-assessing emotions go much further. 

Marcus (1980) and Statman (1990) each claim that dilemmatic circumstances 

and dilemma-free circumstances resemble each other in enough ways that negative 

self-assessing emotions should follow both. However, locating the morally relevant 

resemblance is paramount. Whereas a negative focus on the self, integral to negative 

self-assessing emotions, is warranted by a dilemma-free case of moral failure, such a 

focus is not warranted in a dilemma that has arisen through no fault of the agent’s 

own. At best, the habituation view explains why it is understandable that an agent 

might feel a negative self-assessing emotion, but we are looking for more than 

arguments for why self-assessing emotions are ‘understandable’: we want to find out 

whether they are warranted and therefore to be encouraged. 

To begin to determine warrant, we might ask whether dilemmatic action 

resembles dilemma-free cases with respect to moral failure. Did the dilemmatic 

agent morally fail in a relevantly similar way as if she failed in a dilemma-free 

circumstance? It seems unfair to say that Sophie, who came into a horrific situation 

through no prior fault of her own, acted the best she could and yet still failed morally 

in a relevantly similar way as if she chose to give her daughter to a killer without 

duress. But of Sophie’s guilt, Greenspan (1983, p. 120) writes: 

As an ethical reaction … it seems warranted. She knows she is responsible for doing 

something wrong, something she could have avoided—even though she could not have


avoided doing wrong. The same would be true if she had chosen differently, and 

allowed both children to be killed. It would be strangely insensitive for a mother in her 

position not to experience guilt at either choice. 

Notice that Greenspan goes further than to say that Sophie’s self-assessing 

emotion is understandable: for Greenspan, ‘it seems warranted’ no matter which 

option Sophie chooses. So for Greenspan, Sophie has no choice but to fail morally. 

We could depart from Greenspan’s rationale and argue that Sophie fails by choosing 

at all—thus making her a culpable collaborator along with the officer. We would thus 

maintain a consistency that habituation view proponents do not, when they contend 

that Sophie is morally required to choose and fail. 

So, I submit here that there is no warrant for self-assessing emotions for cases of 

dilemma. But there is room, however, to support a negative emotion. A virtuous 

individual can be repulsed by a host of things, including the base actions of others. I 

am repulsed as the old are mistreated. I am repulsed at the person who does so. Any 

argument saying that the repulsion must take the form of self-assessing repulsion, 

then, must be supplemented by additional claims about the moral relevance of selfassessing 

emotions in dilemmatic circumstances. That is, a successful habituation 

view must explain why personal moral responsibility must imply the repulsion. 

Other reasons for endorsing dilemmatic self-assessing emotions 

It is clear that negative self-assessing emotions felt under the right circumstances are 

constitutive of moral virtue, so these emotions cannot be jettisoned without giving 

up virtue itself. But, my own position differs from the habituation view as to what are 

the right circumstances and the degree to which a virtuous agent can be expected to 

adapt emotionally to the nuances of circumstance. We must remember that the 

virtues have dispositional, affective, and intellectual aspects (Annas, 1993). 

Habituationists seem to forget about the intellectual aspects when they argue that 

dispositions cannot be switched off at will. To say that a virtuous agent would not 

have the intellect to have a true belief about his role in dilemmatic circumstances is 

not to have much faith in our virtuous agent. 

One could argue that emotions should be felt, since the agent is causally 

responsible for the ‘rejected alternative’. Marcus’s (1980, pp. 132–133) words are 

typical: 

Granted that, unlike agents who fail to meet their obligations simpliciter, the agent who 

was confronted with a moral dilemma may finally act on the best available reasons. Still, 

with respect to the rejected alternative he acknowledges a wrong in that he recognizes 

that it was within his power to do otherwise. 

Each option is in a sense wrong, regardless of whether the agent acts for the best or 

not. The agent’s well-intentioned method or rationale for choosing cannot offset the 

fact that what he chooses, ultimately, will be wrong. Some wrongdoing is 

inescapable. Some wrongdoing is intractable. Hence it is quite conceivable to some 

that a virtuous agent may act for the best, perform wrong, and blame himself for his 

choice.

But should not negative self-assessing emotions follow only those scenarios in 

which the agent bears both causal responsibility and moral responsibility? The 

former responsibility, though, is still in question. Commitment to certain moral ends 

does not imply that we bear moral responsibility when those ends are not attained. 

All of our choices are limited by circumstances and, by their being made, limit future 

choices. It would seem destructive (and silly) to go through life feeling negative selfassessing 

emotions every time that our characters are not fully represented by the 

things we cause. 

Perhaps negative self-assessing emotions show that we value something, and 

consequently should be endorsed as useful communications of our true intentions. If 

Agamemnon felt guilty even though he acted for the best, he would then have shown 

the world that he valued his daughter and his role as protector. But, surely there are 

other, more effective ways to express our true values. For example, instead of feeling 

badly that one has lied to protect innocent life, one may more effectively 

communicate honesty by regularly keeping promises and compensating for broken 

promises (Strasser, 1987). And such behaviours do not rely on unwarranted negative 

self-assessment. Behavioural consistency (over a lifetime) and compensation for 

transgressions seem better indicators of true character than emotional display. Our 

‘true feelings’ are notoriously difficult to detect. We cannot be sure whether 

apparent emotions accurately represent character. Epictetus (Baird & Kauffman, 

2003, p. 514) comes to mind: ‘Do not hesitate to sympathize with him so far as 

words go, and, if the occasion offers, even groan with him; but be careful not to 

groan also in the center of your being’. 

But perhaps we act consistently and compensate better with the aid of negative selfassessing 

emotions. Marcus (1980), Greenspan (1995), Rorty (1980), and Statman 

(1990) laud ‘anticipatory’ guilt and agent regret for their power to prevent future 

wrongs because we seek to avoid the emotional fallout. But to celebrate anticipatory 

negative self-assessing emotions in order to justify them for dilemmas misses the 

point. 

Some might seek warrant in the fact that after the action is done, the agent who 

feels morally responsible for it would be more likely to make reparations for harm. 

Once a transgression is committed, guilt or agent regret can provide that extra push 

to make up for the (mis)deed. Even if this were true, it would not explain why such 

emotions are warranted because of dilemmatic action. Surely negative self-assessing 

emotions are not warranted merely as catalysts of future moral behaviour. 

The moral emotions and cognitivism 


Practical wisdom guides the life of the truly virtuous. The virtuous walk by reason, 

not by program. The cognitivist theory of emotions gives proper attention to the 

intellectual complexity of self-assessing emotions and may be used in prescribing 

strategies to better control them. Historically speaking, cognitivism culminates the 

general shift from considering feeling as the primary component of emotion to 

considering thought as primary (Deigh, 1994). The question over whether feeling or


thought is primary may be construed as odd given that emotions are frequently 

experienced as feeling (e.g., many instances of anger). But even anger, an emotion 

notoriously associated with feeling, not thinking, can be primarily cognitive. As 

Solomon (1980, p. 254) puts it, ‘One can be angry without feeling angry: one can be 

angry for three days or five years and not feel anything identifiable as a feeling of 

anger continuously through that prolonged period’. 

Circumstances often help shape which emotions we feel. An elation that one will 

be promoted at work quickly melts into the background (or into extinction) when 

one receives a diagnosis of stage four cancer and will work no longer. Pride that one 

owns a lavish five bedroom beach house likewise fades when one learns that an 

electrical fire has reduced it to ashes. The circumstances per se do not have some 

special power to create human emotions. Rather, it is our cognitions about the 

circumstances that, when present, affect the emotions. Vary the cognition and the 

emotion varies. 

The main tenet of cognitivism is that one’s emotion is grounded in a propositional 

attitude, belief, or judgement. That one believes she will be promoted forms the 

basis for elation directed at her work situation. Upon getting medical results, one 

judges she soon will die from cancer, and her grief is directed at her tenuous hold on 

life. If additional tests show that the seemingly cancerous cysts were merely blotches 

on the previous x-ray, then her grief at her immanent death is unfounded. However, 

the experience may have conjured up disturbing, and often-ignored thoughts about 

her mortality. So, in the end, she may feel more grief than she did before the x-ray 

debacle, but nevertheless any grief is now directed at a different object (her 

mortality). The emotion-instance that results is a new one, since the object has 

changed. As the cognition varies, so does the emotion. 

Since there are many species of emotions, from startle to forlornness, a proof 

concluding that cognitivism accounts for all emotions is too complex for the scope of 

this essay. But whether or not all emotions per se can be explained in cognitivist 

terms, I think that anyone who acknowledges that emotions have moral worth must 

in the end acknowledge that the moral emotions are best explained in such terms of 

propositional attitude, belief, and judgement. This is especially the case when it 

comes to self-assessing emotions. As Elster (1999, p. 149) remarks, the self-assessing 

emotions have ‘cognitive antecedents’ which ‘include beliefs about what the subject 

is, has, or does’. And if moralists desire us to heed their emotional prescriptions, they 

must presuppose that we have some control over our emotions. In short, there must 

be some way to control emotions properly defined as moral. Anyone who has ever 

said ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’ seems committed to this underlying 

assumption. 

Cognitivism and control 

Recommendations of how to feel must confront the still-powerful belief that we are 

passive before our emotions, that they happen to us, and that they are out of our 

control. But cognitivists ably defend how emotions can be developed, quelled, or 

altered. Moral emotions may be described as ‘indirectly voluntary’: they can be


controlled over time even if they cannot be controlled at our immediate behest. 

Normal liver function is involuntary: no conscious effort will influence it. Looking 

upwards to the sky is directly voluntary insofar as it is fully under our immediate 

volition. Moral emotions fall somewhere in between the two categories of the 

involuntary and the directly voluntary. Whereas we cannot usually control a spell of 

indignation or jealousy at the moment when it occurs, we do not have to sit idly by 

and accept these emotions as unwelcome guests for our entire lives. 

Three approaches to controlling the emotions may be offered. The first approach 

emphasizes that we made a voluntary choice at some point in the past, which in 

effect initiated our emotional patterns. A jealous person, for example, at one time 

chose a path of interpreting certain relationship triangles as threatening. The jealous 

person is therefore responsible for cultivating a jealous disposition and the emotioninstances 

that follow from it. The point here is that our initial interpretation was 

once under our direct control. The way we interpret present situations, emotionally 

(and otherwise), is a result of ways in which we voluntarily chose to interpret past 

ones (Louden, 1992). 

A second approach to indirect voluntary emotional control emphasizes our ability 

to alter future emotional expressions. That is, while we may not be able to control 

them at a given moment, we are able to employ longer-term strategies for the future. 

A person with dispositions to react in certain uninvited ways can commence a 

conscious strategy to become more comfortable reacting in other, more upstanding 

ways (Annas, 1993). It may take time to prove successful, but nevertheless such a 

conscious plan could work given adequate time. 

Robert Solomon (1980) offers a third approach to control of the emotions. 

Solomon argues that emotions are essentially nondeliberate choices. Every 

emotional response, according to Solomon, contains a normative judgement. For 

example, if Janice feels shame for having a sexual encounter with someone she just 

met, then Janice judges herself as debased. While Solomon thinks that emotions are 

judgements (which may be referred to as a type of action: a judging action), he stops 

short of saying that they are directly voluntary. He writes: 

We cannot simply have an emotion or stop having an emotion, but we can open 

ourselves to argument, persuasion, and evidence. We can force ourselves to be selfreflective, 

to make just those judgments regarding the causes and purposes of our 

emotions, and also to make the judgments that we are all the while choosing our 

emotions, which will ‘defuse’ our emotions. (Solomon, 1980, p. 270) 

Solomon’s view is not that we control (or choose) our emotion. The emotions are 

not subject to our direct volition. It is that we choose our thoughts, which are the 

antecedents of emotions. Self-examination reveals certain thoughts to be the 

sufficient cause of the emotion and one may be able to extinguish it by extinguishing 

the thought. 1 In Solomon’s (1980, p. 260) words: 

Our emotions change with our knowledge of the causes of those emotions. If I can 

discover the sufficient cause of my anger, in those cases in which the cause and the 

object are different (and in which the newly discovered cause is not itself a new object 

for anger, as often happens), I can undermine and abandon my anger.


Each of these three approaches advocates some level of emotional control short of 

full direct control. Morality, whatever else may be said about it, is about things for 

which we can control with an aim towards bettering human life. The notion that we 

can and should control or modify some emotions at some point qualifies certain 

emotions as moral. We do not have a moral theory about normal liver function 

because we are not responsible for controlling it. Efforts to reassert the importance 

of the moral emotions necessitate shifting our view of emotions from something 

primarily reactive, physiological, and passive to something primarily evaluative, 

cognitive, and active. 

A revised outlook on moral education: cognitivism in practice 

Rather than the habituation view’s emphasis on the automatic, generalized, and 

involuntary, it is important that we instil the kind of moral perception that 

emphasizes the conscious, specific, and voluntary. If we can get pupils of morality to 

vary their beliefs, their emotions will not be far behind. I argued that the dilemmatic 

agent is not morally responsible for his action and therefore should not feel a 

negative self-assessing emotion as if he were morally responsible. 

The moral educator must encourage a self-examination strategy that considers 

whether negligence led to the dilemma, whether the results of the action were 

intended, and whether the agent could have made a better choice. If the agent 

answers affirmatively to any of these, some negative self-assessment is warranted 

proportional to the offence. By endorsing cognitive strategies, both moral educator 

and contemporary virtue ethicist offer a vision of moral life more in line with 

Aristotle’s view that virtue includes reason and more in line with the complexities 

and demands of modern life. 

Castelfranchi and Miceli (1998, p. 311) agree that people can indeed think 

themselves out of guilt working from the premise, defended in this essay, that: 

‘Humans have some control over their emotions. To some extent, they are able to 

induce, repress, reorient, manipulate them, and to inhibit or stimulate their 

expression’. The cognitive psychologists note that: 

In a social context, the person who wanted the event to happen is commonly regarded 

as the true causal agent. Even when aware of the effects of one’s action, the executor 

may not have the goal that such effects should come about. (Castelfranchi & Miceli, 

1998, p. 302) 

The ‘true causal agent’ is roughly equivalent to the persons or circumstances 

responsible for the dilemma. With adequate reflection on why his dilemma troubled 

him at its inception and how he feels towards those persons or values that become 

the casualties of his choice, the agent should recognize that he is not to blame. 

Without the belief to sustain it, guilt will dissolve. 

The moral agent who utilizes these strategies when they are appropriate is on the 

path to true moral excellence. The process may likely begin with some outside advice 

or perhaps internal uneasiness that he feels an unwarranted self-assessing emotion. 

He will then proceed with some investigation. He will reconstruct his moral dilemma


from start to consummation. He will hopefully recall that it was forced upon him, 

that he felt uneasy about his action-options from the start, that he acted with 

compunction (for he still cared about the moral ends his action sacrificed), and he 

did not intend any of the objectionable consequences that resulted from his act. 

Comparing his honest assessment of his action with his negative self-assessing 

emotion, he notices an incongruence: he is not morally responsible and yet his 

emotion proceeds from a belief that he is. He revises his belief to better fit the facts 

and the emotion alters to something more suitable. 

But the agent’s awakening, while a positive step, is not my final end here. It is my 

hope that the agent will view his world accurately from the start: recognize his duress 

in the face of forced options, act for the best possible outcome, and blame only those 

morally responsible for his forced act. And, those who aim to be admirable should 

follow the examples of admirable agents to prevent the onset of unwarranted guilt, 

for the time and energy to rid oneself of unwarranted emotions can be extremely 

taxing. 

Moral educators, then, have a few more responsibilities. The first is to develop 

more nuanced theories that take into account all relevant circumstantial considerations. 

This will generally help those whose moral traditions are strongly influenced 

by such theories. The second is to inculcate strategies for the self-examination of 

emotions. This may be done in journals, but it needs to be emphasized by all who 

have a role in shaping moral life. Instead of teaching that feelings are neither right 

nor wrong, we should be teaching that feelings are malleable to the beliefs we have, 

and that some feelings better reflect the facts of action. 

Widespread promotion of these ideas, some might argue, will lead to the 

undesirable consequences that persons eager to spare themselves emotional distress 

will learn to rationalize themselves out of their just emotional deserts. Admittedly, 

this may happen from time to time, but inauthentic people have always rationalized 

unrighteous behaviour and will continue to do so. But good persons who act for the 

best have too often held themselves captive to irrational negative self-assessing 

emotions. 

Good persons may actually find themselves feeling more negative self-assessing 

emotions as they examine their roles as voters, business persons, and car drivers. 

Voters might choose social safety nets over a truly equitable tax structure, business 

persons might choose profit over workers’ rights, and car drivers might continue to 

choose expediency of travel over potential for pedestrian harm. These are value 

trade-offs we make every day without the duress that makes the negative selfassessing 

emotions inappropriate for dilemmatic agents. 

Even children could be educated to recognize their circumstances, intentions, and 

beliefs. Certainly any child capable of experiencing the complex moral emotions of 

self-assessment is already aware of notions of harm and blame. When we raise our 

children to internalize that events caused by unpredictable accidents do not receive 

the same moral weight, we have already begun them on the proposed road to 

internalize that events caused by a forced choice should not reflect on the moral 

worth of the good person. And even with children, as with adults, a new emphasis on


thought and moral emotion may produce more experiences of negative self-assessing 

emotions inasmuch as children will learn how to better evaluate their own roles in all 

actions, not just in moral dilemmas. 

John Wilson (2001) points out that negative self-assessing emotions, such as guilt 

and shame, express that one recognizes one’s shortcomings of behaviour and 

character and that to not feel them when appropriate implies that one does not 

recognize them at all. Habituationists would agree that a dilemmatic agent acting for 

the best does not make a mistake or have a defect. 

We ought to celebrate the appropriateness of negative emotions that are not selfassessing, 

such as grief, sadness, regret, and even anger. These emotions indicate 

that the agent feels a connection to the harm suffered by others and a wish that 

things had worked out otherwise. These emotions are self-conscious in that the agent 

acknowledges he is part of the interplay between persons, events, and actions. But 

these emotions do not imply the self-censure of guilt. Feeling bad may be called for 

sometimes, but one’s distress should not indicate a distortion of the appropriate 

object of blame. 

Acknowledgements 

I wish to acknowledge Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jiyuan Yu, Pablo De Greiff, Michael 

Donovan and the JME referees for incisive commentary throughout various stages of 

this essay’s preparation. 

Note 

1. Against the notion that emotions are things that happen to us (i.e., things that we suffer), 

Robert Solomon’s brand of cognitivism (judgmentalism) is that emotions contain normative 

judgements, for which we are responsible. They are our choices insofar as we can seek out any 

normative judgement embedded in them and go on to extinguish it. See also Solomon (1976). 

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