PathoLogos

How Emotions Overtake Moral Truth

Aug 30, 2024

[Originally posted on Medium, Sep. 13, 2022]

“The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively.” — Vilfredo Pareto

If you’ve heard of the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, you’ve probably heard of his theory of distribution, the Pareto curve: the idea that some small minority of people (usually around 20%) control the large majority (80%) of resources. In recent years, this has been extrapolated out to other dynamics, from political shifts to the dating scene. You may also have heard of the Pareto optimum, a theory of welfare that defines equilibrium — the end goal — as the point where nothing can be made better without making something else worse. In other words, if you’ve heard of Pareto, it’s probably not because of this quote.

This is unfortunate, because this insight was quite ahead of Pareto’s time. His thesis is essentially that of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, which doesn’t mention Pareto as far as I can recall (probably because Dr. Haidt, like many of us, didn’t associate the idea with the economist). In this book, Haidt examines the psychology of morality, ultimately concluding that the guiding force in shaping our moral intuitions is not logical reasoning or the instruction we have received, but our emotional responses. These responses, he explains, are linked to five moral foundations of care/harm, fairness (whether as equality or as opportunity), sanctity, loyalty, and authority (with a tentative sixth, liberty/oppression). The book goes on to examine the role of various factors in shaping how we emotionally respond to these ideas, how our intuitions are shaped by rational reflection, and the theoretical evolutionary roles of these intuitions. While he doesn’t take a clear stance on whether morality is objective and absolute, he provides good evidence that his theory of how it subjectively works is accurate.

In other words, Haidt concludes that our logical reasoning about moral issues follows our emotional responses, essentially as after-the-fact rationalization. In other words, while we might readily affirm — in the long tradition of Western philosophy — that ethos proceeds from logos, it would seem our notion of ethos and perhaps even logos are shaped by pathos. Those who demand the validation of “my/his/her/their/shleir truth” are perfect examples of this principle working in action; if you’ve ever talked to such a person, you understand the frustration in trying to demonstrate that they’re wrong. Now, I can’t say whether Dr. Haidt meant to give support to relativism, but even if he did, I think what he really discovered was what Pareto had realized some decades earlier: that it’s the nature of human personality to lead with emotion and use reason to make excuses, rather than start with cool-minded, objective contemplation. In other words, we are not guided only by Logos (reason, truth, the Word of God), if at all.

Think of the Garden of Eden. God was very clear that Adam and Eve were not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. How much more rational sense could it have made to two people who had seen God Himself with their own eyes? “We should listen to God, and he said, ‘Don’t do that,’ so we shouldn’t.” This is more or less what Eve said to that cunning Serpent, who made his own use of reason — albeit a distorted, sinister reason — to convince Eve that death would not befall her if she and Adam eat of the fruit (as God told them it would), but that instead they would be “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Adam and Eve agree to eat of the fruit to gain wisdom, only to become deceivers when their eyes have been opened, when they must hide their shame and guilt from God’s judgment and lie in an attempt to spare themselves. They were tricked into losing the fear of death, and so failed to reason further on their decision; in the end, cast out from the Garden and cut off from the Tree of Life, death befell them anyway.

The Catholic Church teaches that Adam and Eve, in their long years, repented of this first sin such that they are now honored as saints. They gained wisdom, but not from simple instruction. They gained it through hard experience. Imagine their anger at the Serpent’s lies and their own foolishness in believing him, their sorrow when Cain killed Abel and even when he was banished from their fold, against the joy they had once known with God in the Garden. This, I think, is what led them to repentance, and in the end, holiness. As always, I acknowledge that any error in spinning this yarn is mine; the point is that emotion can set us right as easily as it led us wrong.

St. Justin Martyr wrote often of Logos, following John 1:1 (“In the beginning, the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word was God”) and to Jesus’s later declaration that “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” linking this with similar ideas of the eternal, guiding logos or Truth in Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and Plato. In this same vein, biologist Francis Collins would later coin the term BioLogos (“Life-Word”) to describe his idea of the God as the guiding force of DNA and evolution. If I may be so bold, I hereby coin the term PathoLogos to describe God — His Truth, His Goodness, His Beauty, His Being — as the guiding force and proper end of our emotions, and so of our moral intuitions.

C.S. Lewis, in his pre-Christian sorrows, often raged at God’s injustice, until he realized it was God at the root of his intuitions about justice. Many others have written about the joy that washed over them and changed their hearts when they embraced God, a feeling I was quite shocked to experience myself after having heard it described. I think the key message is this: knowing where our emotions can take us, let’s all stop to think at the emotional moment, to check that our feelings are rightly ordered before they shape what we think. Once we’ve been able to think about them, and we can make logical sense of them after some reflection, we can share these ideas with others. Conservatism appeals to ethos and logos — goodness and truth. The Left is ultimately pure pathos. While we can show that socialism, gender ideology, abortion, and critical race theory are objectively wrong on grounds of logos and ethos, we can only meet their pathos with a better pathos. How? That’s a question for another time.

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