Are your moral choices driven by logic or emotion?

When was the last time you did something decidedly moral? Spend a moment to reflect on your day and draw out a few good or decent things. It could be a small act, like holding open a door for a colleague, or a bigger one, like offering consolation or support to a friend in need. Holding that act in your head, ask yourself why you did it. Why did you do good? What mental or emotional processes led up to you doing it?

It’s no easy question, and, as with all difficult questions, there’s a rich philosophical literature about the topic. Broadly, the debate falls into two camps: those who think we’re motivated to do good by our feelings and those who think we’re motivated by our reasoning. But what proof is there either way? What can the data scientists and clipboard-clutching empiricists add to the debate? This is exactly what the philosopher Rodrigo Díaz explored in his recent paper, “Do Moral Beliefs Motivate Action?”

Moral beliefs and moral emotions

Díaz opens his paper with an example: Imagine you are a father and your daughter rips apart your treasured, favorite book. You think about physically punishing her, but you do not. What stopped your hand? Was it your belief that parental violence is morally wrong, or your personal discomfort with using physical force? In other words, was it something you believed or something you felt?

The question revisits a point that David Hume made in the 18th century when he distinguished between passions and reason when it comes to being moral. The Humean position is that passions always win. As he put it: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” That means a father refrains from beating his daughter because he simply doesn’t want to — and his moral belief that “smacking is wrong” is what Díaz calls “motivationally inert.”

The Humean position is not quite the same as egoism — the philosophical viewpoint that actions are morally right if they promote one’s own self-interest. Just because we are “slaves” to our passions doesn’t mean those passions are inherently selfish. Díaz gave Big Think an example: “You might go visit your relatives in the hospital just because you want to support them, and that doesn’t mean that you are an egoist, nor that you do it only because it makes you feel good. You might not even expect to obtain pleasure from it, in fact.”

Of course, not everyone agrees with Hume, and the “anti-Humean” position is that our moral beliefs have a motivational force of their own — we do good things because that’s what we believe, even if it’s contrary or unrelated to our feelings on the matter. I do not kick my friend’s cat because I believe that abusing animals is wrong, not simply because I am averse to it.

Low stakes, high stakes

Both positions have some of the greatest philosophers in history at their backs. But, as Díaz puts it, the “limitations [of both] can be addressed by studying actual moral behavior using empirical research methods.” To test which position is more accurate, Díaz called upon the data from two recent studies, one involving people’s behaviors during COVID-19 lockdowns and the second involving the “Dictator Game.”

In the first experiment, Díaz and Cova aimed to measure whether people followed COVID-19 health recommendations (such as avoiding close contact or washing hands) because of their moral beliefs about harm (such as it would protect vulnerable people), as well as their emotional responses to situations involving harm (how much it would personally impair their life). The paper found that “when both moral beliefs and moral emotions were used as independent variables, only moral emotions had a significant effect on participants.” In other words, it’s a point for the Humeans; our reason (moral beliefs) is a slave to our passions.

The second experiment involved the Dictator Game, where participants were asked to distribute raffle tickets between themselves and another participant, who had no tickets. The game was played twice: once with low stakes (a chance to win £10) and once with high stakes (a chance to win £300). Before playing, the participants ranked their various moral beliefs about fairness and their emotional responses to unfairness. What Díaz found was that in the low-stakes game — i.e., when it didn’t really matter — the participants were motivated predominantly by their reason. But in the high-stakes games, it was all feelings. The takeaway: When the stakes are sufficiently high, passions seem to take over.

The driving seat

The results of Díaz’s research don’t quite resolve the millennia-long debate, but they certainly tip the scales a bit. While we might like to think of ourselves as rational beings guided by our moral principles, the results suggest our emotions often have the final say, especially when the consequences are more meaningful or impactful.

Díaz’s findings challenge the view that our moral beliefs are the primary motivators of our actions. This isn’t to say that moral beliefs are necessarily “motivationally inert,” but rather they need to be combined with or complement our feelings if they are to matter. As Díaz told Big Think, “The results of my studies suggest that the motivational force often attributed to moral beliefs is actually provided by co-occurring moral emotions.” This indicates that while we might believe that we are acting out of a sense of moral duty, it is often our emotional responses that gear us into action.

In the end, Díaz’s work invites us to reconsider how we think about moral motivation. It challenges the notion that our beliefs alone can drive us to do good, instead painting a picture of human behavior that is more emotionally driven than we might like to admit. As noted earlier, this doesn’t make egoists of us all. And it doesn’t reduce the idea of morality — we can still be passionately motivated to do great, selfless, and other-regarding things. But it does paint a decidedly less rational picture of humans than some might like.