If charitable feelings can be regulated, does this tell us about whether those feelings are something morally important, or that they’re simply psychological responses we can choose to manage?
Since we can regulate our compassion, generosity, and concern for others, what does this reveal about the moral significance of altruism?
Human charitable feelings demonstrate plasticity. Psychological distance affects our empathy—we feel more for identifiable victims, the drowning person in front of us, than statistical ones, like a caged hen somewhere else.
Cultural conditioning shapes our moral circles, determining which groups receive our concern. Cognitive techniques like perspective-taking can increase charitable behavior, while fatigue and stress diminish it. Even neurochemical interventions can alter our prosocial responses.
This regulability suggests charitable feelings operate more like other manageable psychological states than like an impartial moral sensor. We don’t typically consider hunger a moral guide simply because we feel it, and perhaps charity deserves similar treatment.
Yet the capacity for regulation doesn’t necessarily undermine moral significance. Consider moral emotions like guilt or indignation—these too can be shaped by reflection, education, and deliberate cultivation, and we don’t dismiss them as morally irrelevant. The ability to refine our emotional responses might actually enhance rather than diminish their moral value.
Something seems suspect to normies about expanding or calibrating one’s moral circle. It’s part of the “ick″ of effective altruism. The Buddhist cultivation of loving-kindness and Aristotelian virtue ethics suggest that deliberate emotional development can be genuinely moral. But by anecdote, contemporary interventions like raising awareness of the differences in effectiveness of charities, empathy training or charitable nudges feel more manipulative than transformative. Why? I don’t know.
Our charitable responses serve as initial moral signals for most. Imperfect but valuable indicators of morally relevant features in our environment. Their regulability then becomes a tool for moral refinement rather than evidence of moral irrelevance.
I see compassion as neither an infallible moral guide, nor psychological noise, but a fallible moral responses capable of improvement through reflection and cultivation. It is important we as a community remember this foundation, when we get lost in the large numbers. Remembering this starting points for moral inquiry reminds us that we construct shared meaning with mainstream society from our shared capacity for empathy, and not from abstract economic calculations.
This perspective validates both the spontaneous charitable impulse and the reflective regulation of that impulse. The moral progress of effective altruism involves no less than both following our charitable feelings and thoughtfully shaping them to better serve moral ends.
A reflection on the motivation for altruism is very welcome. In fact, the distinction between “altruism” and “prosociality” is based precisely on the fact that altruism is motivated by a desire for benevolence.
But I think something essential is missing from the claim that “effective altruism involves no less than both following our charitable feelings and thoughtfully shaping them.” The error—if we want to expand altruism to the point where it is truly “effective”—is in considering that feelings are immutable and that only rational reflection can put them in the position of constituting the best motivation for the most effective altruism. This is not how moral evolution works throughout the civilizing process.
The best way to act on charitable feelings is not by thinking about them, but by acting behaviorally on them. Moral reflection, didacticism, and indoctrination are valuable, but they do not have the transformative power over behavior that other psychological mechanisms that have promoted moral evolution throughout the process of civilization (mainly through religions).
The main mechanism of moral evolution is the use of symbolic stimuli with emotional value to enable the internalization of moral behavior patterns. If the resulting moral behavior also involves creating conditions for rewarding emotional relationships in an ideologized social context, the result can even become self-reinforcing. In this case, it would be an “ideology of behavior,” something that is not unthinkable.
What I’m talking about is producing “saints.” Someone with a vital motivation to develop charitable behaviors, and not merely judiciously model the charitable feelings they already have. We don’t have to see this as something fantastic from a rational (and secular) point of view.
Military training camps produce “killing machines”, high-performance centers produce elite athletes, and “Alcoholics Anonymous” produces people who have freed themselves from addictions. All individuals motivated to enter these types of behavioral learning schools expect to be psychologically transformed to some degree as the only way to achieve the desired behaviors.
Entering a Hindu ashram entails undergoing a learning process that is not only intellectual but also emotional in order to achieve Enlightenment. This is done because “Enlightenment” is rewarding for the individual. Might not an integral lifelong conduct dedicated to rationally cultivating feelings of empathy and charity also be rewarding—at least for some?
If we conceive of altruistic behavior as a necessary part of a development of improved behavior in the sense of benevolence, empathy, and control of aggression, might this not be attractive to many people, not unlike ancient monasticism, the Puritan movements of Reformed Christianity, or the spiritual quest of Eastern religions?
None of this has anything to do with the supernatural: moral emotions and transcendent experiences have long been part of human cultural life from a rational point of view. It’s just that the step of developing a rational and committed pursuit of virtue informed by behavioral science and free from prejudice has yet to be taken.