An adaptive syndrome account of feeling justified: Toward improving the evolutionary ethics, moral psychology, and ethical expressivism of Allan Gibbard

In Wise Choices, Apt Feelings Allan Gibbard gives a non-cognitivist account of the meaning of our wrongness judgments. Gibbard wants to explain moral judgments as natural phenomena, and to account for the meaning of wrongness judgments by saying what it is we are doing when we judge acts wrong. Gibbard proposes that wrongness judgments result from the activity of three capacities that were shaped in human beings by natural selection: the capacity to feel guilt, the capacity to feel anger, and the capacity for normative governance. Roughly speaking, Gibbard claims that, when one judges an act wrong, one expresses acceptance of a system of norms that permits guilt for perpetrators, and anger for victims and onlookers. In presenting this version of Norm-Expressivism, Gibbard ties the meaning of our moral judgments to recent work in Evolutionary Ethics, Ethical Expressivism, and Moral Psychology.; This study describes how Gibbard's account explains the structure, anti-endorsement, propositional surface, and putative objectivity of our moral wrongness judgments. It is then suggested that there is a structural problem for Gibbard's account, but that a friendly amendment can help solve this problem. Ultimately it is suggested that Gibbard's account can be improved by adding an additional emotion---feeling justified---into the mix.; Feeling justified is modeled as an "adaptive syndrome", and the author considers the model to be a very speculative "first sketch". According to the model, feeling justified results from a (largely unconscious) process interacting with our normative systems. These normative systems include multiple "other" systems that constitute the "normative audience", as well as a "self" system. A data structure is proposed for these normative systems, and the author illustrates how unconscious processes might interact with these systems to produce emotions such as guilt and feeling justified in moral contexts. Once the adaptive syndrome account is given, it is shown how feeling justified might improve Gibbard's account.; Finally, the question is raised whether an expressivist account can preserve the authority of our moral judgments given that such accounts typically deny Moral Realism. The author finds reason for optimism.