Learning from a comedy of errors

When I was a student, philosophers usually pooh-poohed any notion that ethics could be based on emotions.

Since the time of Plato, most philosopher had held that feelings were untrustworthy and needed to be firmly governed by reason. But I never was sold on any system of ethics based on rules.

One night 45 years ago, in the old student slums west of the University of Texas, I woke to hear a woman shrieking in the apartment next door. I thought she was being killed.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and had trouble getting my right foot through. I hopped on my left foot down a second-floor balcony to the neighbor’s door. I was just out of the Navy, and I always carried a pocketknife in the right hip pocket.

A man staggered out of the apartment. I recognized him as the neighbor. He ducked as a lamp flew by and smashed on the lawn below. 

I looked inside the apartment. The woman who was screaming had just moved in with the neighbor. She was smashing his stereo system with the fury of Medea. She’d just found out that her new love had already strayed.

The point of the story is that I acted without any ethical rule or principle in my head. In fact, I didn’t think at all.

It’s probably not a good idea to go into a place where you think a person is being murdered armed with a pocketknife. It was not courage because I was not aware of the risks. I simply didn’t think. I was half asleep.

And so I did not, as John Stuart Mill would have advised, consider whether the greater good would have been served by injecting myself into the fracas. I didn’t think of Kant’s famous Categorical Imperative.

I didn’t think. I acted on feeling. Someone needed help. When I did think, I could see that I had it all wrong. If anyone needed help, it was not the stereo-smashing Medea.

Yesterday’s note was about Paul Woodruff’s view of reverence.

Here’s his suggestion for a way to look at it: “Reverence is the well developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect and shame when they are the right feelings to have.”

As Woodruff says, if you feel awe at the sight of an ancient tree, you are probably experiencing reverence. If you feel awe at your own wisdom, you are probably not.

This way of looking at reverence fits Woodruff’s way of looking at virtue. In his view, virtue is a capacity for feeling the right emotion at the right time. 

Woodruff contends that emotions are what move us. Feelings, not reasons and arguments, make us act.

I think Woodruff is right about that. Feelings move us, even when our thinking is nonexistent— or comically bad.