So, emotions influence personal ethics at the time of the ethical decision...most of the time. Ok, fine with me, I don't understand how this would override or destroy philosophy. He doesn't quite say it destoys philosophy, but describes what will happen in philosophy as an epochal shift. I assume that he is trying to say that it is no longer possible to philosophize about the ethics without considering a personal and 'other' emotional filter that controls ethics, or simply to arrive at a purely reasoned ethics(reasoned in this sense meaning chiefly non-emotional). Especially, when reading his next to last paragraph:
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The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
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This isn't really news, I thought philosophers have always recognized this, and admitted they were taking a step back away from the decision time to reason something they could bring to the table and apply at decision time. Unless he is trying to say we can never escape our emotional filter, but that isn't what he said, he says very clearly:
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The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.
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...that we can override our filter with reason. So, I'm not really sure what he's driving at, since he seems to be contradicting himself.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
there's nothing particularly radical in this---in a sense it's simply includes something like--you're reading an account of ethics, but something keeps you reading it that's not included in the arguments themselves, but that's in a sense presupposed by them, that is by the fact of the text itself, which is that you feel a sense of resonance, you feel a sense of correctness or its absence---this is separate from (but conditions) your interactions with the formal argumentation itself...
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What you state here doesn't help me clarify, either the conditioning is escapable, or it is inescapable, and he seems to say both.