Outrage: The Root of Moral Reasoning
History and literature are perfect disciplinary discourse settings for teaching readers to feel outrage, an emotionally powerful jolt evoked when a narrative depicts a figure or character is who is treated horribly. Take Frederick Douglass, for example. In his first autobiography about his childhood in early 19th century Baltimore, he narrates his elation when his new master’s wife understands how bright he is and decides to teach him to read.
For a few weeks he is treated to reading lessons. He blossomed in the presence of her kindness and warmth. Not many days passed until the master, a slave owner, discovered what was going on and erupts with anger. He berates his wife, making clear to her the imbecility of teaching a slave child to read. She was spoiling him, making him unfit for hard work, committing a criminal offense. She abruptly stopped the reading lesson and turned cold, hard, distant, mean to him as if he had deceived her.
What options are there for a teacher using this passage for a class assignment? The passage has a narrative structure with dialogue, imagery, pacing, gaps to fill with inferences. It would repay close reading for elements of the writer’s craft. In the context of history it could serve as one example of the typical treatment of slave children to draw upon during a unit on causes of the Civil War. Nikki Haley missed this lesson. Douglass was a powerful writer; the passage could be used as a mentor text and spill over into writing instruction. Or it could become the centerpiece of a lesson uncovering the sentiment of outrage and its role in moral reasoning.
Outrage is a complex emotion, a mix of simple emotions. Does anything in the story make you feel anger? Anger is a fuse of outrage, a catalyst for visceral responses like disgust or shock. Fear might appear in the minds of some readers, fear for their own future in a nation still struggling with racism. Contempt, a complex emotion in itself, is manifest in outrage, a deep disapproval, a sense of moral superiority. Sadness, helplessness, betrayal—teasing out all of these shades of feeling provides readers an opportunity to learn about the transit from outrage, which could lead to chaos and violent impulses if unchecked, to moral reasoning, which could lead to an embrace of non-violence. Moral reasoning could become a topic for direct, explicit instruction useful to all readers of history and literature.
David Hume’s moral system is more primitive than the deontologists like Immanuel Kant and the utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham1, though there’s a lot of overlap. Kant takes up a duty perspective—things one can never do (lie, torture, murder) and things one must do (obligations like integrity, justice, loyalty, accountability). What duty or obligation is in play for adults regarding children and education? Why do these adults fail in their duty? Telling the truth, eschewing deceit, is a moral duty. The mistress therefore acts immorally, one might argue, by being deceitful, lying to the child and to herself about her own guilt. A sense of obligation and commitment to moral or ethical standards, respect for persons, purifying our intentions to act out of moral duty rather than self-interest—these distinguish Kant’s ethical person. How do these criteria map onto the passage?
Utilitarianism is a type of calculus used in contexts of scarce resources or inescapable damage to someone. Decisions like who gets the kidney, how many dead civilians is acceptable in a bombing, which person to not feed in the Donner Party, these dilemmas are decided based upon the greatest good for the most people. The trolley car problem is a classic example. It’s used in three episodes of “The Good Place” on Netflix, which is incredibly funny, built on utilitarian philosophical assumptions. The characters actually ride a trolley car in San Francisco and have to decide who will live, who will die in the crash inevitable at the bottom of the hill. Chidi is my hero. He’s so funny.
Hume (1751) reasoned that what we call "virtuous" makes us feel good from the tips of our toes to the top of our head. Watching a person get tortured or shot with an AK 47 usually makes people feel bad, the seed of a judgment of immorality. Knowing you can count on someone in times of trouble makes us feel good—moral behavior. "Vicious" is the word for bad. When I heard Trump say, “When you’re a celebrity, you can do anything you want to them. You can kiss them, grab them by the pussy, they like it”—that was classic vicious. I felt it in my gut, and my bet is most people did. This remark would work well for a mini lesson in outrage analysis.
Hume doesn’t dismiss our brain from moral decisions, though his morality is often mistaken as sentimental. In fact, the master who abused his wife, the mistress who abused the child, and the system that failed all slave children existed because too many people failed in moral reasoning applied to a clearly dehumanizing and cruel episode because they did NOT feel outrage. There is a direct link between outrage and moral logic. Hume argued that we need to understand cause and effect, to make evidence-based predictions about past and future outcomes in the light of reason. He expected us to be informed about the world and to draw conclusions before taking action. But reason does not motivate us to behave ethically: The motivation to act requires a sentiment or passion. You can probably name a ton of highly intelligent people with exquisite reasoning skills who have the morals of a mosquito.
Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1970s developed a theory of moral development which is flawed I know—for many reasons. He studied only males. To oversimplify, he divides moral development into three phases: self-centered (me, me, me, money, money, money), conventional (deciding not to shoplift because people say its bad and you might get caught), principled (e.g., Kantian models, utilitarianism in medicine, law, industry, the military). He concluded from empirical evidence that only 10% of adults reach the highest level.
Carol Gilligan, in her 1982 book "In a Different Voice," criticized Kohlberg's system because his theory was gender-biased and male-centric. He studied only males—unfathomable to me as a literacy researcher where females are on the whole much more adept than males. According to Gilligan, Kohlberg looked at justice, rights, and rules—male moral reasoning—and ignored an "ethic of care”—relationships, responsibility for others, female moral reasoning. Neither the ethic of justice nor the ethic of care is superior to the other in her theory, but both are essential to moral development. Individuals do consciously take up both perspectives, she insisted. Her critique led to revisions in how moral development is understood and studied.
Post-Humanism philosophy unfolding in real time demands a much higher standard of moral development. History and literature teachers can help us get there with explicit instruction in reading for outrage. Being greedy, selfish, vicious to one another makes no one feel good. But now we need to empathize with trees, with elephants, with all living and material things. We need to feel outrage for the Earth. Passions and emotions seem very distant in the old paradigm from the rain forest and global warming. We are now called upon to make moral decisions every time we start the engine of a gasoline car. If only 10% of us reach maturity as ethical thinkers we are screwed. Our species has to do better or we will all collectively violate Kant’s Maxim, the prohibition against suicide.
Three 18th century philosophers.