4. Analysis
4.2 The Metaphorical Structure of Moral Concepts
4.2.9 Deplorable Acts
In spite of the above being an interesting record of figurative language in moral discourse, and the previous work on moral metaphors apparently allowing for a deeper understanding of the way in which MORALITY is conceptually structured, the work above is significant for what it is lacking.
CMT-based accounts of moral concepts have failed to draw an explicit connection between emotion and morality, which, as I have shown in (Section 4.1), is clearly there (even if the exact nature of that connection is disputed). There is much reason, then, as I have argued, to suspect that EMOTION plays an intrinsic, and potentially necessary, role in our understanding of MORALITY and so it might be seen as a failure of previous analyses (or indeed CMT as a framework) that a ‘MORALITY IS EMOTION’ conceptual metaphor has not been ‘discovered’.
This putative metaphor of MORALITY IS EMOTION appears to be absent from the CMT literature. Zoltan Kövecses tangentially mentions an apparent connection between morality and emotion in reference to the A'ara people of the Solomon Islands (Kövecses, 1990) and also observes how morality and emotion can be conceptualized in terms of force (2000). Here, Kövecses points out the differences and similarities between the
EMOTION AS FORCE and MORALITY AS RESISTING A PHYSICAL FORCE metaphor, but does not speak of a
MORALITY IS EMOTION metaphor (Kövecses, 2000). The closest Kövecses comes to explicitly formulating this metaphor is in his book Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor (2015), where he claims:
If we examine the content of the idealized cognitive models associated with emotion or other emotion concepts, we find that they greatly overlap with Harré’s rules of emotion. According to Harré (1994), in the course of the appropriate use of emotion words in different cultures people observe certain “local rules.” The rules are of four kinds, “classified by reference to what is criterial for their correct usage”: (a) “appropriate bodily feelings,” (b)
“distinctive bodily displays,” (c) “cognitive judgments,” and (d) “moral judgments” and the “social acts”
corresponding to them (p. 7). (Kövecses, 2015)
Although Kövecses makes a vague connection between EMOTION and
MORALITY, a conceptual metaphor connecting the two is not explicitly formulated. Given the psychological data confirming the connection between morality and emotion, one would expect the MORALITY IS EMOTION metaphor to be a psychologically real and extremely salient cross-domain mapping. The fact that this connection has largely gone unnoticed casts doubt on the effectiveness of CMT in analysing the structure of MORALITY, or, indeed, any concept.
This failure might, I conjecture, be down to the fact that MORALITY IS EMOTION
metaphors are easily overlooked, or interpreted wrongly; let’s take an example from Lakoff. In Lakoff’s (1996) analysis, he places MORALITY as a target which has CLEANLINESS as its
source and gives the example of ‘that was a disgusting thing to do’ (Lakoff, 1996a, p. 92) as evidence for this mapping. However, although, as noted above, the mapping between the two domains appears to exist, I believe this particular analysis to be mistaken. In Lakoff’s example, we see the conflation, I claim, of two separate source domains: EMOTION and CLEANLINESS. This is due to the word ‘disgusting’, in reference to cleanliness, is already metaphorical. In saying that something dirty is ‘disgusting’ (it causes disgust), we are firmly in the domain of EMOTION.
The concept DISGUSTING belongs properly to the domain of EMOTION, but is applied to CLEANLINESS insofar as dirty or rotten things can induce disgust – an emotional response – in the observer. This emotional concept can, therefore, be applied to the target of CLEANLINESS. Hence, an utterance such as ‘the floor is disgusting’ meaning ‘the floor is dirty’ is, in fact, figurative language. Therefore, the correct analysis of the moral utterance
‘that was a disgusting thing to do’ should be that it makes evident the conceptual metaphor of MORALITY IS EMOTION and not MORALITY IS CLEANLINESS. This conflation, however, flies very easily under the radar as the connection between the two concepts DIRTY and DISGUSTING is embodied, with disgust being an emotion-dispositional concept (see Section 4.1).
There are, indeed, figurative utterances which, seemingly, make the
MORALITY IS EMOTION mapping manifest:
MORALITY IS EMOTION
(45) Their actions were disgusting.
(46) They committed truly heinous acts.
(47) His crimes were disturbing.
(48) She is contemptible.
(49) They were kept in deplorable conditions
(51) You make me sick/repel me!
(52) His conduct was despicable.
(53) It was a crime of passion.
(54) That was shameful.
(55) I have a guilty conscience.
The above examples, a CMT theorist might claim, show the conceptual mapping between EMOTION and MORALITY. Interestingly, the moral metaphors above appear to track different facets of emotional reactions such as physiological responses, as in ‘you make me sick’, and psychological affective components from both self-blame and other- blame perspectives as with ‘his conduct was despicable’, which I have explicated in Section 4.16.
It should also be noted that it is often the case that employing emotional terms in moral discourse is necessary for conveying the perceived severity of people’s actions. For instance, ‘It was a dirty trick’ or ‘It was underhanded’ are not as powerful as
‘It was a despicable crime’. When describing extremely immoral acts, emotional terms are sometimes the most appropriate. When describing the torture that occurred in Nazi death camps, for example, it is not enough to say that such actions were ‘base’, ‘dirty’, ‘bad’ or even ‘wrong’ – these adjectives simply do not capture the full extent of the immoral behavior. Using terms such as ‘heinous’, ‘deplorable’ or ‘disgusting’ are necessary to convey the true level of the moral transgression in such cases.
It appears, then, that in English a wide range of emotional adjectives such as heinous, despicable, deplorable, abhorrent, appalling, awful, disgusting, loathsome,
6 See Bartlett (2020) for discussion.
obscene, odious, repulsive, shocking and sickening are commonly used in place of moral adjectives7, and, in being so used, appear to be metaphorical8. Such terms, therefore, may be understood as representing the conceptual metaphor of MORALITY IS EMOTION, a CMT
theorist might claim.
It is problematic, then, that CMT has not found this link and hints at its inadequacy as a framework, especially when the link between emotional and moral thinking has been extremely well documented in the psychological and neurological literature. It should lead CMT theorists to ask: Why? It might be due, simply, to the fact that no one has picked up on this kind of language before; or it might be because the method of picking out figurative utterances is particularly dependent on the theorist’s pre- conceived notions of morality (bias), or even that the method employed is unreliable for some reason, such as it relying on a shaky or open-to-interpretation distinction between literal and figurative utterances i.e. should such words as ‘shameful’ or ‘deplorable’, when used to express moral indignation, be considered as literal or figurative?9