It is now reasonably well established that at least some emotions can play an important and valuable role in our moral lives. Emotions are often either elicited by events that are moral violations or they motivate us to pursue moral behavior. I believe the same is true for some moods, notably depression. I will argue for depression's place as a moral affective state, employing several examples to motivate my position.
Jonathan Haidt claims that there are four categories of moral emotions: “the other- condemning family (contempt, anger, and disgust), the self-conscious family (shame, 17 See for example Henry Hernandez’s testimony in Elfenbein 1995, 65.
18 The lack of emotional intelligibility assumes, of course, that the person does not have certain other beliefs
that might warrant an overriding cheerfulness - e.g. "Despite the miserableness of life, there are also many offsetting, wonderful features" or "Despite the disappointments of my life, there are also many successes to be savoured." Beliefs about the afterlife might be an important source of such countervailing reasons.
embarrassment, and guilt), the other-suffering family (compassion), and the other-praising family (gratitude and elevation).”19 Some moods can also be characterized along these moral dimensions. In the case of depression, I believe its belief and judgement components are too mixed to allow it to be placed in a single family. Typically depression incorporates both a negative view of the world and a negative view of the self. Thus, I will argue that it both falls into the other-condemning family and the self-conscious family. I will motivate this claim by considering a few examples, one a fictional character, Sophie Zawistowska from William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice,20 and the other, the mid-twentieth century philosopher, Simone Weil.
The character of Sophie is a woman who lived in Poland during WWII. She and her two children were deported to a concentration camp. While in the camp, Sophie was presented with a choice by a camp doctor. She had to choose one of her children to be killed. If she refused, both of her children would be killed. Sophie chose her daughter to die, and her son was allowed to live. During their time in the camp, Sophie’s son also died. When the camp is liberated, Sophie moves to America.21
The novel is set in 1947 in Brooklyn. Her description clearly meets every diagnostic criterion for depression. But it is clear that her depression is not simply the outgrowth of grief for her dead children. Sophie refuses to let go of her awareness of her own culpability in their deaths. I know that many people think that Sophie is not culpable, that the choice she was presented with was no choice at all. But Sophie does not see it that way. In those few
19 Haidt 2003. 20 Styron 1979.
moments when faced with the choice, Sophie actually made two choices. She first chose to choose between her children and then she chose her daughter. In that moment she learned something terrible about herself – that she is the kind of person who can and will choose between her children. She did what no person may do – especially not a mother.
Sophie can neither bear the world that put her in that position, nor can she bear herself and the role she played. Many will protest that her other option – refusal to choose – would also have been a choice. I agree. My analysis does not imply that had Sophie chosen otherwise, she would have been better off. She likely would simply have had a different and no less terrible burden of guilt. But given where she is, Sophie judges herself to have committed an unforgivable sin and judges the world as intolerable. And she refuses to be consoled or to turn away from this awareness. Under this description, I think Sophie’s depression clearly finds a place in both the other-condemning and the self-conscious families of moral affective responses. To me, her depression is entirely intelligible. I think there is a fit between the occasioning intentional objects of her depression and the features of her particular
depression. More than intelligible, I find her depression morally admirable. There would be a kind of strength in a person who was able to overcome the tragedy that Sophie faced. But I think Sophie’s unflinching gaze at the horror of her past is incredibly strong.
Most of us, I think, have no problem forgiving Sophie. Many of us do not even think that Sophie did anything that needs forgiveness. But Sophie will not relinquish what she knows – that she did an atrocious thing and the world pushed her to do it. Her depression makes clear that she rejects the cheerful denial that so many of us rely on. Her attitudes pass judgement on her own past and also on the rest of us who wish her to think differently and feel better. Had antidepressants been available to Sophie, I suspect she would have refused them. She
made an effort to go on with her life. But she never becomes persuaded that what she knows about herself and the world is not true, or that its importance fades, or that it becomes less worth attending to. In the end, Sophie kills herself.
Simone Weil provides another example of depression that I would like to examine. Although she wrote a great deal about her thoughts and feelings on a wide range of issues,22 there is, with any actual person an opacity that we do not face when dealing with a fictional character. I will present a brief account of her life and motivations but she was, of course, considerably more complicated than my brief portrait will show.
Weil was born in Paris in 1909. She pursued studies in philosophy and had a life-long interest in resisting oppression. Simone Weil judged the world to be, in many respects, intolerable. There was plenty of evidence for this view in the world around her, notably in the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, and then finally in the Nazi atrocities she learned about during the Second World War. It seems to me that her judgement about her own worthlessness was grounded in her sense that she failed to live up to the moral example set by Christ. Like Sophie, Weil refused to let go of her awareness of these truths and her long depression was surely deeply grounded in these beliefs.
Weil and her family managed to escape from Paris as the Nazis invaded. They fled to America, but Weil viewed this as an intolerable betrayal of her country and citizens. She later went to London to work for the Free French. While there she decided to live on the official rations that were allocated to residents of Paris by the Nazi occupying force. These rations were not in fact enough to survive on. People in Paris were forced to supplement
their rations with food obtained through black market channels. Weil refused to do anything similar, and she ultimately died from tuberculosis complications related to malnutrition.