Psychoethics links self-defeating speech acts to impaired moral reasoning and decision-making.

Perfectionistic "oughts" can cloud moral judgments despite lack of ethical breaches.

Overcoming self-damning helps restore rational moral agency.

In this post, I introduce a new study I call “Psychoethics” based on Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), according to which people deduce self-destructive emotions and behavior from self-defeating speech acts embedded in their emotional reasoning, including demanding perfection, self-damning, "can’tstipation," catastrophizing, and world-revolves-around-me (WRAM) thinking.

Psychoethics, in turn, studies how such speech acts can impair ethical reasoning, judgment, decision-making, and moral emotions. It holds that the normative dimensions of emotional reasoning and ethical reasoning are intertwined, and many ethical problems are rooted in disturbances in emotional reasoning and/or its confusion with moral reasoning. Hence, addressing the self-defeating speech acts clients perform in their emotional reasoning can help them function more effectively as moral agents.

Following are case illustrations:

A moral “ought” rooted in a perfectionistic demand about the world that clouds moral reasoning and emotions

A client believed that she ought never to offend anyone by what she does or says. This categorical “ought never” she deduced from a perfectionistic demand that, in all possible circumstances, she does nothing to harm (emotionally or physically) anyone else. Hence, when the client refused to go to a movie with her friend that the friend wanted to see, the client experienced intense guilt. This was the case despite that the client did not want to see this movie, and even if she did, she could not afford to go. Thus, even though the client did not do anything unethical (she had no obligation to go to the movie, and it would have been a gratuitous expenditure given her expenses), she felt guilty.

The problem stemmed from the perfectionistic demand the client was making from which she deduced an absolutistic “ought not.” Thus, giving up this unrealistic demand to inhabit a universe in which nothing she ever does hurts anyone would have allowed this client to see that it can be morally permissible to do something someone else objects to when there are morally overriding reasons.

A self-damning speech act that impairs ethical judgment

The same client further deduced that she was a “bad person” because she had offended her friend. This client had a history of childhood emotional abuse by her mother and siblings, who would ritualistically blame and scapegoat her. Consequently, she would often hear the voices of her siblings and mother in her head, calling her names such as “stupid or “bad.”

This act of self-damning was itself a deduction from her perfectionistic demand. So, giving up this demand could help to dismantle the client’s tendency to self-damn. In any event, giving up this self-damning tendency could allow the client to engage in ethical reasoning that respects her capacity to make rational decisions, without feeling guilty.

Catastrophic speech acts that preempt a rational utilitarian calculus and/or ethical analysis

A client who was prone to catastrophize caught herself catastrophizing about whether to invite her father to her daughter’s son’s 1st birthday, because when she thought about him being there in the same room, it brought back memories of how he would get drunk and sexually molest her when she was a child. But when she considered that he has been sober for the last decade and she was now an adult, she decided to invite her father since he was, after all, her daughter’s child’s great-grandfather. So she dismissed her feelings as irrational. This client also catastrophized about how disclosing the sexual abuse to her daughter might be disastrous, and therefore decided to keep it a secret.

Due to the client’s tendency to catastrophize, she overlooked morally relevant considerations such as whether not informing her daughter about her grandfather’s past might (eventually) put her grandchild at risk. Further, the client was now an adult and her father was in recovery. Still, the client had not yet worked through the childhood trauma, so seeing him in a confined space could be traumatic. So, ethically, the weight ascribed to the client’s father being her daughter’s child’s great-grandfather was arguably outweighed by competing considerations. Hence, the client’s failure to adequately address her tendency to catastrophize could have potentially impaired rational risk assessment and ethical decision-making.

The below table summarizes some of the potential effects of demanding perfection, self-damning, and catastrophizing on moral reasoning and decision-making, and moral emotions.

The import of such a study cannot be overstated because such self-defeating speech acts in emotional reasoning can have untoward ethical consequences. For example, WRAM tendencies of a politician wielding great power could impair rational utilitarian calculations about the best interests of a nation and/or the world at large. Being able to address such impairments of rational judgment and their effects on moral agency could potentially make all the difference in the world.

© Psychology Today