On Seemingly Inappropriate Moral Hangovers
An examination of regret following not-so-regrettable nights out
Moral hangovers are like regular hangovers, but for your conscience. Whereas, with a typical hangover one’s body is in pain, in the case of moral hangovers, it is one’s soul that aches. Usually, these ethical injuries occur after a heavy night of partying, full of drinking and/or substance use, in which the person experiencing the moral hangover committed at least one retrospectively regrettable act.
However, recently the presence of moral hangovers on mornings following nights during which nothing particularly regrettable happened has been a topic of discussion among my group of friends. These occurrences have been puzzling for all of us.
No doubt like many of you who are familiar with the phenomenon, we assumed that moral hangovers only occurred following instances of late-night shenanigans that, upon further reflection, left much to be desired. But the persistence of these episodes, despite the fact that fewer and fewer regrettable late-night shenanigans have occurred (hooray for character development!), leads me to believe that there is some underlying reason for my seemingly inappropriate moral hangovers.
This idea sprung out of a conversation I was having with two friends on a walk home from a bar late one night. The topic of being hungover the following morning had arisen, as is commonly the case among people who are somewhat inebriated and aware of having stayed up past their bedtimes. However, it also happened to be one of those times at night in which it is still and quiet and easy to fall into deep conversation, so the discussion quickly shifted from talk of regular hangovers to that of moral hangovers.
At that point, one friend (friend.1) asked, “Why is it that I sometimes wake up the next morning feeling bad about my previous night, but when I think back, I haven’t done anything wrong?” The immediate reply from my other friend (friend.2) was this: “I think it’s because you went into the night with the wrong intentions.” His answer stuck with me.
Admittedly, I may be digging a bit too deeply into a rather daft and bro-ish phenomenon by thinking about feelings of regret following nights of partying. However, I think there is a profound truth to be seen in my latter friend’s answer, and with a bit more fleshing out, it could be a rather insightful point for those struggling to navigate well the social world, myself included.
In the interest of clarity, I should point out that moral hangovers are typically understood to occur after nights in which moral wrongs were committed or genuine embarrassments occurred. However, this is not necessarily the case. Take it from someone who has experienced them first-hand. One does not have to, for example, cheat on their partner or say something hateful to a friend or fall down drunk and rip their pants to experience a moral hangover. Notice that the title of this article mentions evidently inappropriate moral hangovers. The name is meant to pick out the instances in which one wakes up with a moral hangover having done nothing of the sort I described above. It is these sorts of moral hangovers that I will occupy myself with here.
In such cases our feelings of shame, guilt, regret, etc. appear at first glance to be inappropriate. However, I believe it to be a mistake to dismiss our negative feelings merely because our reasons for having such feelings are initially opaque to us.
So let us return to friend.2’s assertion about wrong intentions.
The role intentions play in moral thinking has a long history in philosophy. Intentions find, perhaps, their most notable home in Aquinas’ principle of double effect, which he presents as a justification for the permissibility of self-defense in Summa Theologica. The doctrine of double effect (DoDE), as it has come to be known, states that it is permissible for an agent to bring about a morally grave harm as a side-effect of another action, so long as they intend to bring about a good effect and this good effect is not itself a direct result of the harmful side-effect. Say, for instance, that two countries (A and B) are at war. Country A, knowing that such a move is the only way to end the long and bloody conflict, decides to bomb a munitions factory that is necessary for Country B’s military function. However, this factory is very unfortunately located adjacent to a civilian center, and there is no way for A to destroy the factory (and thus, end the war) without killing innocent civilians.
According to DoDE, it is permissible for A to bomb the munitions factory, despite the fact that doing so will kill civilians. In the case given, A’s bombing of the munitions factory is the only reasonable way to end their war with B, and while their actions would bring about a morally grave harm (killing innocent civilians), this harm would only be a foreseeable side effect of an action which is not itself morally wrong. A intends to bomb the munitions factory, not to kill civilians. This intention is essential in justifying the permissibility of A’s actions.
If A instead chose to bomb the civilian center, knowing the loss of civilian life would break B’s will to fight and thus, end the war, then A’s actions would no longer be considered permissible according to DoDE. This is the case, not because the outcome of each situation would be different, but because the intentions of the actor in each situation differ. Both courses of action lead to the same ending state of affairs (a destroyed factory, many dead civilians, and an end to a horrific war). However, the former course of action brings about those ends through an intentional action which is not morally wrong (destroying a munitions factory), whereas the latter brings about those ends through an intentional action which is morally wrong (killing innocent civilians).
All this is great, but how exactly are strategic bombings connected to moral hangovers?
The answer lies in the way cases about strategic bombings can alert us to the importance of an agent’s intentions, the importance of what an agent aims at. Though the previous example may seem a bit obscure and unrelated, I chose it because of the clear way it illustrates the fact that one’s aims and intentions contribute to our moral calculations. In the example I give, it is quite literally what A aims at — either the munitions factory or the civilian center — that determines the moral worth of A’s actions.
Typically, we tend to view morality through two lenses, those of consequentialism and deontology. According to the former, we determine the moral condition of our situations by examining whether our actions lead to a good outcome or a bad outcome. If the outcome is good, then we are morally justified in having acted the way we did. According to the latter, we determine the moral condition of our situations by comparing our actions to a set of moral laws or duties which govern whether our actions are morally obligatory, prohibited, or permissible. Such laws include moral proscriptions like refraining from lying and murder, moral obligations like those of parents to their children, and moral cut-outs for things like hanging out with your friends on a normal afternoon when you have no other moral obligations.
However, neither of these views does a good job of explaining why I might have a moral hangover like the ones I’ve described. In such situations, I do not wake up to find that my actions have led to a bad outcome. The world is not necessarily a worse place because of what happened the night before. Or at least I am not aware of it being so, and therefore, I do not have reason to feel regret on the basis of consequentialist considerations. Nor do I wake up remembering that I acted in a way the night before that transgressed against the laws of morality in some way. To be sure, people have moral hangovers for these sorts of reasons all the time but not the sort of moral hangovers I am concerned with.
Herein lies my reason for mentioning DoDE. We ought not dismiss our seemingly inappropriate feelings of regret after nights out because they do not map onto our typical perception of morality. Our moral calculations are not only based on consequentialist or deontological concerns. As we established in the case of the strategic bombing, if one’s intentions change, so too does our understanding of the morality of their circumstances.
Here we might begin to see a connection to moral hangovers and how friend.2’s answer gets at the truth of our situation.
Simply put, our intentions matter. They matter in questions of strategic bombings and in questions of moral hangovers. Friend.2 is right to say that we can feel morally hungover on the basis of having the wrong intentions because intentions matter to us morally speaking. The things at which we aim speak to the sort of people we are, even if having those aims does not lead us to act wrongly or to bring about a bad state of affairs. And perhaps we have reason to wake up regretting the sorts of people we are.
The way intentions may lead us to moral self-examination and regret is fairly easily seen when said intentions are explicit. I had another friend with whom I was discussing this subject who told me that one night she purposefully wore a revealing top, knowing that she would look attractive and receive attention from guys that were not her boyfriend. She woke up the next morning with a moral hangover and regret at having gone out with such intentions. In her case it was not that her actions led to a world that was worse than the one that existed before she went out, nor that she committed some morally prohibited action by wearing a particular article of clothing. She had reason to be morally hungover because her intentions for the night before alerted her to what she was aimed at and the sort of person she was for having aimed at such things.
Most of the time, however, our intentions will not be as clear to us as they were to my aforementioned friend. My friends and I do not often go out with any particular intentions for our night, and if we do, they are something along the lines of “we’re just trying to have a good time”. This, of course is not an evil intention in itself, but we should be careful to note the way intentions work.
Take my writing this paper as an example. As part of the process of creating this week’s newsletter, I am writing this word with the intention of forming a sentence, writing this sentence with the intention of forming a paragraph, forming a paragraph with the intention of writing an article, and writing an article with the intention of sharing my thoughts with people and hopefully, in doing so helping people to think more deeply about the meaning of things in life.
Notice that each of the intentions I have for writing a certain portion of this paper is nested inside of another intention for writing a larger portion of this paper. If we look at this nested structure as a whole, we will notice that each of the intentions I have listed is ultimately in the service of some larger intention, until we reach my final intention, that I want you all to think about meaning in life. However, even this intention might be nested inside some larger intention like: I want everyone (myself included) to think about meaning in life because I think it will make us better people, and a world full of better people seems like a better place for everybody.
Here it is clear that whatever my initial intentions in acting may have been, in the end I am acting for some larger reason. I have some further thing at which I am aimed that provides a reason for me to act and may, therefore, accurately be described as my intention in acting.
Now, when it comes to moral hangovers, it seems to me that my friends and I are not merely waking up with regret for the immediate aims of what we did the previous night. My friends and I are actually waking up with regret over our greater intentions in acting. In the same way that my intentions for writing this paper are nested all along the way in some sort of greater aim, so too are the intentions my friends and I have in going out.
It appears that to explain our intentions in acting by saying something like “my friends and I go out and act in the way we do on the weekends with the intention of having fun,” is to risk something like explaining my intention for writing this essay by saying something like “I am writing this word with the intention of forming a sentence”. It may certainly be a true that all we intend to do when we go out is have fun, just as it is true that all I intend at this moment is to write this very word. But to say only this, misses the greater aim of our actions. I have deeper intentions for going out in the same way that I have deeper intention for writing this word.
My worry is that the greater aim of my actions is not what it should be. And it is my contention that the regret my friends and I have been feeling on certain mornings, even after failing to do anything particularly regrettable the night before, stems from some (perhaps unconscious) recognition that we are not ultimately aimed in the right direction. That while our actions themselves are improving, there is still some deeper part of us that has the wrong intentions in acting. We feel regret because we know that whatever is serving as our ultimate aim, it is not the highest aim we could have, and therefore, the ways we are acting are not the best ways that we could be. This is not to say that our immediate intentions are necessarily evil or harmful in themselves, but it is to say that they could definitely be better. They could always be better.
Though, how exactly we go about finding that at which we should be aiming is a question for another time.
Further Reading:
If you are interested in the philosophy of intention, you can check out Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention.
If you would like to know more about strategic bombings, the rules of conflict, and just wars in general, you can check out Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations.
Deep Tracks- thanks for sharing - Friend 2