Psychoethics: The Normative Study of Emotional Speech Acts |
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........