It took me almost a year after arriving in the United Kingdom to realize that many English words did not mean what I had assumed they meant.

I had scarcely distinguished between love and lust, happiness and stimulation, respect and deference, self-respect and arrogance, or truth and useful speech. These distinctions were not merely linguistic. They pointed toward moral concepts and abstractions that had never properly formed in my mind.

Emotions such as fear, desire, jealousy, anger, and hunger arise naturally. But moral emotions are different. They require distinctions, abstractions, causality, and a conception of the individual extending beyond immediate impulse. They are products of a civilization capable of developing and transmitting such ideas.

In this essay, I examine where these moral distinctions come from, why they cannot simply be assumed to exist naturally, and what happens when a civilization’s vocabulary is adopted without the underlying concepts that give those words meaning.

Read “Moral Emotions Do Not Exist in Nature” at Counter-Currents →