Chapter 9: Reason and Emotion
I. Overview
What is the relationship between ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’?
There is a popular myth that the two are mutually exclusive — that where there is reason there is an absence of emotion, and where there is emotion there is an absence of reason.
It is a myth.
A creature that lived by reason alone would do nothing but sit and rot. Reason cannot tell him to do anything, not even to eat.
Why eat?
To stay alive.
Why stay alive?
In order to ponder why I should eat.
Why ponder?
There is a point at which reason can carry the person no further. If something else does not step in and provide the answer, then there is no answer to be found. There is no reason to eat.
II. Love
It was the start of a new school year, and I was once again living in the dorms. My dorm, Coltor/Pryor, had both male (in Colter Hall) and female (in Pryor Hall) residents. On this day, I went down to the front desk to see if the mail had come in yet. I had just looked in my mailbox and found the box empty. Then I heard a voice behind me ask, “Has the mail come in yet?”
A group of students from the Pryor wing had come down to the front desk, and I had not paid a great deal of attention to any of them. But, when I heard this one voice, I turned quickly so that the next time the person with that voice spoke, I could identify the speaker. What I saw did not disappoint me.
One of the most nerve-wracking things in my life was getting up the courage to ask this person out on a date. It took me over five weeks to work up the courage. Only a few years before, I could not even walk into a classroom full of strangers. This would be my first date, if she said yes. I had no practice in this sort of thing. I had no reservoir of past experience that I could draw upon in order to decide which options may work and which may not.
Still the cost of not asking so greatly outweighed the cost of asking that I bundled up the courage to talk to her. I went to the Colter/Pryor lounge to wait for a chance to talk to her while she was alone. When I saw my opportunity, I walked up to her and asked her out.
She said no.
Even though she said no, she did not shut me out entirely. Once I had broken the ice, she chatted with me from time to time. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in my dorm room thinking of her, and I wrote a short story about an elf. It was just a few pages. She wanted to know if there was more where that came from. I invited her into my Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
She said yes.
Four years later, we got married.
III. The Distinction between Reason and Emotions
In Chapter 5, I gave a strong recommendation for a devotion to logic. I spoke about one of the greatest evils of our age, intellectual recklessness. People at even the highest levels of social and political life, and people in the news industry who are in charge of informing us, have virtually no comprehension of logic. They routinely fill their speeches and reports with arguments that a person with only one elementary class in logic can tell them are as faulty as “1 + 1 = 3”. Yet, these assertions go unchallenged because we refuse to learn how to recognize these mistakes.
It is a shortcoming as short sighted as refusing to learn simple arithmetic, particularly given the magnitude of the errors and the magnitude of the costs associated with those errors.
A president who has sex with an intern and lies about it is condemned. A President who defends war basis of arguments that violate rules of logic discovered 2500 years ago and simple enough for a junior high school student to comprehend is praised.
A part of this recklessess is a culture that views reason as distinct from emotion, and emotion the superior source of knowledge. The capacity to reason is considered somehow alien — at best, nonhuman; at worst, subhuman. If you like an argument, it must be a good argument. If its conclusion makes you angry or frightens you, then it must be a bad argument.
A. Spock: Reason Without Emotion
Spock, from the Star Trek science fiction universe, embodies this distinction. However, Spock did not introduce this distinction to our culture. Spock was created by relying on a distinction that could already be found in popular culture.
One thing that bothers me about Spock and the race of rational thinkers he represents is that, if logic is so important to these people, why do they seem to know nothing about it? A Vulcan, it seems, should be constantly making reference to the principles of logic and be able to readily identify fallacious reasoning by name.
I have never heard a Vulcan mention “modus ponens,” or “D’Morgan’s theorem,” or refer to a “disjunctive syllogism”, or criticize an opponent for employing the formal fallacy of “denying the consequent”.
Nor have any of these creatures that allegedly epitomize rational thinking ever identified an example of “argumentum ad populum,” “ad hominem tu quoque,” “cum hoc ergo proctor hoc,” or “petitio peteti”. They make a very poor representation of what a defender of logic actually knows, and what one would actually do.
Of course, this is just an example of writers not doing their homework. We can guess that the writers did not want to do their homework because they wanted a show that their audience could understand. Star Trek had enough trouble in the ratings war without having a race of rational thinkers that actually understood ‘rational thinking’.
More importantly, if the writers had studied reason and logic, and then tried to design a race that lived by its principles, they would have discovered the problem that I stated at the start of this chapter. Reason cannot identify ends or goals. Reason cannot answer the ultimate question ‘Why do X?’ Reason does a wonderful job of picking out how to best obtain any goal, but cannot give us any reason to obtain that goal.
In order to identify the goals that reason is going to help us obtain, we have to have desires. In the real world, action requires emotion.
B. Anti-Spock: Emotion Without Reason
We could introduce, into a Star Trek type of universe, a species devoted entirely to emotion and without reason. Such a race would suffer the same fate as a race truly devoted to logic. They would sit motionless and die.
However, they would suffer as they died. They would care about a great many things, but be incapable of doing anyting about them. They would know the suffering of starvation, but have no idea of how to go about finding nourishment. They would not eat or drink, because they would not be able to understand the implications of eating and drinking.
C. Summary
As each of us goes through our own personal journey, emotion selects the destinations of our travel, reason selects the route. Emotion told me that I wanted to spend more time in Lesley’s company. Reason looked at the various actions available to me and selected those that promised the best outcome. There were times when reason did not live up to the expectations I had sat for it. Though, in all honesty, it was not reason’s fault. It was the fault of my failure to employ reason correctly.
Either way, the project has been successful. Lesley has been my wife now for 18 years.
III. Irrational Emotions
So, does this render concepts like that of an “irrational fear” mistaken? Can there be such a thing if emotion and reason are so distinct? Was my fear of entering into a crowded classroom not “irrational”?
The concept of ‘irrational fear’ is still useful in two ways. An emotion can be irrational if it blocks the fulfillment of other goals and emotions. An emotion could also be irrational if it involves false beliefs about the object of that emotion.
A. Irrational Means
When planning a trip, we have a capacity to look at all the places to which we want to go, and to decide a route that takes us from one to the other. However, to visit as many of our preferred destinations as possible, sometimes we have to decide to give up on one option in favor of another. Perhaps a trip to the grand canyon means that we have to avoid Yellowstone Park.
We decide not to turn north, even though something we want to visit lays in that direction, because it would prevent us from visiting places to the south that we want to visit more. When planning a trip, it is irrational to select to turn both north and south at the same fork in the road at the same time.
In our daily lives as well, we may discover that we have an aversion to taking a route through territory that provides the sole way to get to the desired destinations beyond. In my own case, my aversion to walking into a room full of people got in the way of all of the other things that I wanted, that I could only get from a college education.
In itself, there is no justification for condemning any reluctance to enter a classroom. Saying that the fear is simply irrational without any regard to the other things the agent may want would be false. As I have stated before, intrinsic values do not exist, and no emotion is intrinsically bad. The negative value of the fear at entering a classroom must be extrinsic — dependent on the fact that it conflicts with other desires. Which it did.
B. Irrational Ends
The account given above is not the only way in which a person may call an emotion, such as my fear of entering a classroom, irrational. They could also use it to mean that the beliefs that I associated with that act, which relate to my fear, were irrational.
I had gotten it into my mind that others would be judging me harshly (the way that my schoolmates had judged me as a child), and the best way to avoid being judged was to avoid being seen.
However, this attitude that everybody in the class knew of my religious beliefs and hated me for it was not accurate. None of them knew of my religious beliefs (since I never talked about it any more) and those few who did know did not tend to care. It was a fluke that those who did care when I was 11 years old were both willing and able to rally so much support to their cause.
Simply put, I was not in the fifth grade any more. Yet, emotionally, I was still reacting to my immature 5th-grade class peers.
In these types of cases, we are not talking about whether the emotion is getting in the way of accomplishing the things one wants to accomplish. The fear of rejection, ostracism, pain, and potentially death are not irrational. The irrational component was the belief that I was at risk of my classmates subjecting me to these evils.
In this context, the concept of an irrational belief is entirely unproblematic.
C. Summary
So, even though there is a split between reason and emotion, this does not rule out the possibility of irrational emotion. This happens when the emotion gets in the way of other things the agent wants to accomplish. In these cases, the rational action for the agent to take would be to change that emotion. It may require professional help — but it is the same type of professional help sometimes needed to mend a broken arm or remove a tumor.
Irrational emotions also occur when an emotion depends on beliefs about an object that are not, themselves, rational. A fear of flying, that is not proportional to a fear of the even more risky activity of driving, is not rational. Fearing a consequence that reason says is highly unlikely would not count as rational, because it gives more support to a claim than reason can provide.
In both of these cases — conflicting emotions and emotional reactions grounded on irrational beliefs — the emotion prevents the agent from getting what the agent really wants. In these cases, something should be done to either extinguish that particular emotion, or to reduce its scope to something that is more reasonable.
IV. The Reason of Emotions
Still, there are people who think of emotion as some sort of decision-making procedure that trumps reason. People are invited to ‘listen to their heart’ as if their heart has the capacity to tell them what is true and what is not.
I think that there is a grain of truth in this view, but it is dangerous misjudge the size of this grain.
Emotion is not a thought process that links premises to conclusions, so it is not a substitute for reason. I think it makes more sense to view emotion, not as a substitute for reason, but as a form of perception. The things we encounter in the world strike our senses and triggers an emotional response. Some of this is dictated by evolution. Some of this is learned.
All forms of perception can be deceiving. To the eyes, a stick that is sticking out of the surface of a pond appears to bend at the surface of the water. If we trust our eyes without question, we would have to conclude that the stick really does bend at the surface of the water. As the surface raises and falls (or we pull the stick out of the water) the bend moves so that it is always at the surface.
However, we know not to trust our eyes without question. This appearance is an optical illusion, generated by the fact that light (photons) move differently in water than they do in air, and our brains are not programmed to correct for this distortion. The stick remains straight. Perception tells us something that is not true, and reason makes the correction.
The fact that our eyes sometimes deceive us does not argue that vision and reason are in conflict. However, it raises serious problems for those who say that where reason suggests one conclusion (the stick is straight) and perception suggests another (the stick bends at the surface of the water), we should scoff at reason and put our faith entirely in perception.
However, if somebody were to argue that we should ignore our eyes and go entirely with reason, this too would face serious problems. Clearly, it is somewhat extreme to say that, because we sometimes experience optical illusions, we should not trust our eyes and we would be better off plucking them out. We need to have some way to get information about the outside world into the brain, so that the brain can reason through that information. If we pluck out all of our senses, simply because we cannot fully trust them, we would have no senses left.
If we take these facts about perception, and apply them to emotion, we reach similar conclusions.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect that our emotions evolved to some extent. A situation may “appear dangerous” simply because our ancestors evolved a disposition to take certain sights as a clue that danger lurks ahead. Those ancestors who reacted to a sight with extra alertness, where the brain triggered the release of adrenaline, the heart beat faster, and muscles tensed, lived to have offspring. Those ancestors who did not react this way were eaten.
I am certainly not saying that emotion is strictly governed by evolution. Clearly, some of our emotional responses are learned. They come to us not through our genes, but through our experiences. It was experience, not evolution, taught me that a classroom full of students was a threat.
Either way, emotions like other forms of perception, carry information.
Those who argue that we should abandon reason and listen only to our hearts, are like those who say we should trust only our eyes. They ignore all of the times that our perceptions lead us into error, the way my emotions lead me into error about the danger of a classroom full of fellow students.
Those who say that we should abandon emotion and trust only to reason would toss out important pieces of data that we need in order to reason well. If we disabled every one of our senses that had the capacity to carry inaccurate information to our brain, then we would be senseless. The brain would somehow have to learn how to interact with an outside world without the ability to get a shred of information about that world.
In this debate, the two extreme views are both in error. The best view is one that strikes a balance between the two. It allows in the information that sight, sound, touch, and the emotions bring into the mind. However, it does not entirely trust that information. It invites us to question all of it, and look for the areas where reason tells us that our perceptions are not entirely accurate.
V. Examples
A. Fear
I have known fear. In some cases that fear was irrational. An examination of that fear through the lens of reason showed flaws, and because of those flaws the fear needed to be discarded.
My fear over what my college classmates may do to me was one example. My fear over the loss of “free will” was another. Once I looked at the free will issue through the lens of reason, I found out that free will has nothing to offer, and I had nothing to fear by losing it.
Yet, not all fear is irrational. When my Christian classmates held me under the water longer than I could hold my breath, I was afraid. I thought I might die. Emotion picked out the goal of my actions, and it picked out that goal with a perfect clarity of focus — to get back to the surface so that I could breathe. My classmates were not going to allow that. My struggles against them were proving fruitless. I needed somebody less inclined to support this type of brutality to come to my assistance. So, I shouted for help.
Perhaps a more rational person would have known the futility of shouting for help while being held under water. Maybe something in my brain knew that if a cascade of bubbles was the best signal that I could give that there was something terribly wrong going on over here, and that the best signal possible was better than no signal at all. However these questions may get answered, no objections can be raised against the genuine fear that I felt at that moment, or that the fear itself was rational.
B. Anger
I have known anger, and I know anger today.
Part of what motivated that attack I suffered through as a child was a culture that promoted the idea that atheists are to be considered a group apart from “good citizens,” that they are not true equals in our national community.
Today, there are a lot of people promoting the same ideology. They seek to post the message and to shout all the louder from the front of the class, from the legislative chambers, and from the halls of justice that atheists cannot be true and loyal citizens of this country.
When one says the Pledge of Allegiance one lumps those who do not believe in God (under God) with those who would divide the nation (indivisible), those who would destroy liberty (with liberty), and those who promote injustice (and justice for all). It lists all four of these groups side by side as enemies of what America stands for, and puts atheists at the top of the list.
There is no reasonable interpretation to be given to the Pledge, in its current form, than an oath to treat people such as myself as enemies of the state. Those who support this message are saying to the students who attacked me in Junior High, “I may not admire your methods, but I admire the sentiment behind them.”
The national motto, “In God We Trust,” can have no sensible interpretation than to declare that the people in this nation are to be divided into two groups. There is a group of ‘we’ (or ‘us’) — people who are welcome and accepted — and they share the common characteristic of trust in God. By implication it says that there is a group of ‘they’ (or ‘them), who are to not to be thought of as a part of ‘we’ or ‘us’, who share the common characteristic of no trust in (a) god.
Making this our national motto says that of all of the principles that this country stands for, the most important principle of all — the one that deserves special mention and special status — the one most worthy of dying for — is the principle that national populations are to be divided into a ‘we’ group that trusts in God and a ‘they’ group that does not.
Proponents of this message seek to post this message on all government buildings, including our schools, where every impressionable child can learn the same lesson my attackers had already learned. “Atheists among you are not welcome here. Atheists are ‘them;, and you must not think of them as having the same status in this country that one of ‘us’ who trusts in God would have.”
These sentiments make me angry. Anger, in this case, is not an irrational emotion. It is an anger backed by reason. As a fellow citizen, I have a right to equal consideration in the eyes of the law. It is contemptible that citizens would find the idea of advancing national slogans saying nothing less than that I do not deserve the equal consideration that is my right. To hold contempt for, and be angry at, those who are contemptible is perfectly rational.
C. Pride
I have known pride. When I was a senior in high school, I took an English class that focused on science fiction and fantasy. My first assignment in that class was to write a paper on cloning and extra-uterine birth (the ability to carry a fetus to term in an artificial uterus rather than through traditional pregnancy). The teacher handed my paper back with a perfect score on the top, and the hand-written comment, “Very good paper, IF you wrote it.”
When I showed the paper to my mom, she was furious at the accusation of plagiarism and wrote a harsh note to the teacher. She gave it to me to deliver it for her, but I did not.
I could not imagine a better compliment. That note at the top of my paper told me that the teacher thought my work was so good that it could have been the work of a professional.
This teacher did not know me from Jack, whoever Jack was. However, I knew the paper was entirely my own work. I knew that there was not even the possibility that I had somehow put somebody else’s words into that paper. Consequently, reason dictated that the praise that she so willingly gave my paper in accusing me of plagiarism was praise that fully belonged to me. Reason said that I had every reason to be proud.
The accusation meant a great deal to me. I never did deliver my mother’s note. I made no effort to defend myself. I did not go to the teacher to say, “Hey, I really did write this paper myself.” It made no difference to me whether the teacher thought I was an excellent writer or a thief of somebody else’s words. I knew what the facts were. I knew that those facts, combined with the professor’s reaction to my paper, meant that I had produced a paper far better than my teacher thought any student was capable of producing.
By the time that this teacher received my next paper for her class, she knew more of what I was capable of. The next paper was a short story. I had struggled to write it for days, and simply did not like anything that I put down on paper. In high school, I had a study hall just before my English class. On the day the paper was due, I finally got tired of trying to write something to please the teacher. I took out my red pen and simply started writing. I turned it in during the next hour.
Several days later my best friend — who had a class from the same teacher earlier in the day — told that class that the teacher informed his class that she had read the best story she had ever received from a high school student. She would not embarrass that student by saying this in that student’s class, but she told the earlier class that I had written that paper.
I think writing the story in ink helped. I had crossed out words from time to time, showing that I had changed my mind. It was evidence that the words were mine.
This time, I got yet another perfect score. This time, there was no accusation of plagiarism. This time, the teacher called me up to her desk to speak to me personally and suggested that I seek to get the paper published.
Still, all of this praise fell a notch short of the pride I felt when the teacher said that my earlier work was too good to have been mine.
D. Guilt
I have felt guilt.
Guilt is actually the emotion that most motivated me to write this book.
I had spent twelve years going through college studying moral philosophy. It was virtually the only thing I did through a huge portion of my young adult life. I dedicated myself to that study because I wanted to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, and I had to figure out somehow what “a better place” would actually be.
In that time, I came up with a few ideas that I can honestly call my own. So far in this series I have presented two of them. One was the argument that a bridge across Hume’s is/ought chasm must exist (in Chapter 3). The other was the argument that by taking rule utilitarianism and saying that the rules are written on the brain in a way that does not allow for exceptions, one can save rule-utilitarianism from the objection that it collapses into act-utilitarianism (in Chapter 8).
I will present other arguments in the chapters to come.
In addition, in twelve years of college I had seen arguments that were popular in public, even though professional philosophers had dismissed them as having clear problems. I watched people continue to use those arguments, while I had made no effort to correct their mistakes.
The relevant point here is that after putting all of this effort into this project and developing ideas that, so far as I knew, existed only in my own mind, I sat and did nothing with them. I had learned about the errors that others were making, but had made no effort to expose those errors. I had done nothing with what I had learned.
Perhaps my ideas are not worthy of mention; that option is certainly higher on the list of probabilities than I want it to be. But, if I sit back and say nothing, then I would have to hope that the are worth nothing — that people are better off not hearing them. That could be true, but I have no basis to think that it is true.
I have sat for years, thinking that some day I should report the ideas that I came up with, until the day that my aversion to those feelings of guilt motivated me to start writing.
And so, I write.
VI. Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide.
The relationship of the emotion “guilt” to reason is of particular importance in this chapter. People are quite commonly advised, in making moral choices, to “let your conscience be your guide.”
Yet, people strictly adhering to this advice have carried out the worst evils committed in the world. They were people who not only failed to sense the evil in what they were doing, but puffed their chest out in pride over the “good” they were bringing into the world. Slave owners, inquisitors, terrorists, crusaders, practitioners of genocide, conquerors and warmongers on a grand scale, those who sold disease-ridden blankets to Native Americans and who slaughtered their neighbors for their land, were too often able to go to bed each night and sleep soundly, because they had let their conscience be their guide.
I have repeated this argument in a number of contexts because I believe it is important. There is no justification in taking anything as a reliable indicator of good, be it a religious book or an emotion, which has in the past been responsible for so much evil. Nothing condemns a system as an unreliable method for distinguishing right from wrong more thoroughly than to show that it was religiously adopted by people responsible for covering the world with misery and suffering.
Before you let your conscience be your guide, I would like to suggest that you check this guide’s credentials and check its references. Hold conscience up to the light of reason and see if there are any cracks or flaws to be found within. Do not take the emotions of guilt, shame, and pride at face value, but look to see if they point to acts where guilt, shame, and pride are truly justified.
David Hume once wrote that reason is the slave of the passions. The points I raise here suggest that this account may be a bit glib. People should be wary of allowing emotions to triumph over reason. In the past, it has lead to misery and suffering on a continental scale. In the future, the suffering may be global. Emotion must be tweaked and calibrated by reason, while reason must recognize that it is emotion that gives the world its value.
VII. Making a Better Vulcan
I would like to see a science fiction author, some day, create a race actually devoted to reason. Members of this race would actually know and be able to use the principles of logic. They would freely accuse others of “argumentum ad ignorantum” where applicable, and praise a sound disjunctive syllogism by name.
They would actually be logical.
They would recognize that fallacious reasoning is the source of a huge portion of the world’s errors — errors that cost people their well being, their health, and often even their lives. As a result, they would see it as a moral duty to strike down fallacious reasoning wherever they found it. They would treat those who practice sophism and demagoguery with far greater contempt than we have, for example, for drunk drivers.
The members of this race would do this because the dangers that a drunk driver imposes on others is insignificant — barely worth taking note of — compared to the risks created by a reckless thinker.
Yet, members of this race would also recognize that reason alone is inert. It is as filled with passion as an electronic database or a mathematical formula. They would recognize that, without emotion, and without desire, there is no value, no end, no reason to do anything but sit still and decay — and not care that this is happening.
Everything of value has its value through passion and emotion. Consequently, the members of this science fiction race would recognize the irony of dismissing emotions and calling them worthless, when emotions and desire stand at the root of all that has worth.
The individuals within this race would recognize the importance of holding the information contained within emotions up to the careful light of reason. They would do this because emotions, like perception, have the capacity to lead us astray from time to time. Affective illusions are no less common than optical illusions.
When our emotions lead us into error, they are a source of misery and misfortune, and even death. Just as members of this race of logicians will hold that it is irrational to assign all emotions to the garbage heap; it is just as irrational to presume that all emotions carry flawless merit. Reason provides the lens through which we can distinguish the good from the bad.
I think it would be particularly interesting if the author who invented this race would call it “human”. It would be even more interesting if this author was not working on a science-fiction story, but a work of non-fiction.
I believe that this race would be a very interesting race indeed, full of promise and potential, and bound for accomplishments of a magnitude beyond the wildest dreams of its primitive ancestors — those that occupy the Earth today.
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