Emotions, Practical Rationality, and the Self

Abstract

In this paper I examine the relationship between emotions and practical rationality, arguing that emotions are incredibly useful in assisting us in making practical choices. However, this enthusiasm needs to be met with some caution as it not the case that every one of our emotions give us reasons we should be considering in order to make a rational choice, and there are times where if we did follow our hearts we would end up feeling ashamed or displeased with ourselves afterward. At the same time, we can feel guilty about a decision we made while purposefully ignoring our emotions when they tell us otherwise. It is ultimately those instances of reflexive shame or displeasure that tell us something about our agency. Our reflexive emotions show us what we should really care about and when we are failing to do so. And, since the purpose of making rational decisions is to properly attend to our goals and aspirations, part of being rational is to purse what we care about. Our reflexive emotions act as a guide to how well or how poorly we are doing just that. Tyler Flanagan University of Wisconsin Osh Kosh flanat23@uwosh.edu https://doi.org/10.7710/2155-4838.1180 Volume 9, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 2 | eP1180 Res Cogitans In recent years research concerning emotions and rationality has revealed that our abilities to reason and deliberate are not as opposed to our emotions as was once thought.1 Because our emotions are evaluations about the world rather than baseless feelings, they are subject to correctness conditions and justification conditions. We ask for reasons as to why we experienced this or that emotion, so that emotions are not simply passive irrational or arational phenomena but rather one of the ways in which we examine and make sense of the world around us through our own eyes (Deonna & Teroni, 2012).2 We would never accuse someone of being irrational if they feared losing their job in itself because of how important it is to have a job in order to survive and be happy. However, we may tell the worker that their fear is misguided and false if their fear comes from being paranoid that their boss does not like them, when it turns out their boss likes them very much. Part of developing a more positive outlook on the relationship between emotions and rationality includes recent reflections on the role emotions play in our practical reasoning. In this paper I argue that our emotions can in fact positively contribute to our practical reasoning, but only a particular set of emotions actually assist us in making rational decisions. These are emotions that are authentic to ourselves as agents, and I posit that the only way to reliably tell if an emotional experience is authentically ours is through our reflexive emotions. As our emotions are thought to give us privileged access to values as we examine the world, they make salient important reasons for our making one choice over another given what we care about. It is then argued that it is not at all irrational if we become emotional while deliberating over what to do, because of the special access to important reason-giving considerations that our emotions provide to us. These sometimes contradict even our most reasoned judgements (Arpaly, 2002; Jones, 2004). If we take a worker who becomes fearful of losing their job as an example, their fear is really that of losing the income and insurance that the job provides in order to continue to take care of themselves and their family. They value the health and happiness of their family and themselves, and the job provides a way for the worker to satisfy what they care about. Thus, when the worker deliberates over what they should do, they are almost pulled towards picking up weekend shifts and staying late on weekdays. What matters for practical rationality is the rationality of the emotional agent’s actions, rather than the internal rationality of the agent’s emotions. The worker as an 1 The amount of literature on this topic is immense and it would be impossible for me to list all relevant articles. See especially Damasio, 1994; de Sousa, 1987; Elster, 1999; Greenspan, 2000; Zhu & Thagard, 2002. 2 See chapters 8, 9, and 10. Flanagan | Emotions, Practical Rationality, and the Self commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans eP1180 | 3 agent is rational insofar as they make decisions and act towards achieving the goals they have set for themselves, often based on what they value. The worker’s emotions are closely related to their goal of maintaining employment, due to both sharing the same value of familial love (Copp, 2005). So, although the emotion the worker is experiencing is inappropriate and therefore irrational, it nevertheless plays a part in rational thought and action. Even though the worker incorrectly fears that their job is in danger, nothing about their actions of staying late and working weekends decreases their job security. If anything, those actions increase job security. Any action the worker can take in order for them to keep their job is rational in light of the goals and values that the worker has, even though the motivation behind those actions is an irrational emotion and false belief. The worker’s emotions are also authentically theirs, because their emotions fall in line with what they value and how they see themselves as an agent. There is no incoherency if the worker stands by their emotions and emotionally motivated actions even after learning that they were mistaken. Still, we should have reservations with putting such an unwavering trust in our emotional experiences being indicative of our values, and that they present reasons to us that will lead to rational decision-making. There is a danger in taking the case of the worker too far and passively accepting all of our emotions as giving reasons that we should accept and take on in our reasoning, as not all emotions represent our personal values. The emotion-personal value relationship is much tougher to suss out in the first person standpoint. Oftentimes our emotional experiences are not black and white and we are left to figure ourselves out. Epistemological conflicts involving emotional self-knowledge, including phenomena such as emotions that directly contradict our most reasoned judgments, or emotions that reflect a character that seems to contradict the values we have committed ourselves to, are central to our possible self-deception about the emotion-personal value link. Even when our emotional experiences are actually indicative of our values, we may not even know ourselves that it is the case (Damm, 2011). The already tenuous link between our emotions and our values, including whether we can know when it is the case that they are linked, presents an important dilemma for practical rationality: if we are rational in pursing what we value, can we really trust that our emotions give us reasons to act or decide as reasons for us? There are times when we react emotionally to a situation that surprises even ourselves. If it were always the case that our emotions presented our values to us in one way or another, what are we to do if the emotion’s evaluation contradicts the kind of agent we take ourselves to be? I see this as a conflict between the narrative self and the “emotional self”. The narrative self is indeed telling a story of person we think we Volume 9, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 4 | eP1180 Res Cogitans are, and also the person we think we ought to be. The values that we see ourselves as committed to upholding are part of the narrative self. The emotional self is our actual emotional reactions as we experience them. The story of who we want to be may not be entirely accurate at the time we tell it if our emotional self seems to represent an entirely different set of values than the values presented by the narrative self. I am suggesting that while we cannot be deceived about the sort of values we want to have, we may certainly be deceived about the values we currently have, when it is the case that our emotions reflect values that we subconsciously hold due to how we were brought up. Part of becoming authentic is integrating the emotional self with the narrative self. Only by achieving emotional authenticity will our emotions present reasons that we should accept. By becoming emotionally authentic we achieve a sense of autonomy, because to be autonomous is to act and decide in a way that tracks to what we care about in one way or another (Furrow & Wheeler, 2013). What we value in general is integral to our authenticity and autonomous agency because our valuations emphatically present to us objects in the world we care about: things, people, and situations which have import to us when our goals are set (Helm, 2009). They are what matters to us as agents. To identify with a value to see oneself as committed to that value, taking the opportunity when it is appropriate to exemplify that value. Our autonomous agency is at least partly constitutive of the values we have because we get to choose the values we want to commit ourselves to. Some theories of agency that take values and cares into consideration fail to capture the intimate link between what we care about and our emotions, and so they also do not account for how we could possibly be motivated by our values and how an agent can still be wholly rational even if their emotions are irrational.3 Jane values her relationship with her daughter, so she keeps her daughter in mind when she makes decisions about what to do with her days. When most people think of Jane they have difficulty doing so without seeing her daughter by her side. Harry values the quality of his home, so he spends a lot of time meticulously caring for of the upkeep his furniture, garden, and overall look of the house. Therefore when Harry experiences anxiety about a buildup of hair on his treasured couch, it leads him to spend time cleaning it up even after a long day at work. He deliberates and thinks that if he does go ahead wi