essay on reason and emotion

Decision-Making

Reason and emotion: a note on plato, darwin, and damasio, if reason and emotion affect decision-making, which matters more.

Posted June 18, 2010 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

I wrote this essay with Anthony Evans and Gideon Goldin.

It is common to think that emotions interfere with rational thinking. Plato described emotion and reason as two horses pulling us in opposite directions. Modern dual-systems models of judgment and decision-making are Platonic in the sense that they endorse the antagonism between reason and emotion. The activities of one system are automatic and often emotional, whereas the activities of the other are controlled and never emotional. The automatic system gets things done quickly, but it is prone to error. The controlled system's mission is to keep a watchful eye and to make corrections when necessary. Like a watchful parent, this system reins in our impulses and overrides our snap judgments.

Emotions can be powerful experiences, but they usually do not last long. They sometimes make us do things we later regret. Today, we are angry at a colleague and want to yell at her. Tomorrow, we wish we had acted more rationally, no matter how compelling our desire was at the time. By transforming goals and desires in the heat of the moment, emotions can lead us to make choices that hurt our long-term interests. Doing something that you do not want to do is one of the hallmarks of irrationality — hence, emotions make us irrational.

The struggle of reason against emotion is an appealing image. But do emotions always lead us astray? Clearly, one of their functions is to guide us towards pleasure and away from pain. To succeed in gaining what is good and avoiding what is bad is difficult in an uncertain environment. We often make decisions that resemble gambles. When we invest in a company, buy a new house, or get married, there is a chance that things won't work out as hoped. It's critical that we're able to judge what risks are worth taking — and emotions can help us make those judgments.

A few years ago, neurologist Antonio Damasio and his colleagues showed how negative emotions can improve decisions involving risk. They devised a gambling task, in which players repeatedly selected cards from four decks. With each draw, they either gained or lost money. Two of the decks were safe and advantageous; choosing them consistently would gradually accrue money over the course of the task. The other two decks were riskier. Although the winning cards were worth more than the winning cards from the safe decks, the losing cards were so damaging that, if chosen repeatedly, the risky decks would eventually bankrupt the player. The best strategy was to consistently choose from the safe decks.

Damasio and colleagues found that participants were initially attracted to the risky decks because of their large positive payoffs. However, players soon retreated to the safer decks where they fared better in the long run. How did they figure out that playing it safe was better? The answer came from a group of neurological patients with damage to a brain region associated with emotional sensitivity to reward and punishment (the orbitofrontal cortex). Though these patients' cognitive reasoning was unimpaired, they could not experience the negative emotions that normally accompany large losses. Like the unimpaired participants, these patients were initially attracted to the riskier decks, but because they failed to respond emotionally to large losses, they never learned to avoid the risky gambles.

So, if fear of loss can protect us from courting disaster, can we conclude that negative emotions always play an adaptive role in decision-making? The answer is no, and to show why, Shiv, Damasio, and others followed up the original gambling study with an interesting variation. In their experiment, participants repeatedly chose between keeping and investing $1. If they invested $1, they had a 50% chance of winning $2.50 and a 50% chance of losing the invested dollar.

In this game, it is best to always choose the risky option. Individuals who fail to invest, out of fear, suffer financially. As in the first experiment, players were initially attracted to betting on risky gains, but as before, they became more conservative after experiencing loss. In contrast, orbitofrontal patients (who have trouble experiencing negative emotions) continued to invest regardless of losses. In this task, the patients who were not encumbered by emotion outperformed individuals experiencing the fear of loss.

The lesson from these studies is that the experience of negative emotions can help and hurt decision-making; it all depends on the context. Considered in isolation, emotions are rather arational (neither rational nor irrational). It seems then that we are right back to the Platonic dualism of reason and emotion. If we can't trust that emotions will always steer us in the right direction, there is no way around a dispassionate calculation of potential gains and losses.

This controlled, quantitative approach is most useful for decisions with clear, measurable outcomes. With economic choices, it's possible to estimate the probabilities of different consequences and to quantify how good or bad those outcomes are. For example, in the games of roulette and blackjack, we can mathematically ascertain that the best strategy is to never play. Similarly, we can come up with mathematical criteria to judge where we should invest our money.

Things get a bit murky, though, when we try to apply calculated reasoning to social decision-making. Many social situations involve costs and benefits that are difficult to assess and compare. Consider the gambit of asking an attractive stranger out on a date. Being rejected is a type of loss (just as being accepted is a type of gain), but assigning numerical values to such outcomes may seem contrived or arbitrary. Likewise, we can assume that there is some probability of rejection, but how to come up with a specific value is not obvious. Understanding human choices in their natural context is harder than understanding the rules of a laboratory game. What's more, the way people respond to social situations is somewhat subjective and variable. The anxious and avoidant might respond to rejection more strongly than the emotionally secure. In a world where something that is rational for one person may be irrational (or even unfathomable) for another, prescribing a rational or adaptive response is difficult.

So Plato's rationalism may not win the day either. Darwin would argue that the influence of emotions on decision-making has survived the rigors of natural selection. In review, we see three reasons why this may be so. One reason, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is that emotions give useful guidance whenever the environment fails to provide all the information needed for thoughtful analysis. The other reason is an asymmetry that might be lurking behind the two Damasio studies. When looking at the two gambling studies, it is tempting to discard emotions from the process of decision-making. If they help in one context and hurt in another, the net outcome seems to be a zero effect. It may be the case, however, that the type of context in which emotions help is more common in our world than the type of context in which they hurt. The final reason not to discard emotions remains the fact that they make us act quickly and decisively.

Bechara, A., Damásio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex, Cognition, 50 , 7-15.

Shiv, B., Loewenstein, G., Bechara, A., Damásio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). Investment behavior and the negative side of emotion. Psychological Science, 16, 435-439.

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. , is a social psychologist at Brown University who believes that rational thinking and socially responsible behavior are attainable goals.

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Reason and Emotion: A Balance That Yields Good Decisions

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This book brings together twenty-three distinctive and influential essays on ancient moral philosophy—including several published here for the first time—by the distinguished philosopher and classical scholar John Cooper. The volume gives a systematic account of many of the most important issues and texts in ancient moral psychology and ethical theory, providing a unified and illuminating way of reflecting on the fields as they developed from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle to Epicurus and the Stoic philosophers Chrysippus and Posidonius, and beyond. For the ancient philosophers, Cooper shows here, morality was “good character” and what that entailed: good judgment, sensitivity, openness, reflectiveness, and a secure and correct sense of who one was and how one stood in relation to others and the surrounding world. Ethical theory was about the best way to be rather than any principles for what to do in particular circumstances or in relation to recurrent temptations. Moral psychology was the study of the psychological conditions required for good character—the sorts of desires, the attitudes to self and others, the states of mind and feeling, the kinds of knowledge and insight. Together these papers illustrate brilliantly how, by studying the arguments of the Greek philosophers in their diverse theories about the best human life and its psychological underpinnings, we can expand our own moral understanding and imagination and enrich our own moral thought. The collection will be crucial reading for anyone interested in classical philosophy and what it can contribute to reflection on contemporary questions about ethics and human life.

"This is a work of conspicuous erudition. . . . Although the books is very clearly written, reading it requires concentrated effort, for the material Cooper discusses is both subtle and in a different idiom from contemporary moral thinking. He nevertheless illuminates a variety of issues on which contemporary philosophers focus."— Library Journal

"This splendid book is a collection of twenty-three of John Cooper's papers on Greek ethical philosophy. . . . But more important, bringing these papers together has synergistic effects: we see Cooper returning to related issues in different contexts and elaborating the scope and depth of his analyses. . . . [T]hey are one of the handful of permanent contributions to the study of ancient ethics in the past one hundred years."—Chris Bobonich, The Philosophical Review

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Reason and Emotion: Scottish Philosopher John Macmurray on the Key to Wholeness and the Fundaments of a Fulfilling Life

By maria popova.

We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. And yet the more we learn about how the mind constructs the world , the more we see that our experience of reality is a function of our emotionally directed attention and “has something of the structure of love.” Philosopher Martha Nussbaum recognized this in her superb inquiry into the intelligence of emotion , observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

A century before Nussbaum, the far-seeing Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (February 16, 1891–June 21, 1976) took up these questions in a series of BBC broadcasts and other lectures, gathered in his 1935 collection Reason and Emotion ( public library ).

Macmurray writes:

We ourselves are events in history. Things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us.

They happen primarily through our emotional lives — the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves.

Three decades before James Baldwin marveled at how “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” Macmurray considers the universal resonance of our emotional confusion, which binds us to each other and makes our responsibility for our own lives a responsibility to our collective flourishing:

All of us, if we are really alive, are disturbed now in our emotions. We are faced by emotional problems that we do not know how to solve. They distract our minds, fill us with misgiving, and sometimes threaten to wreck our lives. That is the kind of experience to which we are committed. If anyone thinks they are peculiar to the difficulties of his own situation, let him… talk a little about them to other people. He will discover that he is not a solitary unfortunate. We shall make no headway with these questions unless we begin to see them, and keep on seeing them, not as our private difficulties but as the growing pains of a new world of human experience. Our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind. When we see them steadily in this universal setting, then and then only will our private difficulties become really significant. We shall recognize them as the travail of a new birth for humanity, as the beginning of a new knowledge of ourselves and of God.

At the heart of this recognition, this reorientation to our own inner lives, lies what Macmurray calls “emotional reason” — a capacity through which we “develop an emotional life that is reasonable in itself, so that it moves us to forms of behaviour which are appropriate to reality.” The absence of this capacity contributes both to our alienation from life and to our susceptibility to dangerous delusion. Its development requires both a willingness to feel life deeply and what Bertrand Russell called “the will to doubt.” Macmurray writes:

The main difficulty that faces us in the development of a scientific knowledge of the world lies not in the outside world but in our own emotional life. It is the desire to retain beliefs to which we are emotionally attached for some reason or other. It is the tendency to make the wish father to the thought. .. If we are to be scientific in our thoughts… we must be ready to subordinate our wishes and desires to the nature of the world… Reason demands that our beliefs should conform to the nature of the world, not the nature of our hopes and ideals.

In consonance with Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s insightful insistence on the courage to disillusion yourself , Macmurray adds:

The strength of our opposition to the development of reason is measured by the strength of our dislike of being disillusioned. We should all admit, if it were put to us directly, that it is good to get rid of illusions, but in practice the process of disillusionment is painful and disheartening. We all confess to the desire to get at the truth, but in practice the desire for truth is the desire to be disillusioned. The real struggle centres in the emotional field, because reason is the impulse to overcome bias and prejudice in our own favour, and to allow our feelings and desires to be fashioned by things outside us, often by things over which we have no control. The effort to achieve this can rarely be pleasant or flattering to our self-esteem. Our natural tendency is to feel and to believe in the way that satisfies our impulses. We all like to feel that we are the central figure in the picture, and that our own fate ought to be different from that of everybody else. We feel that life should make an exception in our favour. The development of reason in us means overcoming all this. Our real nature as persons is to be reasonable and to extend and develop our capacity for reason. It is to acquire greater and greater capacity to act objectively and not in terms of our subjective constitution. That is reason, and it is what distinguishes us from the organic world, and makes us super-organic.

And yet reason, Macmurray argues, is “primarily an affair of emotion” — a paradoxical notion he unpacks with exquisite logical elegance:

All life is activity. Mere thinking is not living. Yet thinking, too, is an activity, even if it is an activity which is only real in its reference to activities which are practical. Now, every activity must have an adequate motive, and all motives are emotional. They belong to our feelings, not our thoughts. […] It is extremely difficult to become aware of this great hinterland of our minds, and to bring our emotional life, and with it the motives which govern our behaviour, fully into consciousness.

This difficulty is precisely what makes us so maddeningly opaque to ourselves , and what makes emotional reason so urgent a necessity in understanding ourselves — something only possible, in a further paradox, when we step outside ourselves:

The real problem of the development of emotional reason is to shift the centre of feeling from the self to the world outside. We can only begin to grow up into rationality when we begin to see our own emotional life not as the centre of things but as part of the development of humanity.

In a sentiment evocative of E.E. Cummings’s wonderful meditation on the courage to feel for yourself , Macmurray adds:

There can be no hope of educating our emotions unless we are prepared to stop relying on other people’s for our judgements of value. We must learn to feel for ourselves even if we make mistakes.

An epoch before neuroscience uncovered how the life of the body gives rise to emotion and consciousness , Macmurray echoes Willa Cather’s insistence on the life of the senses as the key to creativity and vitality , and writes:

Our sense-life is central and fundamental to our human experience. The richness and fullness of our lives depends especially upon the richness and fullness, upon the delicacy and quality of our sense-life. […] Living through the senses is living in love. When you love anything, you want to fill your consciousness with it. You want to affirm its existence. You feel that it is good and that it should be in the world and be what it is. You want other people to look at it and enjoy it too. You want to look at it again and again. You want to know it, to know it better and better, and you want other people to do the same. In fact, you are appreciating and enjoying it for itself , and that is all that you want. This kind of knowledge is primarily of the senses. It is not of the intellect. You don’t want merely to know about the object; often you don’t want to know about it at all. What you do want is to know it . Intellectual knowledge tells us about the world. it gives us knowledge about things, not knowledge of them. It does not reveal the world as it is. Only emotional knowledge can do that.

Emotional reason thus becomes the pathway to wholeness, to integration of the total personality — a radical achievement in a culture that continually fragments and fractures us:

The fundamental element in the development of the emotional life is the training of this capacity to live in the senses, to become more and more delicately and completely aware of the world around us, because it is a good half of the meaning of life to be so. It is training in sensitiveness… If we limit awareness so that it merely feeds the intellect with the material for thought, our actions will be intellectually determined. They will be mechanical, planned, thought-out. Our sensitiveness is being limited to a part of ourselves — the brain in particular — and, therefore, we will act only with part of ourselves, at least so far as our actions are consciously and rationally determined. If, on the other hand, we live in awareness, seeking the full development of our sensibility to the world, we shall soak ourselves in the life of the world around us; with the result that we shall act with the whole of ourselves.

A generation after William James made the then-radical assertion that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” and an epoch before science began illuminating how our bodies and our minds conspire in emotional experience , Macmurray considers what the achievement of emotional reason requires:

We have to learn to live with the whole of our bodies, not only with our heads… The intellect itself cannot be a source of action… Such action can never be creative, because creativeness is a characteristic which belongs to personality in its wholeness, acting as a whole, and not to any of its parts acting separately.

This wakefulness to the sensorium of life, he argues, is not only the root of emotional reason but the root of creativity:

If we allow ourselves to be completely sensitive and completely absorbed in our awareness of the world around, we have a direct emotional experience of the real value in the world, and we respond to this by behaving in ways which carry the stamp of reason upon them in their appropriateness and grace and freedom. The creative energy of the world absorbs us into itself and acts through us. This, I suppose, is what people mean by “inspiration.”

And yet we can’t be selectively receptive to beauty and wonder — those rudiments of inspiration — without being receptive to the full spectrum of reality, with all its terrors and tribulations. Our existential predicament is that, governed by the reflex to spare ourselves pain, we blunt our sensitivity to life, thus impoverishing our creative vitality and our store of aliveness. Macmurray writes:

The reason why our emotional life is so undeveloped is that we habitually suppress a great deal of our sensitiveness and train our children from the earliest years to suppress much of their own. It might seem strange that we should cripple ourselves so heavily in this way… We are afraid of what would be revealed to us if we did not. In imagination we feel sure that it would be lovely to live with a full and rich awareness of the world. But in practice sensitiveness hurts. It is not possible to develop the capacity to see beauty without developing also the capacity to see ugliness, for they are the same capacity. The capacity for joy is also the capacity for pain. We soon find that any increase in our sensitiveness to what is lovely in the world increases also our capacity for being hurt. That is the dilemma in which life has placed us. We must choose between a life that is thin and narrow, uncreative and mechanical, with the assurance that even if it is not very exciting it will not be intolerably painful; and a life in which the increase in its fullness and creativeness brings a vast increase in delight, but also in pain and hurt.

The development of emotional reason, Macmurray argues, is the development of our highest human nature and requires “keeping as fully alive to things as they are, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, as we possibly can.” It requires, above all, being unafraid to feel, for that is the fundament of aliveness. He writes:

The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it, and is the subordinate partner in the human economy. This is because the intellect is essentially instrumental. Thinking is not living. At its worst it is a substitute for living; at its best a means of living better… The emotional life is our life, both as awareness of the world and as action in the world, so far as it is lived for its own sake. Its value lies in itself, not in anything beyond it which it is a means of achieving. […] The education of the intellect to the exclusion of the education of the emotional life… will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life, in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself. When it is the persistent and universal tendency in any society to concentrate upon the intellect and its training, the result will be a society which amasses power, and with power the means to the good life, but which has no correspondingly developed capacity for living the good life for which it has amassed the means… We have immense power, and immense resources; we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely. I should trace the condition of affairs almost wholly to our failure to educate our emotional life.

In the remainder of the thoroughly revelatory Reason and Emotion , Macmurray goes on to explore the role of art and religion in human life as “the expressions of reason working in the emotional life in search of reality,” the benedictions of friendship, and the fundaments of an emotional education that allows us to discover the true values in life for ourselves. Complement it with Dostoyevsky on the heart, the mind, and how we come to know truth and Bruce Lee’s unpublished writings on reason and emotion , then revisit Anaïs Nin on why emotional excess is essential for creativity .

— Published June 29, 2023 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/06/29/john-macmurray-reason-and-emotion/ —

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What is the relationship between reason and emotion?

Tom cochrane.

Reason and emotion are often supposed to be at odds with each other. From one perspective, our emotions are like unruly toddlers, demanding and whimsical, that need to be held in check by the adult intellect. From another perspective, the rational mind is cold and calculating and needs the warmth of the passions to grasp what really matters.

I don’t think that either of these perspectives, properly understood, is wrong. Where they are potentially confusing is if they suggest that emotions and reason are two separate sources of agency vying for supremacy.

Plato encourages this confusion with his tripartite model of the soul (e.g. in The Republic ). Kant does the same in the Critique of Practical Judgement (e.g. Bk.I, Ch.3) when he supposes that the rational grasp of moral imperatives can motivate action independently and even in rejection of our passionate impulses.

In contrast to Plato and Kant, we must remember that humans (and other animals) are single agents and we have not evolved the resources of emotion and reason to fight against each other, but to ever more effectively protect the things we care about. Given this consideration, I think the correct thing to say is that reason elaborates emotion.

To explain: most philosophers and psychologists of emotion these days suppose that emotions have a descriptive function (alongside their motivational function). Emotions inform us about the state of the world- that it is dangerous, enviable, disgusting and so on. Naturally, the kinds of properties we are describing rely on the person caring about certain things; they are relative to the individual in this sense. But given that the person cares about certain things (e.g. the integrity of his body, the status of his loved ones) it can be entirely factual that a situation threatens or supports him. Now along comes the capacity for rational inference. This allows the emotions to massively expand their capacity to track the things the individual cares about, to check whether the initial emotional representation is accurate, to infer consequences, and have further emotions towards those consequences. This, I contend, is the main purpose of reason.

At the same time, it is misleading to say that reason is slave to passions, as Hume famously declares in A Treatise of Human Nature . In my book I argue that the motivational juice driving all cognition is drawn from our underlying homeostatic regulation systems. Emotions are one cognitive resource for elaborating these systems while rational inferences are a further resource. This means that one concern-regulating system can overrule another, where the first is rationally elaborated and the second is not.

The resulting experience can be one where we rationally infer that acting impulsively (say to run away from giving an important speech) could destroy one’s reputation and we accordingly stop ourselves. Thus there is room for motivational conflict, but nothing so simple as reason controlling emotion. We could as easily say that one emotion is controlling another emotion here, or that one kind of thinking is controlling another kind of thinking.

Overall, in my book The Emotional Mind , I try to show how the incredibly complex range of activities going on in our emotional lives all fit together. The picture I provide is of one elaboration building on another. This, I think, helps us to see that there is some order in the chaos.

Read Tom Cochrane’s piece,  ‘A new account of the emotions’ , in The Brains Blog. 

The Emotional Mind  by Tom Cochrane

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About The Author

Tom Cochrane, Flinders University of South Australia Tom Cochrane is Lecturer in Philosophy at Flinders University in Adelaide. He is a co-editor of The Emotional Power of Music (...

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Unit 4: How One Should Live

Reason and Emotion in the Moral Life

Scott O'Leary

It may seem puzzling that given the numerous debates in philosophy over the justification of different ethical theories, moral experience often seems to disappear.  In reality, this is less of an omission and more a question of focus. Many canonical moral philosophers like Aristotle, the Stoics, Hume, Kant, Bentham, and Mill have much to say about the motivations, reasoning, and development of moral agents.

Topics like these are the task of the area of philosophy called moral psychology . Many of the central questions in moral psychology require clarifying the roles reason and emotion play in moral experience.  These questions involve three interrelated topics: moral motivation, judgment, and development.

Moral Motivation

Philosophical ethics often places reason at the center of ethical life and views emotion at odds with reason or a source of error.  David Hume comments upon this picture of Western moral philosophy:

“Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, it is said, is obliged to regulate his actions by reason…” (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part III, Section III: Of the Influencing Motives of the Will.”)

Hume challenges this priority of reason over emotion.  While reason seems central to moral life, emotions are what actually “move us”.  Just as fear leads to fight or flight, indignation can lead us to rectify injustice, anger to correct an offense, or shame to avoid wrongdoing.  Hume argues further that not only can passions motivate action, but reason is impotent and cannot motivate action:

“Abstract or demonstrative reasoning, therefore, never influences any of our actions, but only as it directs our judgment concerning causes and effects….We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”  (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part III, Section III: Of the Influencing Motives of the Will.”)

Inspired by Hume, several scholars have argued for a Humean Theory of all motivation, including moral motivation (Smith, 1998).  On this account, human actions are caused by a belief-desire pair.  The belief component, such as “I believe stealing from the store is wrong” leads to the action of resisting the temptation to steal if I also have the desire “to not harm the business owner” .  Similarly, my sympathy to “help Kevin” combined with the belief “he needs money to pay his bills” is what prompts me to lend him money to make ends meet.

Others challenge this emotion-based theory of moral motivation, most famously Immanuel Kant.  In the Grounding for the Metaphysics for Morals, Kant argues that when we act “for the sake of duty”, we can be motivated by reason.  Kant makes the stronger claim that when we act based on practical reason and not from inclination – his term for desires and emotions – this shows the motive of duty most clearly.  Let’s modify the example above.  Suppose I cannot feel any sympathy to help Kevin, but loan him money anyway because it’s the right thing to do. Kant argues this shows that action can be motivated by practical reason alone.

“Suppose that, when no longer moved by any inclination, he tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone; then for the first time his action has its genuine moral worth. [G398].”

What Kant calls genuine moral worth is doing an action because we believe it is the right thing , not because certain feelings motivate us to act.  If ethics is to be universal, then we have to have a source of motivation that is itself universal, and this Kant identifies with the will – that is, practical reason.  Since desires and emotions are subject to each of our own psychological histories, they are too variable and unstable to morally motivate.

This presents two perspectives on moral motivation based on different roles assigned to emotion compared to that of reason.  Hume’s view aligns with our basic intuitions about the motivating capacity of emotion. Kant’s view points to the contingency of emotional life and gains plausibility when we examine the role of emotion and reason in moral judgment.

Moral Judgment

A widespread view in popular culture suggests emotions distort our judgment (see Disney’s “Emotion and Reason” linked below).  Characters like Data and Spock in Star Trek are shown judging situations more clearly and objectively than others because they are unclouded by emotion.  This position is put forward by Stoic philosophers who argued that emotions were “excessive impulses which are disobedient to reason” (Arius Didymus, 65A).  Kant’s ethics also often appear hostile to emotion and desire, separating these two sources of inclination from reason.  Given such critical views of emotion, it may seem surprising that Aristotle places emotion at the center of the virtuous life:

“For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way…[that] is characteristic of virtue.”(Book VI Nicomachean Ethics, emphasis added)

Rather than emotions distorting judgment, Aristotle argues that to be virtuous, one must feel emotions at the right times, toward the right object, for the right reason and in the right way.  The courageous person is not fearless, but rather feels the appropriate amount of fear.  In many situations, virtue requires us to feel fear and to feel unafraid is to be rash, falling short of the mark of virtue.

Both positions can be supported by the empirical literature on moral judgment.  For instance, the phenomenon of emotional priming suggests seemingly insignificant emotional cues may affect how harsh or lenient we judge moral failures in others.  In an experiment with subjects playing the role of a sentencing judge, people judged crimes more harshly when sitting at messy and cluttered desks (Schnall, Haidt, et al 2008).  A similar phenomenon has been observed in other settings such as parole hearings occurring before a judge has lunch.  Should crimes or parole hearings be judged differently just because the judge was hungry, frustrated, or sat at a messy desk?  If this is emotion’s role in moral judgment, then the Stoics position seems correct.

Other studies show emotions provide a crucial role in determining salience and solving what’s called “the frame problem” in philosophy and artificial intelligence research.  Humans constantly and intuitively filter many sources of information.  Setting up an AI algorithm or robot – such as a bomb defusing robot – to do the same is extremely difficult, if not impossible.  How do we filter and determine what is salient in a situation?

Recent studies have shown that our emotional experience provides just such a role (Faucher and Tappolet 2002).  As Dylan Evans summarizes in Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, “[e]motions are often blamed for distracting us….[but] emotions distract us from one thought only in order to make us pay attention to another,” (Evans 2002, p. 114).  Therefore, while the effects of emotion in moral experience may be contested, research suggests that emotions significantly impact our moral judgments and ought to be incorporated into theories of moral judgment.

Moral Development

In this final section, we will examine the relationship of emotion and reason in moral development. Each of us should be concerned about the development of our moral character from children to adults and from those who waiver in their ethical commitments to those who remain steadfast.  Rather than pose ways past thinkers or contemporary research might answer these questions, we can examine why these positions in moral psychology are so important for our understanding of the good life itself.

According to Aristotle, to feel the right emotions in the right way is “ characteristic of virtue.”    The virtuous person is one whose moral development includes the cultivation of the right emotional sensitivity and feels the right emotions.  For Kant, what is essential is to do the right thing for the right reason, and whether emotions coincide with this or not is generally irrelevant.  In both Bentham and Mill’s accounts of Utilitarianism, the value of emotional experience depends solely on whether emotions promote utility or not.

Such diversity in positions reflects different views on what emotions are and different conceptions of morality itself. For Aristotle, emotions provide important information about ourselves and the world and so their cultivation is an important part of moral development.  One is not fully virtuous if one’s emotions and feelings do not align with one’s reasoning and beliefs.  Thus Kant’s unsympathetic benefactor does the right thing but falls short of virtue because there is a conflict between his action and his feelings.

Is it too demanding to think that our motivations, moral judgments, and feelings will always or typically align?  Does that require a degree of control over early stages of moral development that we in fact do not possess?  To what degree should the cultivation of our own moral character and how we raise our children be centered in our emotional life?  The answer to these questions remains contested; what is not contested is the need to study the relation between emotion and reason in moral experience.

Additional Resources

Cooper, John. “ The Emotional Life of the Wise ,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 43(S1); 176-218 (2005).* *(TCC students may access the full text online at http://199.245.164.25/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=18645621&site=ehost-live&scope=site.)

Disney’s Inside Out :

Disgust and Anger

Disney’s wartime film “ Reason and Emotion .”

Emotional reasoning presented as a cognitive distortion

Evans, Dylan. Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Faucher, Luc and Christine Tappolet, “Fear and the Focus of Attention,” C onsciousness and Emotion 3(2), (2002): 105-144.

Cooper, John “The Emotional Life of the Wise” Southern Journal of Philosophy 43  (S1):176-218 (2005) and Online copy

Schnall, Simone, Jonathan Haidt, et. al Personality Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1096–1109

Smith, Michael.  “The Humean Theory of Motivation,” Mind 96 (1987):36-61.

Stocker, Michael. “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 73  (1986): 453-66.

Short video lecture on Stocker’s “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories”

Yale’s Open Course Psychology “11. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part I” taught by Paul Bloom

Reason and Emotion in the Moral Life Copyright © 2020 by Scott O'Leary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical Thinking: Reason, Emotion, Communication Essay

Introduction, elements of critical thinking, reason, emotion, and communication, fallacies and argument.

Critical thinking is important for the decision-making process and effective communication between people. It may be applied to all spheres of people’s lives. Emotions, unwarranted assumptions, stereotyping, denial, poor communications skills, and other factors are barriers to critical thinking. Sally’s case shows that it is necessary to avoid biased opinion, dishonesty, over-reliance on feelings, and self-centered thinking in daily situations to make reasonable and weighed decisions.

The apparent barriers to critical thinking were conformism, unwarranted assumptions, and an over-reliance on feelings (“Barriers to critical thinking,” 2019). They were present in the situation when Sally did not agree with her colleagues but pretended that she did to avoid confrontation. The woman decided that she would not spend time with her coworkers again only because they had a different opinion and did not feel comfortable about it. Sally may not be a good critical thinker as she relied on her emotions a lot.

The concept of reason was mainly presented when Sally collected evidence to support her proposal and provide the basis for her argument. Sally’s critical thinking involved emotion too; the woman felt agitated and tired, which led to the inability to assess her coworkers’ viewpoints. Sally’s communication style was passive because she was quiet, did not admit that she disagreed with others, and tried to avoid conflict.

The scenario presents a fallacy in Sally’s thought process, which is shown in the situation at dinner. Sally concluded that she did not know enough about the topic to confront her colleagues. It was not possible to identify whether her coworkers had more knowledge than she did. The scenario does not provide an argument for this point of view as it is unreasonable.

Sally’s example shows that a lack of critical thinking may result in emotional distress and the individual’s inability to take weighed decisions. In the presented case, the barriers to critical thinking included unwarranted assumptions, conformism, and an over-reliance on feelings. They prevented Sally from making reasonable conclusions and being more open to her colleagues’ opinions. Moreover, a lack of critical thinking resulted in fallacies in the woman’s thought process.

Barriers to critical thinking . (2019). Web.

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Bibliography

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Reason and Emotion

Essays on ancient moral psychology and ethical theory.

• John M. Cooper

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Copyright year: 1999
• Audience: General/trade;
• Main content: 604
• Keywords: akrasia ; altruism ; animals ; Antiochus ; Athenaeus ; Bruns ; Ivo ; Burkert ; W. ; Chrysippus ; Cicero ; co-instantiation ; courage ; death ; dialectic ; Diotima ; educators ; empiricism ; Epictetus ; ethics ; eudaimonism ; flourishing ; goods ; external ; hedonism ; imagination ; incontinence ; interentailment of virtues ; Isocrates ; justice ; Kelsey ; Sean ; knowledge ; language ; Lucretius ; Marcus Aurelius ; Mitsis ; Phillip ; moral psychology ; motivations ; human ; music ; nature ; nonrational desires ; objectivity ; Olympiodorus ; oratory ; Penner ; T. ; perfection ; phantasiai ; piety ; Plotinus ; Posidonius ; Priam ; rhetoric ; self-awareness ; Strauss ; L. ; suicide
• Published: January 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691223261

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Using Reason (Logos), Authority (Ethos), and Emotion (Pathos)

Rhetorical appeals.

Rhetoric is the way that authors use and manipulate language in order to persuade an audience. Once we understand the rhetorical situation out of which a text is created (why it was written, for whom it was written, by whom it was written, how the medium in which it was written creates certain constraints, or perhaps freedom of expression), we can look at how all of those contextual elements shape the author’s creation of the text.

We can look first at the classical rhetorical appeals which are the three ways to classify an author’s intellectual, moral, and emotional approaches to getting the audience to react in the manner in which the author may have intended.

In composition studies, the term rhetorical appeals refers to the use of ethos, pathos, and logos. These are classical Greek terms dating back to Aristotle who is traditionally viewed as the creator of rhetoric. To be rhetorically effective (and thus persuasive), an author must engage the audience in a variety of compelling ways which involves carefully choosing how to craft their argument so that the intended outcome is achieved. Often that outcome occurs when the audience agrees with the argument or point being presented. Aristotle defined these modes of engagement and gave them the terms that we still use today: logos, pathos, and ethos.

Logos: Appeal to Logic

Logic. Reason. Rationality. Logos is brainy and intellectual, cool, calm, collected, objective.

When an author relies on logos, it means that they are using logic, careful structure, and objective evidence to appeal to the audience. Objective evidence is anything that can be proven with statistics or other facts via more than one source. Oftentimes that evidence has been validated by more than one authority in the field of study.

For example, if Dr. Smith was trying to convince her students to complete their homework, she might explain that she understands everyone is busy and they have other classes (non-biased), but that completing their homework will help them get a better grade on their test (explanation). She could add to this explanation by providing statistics showing the number of students who failed and didn’t complete their homework versus the number of students who passed and did complete their homework (factual evidence). This is an example of logos employed for the purposes of argument and persuasion.

Logical appeals rest on rational modes of thinking ,  such as:

• Comparison:  a comparison between one thing (with regard to your topic) and another, similar thing to help support your claim. It is important that the comparison is fair and valid – the things being compared must share significant traits of similarity.
• Cause/effect thinking:  you argue that X has caused Y, or that X is likely to cause Y to help support your claim. Be careful with the latter – it can be difficult to predict that something “will” happen in the future.
• Deductive reasoning:  starting with a broad, general claim/example and using it to support a more specific point or claim (picture an hourglass where the sands gather in the middle)
• Inductive reasoning:  using several specific examples or cases to make a broad generalization (consider the old question of “if your friend jumped off of a bridge, would you” to make the sweeping claim that all young people are easily persuaded to follow the crowd)
• Analogical reasoning:  moves from one particular claim/example to another, seemingly sequential (sometimes this line of reasoning is used to make a guilt by association claim)
• Exemplification:  use of many examples or a variety of evidence to support a single point
• Elaboration:  moving beyond just including a fact, but explaining the significance or relevance of that fact
• Coherent thought:  maintaining a well-organized line of reasoning; not repeating ideas or jumping around

Pathos: Appeal to Emotions

When an author relies on pathos, it means that they are trying to tap into the audience’s emotions to get them to agree with the author’s claim. An author using pathos appeals wants the audience to feel something: anger, pride, joy, rage, or happiness. For example, many of us have seen the ASPCA commercials that use photographs of injured puppies, or sad-looking kittens, and slow, depressing music to emotionally persuade their audience to donate money. This is a classic example of the use of pathos in argument.

Pathos-based rhetorical strategies are any strategies that get the audience to “open up” to the topic, the argument, or to the author through an emotional connection. Emotions can make us vulnerable and an author can use this vulnerability to get the audience to believe that their argument is a compelling one.

Pathos appeals might include:

• Expressive descriptions of people, places, or events that help the reader to feel or experience those events
• Vivid imagery of people, places or events that help the reader to feel like they are seeing those events
• Sharing personal stories that make the reader feel a connection to, or empathy for, the person being described
• Using emotion-laden vocabulary as a way to put the reader into that specific emotional mindset (what is the author trying to make the audience feel? and how are they doing that?)
• Using any information that will evoke an emotional response from the audience. This could involve making the audience feel empathy or disgust for the person/group/event being discussed, or perhaps connection to or rejection of the person/group/event being discussed.

When reading a text, try to locate where the author is trying to convince the reader by strictly using emotions because, if used to excess, pathos appeals can indicate a lack of substance or emotional manipulation of the audience. If the only way in which an author can persuade the reader is by making them sad or angry, does that make for a solid, valid argument?

Ethos: Appeal to Values/Trust

Appeals using ethos are typically two faceted focusing on audience values and authorial credibility/character.

On the one hand, when an author makes an ethical appeal, they are attempting to  tap into the values or ideologies that the audience holds.  Examples include patriotism, tradition, justice, equality, dignity for all humankind, self-preservation, or other specific social, religious or philosophical values (Christian values, socialism, capitalism, feminism, etc.). These values can sometimes feel very close to emotions, but they are felt on a social level rather than only on a personal level. When an author evokes the values that the audience cares about as a way to justify or support their argument, we classify that as ethos. The audience will feel that the author is making an argument that is “right” (in the sense of moral “right”-ness, i.e.,  My argument rests upon the values that matter to you. Therefore, you should accept my argument ). This first part of the definition of ethos, then, is focused on the audience’s values.

On the other hand, this sense of referencing what is “right” in an ethical appeal connects to the other sense of ethos, the author. Ethos that is centered on the author revolves around two concepts: the credibility of the author and their character.

Credibility  of the speaker/author is determined by their knowledge and expertise in the subject at hand. For example, if you are learning about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, would you rather learn from a professor of physics or a cousin who took two science classes in high school thirty years ago? It is fair to say that, in general, the professor of physics would have more credibility to discuss the topic of physics than your cousin. To establish their credibility, an author may draw attention to who they are or what kinds of experience they have with the topic being discussed as an ethical appeal (i.e.,  Because I have experience with this topic – and I know my stuff! – you should trust what I am saying about this topic ). Some authors do not have to establish their credibility because the audience already knows who they are and that they are credible.

Character is another aspect of ethos that is different from credibility because it involves personal history and sometimes personality traits. A person can be credible but lack character or vice versa. For example, in politics, sometimes the most experienced candidates – those who might be the most credible candidates – fail to win elections because voters do not accept their character. Politicians take pains to shape their character as leaders who have the interests of the voters at heart. The candidate who successfully proves to the voters (the audience) that they have the type of character that they can trust is more likely to win.

Thus, ethos comes down to trust. How can the author get the audience to trust them so that they will accept their argument? How can the author make themselves appear as a credible speaker who embodies the character traits that the audience values?

In building ethical appeals, we may see authors:

• Referring either directly or indirectly to the values that matter to the intended audience (so that the audience will trust the speaker)
• Using language, phrasing, imagery, or other writing styles common to people who hold those values, thereby “talking the talk” of people with those values (again, so that the audience is inclined to trust the speaker)
• Referring to their experience and/or authority with the topic (and therefore demonstrating their credibility)
• Referring to their own character, or making an effort to build their character in the text

When reading, you should always think about the author’s credibility regarding the subject as well as their character. Here is an example of a rhetorical move that connects with ethos: when reading an article about abortion, the author mentions that they have had an abortion. That is an example of an ethical move because the author is creating credibility via anecdotal evidence and first person narrative. In a rhetorical analysis project, it would be up to you, the analyzer, to point out this move and associate it with a rhetorical strategy.

When Writers Misuse Logos, Pathos, or Ethos, Arguments can be Weakened

Above, we defined and described what logos, pathos, and ethos are and why authors may use those strategies. Sometimes, using a combination of appeals leads to a sound, balanced, and persuasive argument. It is important to understand, though, that using rhetorical appeals does not always lead to a sound, balanced argument. In fact, any of the appeals could be misused or overused. When that happens, arguments can be weakened.

Works Cited

Gagich, Melanie and Emilie Zickel. “Rhetorical Appeals: Logos, Pathos, and Ethos Defined.” In  A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing , by Melanie Gagich and Emilie Zickel. Cleveland: MSL Academic Endeavors. Accessed July 2019.   https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/rhetorical-strategies-building-compelling-arguments/   Licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

UNM Core Writing OER Collection Copyright © 2023 by University of New Mexico is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Supplement to 17th and 18th Century Theories of Emotions

Hume on the emotions, 1. introduction, 2. terminology, 3. conclusion to book i of the treatise, 4. the classification of the passions in book ii of the treatise, 5. the double relation of impressions and ideas in the case of pride, 6. sympathy and comparison, 7. “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”, 8. the sentiments and artificial virtues, 9. the general point of view and standards of appropriateness for the sentiments, 10. the judgment of taste, 11. influences on later authors.

David Hume’s (1711–1776) wide-ranging philosophical works discuss the emotions at length, most notably in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), which devotes the second of its three books to the passions, as well as in the Dissertation on the Passions (from Four Dissertations 1757), which covers much the same material. Because of Hume’s sentimentalist bent, his works on moral philosophy are also important for his understanding of the emotions: these include Book III of the Treatise , on the moral sentiments, and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Hume’s essays, published in various editions during his lifetime, also cover diverse topics related to the emotions, such as “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” “Of Love and Marriage,” “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” (1741), and “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). Other texts, such as his autobiographical sketches, and the six volumes of his History of England (1754–62), offer material illustrating Hume’s views on the topic. The Treatise , however, contains ample material to serve as a starting point.

Hume groups the emotions in general among the perceptions of the mind, although they also serve as motivations for acting and even for reasoning. In doing so, he uses an array of terms to describe our affective perceptions, especially the ‘passion,’ ‘sentiment’ and ‘taste’ familiar from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Although he sometimes uses ’emotion’ interchangeably with ’passion’ (see, e.g., T I.3.5 85), he often seems to mean only a mental motion (see, e.g., T I.2.3 36). But if Hume uses old terminology, he introduces several new twists. For one, he borrows the distinction between calm and violent from Hutcheson, but at least initially applies it to distinguish among types of passions (T II.1.1 276). ’Passions’ are impressions of reflection, yet as in Hutcheson, they seem to be relatively low-order perceptions: they are responses to pleasurable or painful perceptions – and sometimes even innate impulses and instincts – not meta-perceptions. However, Hume also talks about ’sentiments’ which seem relatively refined affective responses. The essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” presents a clear contrast between that “higher and more refined taste,” which is also identified with sentiment, and the violent passions that disturb susceptible souls (Hume 1985 6). Sentiment and taste are calm affective states, susceptible to cultivation, subject to standards and capable of reining in the excesses of overly “delicate,” i.e., violent, passions. This usage may explain why, when Hume moves to moral philosophy in Book III of his Treatise , he uses ’sentiment’ almost exclusively for the affective impressions that enable us to make moral distinctions. However Hume does not even acknowledge his change of terminology there, much less explain it. So, whatever distinction he might have intended by the different word choices remains elusive and subject to competing interpretations (see, e.g., Loeb 1977, Fieser 1992, Schmitter 2013b, Watkins 2019, chap. 4).

Hume does not merely discuss the emotions theoretically, he narrates the philosophical experience of them in the “Conclusion to this Book” that closes Book I of the Treatise . This section treats the narrator’s emotional landscape as a response to his skeptical conclusions about reason, sense-perception, and the self. The narrator feels himself “a strange, uncouth monster,” shunned by society and marooned in a skeptical isolation in which even his views about how to limit his beliefs are unstable (T I.4.7 264). Hume treats this unhappy, skeptical view as a kind of illness, which eventually receives a cure from “nature herself.” The first sign of a return to health is “a splenetic humour” that rejects philosophy (T I.4.7 269). But the conclusion resolves with the narrator replacing his despairing skepticism with a cheerful skepticism that is “diffident of [its] philosophical doubts, as well as of [its] philosophical conviction” (T I.4.7 273). This seems a fruitful approach, for the Treatise goes on for two more Books, philosophizing in a “careless,” i.e., carefree, manner (see Baier 1991 1ff.).

The exact source of the “philosophical melancholy and delirium” in Book I, and just how nature comes to the rescue are matters of much debate and a host of creative interpretations (see, e.g., Baier 1991, Garrett 1997, Ainslie 2015, Goldhaber forthcoming). What seems clear is that the cure wrought by nature is a matter of a change of affective state – “the returns of a serious good humour’d disposition” (T I.4.7 270) – rather than the cultivation of any new beliefs or reasoning techniques (although the “title principle” Garret finds in the conclusion might count as a belief that reason should be driven by “natural propensities,” see 1997 232–7). This new mood inclines him again to philosophy, and the Treatise proceeds to topics neglected in the first book, particularly the nature of our passions and sentiments and how they fit us for social life. The motivation throughout is affective: pleasure, an “ambition … of contributing to the instruction of mankind” (T I.4.7 271), and above all, curiosity. Although this curiosity is not exactly the same as Descartes’s and Malebranche’s “wonder,” Hume does declare in the conclusion of Book II that the “first source of all our enquiries” is “curiosity, or that love of truth” (T II.3.10 448, see further Schafer 2014). It drives both philosophy and hunting, of which “there cannot be two passions more nearly resembling each other” (T II.3.10 451), although the passion for gambling comes close. The passion for hunting down truth becomes yet stronger when directed at the objects that intrinsically interest us: human nature, particularly the shared passions and sentiments that motivate us and our interactions with other people – in short, the topics of Books II and III of the Treatise .

The perceptions of the mind divide into two kinds: impressions and ideas (roughly, feeling and thinking): “Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions ; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning …” (T I.1.1 1). Hume proposes a scale of vivacity, in which impressions are vivid, ideas are faint, and beliefs (e.g., in the existence of things we do not presently perceive) are somewhere in the middle. But ideas can borrow vivacity from other sources through the principles of association found in the imagination.

Impressions can also be divided into two kinds: impressions of sense (original) and impressions of reflection (secondary). The impressions of sense include all our sensations, as well as perceptions of pleasure and pain; the impressions of reflection include all our passions and sentiments. In Book I.1.2, Hume says that the impressions of sense arise in the soul “originally, from unknown causes” (T I.1.2 7), whereas secondary impressions “proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of its idea” (T II.1.1 275). Still, Hume considers even secondary impressions to be in some sense “original existences:” they may follow on the heels of a distinct impression (sensory or reflective) or idea, but are not copies of them. On the other hand, impressions can be related associatively through resemblance, and it is the associative constructions they allow that provide structure to our often chaotic thought processes (particularly through “the double relation of impressions and ideas” discussed below).

The passions, then, are impressions of reflection. The Treatise separates this broad categorization into calm and violent passions (although elsewhere Hume sometimes reserves ’passion’ for the violent ones). But this “vulgar and specious division” plays little role in the Treatise , and Hume insists that calm passions are not necessarily weak, nor violent ones strong. More important for Hume’s purposes is the distinction between direct and indirect passions. Direct passions typically arise immediately from “good or evil, from plain or pleasure” (although they also comprise desire-like insincts and appetites); indirect passions require the “conjunction of other qualities,” particularly the interposition of an idea (T II.1.1 276). Curiosity, or love of truth falls among the direct passions, which generally include desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear. Among the “immediate effects of pain and pleasure,” Hume also counts the will, or “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind” (T II.3.1 399). The will is not itself a passion; it is, however, closely connected to the direct passions, since they constitute its “influencing motives” (see T II.3.3 413–4). Among the direct passions that move the will, Hume includes both those arising from pain or pleasure and those coming “from a natural impulse or instinct” that “properly speaking, produce good or evil” (T II.3.9 439; see also Radcliffe 2018, chap.1). In contrast, Hume admits only that the indirect passions can influence the will through their effects on the direct passions. Yet book II begins with the indirect passions of pride and humility, love and hate, which fill two of its three main divisions.

Indirect passions differ from the direct not only in their connection to the will, but also because of their complicated intentionality. Indirect passions have objects that are distinct from their causes, although their respective ideas are associated. The causes can be further subdivided into the quality that excites the passion and the subject in which the quality inheres. In the case of pride, the object is self. The cause is the pleasing quality in a subject that is (somehow) related to self. This forms the framework on which Hume builds the “double relation of ideas and impressions” (T II.1.5 286), in which impressions of sense are related to resembling passions, and ideas of the cause are related through various principles of association to the object of the passion. Although Hume identifies the second impression as the passion proper, understanding its nature and effects requires the whole structure, as we may see in the case of pride. The cause of pride has a quality that gives a pleasurable perception, which is found in a subject, the idea of which is related to the idea of self. Consider, for example, the pleasurable passion of pride Mr. Darcy may take in his beautiful estate:

The same structure can be found in the other indirect passions of humility, love and hate, as Hume shows in “experiments to confirm this system” (T II.2.2 332), in which he varies either the quality of the cause, or the object related to the idea of the subject to produce each different passion in turn. For instance, that which produces pride when connected to self can produce love in another, as when the beautiful estate excites love in Elizabeth for Mr. Darcy:

Similarly, Elizabeth’s dreadful relations may excite humility in Elizabeth and “hate” in Mr. Darcy.

As these examples show, the objects of the indirect passions Hume discusses are persons: either self or other. Our experience of the passions of pride or humility, love or hate directs us towards the relevant person, who appears qualified by the cause of the passion. For this reason, those distinct causes must be closely associated with ideas of self or other. The causes must also be hedonically-qualified, but otherwise can be wildly diverse – property, character traits, virtues, or any other ’eminent’ feature. The passion, however, is structured so that we experience them as belonging to the relevant person for good or ill. The indirect passions thus go far beyond what bare ideas can provide: they give us a robust, value-laden sense for persons as bearers of various salient traits and relations (see further Ainslie 1999).

In this context, it is noteworthy that Hume begins his discussion with pride. Its role for Hume may bear comparison to the importance “glory” held for Hobbes, although they are clearly not the same passion. Almost anything that invokes pleasurable impressions can be the cause of pride, within the limitations that the idea of the subject must allow us to build associative connections directing the mind to the idea of self. The idea of self seems, however, to be intrinsically attention-grabbing, which explains why love for another somehow connected to us readily converts into pride, but not vice-versa (so I may readily feel pride when considering my children’s many accomplishments, but consideration of my own accomplishments does not tend to provoke love for my children). Against the “monkish” preference for humility, Hume emphasizes that virtue itself can be a just cause of pride, one that becomes all the more powerful as our passions reverberate socially through the mechanism Hume calls “sympathy.”

Perhaps the most curious feature of pride is its indispensable relation to the idea of self. The penultimate chapter of Book I of the Treatise (I.4.6) advances a highly skeptical account of the idea of self, maintaining that we have no such simple idea, but at best the idea of an organized bundle: a “kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations,” without even “the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented” (T I.4.6 253). Hume seems to find this a distressing thought, but allows that we “must distinguish betwixt personal identity, as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves” (T I.4.6 253). The introduction of the passion of pride, with its essential focus on self, shortly thereafter may bear this distinction out. Indeed, pride seems both to require reference to an idea of the self, and to buttress whatever meager idea we may already have by directing the mind to an idea of the self outfitted with various pleasurable associations. Hume needs some trick to fortify the idea of the self, because he will rely on our possession of a lively idea of the self, one that will serve as a source of vivacity, for his account of the sympathetic communication of passions.

Sympathy is not itself a passion; it is not the passion of “pity,” nor of “compassion.” Rather, it is a causal mechanism, whereby we come to feel the passions we suppose others feel. In its simplest form, it starts with an observation of the outward signs of a passion in another (e.g., facial expressions, behavior, talk), from which we form an idea of, indeed a belief in, the existence of some passion. Sympathy vivifies that idea into an impression, that is, a passion, by borrowing from the ever-present, and lively sense of self. We do need some sort of associations between the idea of the other and the idea of self for this transfer of vivacity to work. But they are easy to come by: any sort of relation between another person – contiguity, causation, or even simple resemblance – can grease the associative wheels whereby an idea of another’s passion becomes a genuine passion in us.

Hume’s account owes a great deal to Malebranche’s account of the mechanical communication of passions (see Malebranche on the Emotions, sections 8 & 9 ). But Hume does not assume that sympathy produces exactly the same passion in us as we imagine in another, particularly because the transfer may alter the object of the passion. For instance, sympathy can convert the love and admiration others feel for us into pride; indeed, Hume introduces the mechanism of sympathy to explain our “love of fame,” even in cases when we expect no particular advantage from our admirers and take no other interest in their opinions. To be sure, the love of fame still represents a communication of “like to like,” since love and pride are both pleasurable passions. But Hume elaborates on sympathy to show how our affective communications can produce very different kinds of passions (cf., James 2005, Schmitter 2010).

Comparison is a mechanism similar to sympathy, but it produces passions with affective tendencies directly opposed to those we sympathize with in others. It works by invoking another principle, superadded to the operations of sympathy: “ that objects appear greater or less by a comparison with others ” (T II.2.8 375). If, for instance, we come, through sympathy, to feel the unhappy passion of another, we may feel our own (comparatively) happy non-sympathetic passions all the more strongly. The operations of comparison, thus, work to increase the pleasurable (or painful) passions we feel by letting us feel the contrasting painful (or pleasurable) passions of others (but cf. Postema 2005, Schmitter 2010). Hume uses comparison to explain the possibility of envy, and even more, of malice, a sort of “pity reverst,” involving an “unprovok’d desire of producing evil to another” (T II.2.8 377). This differs from hate and other simpler passions, because the desire is unprovoked by any injury or even a desire to obtain some good for ourselves (other than reaping pleasure from the comparison). In this respect, Hume parts company with everyone from Hobbes to Hutcheson, in recognizing the existence of a seemingly disinterested, anti-social emotion. In general, Hume treats comparison as producing socially destructive passions, while sympathy produces sociable ones, but these do not seem to be the inevitable consequences of each mechanism. And Hume does not seem to assume that the production of like from like is the only, or even the primary, way in which the communication of passions promotes social cohesion.

One of the most notorious of Hume’s views about the passions concerns their relation to our practical reason. Hume locates our motivations in the passions. As noted in section 4 , he treats the will in his discussion of the direct passions, identifying it as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind” (T II.3.1 399). If the will did not determine a person’s actions, we would have no way to trace those actions to their springs in character, which is the prerequisite for forming moral judgments.

Hume is particularly concerned with analyzing our practical reasoning, our reasoning about how to act. Passions are the engine for all our deeds: without passions we would lack all motivation, all impulse or drive to act, or even to reason (practically or theoretically). This gives at least one sense in which “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (T II.3.3 415). Hume also holds that the passions are not themselves directly subject to rational evaluation. In fact, it seems something of a category mistake to think that they could be either rational or irrational. Passions are impressions – strong and lively perceptions with a certain “feel” and a direction, or impulse. Reasoning, however, is a matter of connecting various ideas in order to come to a belief; it may apply to, or even form, the circumstances under which passions arise. But reason can generate no impulse by itself.

On these grounds, many have attributed to Hume a belief-desire model of practical reasoning, in which our ends are given by passions (desires). On this view, reason is in the business of producing beliefs, but our beliefs are relevant only to the means by which we seek to obtain those ends: they do not determine the ends themselves. So, reason has only an instrumental use. But whatever its other virtues, this model does little to explain why reason “ought to be” the slave of the passions. It also seems inappropriate to reduce passions to desires: passions have a great deal more structure than their attractive or aversive directions, important though those may be. What seems central to Hume’s view is the inertness of reason, its inability to generate impulses for the mind (see Millgram 1995; for a different view that stresses the inertness of reason and representational states in general, see Radcliffe 2018). It is the inertness of reason that drives Hume to adopt a sentimentalist basis for the origins of our “moral distinctions” (T III.1.2).

When Hume turns to our moral “sense” in Book III of the Treatise , he largely abandons talk of passions in favor of “sentiment.” He still takes it that our sense of the morality of an action or character is motivating; for one, we tend to pursue or avoid actions or persons according to how we have judged them morally. Like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Hume also considers our moral judgments to be directed at persons’ stable qualities, or actions insofar as they express durable motivating dispositions, or character. Moral sentiments underlie moral judgment, by allowing us to make the distinctions expressed in such judgments. And since they are also closely related to motives for action, they play the same roles Hume has marked out for the passions.

However, Hume’s moral psychology also adds important elements to the analysis of the passions we have already seen. Hume divides virtues into the natural and the artificial. Both kinds present puzzles about how they become the objects of sentiments, so that we feel that they demand approval, or even impose an “obligation.” But artificial virtues are particularly tricky cases, since we have no natural motivation to approve them. Artificial virtues, such as justice (which Hume understands as property-justice), or the somewhat simpler example of promise-keeping, are neither uncommon, nor arbitrary, but they do rest on an ’artifice,’ or social convention. Moreover, however useful (or pleasant), the practices informed by those conventions may be in general, particular instances of the behavior they describe may not be. Keeping a promise, say, to respect a deadline, may not promote anyone’s good. The difficulty for Hume is to explain why – despite the artificial foundation of the practice – we nonetheless experience moral sentiments toward the practice, even to the extent of feeling that it imposes an obligation. We might, for instance, feel a pleasant glow of esteem when someone cleaves to a promise at some personal cost. More commonly, we tend to feel a pang of disapproval for instances of promise-breaking or dishonesty; even if circumstances so conspire that they cause no harm, we feel that they violate an obligation.

There are multiple puzzles here: what moves humanity to develop the practices and conventions of property-justice and promise-keeping in the first place; how and why we come to experience moral sentiments surrounding the practices and conventions themselves; and how our behavior and sentiments can be obligated by the practices and conventions independently of the consequences in particular cases, and sometimes even contrary to our own or others’ interests. Hume’s response is likewise multi-faceted. To explain how justice is established, he invokes both our natural ’interests,’ or the passions of avidity and care that he calls ’affections,’ but modified through historical experience and the understanding, as well as by the extension of our affections through sympathy. Against Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Hume denies that we have a “strong regard for the public good” as such (T III.2.6 529). But like them, he also denies that we are wholly selfish. Rather, we have a natural – and thus estimable – partiality for our near relations, feeling greater affection for family than for strangers. As such, our affections are limited in scope, and in the face of some scarcity of external goods, can be as much a source of social conflict as any selfish passion. The solution, Hume declares, is “artifice,” or rather “nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections” (T III.2.2 489). Through time and experience, we establish practices of mutual restraint that become conventions of property – conventions established slowly and without any express “covenanting.” What motivates our behavior in establishing such conventions are precisely the natural passions that generated conflict: interest and “limited generosity,” but mediated by a greater insight into how to obtain our ends jointly with others. A similar development explains the introduction of conventions of promising by avowals or other signs (for further on these and points below, see Santos Castro 2015).

By resorting to the historical development of artifices, Hume can argue that the effects of our practices of justice are in the general public interest without supposing that we are motivated by either general benevolence or mere reason: rather our self-interest and natural affections restrain themselves, as we learn “that the passion is much better satisfy’d by its restraint, than by its liberty” (T III.2.2 492). However, this enlightened interest does not yet explain how we come to see the practices of justice as imposing a moral obligation, much less an exceptionless, context-independent obligation. Hume suggests that the moral sentiments come into play as societies grow to such a size that obeying the dictates of justice no longer seems like an exchange of interested practices with familiar others, and so the benefits they confer are not readily apparent. Instead, we must come to have a sense of obligation to obey whatever justice decrees. Experience has shown that the widespread interests advanced by the artifice of justice will be served only if there are “some general and inflexible principles . . . unchangeable by spite and favor, and by particular views of private or public interest” (T III.2.6 533). The inflexibility and universality of principles of justice seem to be a hallmark of how the artificial virtues impose a sense of obligation directed at condemning breaches, more than praising conformity. Hume’s most telling example, which appears both in the Treatise and the second Enquiry , is the obligation imposed on women to preserve their chastity and modesty. These sexual virtues, Hume explains, are an artifice answering to a supposed social interest in the paternity of children. But the way that these obligations work on the imagination expands “beyond the principle, whence they first arise; and this in all matters of taste and sentiment” (EPM 4.7 207, see also T III.2.12 572, and for a different case T III.2.9 551). The imagination and taste together work to generalize the obligation of chastity so that it applies to all women, independently of its usefulness in the particular case.

The discussion of the general rules surrounding the artificial virtue of justice introduces another kind of generalization, one which applies to all virtues. Justice imposes a general obligation because sympathy gives us a keen sense of how violations of justice might affect those who suffer from them. That uneasiness becomes a genuinely moral qualm when our sympathy is extended through what Hume dubs the “general survey” (T III.2.2 499). Whereas the original motive to justice is interest, it is “a sympathy with public interest [that] is the source of the moral approbation.” Or as Hume puts it later, in discussing the virtue of fidelity to promises, “interest is the first obligation to the performance of promises,” and “afterwards a sentiment of morals concurs with interest, and becomes a new obligation upon mankind.” Sympathy with public interest might sound like the general benevolence Hume rejected in Hutcheson, albeit one that comes a bit late to the story. And indeed, in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , Hume talks about the need for a “sentiment of humanity” whereby we extend our concern beyond narrow interests. But he also describes the importance of this sentiment for our ability to take up a common point of view with others (EPM 9.5–6 SBN 272). That is what the earlier Treatise emphasizes: simply for our moral language to be intelligible to each other requires adopting “some steady and general points of view” (T III.3.1 581–2) that redirect sympathy through general rules to correct for the idiosyncratic partiality of our particular position. We cannot so much as identify instances of justice or injustice until we direct our generous passions beyond their natural bounds, allowing us to approve of the justice or honesty of diverse people in diverse situations, no matter their connection to us. To explain how we can do so, Hume takes sympathy to communicate passions between persons who are not immediately present to each other by making use of experience and counter-factual considerations, according to general rules, so that we can sympathize from a general point of view – or at least imagine what it would be like to do so. And so, the artifice of justice need not harness some general concern we have for everyone; it presupposes only that we can imaginatively put ourselves in the place of someone suffering an injustice so as to sympathize with them.

More generally, it is because they operate from that general point of view that feelings of approbation or uneasiness qualify as distinctively moral sentiments, whatever their origins; putting our affective responses through these mechanisms of generalization gives them their moral flavor. The resulting sentiments may sometimes be too weak to counter our less estimable, but more immediate partial passions. But even if they do not move us to action, such sentiments typically have “sufficient force to influence our taste, and give us the sentiments of approbation or blame” (T III.2.2 499). Additional motives to buttress our moral sentimensts come from both “the public instructions of politicians, and the private education of parents,” which instill “a sense of honour and duty in the strict regulation of our actions with regard to the properties of others” (T III.2.6 534). These various artifices explain how our natural impulses towards self-interest and limited generosity are bent towards the obligations of justice, promise-keeping and the like. But even our native regard for the natural virtues must be steered through a general point of view in order to count as genuinely moral – so that my sentiments appear not merely what I like, but what anyone would (and should) approve.

For this reason, the general point of view figures as a kind of standard for the experience of sentiments. It both extends the scope of the sentiments we feel, and corrects them by providing some sense of what we ought to feel. To be sure, we may continue also to feel many uncorrected passions, whether prejudices or innocuous preferences for what is naturally connected to us. Still, whatever their origins, only feelings of approbation or uneasiness that operate from a general point of view qualify as distinctively moral sentiments. The general point of view is not a standard of rationality; rather, it is a standard of appropriateness. It is that standard that allows us to shape, cultivate and constrain our sentiments in ways that provide the sort of stability and reliability that will form the basis for shared judgment.

It is a matter of controversy, however, whether the general point of view alone provides a genuinely normative standard (see, e.g., Korsgaard 1999; cf. also Sayre-McCord 1994). It is clear that it allows sentiments to be coordinated across a society, so that much of what its members feel will be more or less uniform and generally accessible, without the vicissitudes to which the uncorrected and idiosyncratic passions of individuals in peculiar circumstances are subject. But this may simply mean that the general point of view levels out sentiments to what is socially average and widely accepted. Hume does seem to think that we have a standard more robust than mere social acceptance for our moral sentiments. He also differentiates the general point of view that is a touchstone for moral sentiments from the points of view appropriate to other kinds of sentiments and judgments, such as aesthetic judgments of taste and even seemingly straightforward perceptual judgments about the world we share with others. We correct our sentiments and judgments by appeal to various points of view in those latter cases, which thereby seem to furnish standards with differing kinds of normativity. This may be clearest in Hume’s musings on the standards of taste.

The essay “Of the Standard of Taste” begins by admitting the “ de gustibus ” principle: there is no disputing taste. In many respects, this simply follows from Hume’s sentimentalist approach to aesthetic judgments: like moral judgments, they are based on sense and sentiment, not reason. Nevertheless, we have a real standard for taste, in the taste of a good judge who is in the correct position for judgment. In part, the good judge’s ability seems a matter of adopting a general point of view so that the judge is not so prejudiced by peculiarities of her own position as to be incapacitated for judging as ‘one’ generally does. This requirement may disqualify some candidates on completely circumstantial grounds, even those who might make perfectly good judges under other circumstances. Parents, for instance, rarely make good judges of their own children’s artworks, even when they are professional art critics.

But the good judge must possess specific qualifications, particularly those of practice and experience in judging. Such experience can help judges to filter out peculiarities of their own position, that is, to adopt the general point of view. But it also seems to afford the judge resources that bear on the judging itself. Particularly important to the good judge is “delicacy” in her discernment. Hume provides an example in the story told by Sancho Panza in Don Quixote of the feats of two of his ancestors in wine-tasting. On being presented with what was universally declared a particularly fine “hogshead” of wine, both approved of it, except that one noted a faint touch of leather and the other a tinge of iron. Their judgments were ridiculed until the hogshead was drained and a key on a leathern thong was found at the bottom, “which justified the verdict of Sancho’s kinsmen, and confounded those pretended judges who had condemned them” (Hume 1985 235). The good judge should possess the sort of developed perception that allows her to detect fine differences that may nonetheless be relevant to judgment. This is not sufficient for good judgment, but is required for credibility, and can provide a publicly accessible check.

Hume maintains that “the great resemblance between mental and bodily taste will easily teach us to apply this story” (Hume 1985 235). Presumably, he thinks that sensory qualities such as taste are like moral and aesthetic qualities in that they are secondary, not inherent properties of things, “but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external” (Hume 1985 235). But they do supervene on properties of things, those “qualities in objects,” which are fitted by nature to produce the particular feelings. The good judge, then, like the wine-tasters of the story, may possess a developed ability to detect those formal qualities in art works, or to descry whatever properties of people’s actions might be relevant to the formation of our moral sentiments. The good judge would then be able to justify her judgment by pointing out salient features of what is being judged that others might miss. A good judge will thus be a good critic and teacher of appropriate taste. There is much more to be said about the capabilities of the good judge, particularly about how they are “improved by practice [and] perfected by comparison” (Hume 1985 241). Nonetheless, we can see that the good judge may provide standards that are neither completely independent of the sentiments we are equipped to experience, nor merely hostage to the common run of passions.

Hume’s influence on later authors may be most evident in those features of his approach that differ from previous treatments of the emotions and moral sense. Certainly, his account of how our sentiments can be developed historically and socially was important to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his explanation of the standard in our judgments of taste served as both a model and foil for many later theorists. Adam Smith seems to have taken some of the issues Hume raised about the normative standards for moral judgments particularly seriously in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759). Like Hume, he considers sympathy to provide the engine for such a standard. But on Smith’s view, sympathy operates less to communicate the passions we suppose others actually feel than to allow us to imagine what it would be like to be in their place. Sympathy arises from our view of the situation that excites it, and puts us in the position of a spectator on that situation. There are, in fact, a number of such points of view, but they all seem inherently normative, for what the spectator considers is what one ought to feel in the situation, and one form of moral judgment concerns the appropriateness of an agent’s response to the situation. Because we can also adopt the stance of a spectator on our own sentiments and actions, we have the resources for evaluating our own emotional reactions; Smith criticizes the moral sense theory of Hutcheson for disallowing the importance, and indeed even the possibility of doing so. Smith’s spectator is not exactly the same as Hume’s good judge, especially since the sympathetic spectator occupies a normative position independently of constructing a general point of view. But the highly idealized spectator and the sorts of normative checks that can be provided by adopting somewhat different spectator positions can be seen as a response to and development of Hume’s analyses of the interactions of our sentiments in creating the general point of view and standards for judgment.

Copyright © 2021 by Amy M. Schmitter < amy . schmitter @ ualberta . ca >

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Reason vs. Emotion in Jane Eyre

At many points in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre , readers are made aware of the constant tension between rational thought and emotion that governs Jane’s actions and reactions throughout the novel. For example, in the scene where Mr. Rochester disguises himself as the fortune-teller he professes to know Jane’s character as he suggests: “The forehead declares, ‘Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms’.” (233). In class, we discussed how Bertha Mason may be seen as an alternate form of Jane, a Jane confined in an unequal marriage to Mr. Rochester. I believe that St. John may be considered another alternate form of Jane, a Jane who confines herself solely to the guidance of reason and who shuns emotion. For him, “Reason, and not feeling, is [his] guide” (432). In fact, he suppresses his infatuation with, or rather, his emotional reaction to, Rosamond Oliver in favor of a more rational denunciation of such carnal lust. Later, Jane distinguishes between St. John’s rational, perfunctory love for her and Rochester’s passionate love for her as she claims: “I knew the difference—for I had felt what it was to be loved.” (482). However, Jane soon finds herself on the verge of giving way to reason alone and agreeing to an emotionless marriage with St. John as she reflects: “ but, like [St. John], I had now put love out of the question, and thought only of duty.” (482). Here we find a Jane torn between passionate, earthly, human emotion and the seemingly purer and nobler obligation to missionary work. It is later, in the last three paragraphs of the novel that we learn of St. John’s fate as unmarried and never to be married but to toil dutifully until his death. Just as the fate of Bertha Mason acted as a warning to Jane to avoid confinement, St. John’s staunch and rational adherence to missionary work should act as a warning to Jane who may be tempted to lead a life governed solely by reason.

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Emotion Is Not the Enemy of Reason

This is a post about emotion, so — fair warning — I’m going to begin with an emotional story.

On April 9, 1994, in the middle of the night, 19-year-old Jennifer Collins went into labor. She was in her bedroom in an apartment shared with several roommates. She moved into her bathroom and stayed there until morning. At some point she sat down on the toilet, and at some point, she delivered. Around 9 a.m. she started screaming in pain, waking up her roommates. She asked them for a pair of scissors, which they passed her through a crack in the door. Some minutes later, Collins opened the door and collapsed. The roommates—who had no idea Collins had been pregnant, let alone what happened in that bloody bathroom—called 911. Paramedics came, and after some questioning, Collins told them about the pregnancy. They lifted the toilet lid, expecting to see the tiny remains of a miscarried fetus. Instead they saw a 7-pound baby girl, floating face down.

The State of Tennessee charged Collins with second-degree murder (which means that death was intentional but not premeditated). At trial, the defense claimed that Collins had passed out on the toilet during labor and not realized that the baby had drowned.

The prosecutors wanted to show the jury photos of the victim — bruised and bloody, with part of her umbilical cord still attached — that had been taken at the morgue. With the jury out of the courtroom, the judge heard arguments from both sides about the admissibility of the photos. At issue was number 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence , which says that evidence may be excluded if it is unfairly prejudicial. Unfair prejudice, the rule states, means “an undue tendency to suggest decision on an improper basis, commonly, though not necessarily, an emotional one.” In other words, evidence is not supposed to turn up the jury’s emotional thermostat. The rule takes as a given that emotions interfere with rational decision-making.

This neat-and-tidy distinction between reason and emotion comes up all the time. (I even used it on this blog last week, it in my post about juries and stress .) But it’s a false dichotomy. A large body of research in neuroscience and psychology has shown that emotions are not the enemy of reason, but rather are a crucial part of it. This more nuanced understanding of reason and emotion is underscored in a riveting (no, really) legal study that was published earlier this year in the Arizona State Law Journal .

In the paper, legal scholars Susan Bandes and Jessica Salerno acknowledge that certain emotions — such as anger — can lead to prejudiced decisions and a feeling of certainty about them. But that’s not the case for all emotions. Sadness, for example, has been linked to more careful decision-making and less confidence about them. “The current broad-brush attitude toward emotion ought to shift to a more nuanced set of questions designed to determine which emotions, under which circumstances, enhance legal decision-making,” Bandes and Salerno write.

The idea that emotion impedes logic is pervasive and wrong. (Actually, it’s not even wrong .) Consider neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s famous patient “Elliot,” a businessman who lost part of his brain’s frontal lobe while having surgery to remove a tumor. After the surgery Elliot still had a very high IQ, but he was incapable of making decisions and was totally disengaged with the world. “I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration,” Damasio wrote in Descartes’ Error . Elliot’s brain could no longer connect reason and emotion, leaving his marriage and professional life in ruin.

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Damasio met Elliot in the 1980s. Since then many brain-imaging studies have revealed neural links between emotion and reason. It’s true, as I wrote about last week , that emotions can bias our thinking. What’s not true is that the best thinking comes from a lack of emotion. “Emotion helps us screen, organize and prioritize the information that bombards us,” Bandes and Salerno write. “It influences what information we find salient, relevant, convincing or memorable.”

So does it really make sense, then, to minimize all emotion in the courtroom? The question doesn’t have easy answers.

Consider those gruesome baby photos from the Collins case. Several years ago psychology researchers in Australia set up a mock trial experiment in which study volunteers were jury members. The fictional case was a man on trial for murdering his wife. Some mock jurors heard gruesome verbal descriptions of the murder, while others saw gruesome photographs. Jurors who heard the gruesome descriptions generally came to the same decision about the man’s guilt as those who heard non-greusome descriptions. Not so for the photos. Jurors who saw gruesome pictures were more likely to feel angry toward the accused, more likely to rate the prosecution’s evidence as strong, and more likely to find the man guilty than were jurors who saw neutral photos or no photos.

In that study, photos were emotionally powerful and seemed to bias the jurors’ decisions in a certain direction. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

In a similar experiment, another research group tried to make some mock jurors feel sadness by telling them about trauma experienced by both the victim and the defendant. The jurors who felt sad were more likely than others to accurately spot inconsistencies in witness testimony, suggesting more careful decision-making.

These are just two studies, poking at just a couple of the many, many open questions regarding “emotional” evidence in court, Bandes and Salerno point out. For example, is a color photo more influential than black and white? What’s the difference between seeing one or two gory photos verses a series of many? What about the framing of the image’s content? And what about videos? Do three-dimensional animations of the crime scene (now somewhat common in trials) lead to bias by allowing jurors to picture themselves as the victim? “The legal system too often approaches these questions armed only with instinct and folk knowledge,” Bandes and Salerno write. What we need is more data.

In the meantime, though, let’s all ditch that vague notion that “emotion” is the enemy of reason. And let’s also remember that the level of emotion needed in a courtroom often depends on the legal question at hand. In death penalty cases, for example, juries often must decide whether a crime was “heinous” enough to warrant punishment by death. Heinous is a somewhat subjective term, and one that arguably could be — must be? — informed by feeling emotions.

Returning to the Collins case, at first the trial judge didn’t think the gruesome baby photos would add much to what the jury had heard in verbal testimony. There was no question that Collins had had a baby, that she knew it, and that the baby had died of drowning. The judge asked the medical examiner whether he thought the photos would add anything to his testimony. He replied that the only extra thing the pictures would depict was what the baby looked like, including her size. The judge decided that was an important addition: “I don’t have any concept what seven pounds and six ounces is as opposed to eight pounds and three ounces, I can’t picture that in my mind,” he said, “but when I look at these photographs and I see this is a seven pound, six ounce baby, I can tell more what a seven pound, six ounce baby … is.”

So the jury saw two of the autopsy photos, and ultimately found Collins guilty of murder. Several years later, however, an appeals court reversed her conviction because of the prejudicial autopsy photos.

“Murder is an absolutely reprehensible crime,” reads the opinion of the appeals court. “Yet our criminal justice system is designed to establish a forum for unimpaired reason, not emotional reaction. Evidence which only appeals to sympathies, conveys a sense of horror, or engenders an instinct to punish should be excluded.”

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Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory Kindle Edition

This book brings together twenty-three distinctive and influential essays on ancient moral philosophy--including several published here for the first time--by the distinguished philosopher and classical scholar John Cooper. The volume gives a systematic account of many of the most important issues and texts in ancient moral psychology and ethical theory, providing a unified and illuminating way of reflecting on the fields as they developed from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle to Epicurus and the Stoic philosophers Chrysippus and Posidonius, and beyond. For the ancient philosophers, Cooper shows here, morality was "good character" and what that entailed: good judgment, sensitivity, openness, reflectiveness, and a secure and correct sense of who one was and how one stood in relation to others and the surrounding world. Ethical theory was about the best way to be rather than any principles for what to do in particular circumstances or in relation to recurrent temptations. Moral psychology was the study of the psychological conditions required for good character--the sorts of desires, the attitudes to self and others, the states of mind and feeling, the kinds of knowledge and insight. Together these papers illustrate brilliantly how, by studying the arguments of the Greek philosophers in their diverse theories about the best human life and its psychological underpinnings, we can expand our own moral understanding and imagination and enrich our own moral thought. The collection will be crucial reading for anyone interested in classical philosophy and what it can contribute to reflection on contemporary questions about ethics and human life.

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"This collection is the fruit of a lifetime's study of the great tradition of Greek moral philosophy.... [Cooper's] range is deeply impressive. So is the tenacity with which he wrestles a clear meaning from recalcitrant texts. So too is the philosophical rigour with which he sharpens up the issues and makes the reader face questions that modern philosophers have forgotten or neglected. This is philosophical scholarship at its best." --M. F. Burnyeat, All Souls College, University of Oxford

"This volume brings together essays on Greek ethics and moral psychology by one of the most influential scholars in the field.[I]t will be fascinating and instructive for scholars and students alike to follow John Cooper in his explorations of some of the most important questions of ancient and modern ethics." --Gisela Striker, University of Cambridge

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"This collection is the fruit of a lifetime's study of the great tradition of Greek moral philosophy.... [Cooper's] range is deeply impressive. So is the tenacity with which he wrestles a clear meaning from recalcitrant texts. So too is the philosophical rigour with which he sharpens up the issues and makes the reader face questions that modern philosophers have forgotten or neglected. This is philosophical scholarship at its best."-- M. F. Burnyeat, All Souls College, University of Oxford

"This volume brings together essays on Greek ethics and moral psychology by one of the most influential scholars in the field.[I]t will be fascinating and instructive for scholars and students alike to follow John Cooper in his explorations of some of the most important questions of ancient and modern ethics."-- Gisela Striker, University of Cambridge

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Article Contents

1. introduction, 2. conceptualising emotions, 3. classification, 4. emotion-based communication, 5. discussion, conflict of interest statement, emotions: functions and significance for attitudes, behaviour, and communication.

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James Dennison, Emotions: functions and significance for attitudes, behaviour, and communication, Migration Studies , Volume 12, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnad018

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Emotions are regularly cited as vital components of effective strategic communication. However, there is relatively little guidance about how emotions should be used. Eliciting emotions is key to persuasion because attitudes have a cognitive and emotive component, with predictable physiological outcomes that make messages more resonant and impactful on behaviour, supporting policy objectives. This article shows that communicators—in the field of migration and beyond—should choose their campaign’s emotional frame according to their desired physiological and behavioural reaction. This article applies the emotion schema of Plutchik to offer 32 separate emotions and their theorised physiological reactions, examples of stimuli, and behavioural societal effects. Furthermore, emotional outcomes can be altered via narratives, frames, personal-based messages, facial expressions and body language, aesthetics, ordering (‘emotional flow’), intensities, and combinations. Finally, the limits of emotion-based communication—not least the ‘appeal to emotion’ logical fallacy—and how to overcome those limits—grounding emotion-based communication in facts, values, identities, and efficacy—are considered. Emotion-based communication in the field of migration, although widely used, is largely untested so communicators should test different approaches but also can take lessons from fields such as corporate, health, and climate change communication.

What makes communication effective? What about regarding contentious public policy issues such as migration? How can we use communication to meet policy objectives such as safe, orderly, and regular migration ( United Nations 2018 ), or ‘de-polarised’ debates ( OSCE 2021 ), or ‘re-balanced’ narratives ( ICMPD 2020 )? Moreover, how can communication help governments uphold liberal democratic legal- and rights-based policy frameworks against forces that would undermine them? How can communication contribute to maximising the potential benefits and minimising the potential costs of migration to origin and host country populations and migrants themselves? Strategic communication can have multiple functions: to inform, to persuade, and to motivate behaviour. However, perhaps the most common advice given on all three types of communication—in migration and otherwise—is the deceptively complex instruction to ‘use emotions, not facts’.

In the world of migration communication specifically, Sharif (2019 : 5) suggests that ‘to win the debate’ one must ‘apply value-based and emotive approaches’ in addition to factual evidence, because ‘emotions play a bigger role than facts in attitudes to migration’. Similarly, Welcoming America (2018 : 7) advises migration communicators to appeal to emotion and states simply that ‘Emotion > Logic’. They argue that ‘Logic supports our emotions and is used to justify our decisions, but research indicates we usually apply logic only after we’ve made our emotional decisions. Logic plays a part in decision making, but emotion is always the main ingredient. Emotions will get people passionate about your cause. Appeal to your audience’s emotions first and you’ll win them over’ ( Welcoming America 2018 ). They further argue that ‘No press release, newsletter, petition, or anything else should go out without the personal and emotional touch a story generates’ ( Welcoming America 2018 : 16). The European Union’s (EU) own Fundamental Rights agency argues for the use of ‘real-life examples to trigger emotions’ since ‘triggering emotions can have a lasting impact’ ( European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) 2022 : 15). Finally, a recent article for the European Parliament’s INGE committee argues that the power of online misinformation, particularly that directed at minorities, lay in its emotional appeal, both directly and via the prominence given to such messaging on social media newsfeed algorithms, concluding that ‘it is not effective to respond to disinformation with facts because people engage with the issues on an emotional level’ ( Szakács and Bognár 2021 : 27).

Belief in the persuasive role of emotion-based communication is not limited to public policy. Forbes Magazine recently described emotion as ‘the super weapon of marketing and advertising’ ( Saitarli 2019 ), echoing training and advice given across the corporate world. One study showed that the emotional response elicited by a television advertisement has three times greater impact on the consumer’s decision of whether to buy or not to buy a product than the actual content of the advertisement ( Murray 2013 ). Overall, it seems to be accepted wisdom that ‘using emotions’ is a highly impactful and perhaps even necessary way to communicate across various domains. Despite this, few of the above sources go into detail on several logically ensuing questions: Why are emotions so effective for persuasion? How should they be used to persuade? Which emotions should be used and under what circumstances? And which for migration communication in particular? To what extent and how are emotions currently being used in migration communication? Finally, what recommendations can be made to communicators about the use of emotions ?

Answering these questions is substantively important because the use of emotions is so regularly argued to be a vital tool in communicating and, thus, meeting policy objectives such as those listed above. It is also scientifically interesting because understanding how and why emotion-based communication affects attitudes and behaviours will offer support for more broadly applicable theories that seek to explain why humans think and act as they do in general. Because emotion-based communication in the field of migration has received very little academic study, this article takes an analytical approach based on first principles to answer what such communication is or could be and how it could be applied to migration most effectively based on the theoretical considerations and lessons from other policy areas. As such, it proceeds accordingly. Section 2 overviews how emotions have been conceptualised both in terms of their definitions, classifications, functions, and determinants. Section 3 asks how emotions have been used in communication and what lessons have been learned about what constitutes good emotion-based communication. Section 4 summarises previous findings to offer recommendations for practitioners and a framework of emotion-based migration communication. Finally, Section 5 overviews findings, shortcomings, and next steps for research.

Despite or perhaps because of their absolute centrality to human experience, emotions are notable for their lack of commonly accepted definition ( Barrett, Lewis and Haviland-Jones 2016 ). Broadly and simply, emotions can be thought of as mental states that our bodies use to govern behavioural reactions to stimuli via both immediate physiology and conscious cognition. These mental states are common across humanity though what stimuli induce them may vary from individual to individual. They have partially involuntary physiological components, such as facial expressions, changes in heart rate, and muscular tension that are fairly commonly shared by all humans ( Scherer 2005 ; Barrett and Russell 2015 ). Each emotion in the short term may be pleasurable or unpleasurable—albeit with significant qualitative differences within those two types—and thus give us the immediate motivation to both understand why we feel a certain way and to change our behaviours to achieve or avoid such feelings in the future. As such, emotions allow us to better understand ourselves within the world around us and—as evidenced by the inter-recognisability of facial expressions—our social world and each other.

Some definitions ( American Psychological Association 2022 ) differentiate emotions, as mental states, from feelings (such as pain) that are argued to result from certain emotions, as well as from moods, which are argued to be of lower intensity and more often lack obvious stimuli or starting points, instead being somewhat cyclical. Others, however, define emotions as feelings. Furthermore, some theories see emotion as fundamentally linked with cognition, whereas others see emotion as causing cognition. The extent to which one can: recognise their own and others’ emotions; evaluate their emotions’ sources and meanings; link them to previous experiences; and control and influence them in oneself and others has together been theorised to represent ‘emotional intelligence’ ( Salovey and Mayer 1990 ). A further concept of ‘emotional stability’—long recognised in common parlance as ‘even-temperedness’—reflects the extent to which one’s mental state cannot easily be moved by external stimuli, with very low levels of emotional stability known as neuroticism ( Ellis, Hoskin and Ratnasingam 2018 ).

Much like values ( Dennison 2020a ), academics have sought to understand emotions by classifying, categorising, and relating them to each other to predict what causes distinct emotions and, in turn, what are their effects. If a discrete set of emotions relate to each other in predictable ways across broader dimensions, then they can be arranged along a visual schema that represents each emotion’s relationship to the others in terms of dimensions such as intensity (high or low), arousal (active or passive), affect (positive or negative), or motivation (approach or avoid), with some emotions constituting basic or primary emotions and more complex ones being secondary and formed by combinations of the primary ones.

Interestingly, the distinct schema of emotions, arrived at using diverse methods, draws similar conclusions about what constitutes ‘basic human emotions’. Such theories include Ekman’s (1972) ‘Neuro-cultural theory of emotions’ 1 derived from studies of adult facial expressions; Izard’s (1977) ‘Differential Emotions Theory’ from adult and infant behaviours; Pankseep’s (1988) ‘Affective Neuroscientific’ approaches from animal behavioural responses to direct brain stimulation, and Shaver et al.’s (1987) ‘Prototype approach’ (see also Gu et al.’s more recent and constrained, 2019, Three Primary Color Model of Basic Emotions ).

For example, we can see in Fig. 1 Plutchik’s (1980) ‘wheel of emotions’, as derived from his ‘General Psychoevolutionary Theory of Basic Emotions’, that a discrete number of emotions are arranged according to their intensity (by their verticality in the cone) and their similarity to each other (by their position in the circle) and the basic emotion from which they derive (by their colour with the primary emotion in the middle) giving eight basic emotions with four pairs of opposites. We also see primary ‘dyads’ between each of the eight sectors—these are theorised to be combinations of two primary emotions. As such, for example, disapproval is a combination of—at its most intense—grief and amazement.

In Fig. 2 , we again see these primary dyads in addition to secondary and tertiary dyads formed by primary emotions that are two sectors apart (so that ‘hope’ is a combination of ‘anticipation’ and ‘trust’) or three sectors apart (so that ‘outrage’ is a combination of ‘anger’ and ‘surprise’), respectively.

Plutchik’s ‘Wheel of emotions’.

‘Dyad’ emotions.

Moreover, just as each of the eight primary emotions above have their opposites, so too do the physiological reactions to each of the emotional states, as shown in Table 1 . The physiological reality and behavioural importance of emotions are highlighted by studies that show how differing emotional states are felt in differing places in the body, making them recognisable and encouraging certain behavioural reactions ( Doucleff 2013 ).

Eight opposing primary emotions and their respective physiological reactions

3.1 Functions and determinants

Emotions offer humans a rich source of information to better understand the relationship between themselves and their world. In doing so, they play a key adaptive role in helping us survive issues posed by our natural and social environments. This means, however, that we are left partially subject to our emotions. Whereas happiness rewards us, sadness punishes us, and fear and anger elicit stress ( Gu et al. 2019 ). More complex governing abilities of emotions include the discomfort we feel when undergoing cognitive dissonance—when we come to believe two contrary things—forcing us to reconcile our attitudes, beliefs and so on, often in a painful process of ‘facing up to the facts’; however, our emotions will not let us rest until we do ( Harmon-Jones 2000 ). In fact, this discomfort has been argued to be one of the major sources of persuasion and attitudinal change—our emotional system forcing us to realise that our old beliefs were wrong so that we better survive and thrive in an ever-changing world. The rich variety of emotions we feel guides our attention and gives us qualitative information ( Glore and Gasper 2000 ); the more emotionally intelligent we are, the better we can interpret and manage such information. Repeated emotional experiences can crystalise into longer term sentiments and attitudes ( Frijda and Mesquita 2000 ) and even personalities so that understanding one’s emotions is a key part of individualisation and mental health ( Izard 2013 ). Indeed, Damasio (1994) showed that individuals who had suffered brain damage that disconnected the cognitive and emotional parts of the brain were no longer able to make decisions, despite being able to rationally process information, since they could not identify how they felt about each option.

Many social psychologists ( Zajonc 1980 ) have argued that attitudes to social and political issues result from emotional processes to a greater extent than cognitive processes, so that when in conflict, attitudes reflect emotion over evaluation ( Lavine et al. 1998 ) albeit to varying extents depending on the individual ( Haddock and Zanna 1999 ) and the type of attitude ( Kempf 1999 ). Indeed, attitudes have been argued to include a cognitive component (beliefs), an affective component (feelings), and a behavioural component (intentions) ( Breckler 1984 ), meaning that attitudes entirely free of cognition may be possible. The emotive approach (see Brader and Marcus 2013 ) is also supported by evidence on the effect of motivated reasoning and biases ( Ajzen 2001 ), so that, for example, Burdein, Lodge and Taber (2006) find evidence of motivated scepticism of dissonant information. Despite all this, Gilens (2001) shows that facts do matter, having a large effect on stated policy preferences.

The determinant of which emotion one feels is a complex combination of one’s current circumstances and feelings, the nature of the stimuli, and one’s deep-seated values, narratives, worldview, and ‘self’ ( Dennison 2020a ). However, we do know that an individual’s emotions can be changed via contagion ( Hatfield et al. 1993 ); explanation of the causes and implications of stimuli ( Ross 1977 ) particularly as it relates to personal need-fulfilment ( Izard 2013 ); self-management, often dictated by social norms ( Hochschild 1979 ); and narratives and sense-making ( Weick et al. 2005 ) and beyond. Moreover, the determinants of emotions depend greatly on the theoretical approaches one takes regarding whether cognition precedes emotion or vice versa, or whether both are functions of some broader self-concept ( Izard 2013 : 30–39).

Overall, we know that the emotional system is a fundamental component of how we gain, make sense of, and retain information about our world ( Bless et al., 1996 ; Rieger et al. 2022 ) and acts as a vital source of information affecting our judgements and choices ( Bower 1981 ) so much so that when emotions and cognition clash, it is often emotions that prevail ( Loewenstein, et al. 2001 ).

How are emotions used in communication and what is effective emotion-based communication? How does this differ from the appeal to emotion logical fallacy? Empirical studies have shown that communicators that use emotions are more likely to motivate audiences and persuade them ( Salama and Aboukoura 2018 ). Researchers have also sought to measure and test how commercial advertisements evoke emotion ( Allen, Machleit and Marine 1988 ) building on the classifications outlined above. Hasford, Hardesty and Kidwell (2015) show how consumers use emotions as information to help make purchasing decisions and may also spill over to other decisions. Emotions are particularly vital to persuasive strategic communication because activating them has been shown to over-ride identity-based concerns, lead to deeper consideration of information, and lead people to engage in personal rather than political or ideological reasoning ( Schwarz 2010 ; Bolsen, Palm and Kingsland 2019 ; Feldman and Hart 2018 ).

Probably, the most tested form of strategic emotion-based public policy communication is climate change communication, which is considerably more developed and its effects more verified than the understudied emotion-based migration communication. It has been described as a ‘ booming industry alongside more established “communication enterprises”, such as health communication, risk communication, and science communication’ ( Nerlich, Koteyko and Brown 2010 : 97). Climate change communication is akin to migration policy communication in that both are concerned with a single issue that is relatively novel and which information, persuasion, and behavioural motivation are all likely to be relevant. However, the former has seen so much study that academics have been left asking ‘what more is there to say?’ ( Ballantyne 2016 ; Moser 2016 : 345; Chapman, Lickel and Markowitz 2017 ).

Smith and Leiserowitz (2014) show that people’s emotions when prompted to think about climate change (e.g. hope, worry, interest) explain half of the variance in support for climate policies—more even than socio-demographics (see also Ojala (2012) , on hope and engagement; and Meijnders, Midden and Wilke (2001) , on fear and consideration of solutions). Indeed, Wong-Parodi and Feygina (2021) found that strong negative emotional reactions to learning about climate impacts—via emotive stories about arctic warming and polar animals—made conservative respondents as accepting of climate change and willing to engage in climate action as liberals. Furthermore, Arikan, Melek and Gunay (2022) show that presenting climate change-related threats as diffuse and uncertain elicits greater levels of anxiety, while stories that provide a specific target to blame induce anger, and those that underlined the potential of technology and efficacy of human efforts to solve climate change-related issues elicit greater levels of hope. However, on the topic of climate change research, van der Linden et al. (2017) argue that ‘culture [including emotion] versus cognition is a false dilemma’ and that the two must be used together.

One of the most used emotions in communication is fear, usually elicited via the presentation of threats, which indeed has been shown to have strong persuasive effects ( Tannenbaum et al. 2015 , for review), though can have unintended effects including reactions against the message, the source, and the scale of the problem. Because of these adverse (‘boomerang’) reactions to fear-based campaigns, researchers have experimented with efficacy-only, hope-centred campaigns that focus on individual or collective potential to solve problems ( Roser-Renouf et al. 2014 ). Regarding climate change, these have, however, been shown to be more effective on liberals or moderates than conservatives ( Chadwick 2015 ; Feldman and Hart 2016 ), highlighting that though hope may be useful in encouraging action amongst those already in agreement, it may be less useful in changing minds. Though Feldman and Hart (2018) show that news and text images that elicited fear increased support for climate change policies, especially amongst conservatives.

Beyond climate change communication, the notion that fear-based messages lead to avoidance, denial, and helplessness rather than positive action is supported by findings from the health communication literature which show that provoking fear without offering solutions produces maladaptive coping mechanisms ( Brosch 2021 ) shown to be comparable to populist political attitudes, threats posed by global transformations, and global governance solutions ( Dennison and Turnbull-Dugarte 2022 ). On the other hand, offering overly hopeful messages has been argued to lead to complacency ( Brosch 2021 ). Messages offering positive stories still must emphasise goal-congruence (and so also value-congruence), importance, and feasibility. In response to this, Nabi, Gustafson and Jensen (2018) and Nabi (2015) show that the use of ‘emotional flow’ whereby a fear-based message is used to change minds, which is immediately followed by a hope-based message to encourage action, is more powerful than just one of the emotions for topics as diverse as climate change and the use of sunscreen to avoid skin cancer ( Nabi and Myrick 2019 ).

Furthermore, negative and positive emotional communication has been linked with loss- and gain-based frames, respectively: for example, ‘Stopping immigration threatens our prosperity’ versus ‘Immigration upholds our prosperity’, with gain-based frames having been argued to be more effective ( Davis 1995 ; de Vries, Terwel and Ellemers 2016 ). Loss-based frames have been argued to have the disadvantage of being more likely to have reactive, ‘boomerang’ effects ( Cho and Sands 2011 ; Quick et al. 2015 ) and be more likely to contradict deeply held world beliefs and values ( Feinberg and Willer 2011 ). Moreover, rather than there being right or wrong frames, emotions mediate the relationship between frames and attitudinal or behavioural effects in controversial social issues ( Lecheler, Schuck and de Vreese 2013 ; Lecheler, Bos and Vliegenthart 2015 ; Kühne and Schemer 2015 ).

The narrative has been shown to be a vital component of eliciting emotion ( Damasio 1994 ; Cooper and Nisbet 2016 ) by moving away from abstract concepts to immediate, personal effects and so removing ‘psychological distance’ and heightening character identification and ‘transportation’ while reducing counterarguing in abstract terms ( van Laer et al., 2014 ; van der Linden, Maibach and Leiserowitz 2015 ; Dennison, 2021 ). Storytelling done by down-to-earth and relatable characters have been shown to be especially effective ( Baldwin and Lammers 2016 ). When Gustafson et al. (2020) compared the effects of a North Carolina sportsman’s personal account of how climate change has already affected the places he loves, it was shown to affect the climate change beliefs and risk perceptions of political moderates and conservatives, with the effect resulting from feelings of worry and compassion.

Several studies show that emotions mediate the effects of media frames on immigration attitudes ( Brader, Valentino and Suhay 2008 ; Esses, Medianu and Lawson 2013 ; Lecheler, Bos and Vliegenthart 2015 ; Matthes and Schmuck 2017 ) via enthusiasm positively and anger negatively in the case of Lecheler, Bos and Vliegenthart (2015) . Theorin (2021) randomly exposed individuals in six EU countries to one of the four fictional articles focusing on: a single citizen’s negative experiences of immigration; a single citizen’s positive experiences of immigration; official information from a researcher about the negative implications of immigration for society as a whole; or official information from a researcher about positive implications of immigration for society as a whole. The emotional and positive frames were shown to be the most impactful.

Conversely, Theorin et al. (2021) expose participants to a variety of fictional tweets—some with a negative message on immigration, some with a positive one, and some in ‘episodic’ (or narrative) format and some in thematic (or informative) format—showing that none of the four types has a statistically significant effect on attitudes to free movement. Chkhaidze, Buyruk and Boroditsky (2021) exposed participants to one of the four versions of a passage about an increase in immigrants in one town. Each version included all identical facts and figures and differed in only a single word at the beginning of the passage, describing the increase in immigrant labour as either an ‘increase’, a ‘boost’, an ‘invasion’, or a ‘flood’. This change had a large effect on participants’ attitudes to the increase in immigration and the predictions about its effects on the economy (see also Dennison 2022a ).

Finally, whereas emotion-based communication can be thought of as a tactic to make a logical argument more resonant by showing its importance and relevance, it should not be confused with the appeal to emotion fallacy—arguing that something is true because of its emotional content. This highlights the limits of the idea that communicators should use ‘emotions, not facts’ and instead should use both.

The above conceptual and theoretical considerations regarding the nature of emotions and findings from studies of communication in other fields lead directly to several practical recommendations:

Use emotions in communication to make one’s messages more resonant and impactful on both attitudes and behaviours, supporting broader policy objectives via persuasion.

Choose the desired emotional reaction according to the desired physiological and behavioural reaction using existing psychological schema, one of which this article analyses with 32 separate emotions and physiological reactions.

Narratives, personal-based messages, and aesthetics can all be used to create emotional resonance and reduce psychological distance.

Different frames have different emotional reactions: for example diffuse versus specific; gain-based versus loss-based; threat versus no-threat; the need for action versus the need for no action.

Emotion-based messaging using negative emotions (doom, fear, pity, sadness, shame, guilt, anger) should be combined with solutions to avoid reactive, maladaptive, or ‘boomerang’ effects.

The impact of emotions can be further enhanced (or diminished) by the order in which different emotions are evoked: this is known as ‘emotional flow’.

The intensity of emotions can also matter: for example, intense surprise is amazement, whereas low-intensity surprise is distraction.

Avoid thinking in terms of false dichotomies such as ‘culture versus cognition’—the two must be used in unison. Use emotions as a tactic to enhance one’s message, which should be simultaneously based on facts, values, identities, and efficacy.

Do not confuse emotion-based communication—a tactic to make a logical argument more resonant by showing its importance and relevance—with the appeal-to-emotion logical fallacy, which argues that something is true because of its emotional basis.

Emotion-based communication in the field of migration remains relatively novel and untested—communicators can take lessons from other fields such as corporate communications, health communications, and climate change communication.

Given the relative scarcity of migration-related studies of emotion-based communication, and the relatively limited number of emotions studied in general, as well as the lack of a general theory of how emotions link to physiological reactions, it is worth expanding on the logic of Plutchik’s eight basic emotions and their physiological reactions to each of the 24 ‘emotional dyads’. In Table 2 , we see these combinations with examples of resultant behaviours that are likely to result from each physiological reaction and are likely to form part of migration policy objectives.

Thirty-two emotions and the physiological and behavioural reactions caused by evoking them

Table 2 therefore acts as a guide of which emotions to use when aiming for distinct behavioural outcomes. For example, because it leads individuals to embrace, support, celebrate, and accept, the emotion of trust is likely to most strongly enhance persuasive campaigns to seek to increase support for groups or individuals. Similarly, if we wish to motivate participation, then joy is likely to be an effective emotion, because it leads to connection, while anticipation, which triggers examination, is likely to best support efforts to raise awareness. More complex objectives include a combination of these. Both more and less intense versions of these feelings can be found in Table 1 .

Moreover, migration communication campaigns—the broad umbrella of communication that contributes to migration management and realities at all stages—will have varied objectives that determine the correct emotion to use based on the desired physiological reaction. At least three considerations are of note: (1) the migration domain; (2) stakeholders; and (3) the use of emotions by migrants themselves. Although migration is best viewed as a single phenomenon, rather than the false dichotomy of immigration and emigration ( Sjaastad 1962 ; Leloup 1996 ), it is inevitably viewed from multiple perspectives in each domain (e.g. asylum and labour migration). Given the universal nature of emotions, evoking each emotion should have a predictable physiological reaction, but how that emotion is evoked will be greatly different and how emotion, cognition, and physiology relate to behaviours requires, above all, careful theorising that will vary by domain. Similarly, stakeholders will vary according to their objectives and their reasons for evoking emotions, for example, humanitarian communication ( Ongenaert and Joye 2019 ) and migration deterrence campaigns are highly varied ( Musarò 2019 : 629; Cappi and Musarò 2022 ) with stated aims not necessarily in alignment with actual aims ( Oeppen 2016 ). Indeed, a recent blossoming of critical and media studies of migration communication campaigns focus on their motivations and aesthetic contents, including in terms of emotions ( Bishop 2020 ; Williams 2020 ; van Dessel 2023 ; Williams and Coddington 2023 ) but lack robust testing of their claims. While experiments on the impact of migration communication campaigns tend to be more robust in their measurement of the impact of such campaigns on migrant self-reported propensities, perceptions, and knowledge ( Molenaar and Jucker 2021 ; Pagogna and Sakdapolrak 2021 ; Tjaden and Dunsch, 2021 ; Dennison 2022b ; Tjaden and Gninafon, 2022 ) but pay little attention to the actual content, including emotional, of such campaigns undermining theoretical generalisability. Finally, scholars utilising both approaches have largely overlooked the migration communication campaigns that focus on reducing xenophobia, negative attitudes, and misperceptions amongst host populations, despite such campaigns often being produced by the same international and national organisations, often as part of the same programmes, and possibly being more numerous, and the use of emotions therein. Finally, a further form of migration communication is that done by migrants themselves, including as storytellers ( Bishop 2022 ), for which the function of communication may exist beyond the purely strategic ‘inform’, ‘persuade’, and ‘motivate’ triad ( Rice and Atkin, 2000 ).

Emotions are regularly cited as vital components of effective strategic communication. However, until this article, there was relatively little guidance about how emotions should be used in communication. Emotions are vital to persuasion because attitudes have a cognitive (thinking) component and an emotional (feeling) component. Moreover, eliciting emotions causes involuntary but predictable physiological and behavioural reactions.

This article showed how emotions can be used in communication to make one’s messages more resonant and impactful on both attitudes and behaviours, supporting policy objectives via persuasion. Communicators should choose the desired emotional reaction according to the desired physiological and behavioural reaction using existing psychological schema, one of which this article analyses with 32 separate emotions and physiological reactions. Eliciting unsuitable emotions may have adverse reactions from audiences. Communicators can use this article’s recommendation and framework to ensure that the emotions, and physiological and desired behaviours of their campaigns are aligned and thus effective.

Narratives, personal-based messages, facial expressions and body language, and aesthetics can be used to create emotional resonance and reduce psychological distance. Frames, ordering (‘emotional flow’), intensities, and combinations of certain combinations can also be used to elicit different emotions with predictable outcomes. Emotions should be used to make one’s argument more resonant but the argument should not be simply based on the emotional reaction—the ‘appeal to emotion’ logical fallacy. Indeed, for emotion-based communication to work, it should also use facts, values, identities, and efficacy. However, emotion-based communication in the field of migration, although widely advocated, is still largely untested—communicators should test and use impact assessments and evaluation for different approaches ( Dennison 2020b ) including by domain, stakeholder, and that of migrants themselves, but also can take lessons from other fields such as corporate, health, and climate change communications.

Given the strong indication from the literature that attitudes are emotionally based—and thus qualitatively nuanced far beyond a single spectrum of affect—researchers should consider, first, how to describe such ‘emotion-attitudes’ to various objects of interest. This would see attitudes to policies, issues, groups, and actors measured in nuanced ways far beyond ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ but the extent to which a range of emotions are associated with the object. Secondly, how can such ‘emotion-attitudes’ be used to improve our explanatory capacity regarding a range of human thoughts and behaviours? In the world of immigration, how can, for example, our policy preferences or migration intentions be better explained by these more nuanced ‘emotion-attitude’ components of affect? This may reflect and predict individuals being capable of having multiple nuanced and varied beliefs and perceptions about an object. Finally, following the description and explanation, and building on the recommendations above, research should consider which interventions may affect such ‘emotion-attitudes’ and, conversely, test emotion-based communication using experimental designs.

Leading to the online ‘Atlas of Emotions’ promoted by the Dalai Lama: http://atlasofemotions.org/

None declared.

This work was supported by the EUROMED Migration V Programme, funded by the European Union (EU) and implemented by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) and the Leverhulme Trust [grant number ECF-2021–342].

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TOK Essay: Reason and Emotion

Theory of Knowledge External Assessment

Question # 2: Are reason and emotion equally necessary in justifying moral decisions?

Name: Shay Sidelnik

Word Count: 1521

Date: November 8 th , 2007

        Although reason and emotions can be perceived as completely opposite human traits, they are in fact very closely related. These two traits influence each other, and in one way or another help shape each other. Reason is often related to the brain while emotions are related more to the heart. Reason comes from the logical part of the human, reasonable things are things that makes sense in an individual's mind, things that are logical. Emotions on the other hand, tend to be much less logical; they are inner feelings which in many cases are very unreasonable, and inexplicable. Yet, it is common that the emotions of a person influence that person's reason. Both reason and emotion are necessary in justifying moral decisions. Moral decisions are simple decisions where each individual makes the distinction between what is right and what is wrong. Since emotions are very often unreasonable the ideal would be that people justify their moral decisions by reason and reason alone. The reality is however that emotions play such a key role in human lives that they cannot be ignored, and for that reason both reason and emotion are, maybe not equally but still are nece00ssary in justifying a moral decision. What it comes down to in the end is the individual person that makes the moral decision. Some people are more reason oriented people and are very good at ignoring their emotions and listen to plain reason, while others are more emotional people and would believe that emotions are much more necessary in justifying moral decisions. Since no one can absolutely ignore one of this traits, they are both necessary in making moral decisions, and the amount of their necessity depends on the individual who is making the moral decision.

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        In an ideal world moral decisions would be justified through reason and reason alone. This has to do with the subjectivity of emotions. Emotions are one of the most unreasonable and subjective human traits. For that reason in the idle world they would not be necessary in justifying moral decisions. A common view that praises reason is the view that the ends justify the means. This view is the basic idea of the moral theory of consequentialism , which basically says that moral decisions should be made by looking at the results, while the actions leading to those results are inconsequential. This approach does seem very reasonable, because in the end what really matters is are the results. However this approach has one major flaw in it, this approach assumes that human beings can 100% reasonable and look at situation from a perspective that is completely objective. This is assumption is absolutely impossible. As long as emotions exist human beings will never be able to 100% reasonable or objective.

The moral theory of consequentialism has served as the base of an ethical theory which has been used as a justification for some of the biggest atrocities ever committed by human beings, this theory is known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism that says that the value of a moral action is determined by its utility to the masses. This theory which does seem very reasonable is a theory which has been used in order to justify some of the most immoral actions taken by human beings. Many massive killings over the history of men-kind have been justified by this idea of the greater good. The killing of innocent people is immoral and wrong by all means. Yet over history many attempts has been made to reasonably justify massive killings. A claim that was often made, which does seem reasonable, is that some people must die for the benefit of the majority. However this claim is not reasonable at all, it might seem reasonable but it is not. It is not reasonable because any claim such as this arises from some type of emotions. The idea of killing somebody first rises from a strong feeling of hate towards that person. Yet another proof that emotions influence every decision humans make. That being true all this moral decisions made by utilitarian people, which are justified through reason are in fact not reasonable, hence another prove that reason alone cannot be the only tool used in justifying moral decisions and emotions must be used as well.      

        There also exists the more emotional oriented type of people who will listen more to their emotions and justify their moral decisions mostly through their emotions rather than reason.  An ethical theory, which praises emotions over reason, is the ethics of care theory. This is a theory which was developed by a psychologist named Caron Gilligan. This theory emphasizes the importance of relationships. It basically says that an individual's moral decisions should be made according to what is best for him and those closest to him, not for the majority of people. Since this theory puts emphasize on relationships it puts emphasize on emotions. Relationships are created through emotional connection, thus when a moral decision is decided according to what is best for one's friends and family that moral decision is being made by that person's feelings. Feelings are what connect one human being to another, and when humans base their moral decisions according to what is best for those who are close to them they are listening to their emotions much more than they are listening to reason.

        A great example of a moral decision which was made and is still justified by emotions is something that occurred during the Football World Cup of Germany 2006. That World Cup featured one of the greatest players in the history of the game in their last professional tournament, his name, Zinedine Zidane . This World Cup was to be the departure of one of the greatest player ever seen. The stage was set, of what was to be the grand finale of a great player. Zidane led his French national team all the way to the finals of the World Cup where they faced the mighty national team of Italy. The game started great for Zidane as early on, he scored a goal to give his team a 1-0 lead. It did not take long for Italy to tie the game at 1-1. As the game was coming to its full 90 minutes it seemed to be adding towards over time. Than about 15 minutes before the ending the momentum shifted towards the French national team, and seemed as though they would be able to win without overtime. But than in a few second of irrational behavior from Zidane, he did something which quite possibly was the reason why the French team ended up loosing the game. Throughout Marco Matarazzi of the Italian team, who is a well known for causing other players to loose their temper, was on a mission to make Zidane loose his temper, until five minutes before the end of regulation time he succeeded. Matarazzi is claimed to have made some nasty remarks about Zidane's sister. Until finally it Zidane could not take it anymore, he turned around gave Matarazzi a big smile and head butted his chest with incredible force. Zidane, as a smart veteran player was well aware of the consequences of such action and decided to do so anyways. The consequence of this action was that Zidane was immediately sent off from the rest of the game leaving his team in a huge disadvantage against an already very good Italian team. By all means this was an unreasonable action, yet Zidane to the day keeps on justifying his decision as the right moral decision as the right moral decision. It was unreasonable firstly because as a member of a team he has a responsibility to his teammates, and by taking this action he did not only let himself down but his teammates as well. Furthermore this was the last game of his remarkable carrier, this action leaves Zidane's legacy with a huge mark, and from all rational perspectives this was not a rational action. Yet Zidane insists that his decision was morally correct, furthermore he says that if he was to go back in time he would not change a thing. According to Zidane the remarks made about his sister were too painful to just let go, he chose to listen to his emotions instead of his reason, and take an action which might seem unreasonable but to him was morally correct because of his hurt emotions. Zidane who was always known for his very reasonable behavior on the football pitch decided to follow his emotions instead, which serves as another proof that both emotions and reason are used in the making and justification of moral decisions.  

        Although in the ideal world moral decisions would only be justified by reason, this is not the ideal world and emotions do exist (which is probably a good thing), and thus both emotions and reason are necessary in justifying moral decisions. Since neither one of this traits can be ignored by humans, they are both necessary in justifying moral decisions and the degree of their necessity simply depends on the individual who is justifying the moral decision.

Document Details

• Word Count 1559
• Page Count 6
• Subject Religious Studies (Philosophy & Ethics)

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What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti

A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence. 

The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.

But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions. 

“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada. 

What is happening in Haiti and why?

In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S. 

When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.

Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes . With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate. 

Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N . released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.

“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.

Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided , leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.

Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.

Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. 

Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”

Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder . One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”

But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months. 

Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.

Haiti's uncertain future

A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis. 

But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years. 

Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti , intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.

“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”

In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold . Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself. 

“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses . So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought , but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”  

Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.  

Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern. 

“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press .

Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians. 

In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis . The commission has proposed the “ Montana Accord ,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections. 

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

CORRECTION (March 15, 2024, 9:58 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated which university Jemima Pierre is affiliated with. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, not the University of California, Los Angeles, (or Columbia University, as an earlier correction misstated).

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.