Everyday Philosophy: Can you ever be “too emotional” in decision-making?

I really love this question, not only because it gets to the heart of what philosophy is all about but also to the heart of what being human is about.

First, a story. By the fate of the timetablers, my first lecture of my first year studying philosophy was “Introduction to Formal Logic.” It was taught by a young lecturer in a lovely blazer called Jan Westerhoff, who, over a term, showed us the magic of logical symbolism. He scribbled up predicates, conjunctions, and bi-conditionals. He introduced us to paradoxes involving bald men and nonexistent kings of France. He had us buy books involving “truth trees.” All in all, I loved that module. It was my first whiff of an important lesson: philosophers tend to love logic. They love rational arguments and sorting them from premises to conclusions. For millennia, even in the continental tradition, philosophy has prided itself on rationality.

This is not how everyone else lives their lives. This is not even how philosophers live their lives when they leave seminar rooms. And so, this question of emotions vs. rationality has, rightly, been wrenched back into the limelight. This is not a new concept; Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century pointed it out, not to mention the libraries of books in the non-Western tradition. But the study of emotions in decision-making is relatively new. It’s an exciting fusion of psychology and philosophy. A marriage of the sciences and humanities.

So, in the same spirit, I felt it fitting to look at both a philosophical and a psychological approach to the issue. Representing the philosophers, we shall dip into Aristotle and his offspring, the Stoics. Representing the psychologists, we shall call upon Robert Oum and Debra Lieberman.

Aristotle: No virtue without reason

Aristotle argued that humans are defined by our logos, which is broadly understood as reason. That doesn’t mean that he thought being human meant living like a robot or even that we could become robots, but rather that logos is unique and essential to humans. We are driven by passions, but so are animals. We’re driven by instincts, but so are plants. All three are a part of human nature, but only logos—rationality—sets us apart.

Elsewhere, Aristotle argues that a happy, flourishing, and full life (eudaimonia) requires a life of virtue. We have to be virtuous to be happy. But to be virtuous, we have to use our reason. Or, more precisely, we have to use reason to guide our other human elements. It’s our logos that turns a “proto-virtue” into a genuine virtue. For example, courage is not simply a passion. It’s not charging the enemy down with glory in mind and fear buried away. True courage involves decision-making (prohairetike), which is a key part of logos. Courage is only a virtue when it is aimed at the good. Who you’re charging at matters. Why you’re fighting an enemy matters. We cannot be virtuous, and therefore happy, without logos.

In the centuries or so after, the Stoics took this and shouted it louder for everyone to hear. The Stoics turned logos into a cosmic principle governing the Universe. To be a good human—to be a good anything, really—is to live in accordance with logos. Stoics were not about emotionlessness but rather about selecting emotions. So, feel your “anger in tough scenarios,” but always under the control of logos and always for the good.

For Aristotle and the Stoics, then, emotion is only a “healthy amount” when it’s used in service to rationality.

Oum and Lieberman: An embarrassing, false dichotomy

We are a binary-loving species. We like to divide the world into two neat boxes and fear the wobbly penumbra in between. Black or white, up or down, male or female, straight or gay, us and them, and reason or emotion. But, as with almost everything in life, it’s never so simple. And the pseudo-scientific bifurcation between “left” and “right” brains, or “cognition” and “emotion,” is not how any reputable scientist talks about our minds these days.

Oum and Lieberman make the case that on a neurophysiological level, as well as a conscious workspace one, emotion and cognition are indistinguishably intertwined. As they put it, “emotion is cognition. That is, emotion programs are cognitive programs that activate a suite of psychological and physiological programs in response to a recurring situation that impacts survival and reproduction in ancestral environments.”

A great example they give is most people’s natural disgust toward excrement. We have evolved “cognitive programs designed to detect substances that were associated with harmful agents,” and our sense of revulsion is a decision tool that helps us avoid “disease-causing agents.” Our disgust is both a diagnostic tool of disease and a motivating factor. Our willingness to flush the toilet is not a rational capacity that can be treated separately from our other methods of appraising the world. They all work hand-in-glove, and to differentiate them is an abstraction borne of millennia of false dichotomy.

The spirit of the question

So, if we’re following modern psychology, I’m afraid I’m going to have to push the question back. There is no such thing as “emotion taking over our rational thinking” any more than there is lightning taking over thunder.

But that’s not how the question was intended. I believe it was more about what Aristotle and the Stoics were saying. It’s about what modern cognitive behavioral therapy deals with, and that’s the idea that we feel like our emotions are different from our thoughts. What the Stoics argued (and what CBT has demonstrated) is that many humans can take some degree of direction over their emotions. And here, the question becomes somewhat more fraught. Advocates of Stoicism are very careful to say that it’s not about repression. But I find it hard to imagine how “choosing your feelings” does not, at least some of the time, involve an element of repression or dilution. This then becomes an empirical question. Is it better to voice and vent your feelings—to feel them out to their closure? Or is it better to take ownership of them and face them down? Some evidence might suggest the former, but I will have to hedge my bets and say that sometimes emotional regulation is better.

All of which is to say, I believe there is a healthy amount of emotion to be had, but I’d agree with the Stoics that rarely, if ever, should we want it to “take over” our rational decision-making.