Emotion, Cognition, and the Virtue of Flexibility

Chapter 1: Emotional Response as a Normative Guide

Should we let ourselves be guided by our emotions in our ethical and epistemic considerations? We can find various responses to this question in the history of philosophy.³ Today, several philosophers reply affirmatively. However, I shall argue in this chapter that these affirmative responses have not gone far enough. They assign normative roles to the emotions merely in virtue of emotions being belief-like or cognitive (Nussbaum, 2001), imbued with reason (McDowell, 1998a; Sherman, 1989), or as a second-best and fast way to decide whenever there are no better options (Brady, 2013).⁴ By contrast, I want to consider a non-cognitive kind of emotion, a kind that is basic or primitive, and ask ...