Emotion, Cognition, and the Virtue of Flexibility

Chapter 3: Against the Identification of Normativity with Rationality

In this chapter, I ask whether the normative and the rational are the same. This question, however, is too hard to tackle directly, in particular since my answer is “no”—and this is not a traditional answer. Rather than address the question directly, then, I counter three challenges that could be mounted against my argument for normative guidance by emotional responses. The first two challenges relate to the emotional responses’ ability to get things right and their relation to rationality. The third challenge is of a different sort, namely, insofar as it puts forward a claim about the nature of emotional responses. Emotional responses, the challenge goes, are akin to “knee-jerk” ...