Emotional Rationality as Practical Rationality

Abstract

In this essay I take as my target a messy set of intuitions about the extent to which and the dimensions along which emotions can be assessed for rationality. One strand in commonsense thinking puts emotions entirely outside the scope of rationality assessment. Everyone has heard such statements as, “But, that’s how I feel”—uttered as if that ended the conversation. The view that emotions are out-side the scope of rationality assessment gains strength from the perceived subjectivity of emotion—emotions vary so much from person to person and seem to depend so much on the agent’s history that one can easily think that emotions can’t be subject to rationality assessment, that we can, at most, f..