If Human Emotions Are Based On Rationality, I Feel Like An Alien

 Content warning: suicide.

When I was in graduate school, I TAed a course on Contemporary Moral Problems. I can’t remember what the “Problem” was that we were discussing, but at some point our textbook author made the argument that whether or not to kill yourself was a question that could be approached in a rational manner. For example, he said, there are good reasons to kill yourself and bad reasons: a toothache is obviously not a reason to kill yourself.

I remember being taken aback, because in my experience, a toothache is just the kind of thing that makes you want to kill yourself. In saying this, I  do not mean to be treating suicide lightly or simply. I just mean that my own moments of despair most often occur in response to the kind of relentless, slow-burn, non-dramatic things that make life seem grim and pointless. Things like toothaches.

I didn’t study philosophy as an undergrad, so this textbook passage may have been my first time face to face with the philosophical idea that emotions could be objectively appropriate or inappropriate to a situation. It’s an idea that struck me as bizarre, and, to some extent, still strikes me as bizarre. If being a well-functioning person means being sad when bad things happen and happy when good ones do — well, that makes me feel like a bit like an alien.

I mean, of course I want good things and conversely, but for most of everyday life I am much more likely to be influenced by a mood than a thing in the world to which there is an appropriate response. My moods are highly influenced by things like exercise and fresh air and the right mix of people-time and alone-time — things that seem ambient and animalistic and not rationally assessable as causes.  

For some emotions like fear, I suppose I can see it: if you are afraid of a shark attack while walking around downtown, I guess you could say the fear is misplaced and inappropriate to a situation. But I feel like when you try to make a theory out it, things get weird.

For example, speaking of philosophers who believe that emotions are a form of cognitive judgments, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says “On a common interpretation of their view, my anger at someone is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person.” Then you might be correct or not about that.  

Wow, because this seems to say the emotion is a judgment and I would almost say it feels like the opposite: that my feelings of anger and my judgments about whether I have been wronged run on two separate tracks with occasional but obscure points of intersection. Often, I’m not clear whether I feel anger, irritation, hurt feelings or some other negative emotion, and frankly, I often don’t care. In a vast range of cases, there’s no point to doing anything. In those case, I am much more likely to pursue a strategy of emotion-dissipation through distraction. When there is something to be done, the thought process of what that would be barely feels like it engages the original emotion.

I also don’t get how emotions could be “appropriate” in an everyday way to our global situation of climate disaster and injustice on a truly massive scale. I suppose you could say that certain emotions are inappropriate to our situation — people who know what’s up, but just don’t care, aren’t they doing something wrong? Yes — but to me that seems more like a failing than a miscalculation.

Anyway, maybe my textbook author was thinking of a toothache in middle-class US terms — as a temporary problem you can easily address by spending some money and having some short-term pain. Obviously, I also do not want people to kill themselves over temporary, solvable problems.  What a person needs in that situation is partly other people who love them and can say “don’t worry, it won’t last forever!” And even more importantly: good universal health benefits for everyone.