The Proper Function of Reason & Emotion

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Question: What is the proper role of reason and emotion in a moral person’s life, according to Objectivism?

To answer this question, one must first be clear about what is meant by “reason”, “emotion”, and “moral” and one must keep firmly in view a basic fact about human nature: man is a volitional being. The exercise of his rational faculty is not automatic. I will return to this point shortly.

The Function of Reason:

Reason is the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Two features of reason are essential here. First, it is volitional: one must choose to use it, and to continue using it. This requires effort, focus, and the active direction of one’s attention. Second, reason is a faculty of awareness that identifies reality but does not create it. It operates on the basis of perceptual data, which are automatically integrated by consciousness into entities; these percepts constitute the material upon which reason, in its conceptual capacity, performs its work.

Emotions and How to Evaluate Them:

Emotions, by contrast, are automatic psycho-physiological responses to stimuli, based on one’s implicit value-judgements. By “implicit value-judgements” Ayn Rand means those evaluations - often unarticulated and sometimes unexamined - by which a person takes something to be good or bad for himself. Such judgements are not self-validating. One may experience attraction to that which is in fact harmful, as in the case of addiction, or aversion to that which would serve one’s life, as when effort, fear, or competing temptations obscure one’s recognition of value.

An emotion, therefore, is not a tool of cognition. It does not identify facts, nor does it explain itself. It merely registers the significance which a given stimulus has in relation to one’s existing value structure. It tells one neither why the stimulus has that significance, nor whether the value at stake is real or illusory, objective or merely subjective.

In some cases, the relation between stimulus, value, and emotion is straightforward. If I encounter a hungry lion, blood visible on its fangs, observing me with interest, I will feel fear. The value at stake is my immediate survival; the threat is real; the emotional response corresponds to the facts. In such a case, the emotion reflects a rational value hierarchy.

But this alignment is not guaranteed. Consider two graduates watching a valedictorian receive an award. One responds with admiration, the other with envy. The stimulus is identical, but the underlying value structures differ. The first takes human excellence as a value; the second experiences another’s achievement as a threat to his own standing. The resulting emotions reflect these respective premises. In the former case, the response is rational; in the latter, it is not.

Moral Responsibility for Emotions:

This raises the question of moral responsibility for one’s emotions. Since emotions are automatic, one cannot be held morally responsible for merely experiencing them. However, one is responsible for how one deals with them. A person has a self-interested obligation to identify his emotions accurately, particularly when they are unexpected or in tension with his explicit convictions. Such tensions indicate a disjunction between professed and actual values. To resolve them, one must determine what value was perceived to be at stake, whether it is in fact at stake, and whether it ought to be valued at all.

We may now return to the original question. The role of reason is to provide knowledge and to determine the course of action required for one’s life. Because man lives in a world governed by facts, and because only reason can identify those facts, reason must be the final authority in all matters of judgement and action. To subordinate reason to any other faculty is to sever one’s guidance system from reality.

The role of emotion is derivative but not dispensable. Emotions serve, first, as indicators of one’s implicit value-judgements. Properly understood, they provide indispensable data about what one in fact values, as distinct from what one claims to value. This makes them psychologically significant, though not epistemologically authoritative. Second, in the best cases, emotions constitute part of the reward of living. Happiness, which is the purpose of life, is itself an emotional state – not a momentary burst of pleasure, but a fundamental, enduring sense of well-being. It is the result of achieving and maintaining values, and it may be intensified and made explicit in experiences such as productive work, romantic love, and the contemplation of art.

The relationship between reason and emotion, then, is neither one of opposition nor of parity. Reason determines what is good; emotion reflects what one takes to be good. The task of a moral person is to bring these into alignment: to ensure that one’s emotional responses flow from rationally validated values. This is not achieved by suppressing emotion, nor by indulging it uncritically, but by identifying, evaluating, and, where necessary, revising the value-judgements from which one’s emotions arise.

A fully integrated person does not experience reason and emotion as antagonists. His emotions become the psychological expression of his rational values.