fduniho
New member
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2010
- Messages
- 32
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
I actually thought you were saying this. Here is how I got there. You are saying that ethics is about "reason" as your argument for it not being about feeling.
No, I was not saying that. I was arguing that feeling cannot be defined as being about ethics, because reason can also be used to make ethical judgments. Both thinking and feeling can be used to make ethical judgments, and ethics is not the exclusive domain of either of these functions. Also, both can be used to make non-ethical judgments. For example, I use thinking to debug programs, and I sometimes use feeling to decide what music to listen to.
Therefore you are separating reason from feeling as two different things.
I would distinguish between thinking, which is a conscious use of reason, and feeling, which operates partly at an unconscious level but may still follow rational or quasi-rational procedures. Feeling is faster than thinking, but this can make it more prone to error. One difference between thinking and feeling is that feeling is more associative than thinking is. Feeling may notice similarities between things and jump to the conclusion that they are similar in other respects, such as when you meet someone who reminds you of someone you don't like. To some extent, feelings can be trained to be more rational, sort of like a dog being trained by a human. This is where virtue ethics comes in, where there is a conscious effort to adjust the feeling response to a mean between a deficiency and an excess, as in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics I'll also point out that Antonio Damasio has argued in his book Descartes' Error that emotion plays an important role in rationality. As I recall from reading the book, people who were brain-damaged in ways that cut themselves off from emotional awareness behaved less rationally than other people.
Your example of emotion here makes me think we are arguing semantics. I don't think of "like" and "dislike" as emotions. To me emotions are things more like worried, afraid, happy, sad, etc. Like and dislike are the result of some kind of value judgment. Maybe we just have a terminology problem.
I normally feel emotional bonds toward people I like and emotional aversions toward people I dislike. So I don't think the difference is merely semantic. Also, the examples you give of emotions also involve value judgments. So I don't think there is such a clear-cut distinction between emotions and value judgments.