2 Emotion and the Sense of Moral Obligation. 2 Defining “Cognition” and “Emotion” Emotion. First published Mon Feb 3, 2003; substantive revision Mon Jan 21, 2013 No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior.
What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them—perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word “emotion” and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. 1. How do emotions fit into different conceptions of the mind? To date cognitive science does not seem to have provided any crucial tests to decide between competing models of the mind. 2. 3. 4. Emotion.caltech.edu/dropbox/bi133/files/Psychological.pdf. Moral Reasoning. 1. The Philosophical Importance of Moral Reasoning 1.1 Defining “Moral Reasoning” This article takes up moral reasoning as a species of practical reasoning — that is, as a type of reasoning directed towards deciding what to do and, when successful, issuing in an intention (see entry on practical reason). Of course, we also reason theoretically about what morality requires of us; but the nature of purely theoretical reasoning about ethics is adequately addressed in the various articles on ethics.
It is also true that, on some understandings, moral reasoning directed towards deciding what to do involves forming judgments about what one ought, morally, to do. On these understandings, asking what one ought (morally) to do can be a practical question, a certain way of asking about what to do. (See section 1.5 on the question of whether this is a distinctive practical question.) 1.2 Empirical Challenges to Moral Reasoning 1.3 Situating Moral Reasoning These three topics clearly interrelate. 2.
2 Haidt / The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail. 1 Evidence from Neuroimaging.