Imperfect Cognitions

Today we welcome Steven Gubka, a postdoctoral associate at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, to share his recent paper: " How Anger Helps Us Possess Reasons for Action " ( The Philosophical Quarterly ).   Steven Gubka   Recall the last time that you got angry at someone. Did it help or hinder your decision-making about how you should treat them? Seneca, a stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, argued that anger makes it more difficult to deliberate correctly about what to do. He wrote that “it causes whoever has come into its clutches to forget his duty: make a father angry, he’s an enemy; make a son angry, he’s a parricide. Anger makes a mother a stepmother, a fellow-citizen a foreign enemy, a king a tyrant” (2010: pg. 16).  Here Seneca claims that anger prevents us from appreciating moral reasons to avoid harming people, even those that we have special obligation to protect. This idea of tension between anger and reason remains commonplace, and as a result,...

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the second in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences, eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière, (Psychology Press, 2017) (part one can be found here ). Last week we argued that your intelligence, vigilance, and academic expertise very likely doesn't do much to protect you from the normal human tendency towards rationalization – that is, from the tendency to engage in biased patterns of reasoning aimed at justifying conclusions to which you are attracted for selfish or other epistemically irrelevant reasons – and that, in fact, you may be more susceptible to rationalization than the rest of the population. This week we’ll argue th...