Thus, when nothing but emotion is used in making decisions, the effects can also be detrimental. When you squander your entire paycheck on gambling because you could feel that this was the “big one”, then you used no logic. Both logic and emotion are required if the decisions you make are to be both smart and for the betterment of the world, not just yourself.
A person who makes all their decisions through reasoning will be cold and distant. He won't be able to take any pleasure in the little moments that life throws at him, because he's too busy analyzing. He has no life at all, no sense of enjoyment, thus will have few friends. I once had this friend who did everything through reason, without any emotions at all. Despite being smart and scoring very well for his exams and school work, he still had very few friends as he merely thought about himself all the time, and only did things which would benefit him in the long run or short run. Moreover, although he did quite a fair bit of community work, he did not benefit at all from it, as his mind was just focusing on fulfilling his CAS hours, and not on the spirit of giving.
This would be a crazy world without reason. We need it for everything we do. However, trouble can start when reason is the only criteria for making decisions. It happens though. Those big faceless credit card companies, for example, run solely on reason. The decisions they make are extremely beneficial to themselves. If they used an ounce of emotion in their business though, then they would stop getting ahead on other peoples’ misfortune.
So, we have to strike a balance there.
When you throw morality into the mix, every decision is coloured by a little bit of intuition. Does the decision seem right? And I think that to make those sorts of decisions, there's a mix of reason and emotion, too. You have to be able to feel good about the decision, and at the same time, you have to be convinced that the decision was the right one.
In my experience, emotion is the beginning, the end and the motive for morality. The human brain likes to rationalize its impulses and emotions to the point that, after the moral decision is made, it can categorize its moral decision as one of those clever rational stunts it normally uses to solve problems. Morality is based on what is beneficial or pleasurable to the individual, but benefit and pleasure are products and inputs of emotional states, so reason, logic and rational process is merely the means for the mind to get from one emotional state to the next.
The idea that moral decisions can be made rationally is a socialization trick. We argue that moral decisions are rational just so we can justify our actions, convince others, who might not share the same interests, to agree with our course of action and operate socially, or put pressure on someone, who reacts emotionally, to act in accordance with our wishes and goals.
So how does this all tie in with the importance of emotion’s relation with reason? Both are tools that work in concert for achieving life’s necessarily common end. Some human ends or instinctual effects will quite necessarily favor life while others will not to some degree or may even have no effect either way.
Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions. When people are angry, afraid or in other elevated emotional states, they tend to favor symbolic, viscerally satisfying solutions to problems over more substantive, complex, but ultimately more effective ones.
I have this friend, aged 16, who once had this choice of whether to go home or to stay out late, after midnight. She chose the latter because it was the day immediately after her exams and as such, she wasn’t feeling really good because she quite messed it up. And as such, she went out partying with her friends despite numerous warnings by her parents not to stay out after 11 pm. On her way home, she was faced with a flasher and was scarred for life. From this, we can clearly see her decision making skill was clouded by her sadness as well as fear for her exam results and thus making the wrong decision to stay out late that night.
Emotion is from the realm of the imagination, the part of cognition that we share with animals. Everything is imaginable, that is the imagination thinks in concretes only, and no abstraction is possible. It includes our dreams, our art pieces and all the fictional shows and books.
A clear example would be religion; it is also from the realm of the imagination. What we believe in comes from our faith and neither from what we are able to see nor what we are able to go through. In religion, we are always required to have faith in the things that we can never see, and as such, all we can do is to use our emotions to imagine what God might seem like or what the Bible tells us.
Reason is from the realm of the rational. This is the part of cognition which separates us from animals. In this state everything is abstract. In the imagination, there is no reason for the sun to rise again the next day simply because it has every previous day. In the imagination, just because a cat scratches us for getting too close today has no bearing on whether the cat will scratch us tomorrow. The rational mind quickly makes up for this deficiency. It recognizes patterns much faster than the imagination will.
For example, I once was questioned by my mother if I was gay just because I told her I liked the colour pink a lot. This can be seen as a form of reason, as the usual pattern is that girls were the ones who could and were supposed to like pink, not guys. And as such, this pattern is clearly portrayed single-mindedly by my mother, who portrayed these reasons onto me.
The interaction of the rational and imaginative functions of the mind is in sensation. The imagination absorbs all sensation and processes it into what we can consider coherent. For instance, when I see a brownish, flat surface with 4 legs, my imagination immediately groups those experiences together into one whole. My rational brain takes that information and says "table" to me.
Thus in conclusion, I am proud to state that reason is the psychological component which governs emotion, while emotion is the component that gives impetus. However alone, they both share the same severe consequences and are unable to resolve any issues thrown to them.