Reason guides our judgments to selectively justify certain moral things, giving us a tolerance threshold, to what we can morally justify. Without reason this limit wouldn’t exist, to bring constraint. If wasn’t for reason we would do as our emotion tells us to do, for some it would be to procrastinate, and not do our work. However not 100% of the time we would not procrastinate as we find ways justify our moral decision of procrastination, we then substitute emotion as a reason, reasoning our way into procrastination as a “break” which it rarely is.
If we can picture emotion, and reason, it could potentially be, the devil and angel sitting on our shoulders, telling what we want to do. Our emotions can be characterized as a devil, as it representing our impulsive nature. If we have a yang we must also have a yin to be in opposition to each other to create a harmony, thus reason is born. Reason helps to smooth out all the inconvenience that emotion brings about. Emotion can be very unsound from time to time, especially when we wake up from the wrong side of the bed. Reasons’ approach to life is more logical, less impulsive, and to the point, judging things harshly, like black and white, conversely our emotion would stand in-between to act as a middle ground, like a gray scale.
If what was said so far was true then how does one emotionally justify a moral issue, one such as choosing to believe. Belief is a feeling that something is real or true, so our beliefs are based on our feeling, furthermore feelings are an emotion, which then leads us back to square 1. However there are many people which have a religion, with religion based on belief, and in turn is our emotion we then start to develop a way of substituting emotion as if it was reason, making it true if we believe, but if we oppose it, it would be label as false. By tricking itself with reason our mind makes emotion justify morality,.
Prior to our action of sitting in front of the TV, we make the choice of going to the TV then planting our big lazy butts on the surface of our choice to watch what you desire. How do we justify our decision? There is no logical reason for watching TV, other than for our pure enjoyment, or perhaps it was for an assignment. However we could easily justify watching TV with emotion. Our emotion allows us to differentiate from machines. Emotion can either inhibit our productivity, otherwise motivate us to do even better; it is a major facet of our multifaceted life, letting us come apart from each other.
To use emotion and reason to justify moral decisions we must determine perspectives on what is morally acceptable. As an example, one group of unamed IB students are satisfied with a “C”, while some consider getting below 90% to be completely unacceptable. If you were to experience a scene where a person is getting beaten up by a group of people, would you risk your life, and livelihood for an unknown person? Questions like these might go through your head, perhaps none at all; even before this is ever thought up in your head, emotions might have intervened. Our emotions are erratic, they change as your surroundings change. One majority used phrase “waking up on the wrong side of the bed” couldn’t describe this better.
Our emotions can lead us to do unexplainable things, cloud our decision, and create biases in which we either agree with or disagree. Have you ever seen a person in a furious state, or you might be the one which was angry. As we all experience most of our senses become focused on to ourselves, the opinions of other just fade away. If we merely use emotion to justify decisions, our decisions would be unstable, and chaotic. To keep our thoughts consistent we must have reason. Reason limits the erratic/impulsive nature of emotion, if not we would do: unreasonable things, buy on impulse, and wild mood swings.
When justifying moral decisions it takes more than reason, or emotion alone, both are necessary to make a proper judgment. As we all have human qualities, everyone has different emotions leading to different tolerances, additionally our sense of reason would also vary from person to person. If we look at emotion as well as reason we find that they are very similar but yet they are different. Emotion along with reason are both ways of knowing, each as significant as the other. Without the presence of each other our judgments would lack in crucial areas, which helps us, interpret the world around us. If reason were left out in judgment, our unstable emotion would then produce a inconsistent answer, one which there is no limit to, but if all we had was a sense of reason to guide us onto our judgment, without emotion, our judgment would lack the human quality in which it demands, making it nothing more than a calculated answer.
This essay believes that it is equally important to regard both reason, as well as emotion to be equally important in the making of each choice to justify our moral decision. Emotions make up whom we are, without emotions we would be nothing more than a machine. Yet we must not be clouded by our emotions, which would make use do irresponsible things. Thus there is reason. Justifying moral decision requires, reason, and emotion, however we must not let our emotion take control of our decision. We have to aware of our moral judgments for it creates a ripple effect in the world around us.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion1
