Speakers conference Moral Emotions
Ronald de Sousa
Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was educated in Switzerland, England and the USA. He got his BA at Oxford and his PhD at Princeton. He lived and taught in Toronto since 1966, with only temporary interruptions for visiting appointments in Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland, and China. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion (MIT 1987) and Évolution et rationalité (PUF 2004), of which an revised English version is expected in May 2007 from OUP as Why Think:? Evolution and the Rational Mind. His current research interests, reflected in a sample of some sixty articles and reviews available on his website, focus on emotions, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and sex, as well as the puzzle of the stubbornness of religious belief. His next book, also from OUP, is titled Emotional Truth.
Title: Here’s how I feel: “Don’t trust feelings.”
Abstract: It is a truism that most of we do is governed by our emotions--providing ‘emotions’ and ‘governed’ are taken broadly enough. Bayesian calculus describes how choices derive from preferences and subjective probabilities, and both preferences and probabilities are influenced, if not determined by emotions. But there are many reasons, both empirical and theoretical, for thinking that our emotions are poor guides to risk in most circumstances. This fact has been richly exploited by advocates of “organic” agriculture (which would either result in mass starvation or in the eradication of the earth’s forests if universally pursued) and by opponents of nuclear energy (which has caused far less harm in half a century than coal). It is also true, however, that attempting to correct emotional estimates of risk in the light of more objective probabilities and rational expectations will be wholly ineffective, unless the corrections are framed in terms liable to affect hearers’ emotions in the appropriate ways. These considerations raise two sorts of questions: 1. What methods are appropriate for identifying those areas for which emotions do and do not constitute appropriate appraisals of risk? 2. Are there ethical and non-deceptive ways in which people’s emotional stances can be appropriately corrected?
