From gut instincts to emotional authenticity, we increasingly treat our feelings as infallible. But philosopher of emotion Michael Brady argues this is not just wrong but dangerous. Emotions contain judgements, and judgements can be mistaken: fear can be wildly disproportionate, jealousy can accuse the innocent, shame can attach to things that aren't shameful. A world where no feeling can be wrong isn't kinder, it's stuck. Nobody can be corrected, and disagreement becomes a shouting match of feelings that can't be questioned. Instead of treating emotion as an answer, we should treat it as a question — the start of inquiry, not the end of it.

The notion that human beings are rational animals is one we probably owe to the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who claimed that “reason more than anything else is man.” But as Aristotle’s predecessor and teacher Plato made very clear, reason is not all that we are. We are creatures with appetites and desires. And we are creatures with emotional lives. Indeed, emotions seem to play a role in many if not most of the things that we do: in our enjoyments and relationships, in our social and political movements, in artistic and religious and intellectual endeavors. It is thus a platitude to say that emotions are important. 

How important? An increasingly common view—encountered online, promoted by mental health influencers, self-help hobbyists, wellness gurus, and similar—is that our emotions are very important indeed, since they are impeccable and wholly reliable guides to thinking and acting. Thus, we are exhorted to trust our gut because we won’t go wrong, or to go with our emotional instincts no matter what. We are told that emotional intuition never lies and will always lead us in the right direction. Our emotional experiences are all said to be “valid,” and our emotional instincts are held to be pure and authentic forms of counsel and advice. As the comedian Robin Williams wrote, “There are no rules. Just follow your heart”—which is one popular way of interpreting the famous words of the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.”

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It is easy to sneer in the face of such positivity, and to be cynical about aphorisms such as “follow your heart.” For there are obvious cases where we ought not to follow our heart, and paradigmatic instances where emotions are not trustworthy guides to thinking and acting. Think, for instance, of the very common phenomenon of someone who is terrified of flying—such as the footballer Dennis Bergkamp, also known as the Non-Flying Dutchman—and yet who believes that flying is one of the safest forms of transport, indeed many times safer than the taxi that takes you to the airport. Here is a case where the emotional experience of fear seems to be getting things wrong. Or if this isn’t convincing—since flying poses some risk—think of someone suffering from koumpounophobia (fear of buttons) or xanthophobia (fear of the color yellow).

There are other occasions when it seems problematic to trust one’s emotions without question. Suppose—to take an example well-used by influencers—we feel that someone is untrustworthy because they give off the wrong “vibes.” Should we rely on our emotions in this instance to conclude that the person is untrustworthy? That would be a very bad idea in many cases—for instance, if you are on a hiring panel for a job and you dismiss a candidate because they just “felt wrong” for the post, or a judge in a court of law and you dismiss the testimony of a witness because of bad vibes. Cases abound: the fact that I feel that something (my sexuality; my appearance; my accent) is shameful surely does not mean that this thing is shameful. Survivor guilt in the aftermath of an accident where I alone survived doesn’t mean that I did something wrong. Our feelings in the first blush of love are—as a divorce rate of close to 50% indicates—not always reliable guides to “the one.”

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But how can we take our emotions seriously if they sometimes, perhaps often, turn out to be unreliable? Doesn’t this have the air of a paradox or puzzle?

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There are, moreover, seriously negative social problems generated if everyone regards their emotional responses as trustworthy or infallible. For one thing, it renders putative disagreements unintelligible: my negative response to the assisted dying bill is an infallible expression of my emotion, your positive response to the bill is an infallible expression of yours—in which case what looks like a moral/political disagreement turns out to be a case where we are both right. What happens to political debate in this instance? Do we just go with whoever has the strongest feelings? For another, the idea that our emotional responses are infallible guides rules out the possibility that our emotional responses—both individual and collective—can be improved. If we think that there is such a thing as individual and collective moral progress, we should balk at this conclusion.

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Nevertheless, I want to say that there is something deeply right about the idea that we ought to take our emotional responses seriously, in spite of the fact that they sometimes, perhaps often, lead us astray. But how can we take our emotions seriously if they sometimes, perhaps often, turn out to be unreliable? Doesn’t this have the air of a paradox or puzzle? The answer to resolving this puzzle lies in a better understanding of what emotions are, and how they are meant to tell us about the world and about ourselves. 

Nearly everyone who writes and thinks about the emotions—including philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, and evolutionary biologists—believes that emotions have developed or evolved to play a number of very important roles for human beings, in our distinctive human environments. As the philosopher Annette Baier writes: ‘we all accept the idea that emotions are reactions to matters of apparent importance to us: fear to danger, surprise to the unexpected, outrage to insult, disgust to what will make us sick, envy of the more favored, gratitude for benefactors, hate for enemies, love for friends, and so on.’ One of the roles that emotions play is to motivate the right kind of behavior. Consider fear again: a central function of fear is to generate an appropriate behavioral response—typically, fight or flight—when we encounter danger. Motivating this kind of behavior is what fear typically does, and indeed is what fear is meant to do.

But a second valuable function is for emotion to give us important information about our environment. So fear in some sense “tells us” about danger; anger “tells us” about insults; guilt “tells us” about wrongdoing; and so on. Indeed, emotions often give us information about the world in a way that is quicker, more efficient, and less costly than other forms of information gathering, like consciously searching for potential threats or insults or romantic partners. Empirical studies have shown that we are quicker at identifying or picking out emotion-relevant objects, such as spiders or angry faces, than we are at picking out neutral objects, such as wheelbarrows or cups. Emotion-relevant objects “pop out”, so to speak, from a wealth of background information.

The important question for our purposes is how emotions are meant to give us information. A bad answer—and one favored by influencers, wellness gurus, and the like—is that emotions constitute infallible answers to our environmental situation. On this (mistaken) view, emotions provide answers to the question of whether we’re in danger, in the same way that our visual experiences provide answers to the question of whether the car is red or green, that our olfactory experiences provide answers to the question of whether or not the wine is corked, and so on. This is a bad answer, because emotional experience is very unlike visual and olfactory experience. If conditions are normal, we are right to trust the evidence of our eyes, ears, and other senses. But as the examples above show, even when conditions are normal, we often go wrong if we trust our fear, shame, and guilt. So the popular view goes wrong because it treats our feelings as answers.

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The heart has its reasons; but there are many other reasons that have a bearing on whether the heart is getting things right.

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This suggests a much more plausible solution to the puzzle. Emotions are not to be regarded as answers. Instead, emotions should be viewed as raising questions about whether something/someone is dangerous, shameful, insulting, lovable, and so on. In other words, emotions “tell us” things by asking questions about those things, questions which we then ought to take seriously. On this picture, fear doesn’t tell us that the alleyway or animal or line of questioning or political opinion is dangerous; instead, fear raises the question of whether the alleyway etc. is dangerous. Jealousy doesn’t tell us that a partner is unfaithful; instead, it asks whether or not our partner is unfaithful. Shame doesn’t tell us that something about our person (sexuality, accent, appearance) is shameful; instead, it asks the question whether or not this aspect of ourselves is shameful. And so on.

What emotions do, therefore, is make certain possibilities live: emotions bring possibilities to our attention, so that we can then try to answer, through reflecting, reasoning, investigating, conversing, remembering, whether things are as our emotions suggest. Sometimes, as a result of reflection and investigation, we will come to endorse our fear, anger, jealousy, joy, or shame: we come to judge that things really are dangerous, or that we really have done something shameful. But sometimes our investigations will lead us to reject our feelings, as when we come to realize that the dog is harmless, and in any case chained up, behind a fence, and so on. Emotions therefore raise important questions; but they don’t, in and of themselves, answer these questions. As a result, we shouldn’t treat them as answers.

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There is something deeply right, therefore, about the exhortation to follow one’s heart; but this is really an exhortation to start inquiring, rather than to close one’s mind to inquiry.

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So here’s the picture that solves the puzzle. We should, as the influencers and wellness gurus suggest, take our emotions very seriously. This is because they raise questions that we need to pay attention to: Are we in danger? Have I just been insulted? Is she attracted to me? Will I regret turning down the promotion? But we can ask these questions and thus take our emotions seriously without answering all of the questions in the affirmative. Indeed, one of the marks of being human—of being a rational as well as an emotional creature—is that we can reflect on the reasons that have a bearing on whether the remark was insulting, whether what I did was shameful, whether the promotion is a good thing. The heart has its reasons; but there are many other reasons that have a bearing on whether the heart is getting things right.

A very valuable outcome of this way of thinking about emotion and reason is that it allows for genuine moral disagreement between people with different emotional responses, precisely because their emotions are now viewed as raising the question as to whether (e.g.) assisted dying is morally wrong, rather than settling this question. If we are to settle this question, we have to go beyond the fact that people feel differently about it, and examine the reasons and considerations that lie behind these feelings. This allows for the possibility of rational correction, rational persuasion, and moral progress, whilst acknowledging the vital role that our emotions play in our thinking and acting. There is something deeply right, therefore, about the exhortation to follow one’s heart; but this is really an exhortation to start inquiring, rather than to close one’s mind to inquiry.