DO WE GENERALLY USE REASON OR EMOTION TO MAKE ETHICAL
DECISIONS? WHICH ONE SHOULD WE USE?
In my opinion, we make ethical decisions based on our
emotion more so than our reasoning. The definition of ethics is moral
principles that govern a person's or group's behavior. Reason is more based on
knowledge and facts. Ethics is more subjective depending on the person you are
talking to. The presentation on Thursday talked about if animals have rights. All
the people that abused animals like dog fights did it based on emotion
"because it was fun and made them feel good". They had no real
reasoning or facts behind why they did it, but it was just for pure enjoyment.
We also save and care for animals because we feel emotional about a creature
being hurt or abused. When we make ethical decisions I think we should mostly
use emotion but a bit of reason couldn't hurt because sometimes emotions can
skew our perception of things so a balance of both is always necessary.
I generally agree with you that Ethics uses emotion more than reasoning. But just to play devil's advocate, here are a couple possibilities where reason is maybe used instead. With dog fights, as you mentioned, some people did it because it made them feel good. But, there's also a lot of money to be made in dogfighting, from admission fees, stud fees (for the winner), and gambling, so some people could be looking at it from a purely business perspective, using reasoning to decide how/when/where fights occur. But at the same time, I agree there has to be some emotion going through people's minds for decisions such as participating/watching a dog fighting.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that we should mostly use emotion when making ethical decisions. Emotions, as we mentioned in our TOK Presentation, can spur on and encourage people even when it doesn't seem logical. To give an example, in The Martian, by Andy Weir (and now also a movie), one person (Mark Watney) is stuck on Mars. He was going to starve before the next martian mission landed, but instead of saying "nice knowing you," it seemed NASA and the rest of the world pulled behind Watney, with international cooperation, a risky maneuver, and millions, if not billions of dollars being spent to try and get him home. Using logic, the ethical decision might have been to leave him on Mars, since part of getting Watney back required risking the lives of the 5 astraunauts who had to go get him. But instead, more people used mostly emotion, and managed to find a way to get him back. Though as you also said, a bit of reason couldn't hurt. To use The Martian as an example again, throughout the entire rescue effort, though mostly motivated by emotion, were also using reason, to try and make sure their rescue had a logical basis. (A rescue attempt is nice, but useless if it's going to immeadiately fail because it wasn't reasoned through.)