Thursday, 26 June 2008

Emotions are Values

"People who suffer damage to the frontal cortex can lose most of their ability to experience emotion while retaining their ability to think rationally. But they don’t therefore see the world with crystalline logic, so that life suddenly becomes simple. On the contrary, Haidt reports: “They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, ‘What should I do now?’ they see dozens of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning, but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the other."

JOHN LANCHESTER, The New Yorker
PURSUING HAPPINESS : Two scholars explore the fragility of contentment

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