Emotion And Reason Coexist In Justifying A Moral Decision Essay

We are faced with countless decision making, from life-changing decisions to insignificant ones that occur in our everyday life. There was this decision I had made rather trivial in part of my life when I was back in middle school. I was caught in a dilemma about whether or not I should help a cat who appeared like it was on the brim of dying from starvation. She was still very young seeming unable to feed herself properly. My decision was to leave the cat as it is. The question came upon me of to what extent can emotion and reason coexist in justifying a moral decision?

I left the cat without feeding it because in my thought process, I believed that it would be more selfish and cruel for me if I were to feed it only once just for the sake …show more content…
Reasoning, on the other hand is a very time consuming process, so by depending on our emotions, it elaborately fastens our thinking route. This to be said, basing our decision making on emotion is less time consuming but relying on it too much, may hinder our decision, and most of the time lead to some unwanted consequences. However, lack of emotion may also cause an equally irrational behavior where it may lead to immoral decisions. For example, if I walked past and deliberately ignored a half-dying cat without any emotion of sympathy or the sort, that is unquestionably an act of irrationality. So overall, emotion and reason is essential in finding an ultimate balance in playing an important role throughout our decision …show more content…
I was simply seeking justification for the decision I have come upon. This is an example where my emotions of fear helped me to make decisions. However, these negative emotions of fear that stops us from taking an unwanted course of action at that point of time, is not at all times guaranteed to deliver a desired result afterwards. Just as how I am now painfully regretting that, because I did not have the ability to take care of the cat, it doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have gone by another decision to pick her up and find a household that has the ability to feed and take good care of her.

The conclusion that I have come upon regarding to the coexistence of emotion and reason is that they are strongly related, and none of those two mechanisms can be lacked in making any decisions. They work dependently on each other where in my opinion the gap between reasoning and emotion does not, if not hardly exists. In fact, reasons are derived from emotions and they are closely related to the processing in our brain of formulating our own