Plantinga: Emotion and Reason

In “Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism”, Carl Plantinga argues that a Brechtian dualistic approach as overly simplistic. What Plantinga defines as Brecht’s “moralistic opposition between ‘feeling’ and ‘reason’” (PF) represents, I believe, a misunderstanding about the way in which humans make moral judgments. While certainly, there are Holywood films which play cheap tricks on our emotions by offering pornographically glorified pseudo-realities, which can be seen in any Schwarzenegger action blockbuster, for example, to suggest that reason must be devoid of feeling is dangerously inhuman. I would argue that the vast majority of the moral framework that guides what we would view as a just and praiseworthy society is based on the way the issues in question make us feel. We have banned cruel and unusual punishment because we are repulsed by the thought that humans can be legally made to suffer extreme physical and emotional trauma. No matter how effective torture may be as an interrogation method, the majority of American citizens view indulgence and utilization of these methods as degrading to our society and culture. If torture is so effective, then pure reason should tell us that we absolutely should torture; however, reason alone is not an adequate metric for determining moral propriety. We do not believe in torture, because of the emotional relationship human beings share. We naturally empathize with each other, and to disregard this emotional connection is dehumanizing. It makes us less human. To feel compassion for another person is not a matter of reason. Rather, it is inherently emotional. Likewise, the civil rights movement in America gained national support when people were faced with video images of their fellow humans being beaten by police, mauled by dogs, and knocked down by fire hoses. One could argue that reason alone has and will lead to immoral behaviors in our society. At the birth of our nation, slavery was a Constitutionally protected institution. Despite the fact that many founding fathers, including slave owners like George Washinton and Thomas Jefferson, felt that slavery was a moral wrong, it was kept for pragmatic economic and political reasons. Compassion and emotional connection to their fellow human beings was ignored, in favor of a reasoned approach to the nation’s political and economic condition. Even though this was a reasoned rational approach to the question of slavery, every sane human being can agree that this decision to keep slavery was morally despicable.