The Balance of Emotions and Reason

The title of the lecture given by speaker and DePauw alum Joy Meeker was Facing Discomfort: Engaging Justice, which was particularly interesting, because many of the points that she brought up seemed somewhat unfamiliar or uncomfortable to me. Near the very beginning of the lecture, she mentioned an instance in which someone told her that they believed that the ideal mediator of a conflict would be Mr. Spock from the Star Trek series. I immediately agreed with this before she had a chance to say anything else. Who better to solve a problem than someone who is as impartial and unbiased as he is brilliant? But to my surprise, Meeker went on to say that this is a terrible attitude to have towards disagreement.

Meeker, much like Alison Jaggar, believed that emotions were not only an inevitable part of how we perceive and judge things, but also a beneficial one. We feel the emotions that we do because there are good reasons for us to feel them, and so they should not at all be separate from our decision making process. This is somewhat contrary to the mainstream, somewhat positivist view that emotions should be all but shut down and barred from taking part in any serious ethical decisions. Initially, that is the view that I had aligned myself with, but on further consideration, there may be far more to it than I had initially realized.

If I may go on a somewhat nerdy tangent and return to the earlier Star Trek example, the structure of the Enterprise's leadership is aligned with Jaggar and Meeker's ideas about the dual roles of emotion and logic. Out of the entire crew, Spock possesses probably the most intelligence  and definitely the most (literally) inhuman lack of strong emotions. However, perhaps for that very reason, Spock was not the one in charge of making decisions for the crew. Dr. McCoy was an officer of nearly equal rank as Spock, but with a very different style of decision making. He would usually let reason take a back seat to his strong emotions; and would often end up in trouble because of it. The captain of the Enterprise was James Kirk, who fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. He would use a combination of logic and reason to solve problems, relying on mediation from both Spock and McCoy. Because of this, he was able to overcome whatever obstacles he faced.

In Freudian terms, the three characters seem to represent the three parts of the psyche: the id, the ego and the super ego. To the best of my understanding, the id is responsible for our surface-level emotions, the super-ego is the strictly calculating part of the psyche, and the ego is responsible for mediating between the other two to make informed decisions. Meeker's ideas about decision making seem to represent this model: an even balance between logic and emotion to determine the best course of action.